If you are generally looking for some ideas on how you might be able to improve your cooking skills, and you really want to be able to impress some people in this way, there are a lot of things you might want to focus on. The truth is that anyone can learn to drastically improve their cooking, as long as they are happy to focus on a few key things in particular. In this post, we’ll look at some of those, so that you can hope to start cooking some truly amazing meals that will impress anyone.
Whether you are trying to impress your date, your family, or some friends, you will find that the following tips are really going to help.
Brush Up On Cooking Theory
There is actually plenty of food theory that you might want to look into if you are want to learn how to cook the best possible meals. Just having a basic understanding can help a lot. There are a lot of theories in fact, but one of the main ones – and one that seems to have a lot of utility – is that known as: salt, fat, acid, heat.
Essentially, this theory is all about finding the perfect balance of these four fundamental elements. As long as you have balanced the salt levels, the amount of fat for taste, a little acidity, and the application of the right amount of heat, you are much more likely to end up with a dish that you can be proud of.
That’s just one example of food theory, but it should give you some idea as to how you might be able to make use of this kind of thinking in order to produce much better meals. At the very least, being aware of it is not going to hurt.
Use Fancy Ingredients
A very simple way you can hope to make better meals, and particularly more impressive meals is to make a point of using fancy ingredients. You don’t have to always do this, but even just occasionally doing it is going to mean that you are producing dishes that people are going to be absolutely blown away by.
What kinds of ingredients might we be talking about here? Well, for instance, you have certain ingredients which are always known to be especially well-loved in this sense. A good example is lobster. A simple use of lobster is to make a restaurant quality lobster bisque.
Just thinking a little more carefully about the ingredients you use might be all the change you need to make in order to cook amazing, and hugely impressive, meals. It’s a really simple thing that will produce great results.
Go Slow & Low
As a very general rule, food is always more delicious if you are making a point of cooking it slow and low. In other words, the longer you take with your food, the more delicious it will end up at the end. That is not true of absolutely anything that you can cook, but it’s certainly true of the majority of dishes. For example, if you are cooking a beef stew, the main way to ensure that you impart plenty of flavor in the dish is to spend a long time cooking it on a very low heat. That is going to allow for the proteins to bind together more, which means that each and every mouthful will quite simply have more flavor, and that is absolutely what we are hoping for here.
Slow and low, when in doubt, will produce much better results, no matter what you are cooking.
Rest Meat
For pretty much any meat dish that you might be cooking, you are going to find that it is much tastier in the end if you allow it to rest after cooking. Why? Because it means that the proteins are going to bind together more, allowing juices to stay inside the meat, which will make for a much more delicious meal with every mouthful. Generally, you should allow 5-10 minutes for resting, especially when it comes to good meat like steaks and brisket and so on. You’ll be amazed at how much of a difference it makes.
Ryan and I actually watched a show on Netflix called “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” and it was really good! We LOVE good food, so it was fun to see how to better balance these elements.