How Reading Makes You a Better Cook
Simple steps you're skipping in the kitchen.
Cooking a meal from scratch, particularly from a new recipe, can feel daunting as hell. People quickly get overwhelmed, realize they don’t have the right equipment or ingredients, and start making wild substitutions. They rush, smash steps together, and then get confused when the food they cook always turns out the way it does. We’ve met plenty of people like this over the last 10 years we’ve spent writing cookbooks. After countless versions of this conversation, we’ve figured out where so many people go wrong when cooking a recipe. We’ve come up with best practices to make sure you’re avoiding self-sabotage when you start dinner.
You might be one of those people claiming they “just can’t cook” but if you can drive a car, shop for groceries, read a book, or follow a makeup tutorial, you sure as shit can cook. Life is hard enough so it’s time to learn how to get out of your own fucking way when you’re cooking.
Follow these simple steps and you’ll be throwing together delicious dinners in no time. All of our attention spans are shot to shit, but really try to keep your wits about you and learn where you keep going wrong.
1. Read the recipe all the way through.
Gonna say that again. READ. THE. RECIPE. START. TO. FINISH. The first and most common mistake people make is not reading the recipe. They glance at it then confidently march into the great unknown without reading the entire thing. Lots of stuff can come up while cooking that you might need to be prepared for, but you won’t know what that shit is UNLESS YOU READ THE WHOLE RECIPE. You might need to grab a random pan that’s dirty, you might have to marinade something and need to account for dinner being way later than planned, you might need an extra set of hands to stir the sauce while you sauté the stuff in the other pan. You just won’t know what the fuck lies ahead unless you look. Also, the writer might use a niche cooking term in the directions that you’ll need to look up. There’s no shame in needing a little extra time to get your bearings. This whole process won’t take you longer than a few minutes but will save you a world of “oh shit” scenarios.
2. Pull out everything you’re gonna need.
Again, this might seem obvious but so many people skip this step. Getting all your ingredients together before you start cooking is so important that it even has a fancy French culinary term: mise en place, which means “putting in place”. This act of gathering all the spices, grains, oils, etc. that you’re going to need allows you spot what the fuck you’re out of before it’s too late. This is the time to think through or look up your substitutions before you go rogue and make a big ass mistake on the fly.
Also, gathering everything up and having it ready allows you to react quickly and stay on the timeline the recipe is using. No wasted time looking for the peeler or digging out the brown sugar from the back of the pantry. Using this technique, you’ll have everything you need right at your fingertips while you’re cooking so you can concentrate on what matters: not burning the hell outta the food.
3. Before you turn on the heat, do the prep.
This can be part of your mise en place routine. You want to chop, dice, and peel as much as you can at the start so that you can stay on pace with the recipe when you start cooking. Too often people try to chop as they go, forget they have something under fire, and end up ruining the food because they aren’t quick with a knife. Or worse, your knife betrays you in your haste. Goodbye dinner, hello ER.
Recipe writers have to guess how much time everything will take the average person to do, and we aren’t always right. If you chop before you get started, then you can take as long as you fucking want because nothing is as risk of burning. Need to brush up on your knife skills? Next week we’ll show y’all the best ways to chop up even the most awkward of vegetables.
4. Taste as you go.
It is absolutely insane how many of you don’t taste the food you’re making until it’s almost done. You need to taste the food at several different steps in the recipe to make sure you’re on the right track. Not only will this help sharpen your palate, but you’ll also be able to catch any mistakes or missteps in the recipe long before it’s too late. You don’t want to get all the way to the end of a 2-hour recipe only to realize the canned tomatoes you used at the beginning taste weirdly metallic and now you hafta start the whole dish over. Don’t let that shit happen to you. One of our favorite features of vegan food is that you can try most things at every step of the cooking process because there isn’t an ingredient like raw chicken waiting to give you salmonella poisoning. Taste your food. This alone will make you a better cook. We swear.
So you’re gonna successfully cook a meal this weekend right? RIGHT?! If you’re looking for some inspiration, head over to our paid supporters edition tomorrow where we’re walking you through the steps to make our second favorite kind of tofu: chickpea tofu. This style of protein is popular in Myanmar where it originated. It is delicious, addictive, and takes zero skill to make. All you need is some chickpea flour and a fucking plan.
Thanks again for joining us here in The Broiler Room. We’re entirely community supported and appreciate everyone who has found a little place in their budget to support our work. We sincerely appreciate you and can’t wait to show you y’all everything we’ve been cooking up.
Michelle and Matt
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