Cooking Tips

Order spices online

Great tastes often are the result of optimal spice usage. Buy a cheap coffee grinder and grind whole spices yourself. But also remember that fresh herbs and spices only really stay that way for about 6 months. So you need labeled reusable containers and a website online you can order them from. A protip is to skip any website selling mixes or combinations of spices. Only buy from a website that sells the whole thing in its purest form. You can always combine them yourself later, but you can’t uncombine them! You will be blown away with the freshness, and save a lot of money in the process by not needing to buy the containers these things often come in. You can also buy small quantities to try new things out

If you’re learning how to cook, don’t use recipes

The problem with recipes is that they don’t explain why you do something. This means you never really learn how to go out on your own. Why does one recipe say to gently fry the freshly ground spices in olive oil but the other recipe says to put it at the top in the end? What is the difference between salting before and salting after? It’s not rocket science, but these details matter and your cooking ability will skyrocket if you focus on that first. A great place to start is SALT FAT ACID HEAT by Samin Nosrat. Another exceptional resource is The Science of Spice by Dr. Stuart Farrimond

Own 3 frying pans

1. Cast Iron - For anything that doesn’t need a deglaze and isn’t eggs or pancakes
2. Steel Pan - For anything you would normally put in the cast iron, but you will be deglazing with acid
3. Teflon Pan - For eggs and pancakes on medium heat

Just get one of each and learn how to use heat and fat so the food doesn’t stick. And then learn how to deglaze and make delicious sauces. The teflon pan will be the one you use the least, but it’s nice to have for pancakes.

Buy 2 excellent knives and learn to sharpen them

You only need a chef knife and a small useful utility or paring knife. Once you’ve used the hell out of them go ahead and buy an usuba or filet knife or whatever floats your fancy. But the truth is you’re still only going to use the chef knife and the utility/paring knife 97.7% of the time. So it’s worth investing in something that is forged, not cut, and made of a quality metal alloy which will retain the edge for a long time. Then you can learn how to use a wetstone to keep it sharp. All knives become duller over time, and it’s really satisfying to cook with sharp knives. They should be sharp enough to cut through a sheet of paper with a gentle flick of the wrist. This takes some time to learn, but as an added bonus you can sharpen other people’s knives!

Use a scale

There’s really no excuse for not having a kitchen scale. Here’s a list of why you should use one:

• Measurements are precise. Flour, for example, is compressible, which means a volume of it, or “1 cup”, can have different mass depending on how it’s packed together
• Metric units are easier to work with and less error-prone. You can convert anything into metric units, and then use those from then on
  • As an extra, it’s easier to tweak a recipe by slightly changing the mass of an ingredient. What does a “little bit more” flour really mean?
• Fewer measuring utensils means fewer things to wash afterward. Add item to bowl until desired weight. Tare. Repeat.
• Weighing is faster. Ex. 1500 g of water is a lot faster than filling up and counting a bunch of 2-cups servings
• Easy to see how many ingredients are remaining. Do you have enough sugar to bake 3 cakes? Now you know.
• A scale takes up less room than a bunch of measuring spoons and cups
• Not a reason, but scales don’t even cost much. At the time of writing it is the same price as one meal in a restaurant

Slowly become able to make almost everything yourself

No spice mixes. No rice packets. No cake in a box. No salad dressing. No cookies in a plastic container. Okay, you get the idea. Actually, if a mix makes you happy then that’s wonderful, but even better if you learn how to recreate it and make it even better for yourself. Here’s why:

1. Most products are kind of a scam at least to some degree

• The sizes get shrinkflated
• The quality ingredients get dilutionflated
• Flavours from real things like lemon juice are not used in place for artificial variants that don’t come close to the real thing
• The packaging is stupid and probably overpromises on the experience leaving you disappointed. Unrealistic photos. Probably plastic as well. Ever see 100% “from concentrate” on juice? Yeah, that’s another scam
• They are made to make profits, not to nourish you or make you healthy and feel good
• Often contain additives and unnecessary crap making them literally unhealthy
• Often lacking in fibre and essential molecules which make you feel satiated after eating them

2. It’s more cost and space efficient to store the raw ingredients and then assemble them on demand than it is to have a bunch of packages with similar contents
3. In the beginning you will take a little bit longer to make something because you may need to weigh out the ingredients and or choose them. But over time it will actually be faster than using something ready-made because you will be able to scale it on demand and tweak it on demand.
4. More importantly, you will use much higher quality ingredients that taste richer and have more depth. I might sound fanatic but over time you will absolutely hate mass produced products because they taste like dogwater in comparison. You will never buy ready-made tomato sauce in a can/bottle again after you buy a bag of tomatoes + some garlic/onion/zucchini or whatever and stick them in the oven with some seasoning and then take that out and put it in the blender
5. You will then learn an intuitive sense for what will go well together. Now cooking becomes this beautiful emotional experience with learning and improving happening at every session. Bread is amazing when made at home, but I make it an exception because some things are a lot of work. Phylo dough is another example. I wouldn’t make a hard rule about doing everything at home but definitely most things
6. Over time, it will massively simplify the shopping experience. You can zip through the grocery store by skipping most of the products designed for profit and made without love

Aim for the 100% stuff

Similarly to making almost everything yourself, it’s usually optimal to buy the 100% stuff. 100% peanut butter will satiate you more and is healthier and more versatile than the mixed stuff designed to be easy to spread. 100% maple syrup. 100% olive oil. Check the label, often they mix it with low-quality oil. Tea? It better have one ingredient on it. 100% honey. 100% yogurt. 100% fruit juice. You get the idea. Usually products are substituted with some cheaper form of sugar or fat added in to take up the volume

There are 4 types of cooking. Commit to one at a time

• Meal prep - bulk productive nutrient rich and decent tasting in a time efficient manner
• Fancy meal - put your best work together to make something to be eaten once + leftovers
• Experimentation - similar to #2, but you add extra effort to make some variations or you do things that you’ve never done before
• Dinner party - A combination of #1 and #2, it’s showtime, and you need a bulk quantity of your best stuff. Victory loves preparation. Ideally everything is calculated in advance right down to where to buy something if a store is closed and how long it will take to prepare the good even if your additional helpers can’t make it

Regularly compare brands of things you buy

Not all butter is equal. The same goes for pretty much everything. But is the more expensive one worth it? Try it out! Always buy the highest quality ingredients you can find, but be sure to use your own tasting experience as a truth test. Not the price tag