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Chefs of Tildes, what’s one simple cooking trick that can vastly improve the flavour of a dish?
Are there any simple techniques that chefs do that the layperson can employ to really improve a dish or their overall cooking?
Salt/season as you go. Salting your food after it's been served is too late, you'll be left with both unsalted and some over-salted patches. You want the salt to be evenly distributed throughout the food and absorbed inside. If you don't have time to marinade your meat or tofu a few hours to a day in advance, at the very least add salt when prepping and cooking.
Expanding on @anbe: if something tastes bitter, like avocado, add an acid. Bitter tastes are usually due to basic molecules. Also, the fishy smell of fish can be partially countered with an acid, for the same reason.
Use fat to spread flavor. Fat is not unhealthy, don't be afraid of it. Some flavors are only water-soluble and others are only fat-soluble. Especially capsaicin, the molecule responsible for hot kind of spice.
There's a good video by Ethan Chlebowski which touches upon this topic, explaining that it makes a (sometimes big) difference when you add the spices to your dish. Before, during or when serving. It was very interesting to me, since I wasn't aware of such big differences :)
Other than Kenji, Ethan has been my most significant level up to cooking.
Adam Ragusea is also very scientific in his approach like Ethan. Very well paced video production and I think an even greater wealth of content than what Ethan’s built up as well.
Ethan tends to be a longer slower paced video. Adam is really punchy and to the point.
I can play an Ethan video in the background and not get too distracted. I can’t do that with Adam.
Internet Shaquille is also really good. Helen Rennie as well if you like the slower paced long formed like Ethan—she probably forms some sort of Mount Rushmore of YouTube cooking personalities.
I liked Adam’s content until he started lecturing his viewers about his social stance on things. Unsubscribed. It was really tacky.
I found that acids (citrus juice, vinegars, fermented dairy products like yogurt and others) really help bring out the flavour of many dishes.
Grilled or roasted vegetables are so much better with a lemon sprinkled over them or served with a tangy yogurt sauce. Sauces, salads and slaws love some vinegar. Many deserts are greatly improved with some acid as well, especially if they’re very sweet to begin with.
Another obvious one is heat, you want some Maillard reaction going on, without overcooking your food. Breads are often more tasty with a browned crust, so are roasted potatoes and other vegetables. Steaks and poultry of course.
The reverse is also true, some sugar can cut a very acidic dish, like tomato sauce.
Expanding on the wine: don’t buy cooking wine, just use the cheapest regular wine. If we don’t finish a bottle of wine it’s sat for too long, I also use that for cooking.
I've always wondered... how long is too long for old wine (for cooking)?
Taste the wine. If you don’t like the taste then you won’t like it in the dish. But I’m also not worried about the last cup in a $4 bottle of wine either.
How true is that for real though? I mean, I don’t particularly enjoy drinking vinegar. If wine sits for too long and goes mildly vinegary to the point where I wouldn’t drink a glass, that doesn’t mean I won’t like it as a part of a dish.
Vinegar and sour wine have very, very different flavors though?
I don't cook with wine much so I can't say.
So you have to ask yourself in that case, is this a recipe where I’m okay adding vinegar to it? How much vinegar?
The dishes I tend to make that I use wine in get lemon instead of vinegar for that sour acid component. But that’s just my style of cooking.
Yeah, I dunno about that sentiment. I vehemently hate wine, but love cooking with it.
And as a recovered alcoholic, I am certain the alcohol is not my problem with wine. It's just rotten grape juice.
I honestly never throw it out and sometimes it’s out for quite a while… it essentially turns into a tasty vinegar, through excessive oxidation, but then it reaches an equilibrium pretty quickly (several days or so). So it doesn’t spoil dramatically and exponentially like olive oil (or any high omega-3 oil) does. Still, a lot of the wine flavour remains, not to mention the alcohol and acidity which helps with the deglazing.
In my experience, given that I use it to cool (and steam) or deglaze the pan, the acidity and alcohol mostly evaporates anyways, and the wine flavour still remains.
To jump on the msg thing, I always have a container of premixed salt and msg in the kitchen that I simply replace regular salt usage with when seasoning. Additionally, if you can find the two "secret ingredients", you can make super salt for big flavor boosts:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate
It really kicks up that umami flavor to another level.
