How do you make food that's restaurant quality?

[Destinysdaughter]

Can you?

What the difference between home cooking and making meals that are of the standard that you get in a good restaurant?

Anyone know the secret...?

[Artandco]

Just good cooking and ingredients. I would say most our meals are equal or better than most restaurants tbh. Only what we don't have is somewhere that makes food using lots of complicated methods like dry ice or dehydrated ingredients etc

[Wallabyone]

Shed loads of butter!

[Destinysdaughter]

Am currently watching Celeb Masterchef and they're in a restaurant kitchen and thought I'd love to be able to cook like that but just don't know how!

[Artandco]

Do you have some good recipe books to start from?

[CointreauVersial]

A lot of it is in the presentation.

And the fact that you haven't slaved away cooking it yourself always makes it taste better.

[ShyOyster]

DP says my cooking is restaurant quality total suck up but extremely flattering
I try and make as much as possible from scratch, use fresh and good quality ingredients (best I can afford). I grow my own herbs too. I don't go all Heston Blumenthal on my food though- I don't have the technical knowledge or the equipment for it.
I love cooking but I would lie if I said I cook like this every night, there's always at least one night a week when we have beans on toast or frozen pizza

[perrita]

Oil, butter, cream... All the lovely fattening stuff that they freely add! I tend to barely use those bits when cooking at home, I feel like I cook nice food but I think that's the main difference between home and restaurant cooking.

[Highlove]

I think learning to season food correctly is a huge part of it. The best ingredients and hours of care in preparing them can still be a bit bland without careful seasoning.

That and plenty of butter, oil, etc!

[neolara]

As a vegetarian, home cooked food is usually considerably better than restaurant food.

[Statelychangers]

Clearly it depends on the quality of restaurant you are trying to match.
Quite often my food tastes better than restaurant food - I cook everything from scratch, best ingredients, very few shortcuts.
I know my limitations though....I don't do fine dining. But then I think many restaurants present food as fine dining but the flavour is lacking.
In general Asian food is best made by the experts - every version I made is a bit pedestrian - perfectly edible but missing a little something.

[LBOCS2]

Lots of salt, lots of fat. If you go somewhere high end, the food will be seasoned properly and it will almost certainly have been basted in some sort of fat; joints of meat, fish etc - all basted in butter, it's whisked into sauces to make them shiny, there's lots in potatoes (along with cream), purées etc have been cooked in milk and then thinned with cream - it's not a low calorie experience.

Tastes great though :)

[Unescorted]

Practice and a bit more practice.
Good quality ingredients
Good quality equipment
Practice
Time
Practice

[lljkk]

imho, Restaurant meals are

hugely more salty
higher fat (heavier)
(too) large portions
much less veg, less tasty veg, than we usually do at home
meat portions are too large compared to what else is in meal

Yes there is a consistent quality of presentation in a restaurant, but presentation doesn't makeup for the problems. Our food at home is kind of boring and rarely pretty, but I still like it better.

[ArgyMargy]

It could be about the ingredients. Jimmy Osmond cooked sole, Audley did fillet steak, and there's usually a shed load of fat scallops. All probably locally sourced, super-fresh and cooked with butter, as pps have said. It's hard to go wrong.

[ChickyDuck]

The butter/salt/cream thing is definitely the case. There is also definitely an element of making sure every step of the preparation is done beautifully. Veg peeled and cut into perfectly shaped even peices. Onions in a tiny dice sweated until they practically dissolve. Fish freshly prepared and de-boned. Sauce tasted over and over until the seasoning is perfect etc etc

So often I eat at friends' houses and the food still has massive chunks of crunchy onions in that haven't been cooked down enough. Their food is fine, nice even, but it is those little bits of finesse that make the difference.