How to become a better cook?

[1newname]

It can't just be practice, I've been cooking most days for 24 years! I can cook and have some dishes that are very good but most are mediocre. I actually feel like I've gotten worse over the years. Is it possible to improve? Or is it a case of you've either got or you haven't, a bit like art?!

Salt, and more salt. Bring everything to room temp before cooking

Yes, re temperature! Keep butter in a butter dish, and eggs out of the fridge.

I was always able to follow a recipe and I could feed myself.

I really learned to cook by watching, "Ready, Steady, Cook" in the early 90s.

If you can find them on YouTube the chefs are given ingredients they have to use.

I do also watch a lot of cooking shows, Masterchef (UK, US, Aus, Junior) Great British Menu (I never try to recreate those dishes though), My Kitchen Rules, Kitchen Nightmares (UK, US and Aus).

Jamie Oliver did some stuff during lockdown where he had a recipe but said, "If you don't have that, you use x, Y, Z"

One of my sons favourite things when a teen was Nigel slaters blue cheese pasta and if I rember correctly it was just pasta, blue cheese, bit of butter, spinach and a tiny bit of cream - lots of black petter on top - it was monumentally easy even for me but no doubt, butter, cream, blue cheese now all frowned on - unfortunately ,as someone else mentioned, fats often enhance some very simple things and turn ok into amazing!

Is your problem technique/methodology - under/over cooked, or that the dish doesn't taste good. You need sharp knives, a reliable oven and a meat thermometer, read the recipe and check you understand it before you start, sometimes you cook at low temperature for a long time, sometimes high temp for a short time (everything needs to be prepped ready), the methodology is not interchangable. If taste is the problem, depending on the dish, more salt, garlic, tomato puree, worcester sauce (Henderson's Relish if your veggy), soy sauce, oyster sauce, anchovy essence, mushroom ketchup can all give it a boost, or failing that lot some Aromat (which is mainly MSG as used in the finest Chinese restaurants)

Our council does adult cookery classes that were fun. I had to pay but it was a really good way to bring some joy back to cooking

How do you cook them? I love cooking and I would say I am a good cook. I make most food from scratch such as mayonnaise, flat bread, authentic curries, anything but I do follow a recipe. AI is really good for recipes. DH chooses a country each week and I make a meal so it is Portuguese this week. I have a basic pantry of basics such as spices and flours etc.

I take recipes from social media a lot. Especially TikTok.

I tried a recipe from there earlier in the week actually. It looked delicious, came out of the oven looking great, but the flavour was horribly bland and "nothingy". You win some, you lose some.

I think add more seasoning than you think, don’t be afraid to use fats (butter/olive oil) and be patient. Learn which flavours go together so you can improvise, and learn what you can swap out for each other. I also think things like adding garlic to onions at the right time in the process makes a massive difference, if you add them both at the same time like it says in a lot of recipes then the garlic will burn and alter the taste of the dish. Fresh herbs make a massive difference too. But I think patience is definitely the main thing, let the flavours infuse and blend together

I think also- add the right herbs/spices for the dish! Maybe this is just leftover from my childhood but my mum always used to add the most bizarre concoction of spices that made absolutely no sense with the dish and it used to drive me mad 😆 think seasoning chicken with Chinese five spice and soy sauce when it was going with tomato pasta etc.

This one is an easy fix - don't follow the time! Get a meat thermometer and oven thermometer and work our what's actually going on. It will continue cooking whilst it rests!
For chicken or turkey you want between 68 and 70 to allow the resting time cook process. Also don't cook straight from the fridge everything tightens up too quick due to the heat.

For how to improve generally its about tasting as you go and making small tweaks with herbs, spices, salt etc.

Focus on sauces first so master a salsa Verde which can go with lots of stuff and add. So a harissa yogurt, a teriyaki etc.

If you make a good spag bol sauce then use this as base for a moussaka for instance - the tip with aubergines is not too much oil and ideally griddle as they act as sponges.