Nice, I hadn't heard of using those last two. Thanks for sharing!
Definitely with you on the MSG and I've heard of the other two from Tim's Hawaiinan chips but never thought to buy individually. Do they have a distinct flavor by themselves? Or are they more of a mouth feel like MSG?
They do help flavor "pop" in ways similar to msg, to my knowledge, but I'm not an expert on this haha. I haven't tried to use them individually, only in the "super salt" mixture, and it definitely adds that little bit of extra flavor pop. Not a ton, but definitely noticeable.
Will you taste a teeny bit of it straight and report back? ... For science?
I was kind of surprised that MSG wasn't salty. Even more surprised that Epsom salt wasn't salty. (That's when I learned that salts are not all sodium.)
I just started using MSG but I’ve been struggling with exactly how much to use. I’m very much a “by feel” salter so I feel a bit blind with a shaker of MSG in my hand.
Do you have a rule of thumb for its use? Can you use too much? What does too much MSG taste like?
MSG is sold in different levels of fineness, just like salt. My MSG happens to be extremely fine (finer than even table salt,) so it's easy to add too much. If you have MSG comprised of larger crystals, then you probably don't have to be as careful. It's like how you handle table salt or fine salt differently than kosher salt or flaked salt.
My rule of thumb for MSG is the same as salt - add small amounts gradually, tasting each time, and stop when it tastes good. (This goes for any form of MSG, whether it's straight MSG, soy sauce, Marmite, etc.)
The taste of too much pure MSG is extremely strange and hard to describe. MSG tastes "round" or "warm" to me, which is incredibly unhelpful when it comes to describing it, since those words don't make any sense in the context of what tastes are. I wish I could explain it better, but I guess the best description is that too much MSG is just that - too much. It overwhelms the taste buds and crowds other flavors out - it doesn't taste "bad," but it doesn't taste good either. However, I usually only come across this issue when I'm adding MSG to a very small amount of food, such as a small bowl of sauce or dressing. Adding it to a whole pot of food (which is a more typical way to use it,) it's pretty easy to add the correct amount.
Also, I find the experience of adding too much salt to be very different than adding too much MSG, even though the two are functionally similar. Too much salt feels like an aggressive assault on your taste buds, dries out your lips, and makes you very thirsty. Too much MSG just has a subtle but distracting and unsettling taste to it.
Have you used Miso to add Umami flavor before? I like to add it to rice, soups, stews etc.
Another umami secret is molasses. I add it to every soup, sauce, and stew.
For umami I also like fish sauce, anchovy paste, and mushroom sauce (mushroom broth, dried mushrooms, powdered mushrooms, etc)
The thing that will really elevate a dish to restaurant tasting is almost always butter. Salted, in my preference.
The classics are salt, fat, acid. Butter takes care of the first two; you might want a little squeeze of lemon or a tiny splash of balsamic for the third, but this really depends on what you’re cooking. You can get into the weeds about what type of fat is appropriate for which dish, too, but for an amateur cook it’s fine to start with just adding butter.
Something which new cooks don’t always think about is texture, and how much this is influenced by your knife. If you’re making a basic tomato pasta sauce, for example, you want onions as fine as you can make them (use a food processor if you haven’t mastered a fine dice yet!), but for a jalfrezi you want nice thick wedges of onion. The mouth feel influences the flavour.
Absolutely do not add your garlic before or with your onion. It’s the easiest way to end up with burned and bitter garlic - most people have the heat too high. Wait until your onions are translucent, then add the garlic and stir for a minute or so until fragrant (ie there’s a strong smell of garlic) before adding other ingredients.
I prefer unsalted butter because I can adjust saltiness independently of the amount of butter I'm adding. If I'm already cooking with salty ingredients such as some processed meats or cheeses I may not want to use salted butter for instance.
I personally don't think the salt level in the butter is enough to skew a dish to be salty. I prefer salted butter for everything too, even sweets because it seems to have more buttery flavor.
Huh, that's interesting. Maybe I'm overly sensitive to salt but I can definitely taste the difference while cooking. And I have definitely tried both because I keep some salted butter in my fridge for toast.
I guess part of it is that I taste every step of the way when I can (raw meat excepted) and I don't tend to add too much when I use salted butter? But the butter flavor is just better to me with salted butter.
