subject: 4 Cooking Tips Will End Your Recipe Guessing [print this page] Cooking is not made easy when youre still guessing. In fact, guessing at cooking increases the stress because guessing makes you unsure of the results to come. Im going to give you a little cooking help by offering some tips on how to end your guessing.
One of the reasons that you guess is because its hard to believe something until you can actually see it. But I want to help you to wrap your head around the idea that you have to believe it first and then youll see it.
Quantifying your portion sizes, temperature and testing are great ways to allow you to stop guessing. Lets go ahead and look at how that might work.
4 Ways to quantify your cooking and eliminate guessing:
Cooking Tip #1: Temperature
Temperature is important in cooking. Some foods will make you sick if you dont cook them at the right temperature. Other foods will be utterly destroyed if you cook them much above medium heat.
Use water as an indicator of temperature. Water evaporates at 212 degrees F, so if you are using a saute pan, if you sprinkle a little water in the pan and it evaporates, you know that the pan is at least at the boiling point of water. The quicker the water evaporates, the hotter your pan is. This works on the grill as well.
You can also test a small piece of your food to test for temperature. For example, maybe youre going to fry some chicken in oil on the stove, but you cant tell if the oil is hot enough or not. Dont ruin a whole breast by putting it into oil thats not hot enough. Instead, take a small piece of the chicken and drop it in the pan. Youll know right away whether the oil is hot enough or not to cook your food.
Cooking Tip #2: Test a Small Quantity
Sometimes, you just need to test a small quantity of something before cooking the whole thing. This is especially helpful in roasting. I can tell you that when I had my catering business, sometimes we would have to make hundreds or thousands of crab cakes in one big batch. Well, we would take one crab cake, cook it and test it. This would allow us to make adjustments on the rest of the batch and make a superior product! Cooking or roasting a small piece of something is a great way to see if your plan is going to work without sacrificing all of your ingredients during one of your guessing adventures.
Cooking Tip #3: Portion Size
Get a digital scale and begin to understand your raw portions sizes. Let me tell you a story about how I discovered the importance of this tip.
When I used to make spaghetti for myself and my wife, I would cook a whole pound of spaghetti, basically one whole box for the two of us. When we sat down to eat, because so much spaghetti was available, we ate more than we should. After finishing our meal, there was always spaghetti left over, we would put the leftover spaghetti in the refrigerator and a few days later throw it out because we wouldnt eat it.
With my digital scale, I started by weighing 8 ounces of dry pasta for the two of us. I cooked the 8 ounces and still had some leftover, so I adjusted it down until I knew EXACTLY how much dry pasta to cook for the two of us5.3 ounces is our perfect amount. Knowing this finally made cooking pasta easy, we dont overeat and we dont have leftovers.
Understanding and knowing your portion sizes will also help you to not overbuy at the grocery store because youll know EXACTLY how much to buy of a product to feed your family for a particular meal. And make sure you stick to the portion sizes. If youre cooking frozen shrimp from a bag and the portions end up leaving 3 shrimp in the bag, dont just dump them into the meal and cook them. NO, youll be feeding too much to your family! Leave them in the bag and cook them the next time. You dont have to just make the whole package.
Cooking tip #4: Test Spices
If you are making a pot of something and you need to add spices, dont start throwing in the spices and guess what its going to taste like. Get the spices that youre thinking about using and put the concoction in a small ramekin or a small souffl cup first. This will help you to know how the flavors work and give you the confidence that the combination is going to work.
So, by using these quantifying cooking tips, you can stop guessing at whats happening to your food. Observe your results and purposely alter your steps for the next time. You will be amazed at how starting with these little visual cues can help you to stop guessing and be confident that what you see is what you believe will be true. This isnt guessing, this is cooking made easy!
