The #1 Mistake Most Home Cooks Make… Every Time
It’s all there in black and white – step by step instructions – yet we’ve all experienced the pain of royally messing up a recipe due to haste. The simplest and best way to avoid catastrophe? Read the recipe all the way through before you begin. Simply put, this is the most fundamental way to be a better cook.
Understanding the process to follow ahead of time will ensure everything flows seamlessly – but it’s equally critical to know exactly when each ingredient is added. For example, a recipe may call for two cups of sugar in the ingredient list, however, within the instructions it may specify that one of the cups goes in the cake, and the other cup goes in the caramel sauce. If you go ahead and add two cups to the batter, you’ve got a disaster on your hands!
Want to know what I do? I have a method that works for me, every time.
Call me old fashioned, but I don’t enjoy having electronics in my cooking space. Touch screens and messy hands make for a nightmare. I also don’t love having hardcopy cookbooks on the kitchen counter. They inevitably get splattered and dirty.
Instead, I have a notebook that I jot down a sort of “CliffsNotes®” version of the recipe to work from. This process allows me to get familiar with the steps and determine my game plan before I begin. In my own shorthand, I write down the ingredients, when and how they go together, baking or cooking times and temperatures. It’s almost like a practice run before the big show. I can’t tell you how many times it has kept me from a major headache! Like those times when you come to find that what appears to be a simple ingredient is actually an entire other recipe!?! Yeah, that’s a good thing to know before your hands are covered in batter!
I can’t extoll the virtues of my shorthand process enough, however, if it seems too fussy to you, at the very least a read-through of the whole recipe before you begin. It will save you time, energy and ingredients. Because when we’ve invested all of these things into our busy lives, at the end of the day we all want something delicious to eat.