When you’re used to salted that isn’t an issue, I already have automatically adjusted the level before adding the butter! I find unsalted butter vile and never use it, so it’s easier to learn how to cook with salted so I don’t have to keep both.
I strongly agree with this comment.
There is currently a fashion for unsalted butter, but in my experience (which is considerable - and began with me making butter at home as a child, using milk from our house cow) there are very few instances where it is worth making the effort to use it.
Salted butter is simply a superior product, with a salt level engineered to be acceptable - more than acceptable! - to the majority of people consuming it.
As @AgnesNutter noted, unsalted butter frequently tastes actively unpleasant.
I'm not a pro chef, just a home cook who has tried to up my game the last few years. Game changer for me was buying quality knives. If you can only afford one, get a chef's knife and keep it sharp. You can do almost anything you need with it. I have other knives but reach for the chef's 95% of the time.
I think the reason it helped me is that the more comfortable you are and the easier your cooking tasks become, the more you can focus on your food and what you're doing with it. I can do my prep in 1/4 of the time and I've tried to get better at the various mincing, julienne, etc. Bottom line, your work will be easier and more enjoyable, a sharp knife is a safe knife, and your food will look better and as someone mentioned above, good presentation only helps the experience of eating.
To add: know the difference between sharpening and honing a knife. The blade edge of a sharp knife is actually very delicate, because it's so thin. When you use it, it gets bent in either direction. Honing it will recover the straight edge to the middle. Sharpening on the other hand takes away material from a properly dull knife to create a new edge.
You generally don't need to sharpen your knife very often if you take care of it. Honing is one way to do so and should be done quite frequently, and it only takes a few seconds.
I know my knife needs honing if I can't cut through a soft tomato without squishing it with only gentle pressure (the weight of the knife). But after a few passes on the honing steel, voila!
A few tips on this:
Honing is often done with every use, but that's not strictly necessary. I usually do it, but not for very long. A quick couple of draws across on both sides is usually enough to keep me running fine since I use it consistently.
When you're thinking about sharpening expensive knives, you should invest in some whetstones. Any "kitchen sharpener" is going to create a weak edge that will dull quickly or wear away an excessive amount of material. There are tons of guides on how to sharpen a knife with a whetstone - it's really not as scary as it sounds. This can get expensive but you can find fairly cheap sets, and as long as they didn't lie about the grit, you should be fine.
Properly wash and store your knives. The most important part of knife care in my opinion. Wash your knives in warm, soapy water like normal except - use a wash rag and don't drag it across the blade. I basically grab the knife and palm the blade, then pull perpendicularly away from it while "massaging" the knife to clean away anything. Towel dry your knife so it doesn't get damaged, then store it in a place where it doesn't clatter amongst other items.
And don't be afraid of getting the big chef's knife, I find it way easier (and safe) to prep a lot of food than using a small paring knife. You can't really dice as easily with a paring knife, you can't cut through meat as well, and you can't use the weight of the blade to more easily cut through things.
Get the big knife, learn the claw grip so you don't cut off your fingers, and leave the paring knife for when you need a small knife for small tricky cuts.
I'll throw a recommendation for Victorinox Fibrox knives in here - they're very reasonably priced and while they aren't as nice as some of the premium knives, you really can't beat them for the price. I have this one and it's night and day from the entry level rubbish I had been previously using.
Using a whetstone is ideal, but if you don't want to learn, you can get a knife professionally sharpened for like $5. Butchers, hardware stores and sporting goods stores often offer the service.
(Not an actual chef)
Make practice dishes! Far too many people will pick a recipe that sounds good but not actually try it ahead of time, and so have no idea how it's going to actually turn out.
My work held a chili cook-off and I offered to bring a few trays of cornbread. Before making the actual trays, I cooked four mini-pans each with a slightly different variation on the recipe.
The original recipe was disgustingly sweet, so my final variation used less sugar and a little nutmeg to give it complexity. I also added more eggs. But if I had never made those test pans I would have never known!
So that's my advice: many recipes online are garbage and should be used as a starting point for further modifications.
I second this! I always cook for myself or partner/test subject first with any new recipe. I also usually take 2-4 different recipes, see what I think they do well or poorly, and make a hybrid recipe to my liking. By the third try, it usually gets a lot of compliments.
I started doing this after seeing an article in Cooks Illustrated where they approached their recipe in a very scientific way.
