Table of contents:
1. The basics – Flavour
Home cooks mostly depend on other people’s recipes. If you do a recipe time and time again you develop the intuition on how to make the food good. Once you have a deep technical understanding of cooking, you can create your own recipes.
The cooking skill covers three fields of knowledge:
- First is understanding what flavor is.
- Second, is how to make stocks and sauces.
- And the third is, knowing all the different techniques, and which is appropriate for each food product.
What is flavor? Flavor is taste plus aroma.
Firstly, we need to decide what is the main ingredient in our dish and from there we create our flavor structure for that dish.
Let’s say it’s a pork chop. Is it going to be sweet and sour or salty-umami, or is it going to have a different flavor profile? We can always include spiciness of course, but the focus is to mainly balance between these three. Sweet, sour, and salty. The complexity of flavors actually comes from aroma (about 85%).
Secondly, we need to taste while we cook and season accordingly, in order to achieve what we aim for our liking. If you taste too much bitternes or sourness, balance it out with a little bit of sugar, or replace the sugar with another sweetener like maple syrup or honey.
Thirdly, always include ingredients responsible for saltiness, sweetness, sourness, and some spiciness. These flavors need to be in harmony. They need to balance one another. As an example here, I would like to give Thai cuisine. A lot of Thai meals are nicely balanced this way. Of course they’re spicy, but they’re also salty, umami, a little bit sweet, and sour. That’s why you need to taste the food that you cook and adjust the taste.
What is the umami flavor? Umami is somewhere between salty and sweet. If your meal is nicely balanced but is missing something special, it’s the umami. In today’s world everything needs to be made fast. Take any packaged food in a store, look at the ingredients list, and you will find the artificial ingredient responsible for the umami taste, which it’s called MSG (mono-sodium-glutamate). There are of course ingredients that contain natural umami. The first obvious one is soy-sauce, and other fermented soy products. Umami will also come from mushrooms or can be found in sauerkraut and other foods.
2. The basics – Seasoning
Without enough salt, our food is never going to taste right. We need to season our meals well so they don’t taste blend. Salt enhances flavors, so don’t underseason your food. A tip here: you should include 0,5-1% of salt by weight in whatever you cook. Anything below that will be perceived as under-seasoned, and anything above can be too salty for the majority unless you’re into salty foods. If you bake a bread which contains 600g of flour and 400g of water, which in total is 1 kg, then 10g of salt is the perfect amount. If your final pot of soup weighs 5 kg, then 50g of salt should season it just right. If you’re making a potato mash and you boil your 2 kg of potatoes without salt, after straining the water out and adding 200 ml of cream, you can add 22 g of salt without tasting.
You can take your food to the next level by adding some acid. It can be vinegar or citrus juice. Salt acid will help enhance the flavor of food without being perceptibly sour. A squeeze of lemon juice or a few drops of a vinegar at the end of cooking, brightens up the flavor and cuts through sauces that are rich in fat/oils (coconut milk based curries).
Fats and oils are important in our food because they carry flavors. There are water soluble and oil soluble flavors. Many spices contain flavor and aroma molecules hidden in their oils, which can be extracted/awakened in the oil/fat that you cook. Indian cuisine is a great example of this technique. Cooking very often starts with high heat treatment of spices, like mustard or cumin seeds in canola oil or in clarified butter (ghee).
3. The basics – Colour & heat control
When I think about the basic knowledge on cooking, the first thing that often comes to mind is a rule which my first head-chef taught me. The rule says: “No color – no taste”.
This is rule number one if you want to learn how to cook tasty meals. What does it actually mean? The colour is the browning you give to the food when you fry it in a pan/pot. You should often aim for that golden brown colour on your ingredients. Pay attention to what I’ve said: often, not always because it depends on what you cook. If a meal requires browning, or caramelization of the meat, or onions for example, then you have to make sure that you do it. Technically caramelization refers to sugars only, so in the case of meats we should be talking about the maillard reaction, which refers to proteins and sugars. That takes us to heat control.
A quick side note here. There are 2 types of heat: direct and indirect. Imagine a grill. Your stake touches the hot grill, and gets a marking from the surface that it’s in direct contact with. It also absorbs indirect heat, that comes from the surrounding hot air, or radiation of the hot coals. Same goes in your home kitchen. The hot pan is direct heat, the oven is mainly indirect heat.
Let’s go back to colour. Browning of your ingredients, caramelizing of the juices; by doing that you create different taste profiles, and develop the umami taste. Let’s say that you cook bolognese for your lasagne. You could throw all the ingredients into one pot and boil them, but it won’t be tasty because the meat needs browning, the vegetables need to sweat in the fat, etc etc. That’s why a proper technique in the proper order is needed if one wants to cook well.
