Being a poor cook can be frustrating. Most ready-meals are expensive, have a dissatisfying taste and aren’t particularly nutritious. Improving your cooking skills can allow you to make your own meals. This can be a fun project as well as a step towards healthier, more exciting eating at the same time. Below, we explore how you can improve your home cooking.
Watch cooking videos
Cooking tutorials can be an excellent way to follow a recipe, cook new food and find inspiration. At the start of your cooking journey, these step-by-step guides can be incredibly helpful. Just search on YouTube for the sort of recipe you want, before collecting the right ingredients to follow it.
Cooking videos provide detailed explanations and step-by-step processes to help you recreate a delicious recipe successfully. To get started, follow credible content creators with great reviews and on video streaming sites. Know their culinary background as well and get acquainted with basic culinary terms and techniques.
Equipment
Once you’ve been inspired, you’ll need the appropriate equipment to follow recipes and do justice to your ingredients. Blunt knives will prevent you from slicing components to the correct size. Meanwhile, your food may stick to the bottom of an old pan and burn. Revamping your cooking equipment with new stainless-steel cookware should give you the best chance of following recipes and becoming a better cook though.
You may also become a better cook by getting inspiration from your surroundings. If you have a lovely spruced-up kitchen with personalised décor, you may be more pumped up to work your way in the kitchen. Personalised boards by Sweetheart Creative can be something you may add to your kitchen to get you more inclined to prepare sumptuous dishes.
Experiment with flavours
Your ingredients and flavours really matter. If you stick with the same old meals, cooking can become boring, and you might slip back into the habit of purchasing ready meals. Instead, you should have fun and experiment with flavours. Explore different spices and flavours – if you’re making a curry, for instance, you can try and sprinkle in a new spice to see if it makes a difference. It’s a similar story with ingredients too. Don’t just stick to the same vegetables; try and buy new and interesting ones to try out.
Cooking lessons
Some techniques can feel overwhelming and alien initially. If you’re feeling truly committed to becoming a better cook though, lessons could help you push on. Most courses should help you develop basic knife skills, plus the ability to poach, prepare stock, sauté components and even braise ingredients!
Practice
Ultimately though, practicing might be the best way to become a better cook. Even with the best ingredients, equipment and training, a lot of cooking revolves around your feel for the dish. You need a sense of how a dish works. The best way to develop this is through trial and error and plenty of practice as you work out how you prefer to follow recipes.
Becoming a better cook can be a healthy and rewarding experience. The best place to start is by getting the right equipment and following some basic recipes. From there you can look into lessons and explore more exotic flavours. With enough practice you should soon be able to notice a difference.