In addition to helping me fine tune the recipe itself, it also helps me develop a taste for specific things. What does clove taste like in this dish? Let's taste an example of the recipe with and without it.
Since nobody has mentioned it explicitly, but most of the advice here is "salt, fat, acid, heat", I would suggest the book and Netflix series Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat.
It's not instructional per se, but her passion really shines through and the series is a good watch.
The two big ones I have learned from doing meal kits would be...
I'd also recommend trying and finding some solid spice combinations that you can keep going back to. Premade spice mixes are fast and require no thinking - something like italian, togarashi, za'atar, chinese 5 spice, garam masala, etc. Figure out which ones you like, and which ones complement the meals you make. I'm leaning more towards fish, so I love having an orange ginger spice mix that goes wonderfully with salmon. Togarashi is also an easy way to give some life to leftover rice if you have nothing to pair it with.
And a beginner tip for working with spices: don't be afraid of adding more.
Most cooks know how much salt to use, but so many people just use tiny amounts of pepper and other spices.
I get compliments on my tomato sauce every time I serve it. And there's no secret to it, I just use a very basic Herbs de Provence mix - but I do use a whole lot of it.
I use a lot of herbs and spices but I agree, my food is tasty!
Yep, using more spices--and fresher ones--has upped my cooking a ton. If I'm making a big pot of something (enough to feed my family of three for a few days), I tend to use about a half cup of herbs/spices. I also cook them directly a little bit, generally after I've cooked the onions/garlic a bit first, and that seems to bring out some extra flavor.
Totally.
Another easy upgrade: fresh spices. If I'm doing veggies or meat in the oven, entire branches of rosemary and/or thyme go onto the tray.
Work on improving your sear/browning. Get that Maillard reaction going. Beginners tend to be very afraid to burn things but it's actually surprisingly hard to do if you pay attention to what you hear, see and smell.
This includes drying off meats in the fridge and paper towels, giving vegetables a hard sear in a griddle/grill pan.
For example broccoli roughly cut, grill in cast iron if you have it on one side to get a proper char. Then I add a mixture of water, lemon juice and some spices and salt and steam them for the last bit. My wife hated broccoli now it's her favorite. The point I tried making in this context is the importance of the initial seer.
What also helped my cooking /searing game a lot was moving away from non stick to the old school materials: cast iron, carbon steel, enameled iron and some layered stainless steel. It was intimidating for someone not used to them but so very much worth it.
I second using cast iron and stainless steel. Once you get them properly seasoned, cleanup is as simple as some hot water and paper towels. No scrubbing. No anything.
I used to be lazy and would "let things soak". But now it's so easy I have cleaned up before I even eat my dinner.
Use Diamond Kosher Sea Salt if you aren't already. Its incredibly forgiving.
Season progressively with your fingers -- but dry them off if they're wet at all. Its easy to overseason with wet fingers. You can correct overseasoning with ease when working progressively.
Look up some tips on plating. Everything tastes better when its pretty.
Mustard... Simply add a bit of mustard while cooking. Can be a sauce or a salad dressing, to your chilli or to the butter and garlic mix you are using to cook your steak.
Can be a great ingredient in pan sauces, too. I did a white wine and Dijon pan sauce for some porkchops a while back that came out amazing.
Up your umami game. There's more options than just straight MSG! For instance, these other ingredients contain MSG and can add complexity to your dishes:
A couple more options that aren't pure MSG are soy sauce and Vegemite/Marmite. They're my MSG of choice for big pots of chili, but can be used in pretty much anything that needs some umami.
Also, I want to clarify that I'm not recommending these because pure MSG is bad in any way, it's just that soy sauce, yeast extract, and the things you mentioned bring an even more complex and delicious flavor profile than pure MSG can (like you said.) I use every one of the options mentioned in both of our comments, depending on the dish.
Pure MSG is always nice if I don't want to think too much about texture, liquid content, or if I'm not sure I want the more "complex" flavors involved. It's the simple old dependable, basically.
Exactly, on all fronts. Layers of flavor are best. Straight MSG is simple. Complicated can be better.
Learn to use a variety of oils. EVOO is great on salads but horrible for frying potatoes which taste much better with peanut oil. Sesame oil is great for most things but toasted sesame oil is overpowering if used as a main fat and should be used to finish a meal or be mixed with other oils.