When it comes to proper browning, you need to choose the proper equipment. Either you would use a big enough pan or pot, or you will brown things in batches. You need to make sure that you hear the “PSSSSSS” sound. See, I don’t know how big your family is, and/or how old your kids are. It all depends on how much food you need to prepare, and the more food you cook, the bigger the kitchen utensils you need.
4. The basics – Cooking techniques
All cooking techniques can be divided into 2 main categories which are wet/moist and dry. These can also be seen through the prism of the time needed to prepare the product. That gives us four categories:
- Wet and slow – braising, stewing, sous-vide
- Dry and slow – roasting, smoking/BBQ, confit
- Wet and fast – boiling, simmering, steaming, poaching, blanching
- Dry and fast – roasting/baking, grilling, searing, sautéing, broiling
Simmering is probably one of the most used techniques at homes, and it’s basically boiling on very low heat. Sometimes we could call it sweating, when vegetables slowly sweat and simmer in their own juices and fat. Sweating is a technique with which you should be starting, for example, all of your soups. In order to release water from the vegetables, use salt right at the beginning of cooking. You wouldn’t do that in the first three techniques (sautéing/stir-frying/pan-frying). They are very similar, that’s why I’ve put them together, and it’s basically cooking in a hot pan with minimum required oil/fat. Extracted by the salt water wouldn’t allow the vegetables to fry and get the color. That’s why seasoning comes last in these 3 techniques because your food will not fry/sear but it will boil. As we all know, boiling water happens at only 100°C (212°F), when oils reach much higher temperatures. Distinguishing those two basic methods is crucial because sweating and sautéing an onion develop different flavors. We need to know what we want to achieve in the final dish, and then we should follow the appropriate technique.
When and why should you apply all the other techniques? Meat is the best example here, however, a great majority of these techniques can be applied in cooking just vegetables.
Meats can be divided into 2 groups: lazy muscles and workforce muscles (tough cuts). The first group needs fast cooking methods, and the second group comes out best only when cooked long and slow. The working muscles contain a lot of connective tissue (collagen) which breaks down into gelatin when cooked slowly. Collagen starts to break down at 68-73°C (155-165°F) but this doesn’t tell us much. What you need to know is that tough cuts will become tender after 1,5 hours of, for example, stewing (counted from the moment it starts simmering). When a cooked meat is not good or tender, the fault lies on the technique for preparing the dish. Technique is super important. Technique is king.
5. The basics – Stocks
A stock is basically an extraction of flavor into water. There are 4 classic stocks: veal, fish, chicken or vegetable based. For a meat stock you need bones (and meat) and aromatics. These stocks can be divided into white or dark stocks, and the difference is that in the case of the dark one the bones and aromatics are roasted/browned.
In French cooking the basic aromatics are called mirepoix and these are: 2 parts of onions, 1 part of celery, 1 part of carrots. The vegetables are roughly cut and don’t need to be peeled, they’re discarded later. The reason why veal bones are better than beef bones, is the intensity of flavor in mature animals. Veal, as a younger cow, is more delicate than older types. This matters when the stocks are reduced to demi-glace consistency (demi = reduced by half. In fact very often by ¾).
When we want to make a white stock, the bones need to be blanched first. This means that you need to first boil the bones once. Cover the bones with water, bring it to a simmer and when it pours off the first cloudy water, rinse the bones and refill the pot with fresh water. This way you’re gonna end up with a nice clear stock. Never boil it on high heat, just simmer. The required amount of time needed for extracting the flavours into water is vegetable stock (45-60 mins). Next is fish stock – 1,5 h. Chicken stock needs 6-8 h and veal needs 8-12 h.
In all stocks you need to use aromatic herbs and spices like bay leaf, parsley, thyme, peppercorns, allspice as well. Don’t use salt. Stock are your base for your soups and sauces.
6. The basics – Sauces
We need to start with The 5 “Mother Sauces” and then we’ll move to modern versions. The 5 French Classic sauces are:
- Veloute – usually a white stock thickened by white roux
- Brown sauce – dark stock thickened by dark roux
- Sauce tomat – tomato based sauce also thickened by roux
- Hollandaise – an emulsion of egg yolks and butter
- Bechamel – milk thickened by roux
What is roux? The French roux is equal amounts (by weight) of butter and flour, cooked together. There are three variants of the roux, depending on how long the flower is cooked in the butter.
There is white, blond and dark roux. White roux is usually used in veloute sauces, blond in bechamel, dark in dark sauces. Different stages of browning the flour give different flavor profiles
Very often chefs tend to thicken their sauces with either corn or potato starch. This allows for a gluten-free version of a sauce, but definitely you get better tasting sauces by using classic roux. There is also something called the “swiss roux”which is equal parts of flour and oil. You can use olive oil to make it more healthy. Mix these two with a whisk in a bowl, and pour slowly into your stock or milk, whisking constantly.
