10 Top Tips to Improve Your Cooking

Being a home cook can be a challenge, especially if you don’t LOVE cooking. I was never a big cook when I was younger. I learnt to love cooking when I started growing my own food. I didn’t want that beautiful produce to got to waste. I wanted to showcase it as much as I could. The freshness, the flavours, the fact that it was organic. But there are some tips I wanted to share with you, so you could work on and improve your home cooking. Small changes that you might not have thought of, that dramatically improve the flavours of your dish.

These 10 simple tips will elevate your cooking to the next level and I bet a lot of them you wouldn’t even think of. I hope they help if you manage to implement them.

Gem’s Top 10 Tips to Improve Your Cooking

USe the right salt

Still reaching for table salt? Stop. Table salt isn’t bad necessarily, but I wouldn’t choose it as my go-to salt to use in cooking. It has anti-caching agents which can create a metallic aftertaste in the mouth. A lot of them don’t contain iodine either, which is essential to our diet. If you can only get table salt, try and get one with added iodine. When it comes to cooking, kosher salt is the best. With slightly larger crystals, you can tell how much you’re using and it is a great seasoning salt. Then there’s sea salt or larger flaked salt like Maldon. Mainly used at the end of dishes for a good level of texture. You can also by Indian black salt (Kala Namak), which is great for adding a sulphur flavour. Great if you are vegan, adding it to scrambled tofu will bring out that ‘eggy’ flavour you want.

Don’t forget the acid

If you have never watched or read ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ by Samin Nosrat, I highly recommend you do. It will change your life. We get acidity from vinegars, citrus, yoghurt, wine, tomatoes, buttermilk. Adding acid helps to balance out spices, tenderise meat, help to balance out fats. Acid also helps to bring flavours into focus. It’s why if you add a spoonful of white vinegar to a pot of soup at the end, the flavours will zing. Sometimes we want to taste the acid and other times we want it to be more subtle. But the main thing is to include it.

fresh herbs vs Dried herbs

Herbs are essential to cooking and there really is no comparison to using fresh herbs in cooking. But if you haven’t got a herb garden growing, don’t underestimate the power of dried ones. Learning when to use either fresh or dried is a bit of an art. Fresh herbs are great for sauces, pesto, salad dressings and so on. They are also good for finishing things like salads, curries, pasta, meat and fish dishes, or sandwiches. Dried herbs are good for soups, stews and longer cooking. If you’re cooking a dish that’s going to be on the hob or in the oven for longer than 15 minutes, then there’s no need to use fresh herbs. All the volatile oils will disappear anyway. So unless you have fresh herbs to hand, don’t worry about using dried. Woody stemmed herbs are great bundled together, you can either make a brush or simply chuck them in the soup to add flavour. What we need to remember is ratios. When cooking with fresh herbs, we always add more. Whereas if you’re cooking with dried, we add less. It’s usually a 1:3 ratio, so 1 tsp of tried to 1 tbsp fresh and vice versa. It’s also worth remembering that fresh herbs always go in a dish at the end and dried, the beginning.

use whole spices

I know you probably don’t need another kitchen gadget, but a spice grinder will change your cooking. Ground herbs lose their flavour profiles super quickly. A lot of whole spices have a protective shell, keeping all those essential oils from being released. It’s only when we grind them they release all of that fragrance and essential oils that are great in cooking. I love doing this for Indian based dishes or if I’m making cakes, especially things like gingerbread or chai spice. It’s also great to dry toast your spices, this also helps release essential oils. Great for adding to sauces, dressings or spice blends.

invest in precision

I don’t know the amount of times people message me and say that their oven runs too high or cooks too slowly. Most ovens aren’t calibrated correctly, so you might think you have something on 200c but it would actually read 240c if you used an oven thermometer. I highly recommend one for baking and cooking meat. I would also suggest investing in a good digital scale, they are so precise. I trust them much more than old school scales. A jam and sugar thermometer is good to have as well. They are great for oil temperature if you want to fry something like my cauliflower wings.

eat seasonally

I do harp on about it, being my ethos and all. But it really counts when it comes to flavour in cooking. If you buy a strawberry in June-July, it will taste much sweeter than in Sep-Oct. That’s because eating ingredients when they are in season means they are at their true ripeness. They haven’t been forced into production in a heated polytunnel somewhere. They have grown and been ripened by the sun at the right time of year. Fresh grown basil is the flavour of summer, it’s never going to taste the same in winter. Especially when paired with warm off the vine tomatoes. I genuinely think that eating tomatoes out of season is a criminal offence on the taste buds.

Season in layers

When we cook, it’s all about layering flavours. You might caramelise some onions for sweetness, one layer, add garlic to sauté, another layer, then you might add toasted spices, another layer. Thinking of cooking from this point of view will improve the flavours and textures of your food. A lot of people just add salt and pepper at the end of a dish. You need to think about the layers of seasoning from start to end. This is where we come back to salt, fat, acid and heat. It’s a balancing act that we need to master to increase depth of flavour.

taste as you go

Which brings me to my next point, taste as you go. Taste your cooking at all the different stages, not just at the end. Taste before you add salt, taste before you add acid. Does something need sugar or salt, or are you not allowing the flavours to come through one their own? Tasting your food is key to good cooking, it’s why us recipe developers test our recipes over and over to get them right.

experiment

Applying a growth mindset to cooking is one of the best things you can do. Experiment with different flavours, make new recipes, try things from cookbooks, your favourite blogs. Getting into the habit of trying new things, flavours and textures sets you on the path of becoming a better home cook. Try and make something out of nothing, the odds and ends in the fridge. I have every faith in you!

don’t overcrowd the pan

When it comes to overcrowding the pan, it can turn things like roast vegetables into steamed vegetables. Or things like meat won’t cook properly. You want to give everything space to breathe alone. If you’ve ever tried to make roast potatoes that didn’t turn out crispy, you will know. Packing things in can cause uneven cooking and textures we don’t want. I love large baking trays for this reason. You can fit so many things on them, but everything has its own space. I absolutely love these ones.

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