Learning the different flavor profiles as well as smoke points will give your meals depth and variety.
I generally have the following oils:
(Most used to least)
Sesame: High while point good. Get it from an Asian market and it will be cheap!
Peanut oil: Great for anything potatoes, high smoke point. I try to find the Spectrum brand for better flavor.
EVOO: extra virgin olive oil. I mostly use as a finish or on salads. I usually have two qualities one high quality strong flavor and another less expensive one or a lighter olive oil.
Rapeseed or canola oil (canola is a brand name of a rape seed cultivar) I use this lesson less and can be replaced with a basic vegetable oil.
Toasted Sesame: a little goes a long way do not fry with straight toasted sesame oil.
Other oils I'll sometimes get: Coconut, palm (high quality ideally red palm) avocado, sunflower.
Tips: Keep oils in a tray to help keep your kitchen clean.
Invest in a good spray bottle for the kitchen.
Other fats, butter is the most common animal fat (ghee is better) but definitely try out duck fat, lard (pork), tallow (beef) for more flavors.
Experiment and find what you like and best suits your cooking style!
I’m a huge fan of avocado oil, it has a very high smoke point and is neutral. I fry almost exclusively with it.
Coconut oil is annoying because of its low smoke point, but I found it works wonders for slightly crispy pancakes.
What kind of spray bottle do you use? I’ve never found one that sprays consistently and works well. The oils seem to have a poor surface tension for atomizing properly and it ends up being a squirt/stream.
If I'm being honest I've had a lot of crappy oil sprayers as well.
The one I have at the moment that seems to be working well in the 3 months I've had it is: Evo oil sprayer
It can spray regular or in a fan out flat, vertical or horizontal. The trigger feels good and solid with a good amount of spray per pull. The only thing I don't like about it is the yellow color of the plastic. It would be better to see the color of the oil I'm using.
Don't under salt, season, spice, etc! Don't be afraid of flavor! It's hard to add wayyyy too much, and easy to add WAYYYYY too little.
A personal anecdote: My grandmother is an excellent cook. I say that knowing that everybody's grandmother is an excellent cook, but mine truly is! There is one exception when it comes to one traditional dish. Her side of the family is Swedish, and every Christmas she made a Swedish sausage called patataskorf. The problem was that she always forgot to scale up the salt when she made it for a large crowd. So, when she made a few of this beef, pork, and potato sausage, it was delicious! But when she made 15 lbs (5 each of each main ingredient, meat ground and potatoes boiled), she forgot that you had to scale up the salt. We only realized this when my wife and I made it instead of her one Christmas, and I had just seen a lecture on food chemistry that year...It is truly amazing what 1% by weight salt does to sausage, versus a little sprinkle. Everybody (including my grandmother) appreciated our intervention xD
I'm not a chef, but something I learned from chefs is protein temperature. Let your proteins sit out for at least a half-hour before they hit the pan. They should be at room temperature, not cold out of the 'fridge. It's improved my chicken dishes across the board, and works for any protein I've tried.
Which is a great case for sous vide. You control the final temperature and time. I have a pump and absolutely love the results, but I rarely use it because I'm always in a hurry and have tried to cut my cooking time down with several practiced recipes that take zero thought and make the clean-up process quick as well.
Also: Make sure your pan is hot first! Throwing the meat on a cold pan can cause your meat to dry out before it's cooked through.
My understanding is:
Totally! Just FYI the heating of the pan before adding oil allows the pores in the metal of the pan to close up, which reduces stick of the browned meat/veggies. Any steel pan is a non-stick when used properly.
Oh cool, I didn't know that. Does that apply to cast iron as well? Ceramic coated pans?
I desperately need new cookware. We've got a beaten up assortment of random stuff.
Please don't use ceramic coated pans (pots are fine). They have terrible heat conducting leading to low heat or uneven cooking.
In a pot, where you'd typically cook liquids it's less of an issue as the liquid will even out the heat.
Thank you for this! We've 3 pans, a large ceramic, a medium steel, and a small cast iron. The large has been my default, but it explains my struggle.
That and the fact that our stove is electric, which makes me sad.
Definitely going with steel
Electric stoves can be very good, if they are high quality.
Personally I still use my non-stick pan for most of my cooking, because it's easiest to clean and maintain day to day.