Modern sauces tend to be divided into 3 groups:
- Reductions
- Emulsions
- Purees
The purpose of Reduction is to intensify flavor and to thicken the sauce. The thickening will however happen only when the stock is made out of high collagen content bones and meat (e.g. knuckles). Evaporation of water concentrates the flavors and the gelatin, which we achieved by breaking collagen by long and slow cooking of our stock. The classic way of creating demi-glace would be reducing red wine, then adding veal stock and reducing it by ¾.
Examples of Emulsion are: hollandaise sauce, mayonnaise, aioli and vinaigrette. Emulsion is a stable combination of two liquids that do not usually mix (water and oil). Tiny droplets of oil become surrounded by molecules of water or vice versa. A stabilizing component like egg yolk, mustard or garlic, is needed to help create these bonds. When you add flavor on top of that, you create a sauce based on emulsification technique.
Purees are pretty obvious. Both vegetables and fruits are suitable. Very often a fruit puree/sauce is called a coulis.
7. The basics – Knive skills
Remember when I shared with you one of my first lessons I had learnt at culinary school? It was “Clean as you go”. The second lesson was: “How to cut an onion”. It’s not just about the onion, but about general cutting skills. Cutting and chopping can be easy and fast, when it’s done properly with a proper knife. Some chefs are obsessed about knives. Probably every knife in our case has an exciting story.
As a home cook you don’t have to be a master of knife skills. It’s different for chefs, because knives are our working tools. We use knives on a regular basis, but when it comes to home cooking, and time efficient home cooking in particular, I would often use a food processor to speed things up. Both good knife skills and various food processors will save you a good amount of time. Preparation takes most of the time spent in the kitchen. Also at home, when you chop parsley for instance, it doesn’t have to look nice and perfect like some chefs would try to do to make a restaurant dish look nicer. Home cooking in my opinion should be rustic. Roughly chopped vegetables, no perfection, let’s call it: an artistic mess. This kind of food looks more real, more home-like, more appetising.
I encourage you to google for example a YT video on: “how to dice an onion” . I’ve seen home cooks doing very weird stuff, and no offence, but you might be one of those who don’t do it the easy way.
When it comes to knives themselves. all you need in fact are three knives. A 20cm chef knife, a bread or carving knife, and a small paring knife. If you are into fishing and then filleting the fish, you need a flexible filet knife. That is all, really. Three, good quality knives and you’re good to go.
Let’s also cover the topic of chopping boards. It’s nice to have a good, decent size, wooden chopping board, but it’s important to take good care of it. A good board makes your work easier – you can plan your working space better. I personally use a bamboo chopping board from IKEA. Basic, medium size, does the job. It’s important to oil well, both wooden or bamboo boards, before first use. What I also have, are two thin plastic chopping boards which I use for smelly things like onion, garlic and fish. My wife, like most women, has a very good sense of smell. If I use our main board for chopping onion, she will then smell it on everything she eats.
8. The basics – The “magic”
Let the flavours merge/marry.
Another factor of preparing tasty meals, is something that is simply the most magical process that happens in a kitchen, and it happens when flavours marry. There is no way of speeding it up, other than simply giving it enough time. How long is enough? Usually “overnight”.
Depending on a dish, sometimes bringing it to the boiling point will help flavours to marry. Let’s take a salad which is seasoned with mayonnaise based dressing, as an example. Make it, and taste it the next day. There is a difference. Soups, sauces, and other one-pot dishes like stews, always taste better the next day.
“Cook it until the oil separates”.
This one is probably one of the best tips you can get. Many Indian recipes have a few repeatable steps needed to be followed in order to make delicious curries. Very often you start with frying spices in oil, then you add aromatics like garlic, ginger,and onions. Some of those recipes will tell you to cook the onions “until the oil separates”. This usually takes about 20 minutes and it’s a key step not just for making curries.
Use this technique in making, for example, tomato soup or tomato sauce. Sweat your onions and garlic in a good amount of olive oil, add diced canned tomatoes, and simmer until the oil separates. You will be able to see ponds of oil on the surface of your sauce. Again, when this step is followed and enough time is given to prepare a meal, something magical happens. The flavours marry, the overall taste mellows, and it simply tastes better. Is it magic or a simple technique?
The Ingredients – Pantry Staples
To be honest, if we follow our every week plan we won’t need that much in our storage. We don’t need to store different pastas, canned tomatoes and others. Of course, whenever we see a good deal on canned or frozen food it’s financially better to invest in such ingredients, but I leave it to your own decision.
Each cuisine uses two staple aromatics, like onion and garlic. These two would be a must-have, but it all, of course, depends on your eating habits, sometimes on religious restrictions, and you best know what you mostly use. Apart from other very basic ingredients like good sea salt, whole black pepper in a grinder or even a bottle of soya sauce, next are oils. I mostly use olive oil, but for high-heat pan-frying you want to use sunflower or canola oil. This is because of the differences in “smoke points” of fats and oils. I encourage you to learn more about oil’s smoke/burning point.