I tend to use the “cook the perfect” recipes from the Guardian, either to follow that recipe or to identify which of the many recipes I would prefer. I follow recipes exactly the first three times I make a dish, then I vary.
If you are having trouble roasting a chicken, I really wonder if it’s your oven.
Otherwise, I wonder if you have cooked too much over the years. Perhaps a month off, with the family stepping in, would do you good.
I also find a big quality decline when I’m interrupted every three minutes while cooking. It feels like you should be able to do other things at the same time, but have you tried focusing on the food and listening to the radio and doing nothing else?

"Choose a country/region" was something we did when the DC were pre teens/teens and they loved it. Each weekend one of the DC would choose the country for the following Sunday.

It occasionally made for odd combos, there was a period of competitive “difficult countries” but it was another good way to involve the DC in food choices and prep and some of the novelties became favourites.

I improved as a cook when I set myself two challenges.

First was to make 100 new to me recipes in a year. This gave me more of a feel for the style of cooking I wanted to explore.

Then I cooked every recipe in a particular cookbook even the ones I'd usually turn past.

Both pushed me out of my comfort zone and improved my repertoire.

That's because they're designed to look good on Tik Tok & Instagram rather than taste good. The originators will have spent a lot of effort getting that final "pack shot" right, moving bits around with cocktail sticks, painting to give just the right colour or degree of shine, little bits of cotton wool dipped in chemicals to give the effect of a bit of steam.(Can you tell I've worked on advertisements.) The one thing I learnt, never crack and egg into a bowl on camera, it will never crack cleanly and you have no idea what it will look like when it lands in the bowl.

Excellent advice in the posts above especially about using good quality produce, lots of seasoning and quality butter and olive oil.

I would add:

Umami paste is a good flavour enhancer
There are some good and well tested recipes in Felicity Cloake's book. Forgotten the title - she used to do the 'cook the perfect' column in The Guardian.

I agree with Felicity Cloake, where she compares other people's recipes after testing them and makes recommendations.

Otherwise my go to is Darina Allen's Ballymaloe Cookery Course book, you can get it at a good price second hand online. I like books which explain the science behind what you're trying to achieve and why the process works the way it does. It's an excellent kitchen bible so to speak.

Totally agree that flavourful dishes, as opposed to flavoursome ingredients, contain heaps more butter, good quality oil and seasoning than you'd ever imagine in most domestic kitchens. It's also true that sticking to seasonal, local if you can get them, ingredients gives you much better flavours than imported.

Some always availables in my kitchen are

Roasting bags for chicken. I stuff the cavity and around the seasoned bird with herbs and citrus chunks and keep the jelly for stock.

Roasted heads of garlic in the fridge. Put a head of garlic in tinfoil inside a small ramekin type dish to fit, cover with drizzles of oil, close foil and roast while something else is cooking. You use the roasted garlic as a paste that squeezes out of each clove. It's a great flavour, but less of a sharp edge than raw garlic added to a dish.

Similarly I keep roasted sweet peppers in the fridge in the oil they were cooked in. Very handy to have by you.

As I said before, make in advance and let flavours develop, curries and casseroles and that aubergine dish above in particular.

A tip for cooking aubergines was a Barefoot Contessa method of stabbing a whole aubergine all the way up and down and around, with a fork and massaging it with olive oil before putting in the oven. They always need a lot more cooking than recipes would have you believe.

Finally, for now, take inspiration from dishes you see in the supermarket. I make my own tomato and vodka sauce for pasta after seeing it on sale commercially. I also follow Instagram cooks and chefs and cherry pick what to do that they demonstrate. Julius Roberts is one favourite and Nancy Birtwhistle has inspired me to make my own stock cubes.

Obviously not everyone has the time or inclination to make stock cubes etc. but once you get into your stride and accept you get some wins and some fails, you feel much more confident to give things a go or adjust the recipes you follow to your own taste.

The Felicity Cloake book is called 'Completely Perfect'