But I also have a nice carbon steel wok I use about once a week (making fried rice is my favorite way to finish leftovers) and a cast iron griddle for cooking meat.
With cast iron you have to “season” it, where you create a thin layer of interlinked hydrocarbons by coating with a thin layer of high omega-3 oil (like flax seed oil) and then baking it on max heat in the oven, repeated a few times. This creates a non-stick layer. Ceramic is already non-stick.
If you’re a casual cook, but have some money to spend, I would recommend ceramic coated, since they’re quite tough and don’t chip toxic teflon flakes like the teflon cookware.
Nothing beats a clad stainless steel pan for durability and versatility, like the using it in the oven. They can generally last a lifetime if used with care.
Cast iron pans are also great, but they do have some downsides: they’re heavy, require maintenance, cannot be exposed to acids or scrubbed with soap (will remove the seasoning layer) and take a long time to heat up, though that’s also a benefit in that they hold heat well. Because of its weight, you can’t do much one handed flipping while sautéing, but they can double as a casserole dish and whatnot for the oven.
My setup is: one clad steel frying pan with a heavy/thick base (to hold heat), one cast iron (for fun and occasional niche uses, and my second pan when needed), one medium/smaller ceramic pan for frying smaller pieces of e.g. meat, and the pots are either stainless (inexpensive) or ceramic, which allows for some lazy sautéing for stuff that will go in a stew in the same pot.
I’d recommend you start with a good quality but not too expensive clad steel pan (with a steel lid, overall oven safe), and learn how to use it, see how it works for you. Then decide if you want a cast iron (hold one first so you know the weight). Nothing wrong with ceramic coated cookware, but they have a bit of a premium and cheap kitchen tools are never worth it.
Thanks for all of the advice!
I grew up in a rural area where cast iron is quite popular. In fact, I think it's all my family cooked with, and what I learned to cook on. I generally like cast iron and it adds a taste/quality to the food that is a reminder of home :)
I also grew up on gas stoves (propane to be exact), and I feel like electric makes cast iron harder to use. It's slower to heat up like you said, and SO much harder to control the temperature in general. We actually have a natural gas hookup so I may see if I can convince my spouse we need a new stove/oven :)
Hey that's an even better reason to use it!
Just want to say one more thing: there's been a lot of attention lately given to the not-insignificant amount of polution that a gas stove can produce. Just FYI in case you don't have really good ventilation in your kitchen or kids at home.
Not a professional chef, but a pretty well seasoned home chef.
Mise en place! I sometimes get anxious in the kitchen and having everything ready to go helps immensely! While I understand it does create some extra dishes to clean, it is absolutely worth it for a more enjoyable cooking experience. No need to dig through a drawer for a teaspoon while something time sensitive keeps cooking or hurriedly chopping vegetables to throw in a stir fry. You can also group similar cook time items together to help cut down on the dishes needed or use your cutting board as a staging area. Chinese Cooking Demystified has a great video going into further detail on how this is used in Chinese cooking.
For the most part, technique doesn’t improve flavor, it improves/preserves texture.
Flavor is all about mixing flavorful foods together in the right proportion and that takes time to learn what those are. Make sure you taste your food as you go.
Technique can absolutely change the flavor. Take a steak, sprinkle salt on it, and immediately plop it in a cold pan. Turn the heat to medium and let it plod along until the steak is done. Now take the same steak. Pat it dry if it's damp, salt it, and throw it in a cracking hot pan. Sear it a minute or two per side and finish in the oven. It's the exact same ingredients, but the second way will give you a much tastier steak.
Or if you're roasting broccoli, for example. The taste (and texture) will be very different depending if you roast it plain and add oil and salt later, or if you toss it in oil and salt beforehand.
And that all gets kicked into high gear when we're talking about baking.
Love gets called a secret ingredient, not just as a joke, but because it gives you the patience to do all the extra steps that make the food taste better.
Technique and process are two separate things. The things you have listed are processes.
I never said that technique can't improve the flavor, merely that it usually doesn't. Learning to master the maillard reactions is one that does.
I dunno if it’s cooking per se (probably so bc the additional elements need preparation), but adding texture to your meals makes a world of difference in the taste, presentation, and quality of the dish. I made a bowl meal the other night that had (among other things) rice and other soft-ish elements aside from the protein. The final touch was some umami crunchy flakes in chili garlic oil. Aside from the taste it added, having that crunchy element really elevated the whole dish and my family loved it.