When it comes to herbs and spices, all of us have a few favorite ones and this of course depends on where we come from. I wouldn’t buy things like “grill spice” or any other ready-made spice mixes. They’re unecessary and if you look at the list of ingredients then you will see that most of the time, you pay for salt, MSG or potato starch. The dried herbs I mostly use are thyme, bay leaf and lovage, but I’m also very much into Indian cooking so I have a lot of those spices as well. I also try to have fresh herbs in my fridge, but these I buy according to my menu plan. A tip I’d like to leave here is, that freezing chopped fresh herbs like parsley or dill is a good practice too and might work in your case.
I bake all of my bread 1-2 times a month, so I always keep some ray flour to feed my sourdough starter. Of course you should also have regular plain wheat flour and some corn or potato starch.
Other staple ingredients I use are two types of vinegars: apple cider for different salad dressings and brown or white distilled vinegar for e.g. mayonnaise.
I believe that it’s also good to always have some rice, oats for different breakfast options, flax seeds, some dried fruits like apricots, figs, raisins, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa powder, good quality honey, some nuts like walnuts and/or almonds.
All I have mentioned is a super basic list of ingredients. There are too many possibilities and there can be a lot more. You need to decide what it is that you use in your cooking on a regular basis.
Self-Prepared Pantry Products
Self-prepared pantry products are key in being time-efficient in making quality food. So I’d like you to ask yourself this question: What kind of tasks are repeatable? What kind of tasks do I need to do each time, and what could I do once? Prepare a bigger amount, and save yourself some time when you need it again. It will basically be a shortcut in your cooking every time.
From time to time I would make an Indian dish which always includes aromatics like garlic and ginger. It is true that the dish tastes different and better if the garlic and ginger are finely chopped. This course is about being time-efficient so we would go for a homemade garlic-ginger paste which lasts very long. Once a month, I would make a batch of the paste using more or less the same amount of garlic and ginger, and blend it into a paste with enough oil to make it spin in the blender. It’s important to add some lemon juice so it doesn’t oxidize (doesn’t turn dark). I love this paste because I can use it in Chinese dishes, in my own dish creations, and to marinate meat. It’s very useful.
You could do the same thing with sofrito which is a Mediterranean, Spanish, Italian or Latin American mix of aromatics like onion,garlic, peppers and sometimes tomatoes. You could make a batch and freeze it in portions to use them in various options. It’s a huge time saver.
The same could be done with mushrooms. I like to go mushroom picking every autumn, and then I simmer them with onions in a form of a sauce which I, again, freeze in small batches. Whenever I feel like eating mushroom risotto, I have the base ready to go. Those few aromatic bases are great for a start.
Another shortcut that I use is tomato sauce. In fact, it’s a sauce made with different roasted vegetables like zucchini, egg plant, peppers but it mainly contains tomatoes. I prepare it from time to time and freeze it in batches. It’s a good way to smuggle some more vegetables for your kids. Whenever I need a quick dinner, I defrost a portion of that sauce and use it with pasta or even as pizza sauce.
In autumn it would be smart to bake a big pumpkin, puree it, and freeze it in batches. This can be used in risottos or whenever you want to make a pumpkin soup again.
You can do similar things with stocks and soups. I always have frozen soup, for example cream of carrot and coriander.
The possibilities are endless. Think about a shortcut. Think about what could save you some time. Cook in bulk.
The Utensils – Essential Kitchen Tools & Equipment
In this session I would like to share with you my thoughts about bigger and smaller kitchen equipment.
Let’s start with the small tools. One thing I can’t live without is rubber spatulas. The best are heat-resistant ones you can use with your pans and not destroy the non-stick layer. They are great at scraping everything out of a bowl. Next are vegetable peelers. Both vertical and horizontal. are good at different tasks. Microplane, very sharp, very useful kind of a grater. Perfect for hard cheese like parmesan, for mincing garlic, ginger, horseradish. and super good for nutmeg. A scale, obviously you need a basic scale. Three types of strainers: a basic sieve, a fine one like chinoise and a colander. If you work with any kind of dough, it’s nice to have a plastic or metal bench scraper. Last but not least, what all home cooks and restaurant chefs need, are good frying pans. What I want to share with you is that spending a lot of money on expensive pans makes no sense. There is no difference in performance, if you compare it to cheaper non-stick pans. When your pan wears off just get a new one which would probably be needed every 3 years. The only one solid pan for generations, is a cast iron pan. A good indicator of a good pan or pot is a thick bottom, that’s all. If it has it, there is less risk that your food will stick to it and burn. The heat is also distributed more evenly.
If you’re equipped with all the above, you can do magic in your kitchen.