There is no reason not to know how to cook. It brings delight to friends, family, and partners alike, and elevates you in their eyes. Even if you can do nothing else satisfactorily, your ability to provide a good meal will make you valuable to them. Beyond that, it grants you a great deal of self-reliance; you can give yourself delicious food any time you want it! You’ll save money, you’ll (usually) eat more healthily…you’ll even be happier! Something about the activity is both calming and gratifying, and it grows on people. I started out seeing cooking as a little bit of a chore, but I liked the good food I could make. Now, though, my skill has grown into a beautiful hobby! I love it! I suspect with time you will develop an appreciation too.
This book is amazing. It shows you all kinds of cooking tricks and brings them back to first principles. So, instead of having a particular recipe that works well, you’ll know why it works well and be able to adapt it to other foods. If you’re even the smallest bit interested in science and/or learning how things work, give it a read or borrow it from a friend. I can practically guarantee that it will make you a better cook.
I was pleasantly surprised by how so many of the concepts cross over from one recipe to another. Usually, I’ll first use one of their pointers on a new recipe when I don’t know as much about what I’m doing. It helps the food turn out better, and helps me better incorporate the knowledge through practice. Then, on a later recipe, I’ll find myself applying a principle from the first recipe, because I better understand the effect of different techniques. For instance, I cook fried eggs at slightly higher heat because it gives them better flavor. It’s amazing to me how the book has improved something as simple, and commonplace as the fried eggs I eat every day. Ultimately, the book gives you a much bigger toolset to use when influencing the end-result that you eat.
By way of example, here are a few more tricks I’ve learned about cooking with meat (the book covers a huge variety of things but here are some of the lessons I’ve learned and adapted).
- Salt your meat for at least an hour before cooking! It makes your food more flavorful, more tender, and juicier. The salt loosens the fibers in the meat, making it tender. Initially, the salt pulls moisture to the surface of the meat, and can dry the meat out if cooked shortly after salting, but after a while the moisture gets sucked back in, salt and all. This enhances flavor, and further contributes to tenderness. This works on everything, I’ve gotten great results with steak, pork chops, and even Thanksgiving turkey! It’s hard to overdo, either in terms of the quantity of salt added, and the time the meat has to tenderize.
- Pat your meat dry before cooking. Usually you want at least a little bit of a sear and some browning to occur, and this only happens when the meat and your cooking surface is above 300 degrees. Sounds easy enough, but what often happens is that the meat drags down the temperature of your cooking surface once it’s added (the meat being at room temperature, vs 400-500 degrees for your pan). When your meat is dry, just by leaving the gas/power own, you can heat the surface up again and quickly start driving some heat energy into the meat. However, if your meat is damp or covered in droplets of moisture, it’s a different scenario. Water takes a lot of energy to boil off the surface of your meat, To avoid this, use a paper towel to collect the excess moisture. It really helps the flavor and appearance of your food. For a while, most of the meat I cooked looked (and felt) soggy, even after it was fully cooked, or it would be over-cooked but aesthetically ok. If you want beautiful, plump, flavorful, appropriately cooked meat entrees, be sure to remove excess moisture before cooking.
- Rest. Your. Meat. Once it’s out of the oven, insulate it with a combination of tin foil and towels. Then leave it alone for a few minutes. The bigger the cut, the longer you rest it. I rested a 20 lb turkey for 45 minutes and it was still plenty hot. Similar story for a roast. But for steaks and hamburgers, about 5 minutes is fine. The idea behind this is that during cooking, a lot of moisture is driven out of the meat fibers, and winds up in the spaces in between when those fibers shrivel up. This is why so much fluid runs out if you cut a steak or hamburger right after cooking it. When left to run all over the place, those juices don’t do anything beyond make a mess on your plate, unfortunately, which is especially sad considering how much juicier, tender, and flavorful they could be making the feature item of your meal! By contrast, when you rest your meat, the fibers slowly relax and pull the moisture back inside themselves, greatly improving the texture and juiciness of your meal. And that’s why you should rest your meat!