Start earlier and go slower. If you need to "make up time" then you've already ruined it.
Honestly at this point in my life I'd say that every protein is best cooked low and slow. The lower and slower the better. Gradually bring it to temp and sear to finish. I'll throw a steak in the oven at 200°F for an hour then drop in in a searing pan for a minute on each side and wind up with the juiciest, most consistently cooked steak of my life. Put bacon in a cold pan, add a little water, and turn up the heat; by the time it's done it'll be perfect.
Herby oil with salt and acid makes everything better.
A few of my favourites. Blanch your vegetables before cooking them, use different varieties of the same vegetable in a dish, make your own pasta and dough instead of buying them, use fresh herbs (grow them yourself even), weigh your ingredients, and deglaze your pans.
Maybe this is silly, but here goes:
If you're not sure what to season with, a little onion powder and garlic powder go a long way. They work with just about any food/dish that doesn't have prescribed seasoning. Cooking ground beef to mix with mac and cheese? Making meatballs? Chicken soup? Chili? Shepherds pie?
Those all taste better with a little onion and garlic
I’ve got some BBQing tips, if those work for you OP!
Firstly… the quality of the fire matters. If you’re used to just using charcoal bricks and lighter fluid, or pure propane, I HIGHLY recommend experimenting with wood in the mix. Look around and see if anybody is selling some logs of Oak, Mesquite, Hickory, etc. Try natural charcoal instead of the bricks. The smoke from the wood DRASTICALLY changes the flavor of the food for the better. If you only have charcoal bricks, see if you can find some apple wood or hickory pellets and sprinkle them over the coals right before cooking. Avoid using lighter fluid if you can, or be mindful to only use a tiny bit and be careful to ONLY get it on the charcoal and not the grates, or else your food will taste nasty. (I highly recommend investing in a bbq chimney starter).
Second… learn to control the fire. Don’t dump all the charcoals or fire logs in the middle of the grill. Pick one side and pile everything there. This way, half your grill gets direct flame and the other half doesn’t. This way you can just strategically move your steaks around the grill and cook everything better.
Third… practice seasoning properly. Learn to use salt and pepper first, then experiment with other spices. Try herbs like rosemary. Try chipotle. Marinade with beer. Try red wine. Don’t just rely on the premixed packets from the store otherwise you’ll feel lost when you run out of it.
Fourth… learn to judge doneness the old fashioned way. Memorize what the color and feel of the meat should be. It takes practice but eventually you’ll be able to tell how far along a steak is by pressing it with your tongs or fingers. You can judge the doneness of almost anything without a thermometer with enough practice.
Fifth… learn the basics of higiene. Don’t cross contaminate by using the same surfaces, utensils and plates with everything. Learn how to store raw and cooked separately. Learn what bad or old raw meat smells like, and what good raw meat should smell like. If you don’t trust it or aren’t sure, trust your gut and don’t cook it.
Sixth… research the art of Sous Vide. Perfect steaks every time.
There’s way more to all this of course, but those are just some basics off the top my head.
When possible, always add the salt last. You never know how much salt will other ingredients bring, and it's easier to control saltines in final product than in each ingredient separately.
Some foods do require you to out to salt first, but many don't. In any case, always put less salt than you think you'll need so you can regulate the amount on the final assembly.
I disagree with this. Sure, it takes a little experience, but salting little and often as you go brings out each flavour in a much better way - salting at the end is often what makes things taste too salty, doing it early just leaves you with enhanced flavour. I’m not sure why, would love someone to chime in with the chemistry/magic that’s responsible
My experience is the complete opposite. Most preparations don't really require salt to be added during cooking, and are more easily controlled by salting near the end.
No only that, a lot of recipes tell you to prepare everything together in a pot, but if you want more control you can just as easily do things in separate pans and then join at the end.
Generally speaking, recipes make things more complicated than they need it to be, and "real cooks" tend to value what is more difficult and complex because otherwise cooking gets dull.
But, regardless of when you add the salt, you still have to taste it, adding little by little. There's not a set amount of salt you just add to recipe, it always varies. You can't just carelessly throw it in.
Some things do require salt to be added during cooking though. In those cases, I add a small amount during cooking and the rest by the end.
Salting during cooking feels right, but it's often not a requirement. It's probably just a way to force you to salt carefully and taste often, but you can do that at anytime.
Obviously it depends on what you're cooking, but the science is more based on the absorbency of the food and how much you can get the salt to permeate the dish rather than simply be in it.
America's Test Kitchen has a video explaining and showing why salting is done early. They do caution you to use less salt if you don't add it early, but that video is pretty short and doesn't really add a ton of personal experience.
A good example of this is actually steaks - I salt my steaks before I cook them for 2 reasons: 1, it adds salt to my steak and makes it flavorful, and 2, it draws out moisture (in the form of water, which will be replaced with fat during cooking) which allows me to get a solid crust from the Maillard reaction by not creating as much steam from the water drawing out later. I've personally tested this with two cuts from the same steak cooked in the same pan - but of course that's a small sample size so take my words with a grain of salt.
Different salts can also impact your cooking, kosher salt being a commonly used one because it's easy to portion and larger in size. Table salt is far smaller and can quickly lead to over salting thanks to it being harder to portion while cooking.
Basically, it's not all just smoke and mirrors, but it's not the end of the world if you don't do it the same way.
Of course let me underpin all of this with a, "If it tastes good to you and you're happy, it's right." That's more important than anything else - you're not wrong because you choose to salt it at different times, but there is a legitimate reason why it's done. If you're enjoying your cooking, then I'm genuinely happy for you!
I do seasoning while I cook a lot of the times. However, I believe that in many situations it's not exactly the time of seasoning that makes the difference, but the gradual consideration it forces upon you to ponder on taste. I have found that there are many things where adding salt later is to no detriment at all, allowing for a finer control of salt in the final dish.
Too much emphasis on "season while you cook" can lead beginners to culinary disasters. Fixing "not enough salt" is way easier than fixing its excess.
Obviously however you prefer to cook is fine and good and you should keep cooking that way! But this is a science thing and not just subjective - the salt acts differently when it’s added throughout rather than at the end. You know how you can look at a packet of something very processed and there’s SO much sodium in there but it doesn’t taste over salty? That’s why.
Agree to disagree about chefs preferring complexity over simplicity. I’m sure some do but many make simplicity their whole thing. I’ve worked in kitchens (for clarity, more like pubs and cafes, not fancy restaurants) with chefs who’ve gone to culinary school, and none of them were like this. Perhaps the famous ones are more so. I do think amateur cooks sometimes do this, though - I’ve seen cooking discussions online that baffle me with how they choose to do something simple!
I’ve been cooking for a long time, my dad was a good cook and taught me a lot, by now I have the experience to salt as I go without it tasting salty. It’s a learned skill.
I don't know any professional chefs, so I was definitely talking about home cooks.
You can definitely experiment with adding salt later in the cooking process of meats, sauces, soups, pasta, vegetables, etc. Or even after the meal is done. It's really not a big deal.
There's probably little for you to gain by doing that, but a beginner cook can prevent some salting disasters. Specially when you're making several preparations at once.
Kitchen organization is huge. Make your kitchen a place that you enjoy cooking in. Some tips:
Reclaim your counter space. Stack vertically instead of spreading horizontally. Put less used appliances away.
You probably don't use every knife in your knife block. Save the counter space and put your most used knives in a magnet strip and your steak knives in a drawer.
Hang your pots and pans so they're easy to reach and won't bang into each other.
Deli containers are wonderful for meal prep. They make it easier to look in your fridge and see what ingredients need to be used up. You can buy plastic ones that will survive the dishwasher, microwave, freezer and having boiling liquid poured into them.
Buy some organizers to keep your drawers, fridge and pantry under control. Ingredients are easier to use if you can see them at a glance.
Keep your most used ingredients in an easily accessible place. I have a magnetic rack on the side of my fridge for items like oil, salt, pepper and tongs.
I'm a huge fan of this. They're incredibly cheap, but instead of being throw away items, they work just as well and last as long as more expensive containers. Maybe slightly leaky sometimes, so I just don't use them to transport food around. All the lids are the same, they all stack compactly in storage or in the fridge. It's truly the cure for that infomercial guy who keeps opening his cupboard and being destroyed by an avalanche of tupperware.