On Cooking

While I’m far from a master chef myself, I can in fact throw down a decently delicious dinner for a few guests. I realize that’s not too impressive in itself, but it’s far from where I was when I started college. Trust me. Back then the standards set by my cooking skills were so low that I was legitimately hyped when I treated myself to some McDonald’s takeaway for dinner.

At some point I realized that really learning how to cook would be pretty worthwhile:

  • Health benefits
  • Saves money
  • Delicious food
  • No deep desire for McDonald’s

Since then, cooking has become kind of a hobby for me, so this year I decided to double down on it. I thought now’d be a good time to explore what advice I’d give my old McDonald’s me to get him to a place where dinner is a highlight, not a necessity.

Salt#

Use a ton of salt.

Seriously. I’m not putting this first for no reason. If you’re more the learning-by-doing type, here’s an experiment that will make up your mind once and for all. (All credit goes to Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat).

First we’re going to make some mayo. Yep, make some damn mayo, with our own hands. You’re only going to need an egg yolk at room temperature, and 175ml of vegetable oil.

Place a small bowl on a damp dishrag for stability. Put the yolk in and start whisking while adding oil drop by drop. Literally. Mayo is an unforgiving bitch, and it’s going to make you suffer if you add oil too quickly. You know you’re doing it right if you’re painfully slowly dripping oil into a creamy mass that is slowly getting harder and harder to whisk, with the remaining amount of oil never seeming to shrink even a tiny bit, while your whisking arm is dying of exhaustion (I didn’t say it was going to be a fun experiment).

As more oil is added, you can begin dripping a tiny bit faster. Don’t get cocky - you can still easily fuck up your mayo. If you add oil too fast, your mayo will stop being creamy and become flaky. To save it, you gotta start over - just add the rest of the oil to your broken mayo, then put half a teaspoon of extra hot tap water into another bowl, and whisk your broken mayo mixture into that. Drop-wise, of course.

Once done, take some time to taste your mayo. After all, it’s the product of a lot of pain, so this fresh, homemade mayo better be worth the effort.

But wait - it just tastes like nothing at all?

Now before you start making plans to find and murder me, let’s move on to the second part of the experiment real quick. This one is going to be fun, I promise.

Prepare some more ingredients: you’ll need some pounded anchovies and garlic, grated Parmesan, Worcestershire sauce and table salt. Just progressively mix them into your mayo until it tastes amazing.

Since it’s an experiment, you should also try going beyond the point where it tastes amazing - you can always dilute your overseasoned mayo with unseasoned mayo. (I won’t even be mad at you if you use store-bought mayo for that.)

Finish it off with some lemon juice and vinegar. Do the same season-to-taste strategy.

Better now?

It should be a world of difference between this and your original, bland ass unseasoned mayo. Note how much of each ingredient you’ve added until it was too much - most likely, you will find it took a lot more than you expected.

When I made this for the first time, I was pretty amazed that oil and an egg yolk could be made to taste this good. The reason this recipe works so well, Samin writes, is because you’re layering salt from multiple different sources (each of our ingredients contains a lot of salt on its own).

You can serve your delicious dressing over some lettuce with croutons and impress your date (or your mum) with it. Thank me later. Oh, and an alternative that I also found to be delicious is mixing the dressing with canned tuna and building a fat sandwich with some lettuce and sliced bell peppers.

Now that it’s clear why you should salt, let’s conclude with a few general tips:

  • Salt from the inside: salt has numerous desirable effects on food besides making it saltier. For example, it makes meat more tender. But to get that effect, salting your steak at the table isn’t enough - you should do it the night before and just let it sit in the fridge.
  • Use it everywhere: salt also amplifies flavors, so a pinch of salt can immensely help flavor even in sweet dishes.
  • Salt to taste: no recipe can precisely tell you how much salt you need, because for example, a teaspoon of sea salt is roughly half as salty as a teaspoon of table salt. Just use your taste buds.

Seasoning#

A classic thing that I used to do when following a recipe was skipping any spices that seemed more exotic than paprika. Another classic thing I used to do is wondering why my food tastes kinda bland.

It’s obvious advice, but don’t cheap out on spices.

They don’t even have to be expensive: find any ethnic store and you will be greeted by shelves full of spices. And not those expensive, tiny bags you can get at the supermarket. My 2€ pack of powdered cumin has lasted me like two years now. Spices do lose flavor though, so you might have to use more to compensate.

Herbs are similarly important, with the added difficulty that the dried stuff doesn’t even come close to fresh herbs. Luckily, fresh herbs are both decorative and tasty. A basil plant is worth it even if you’re just using it for garnishing your pasta every now and then. But keep in mind many herbs are seasonal plants.

Equipment#

Mostly all you need is one trip to Ikea:

  • Food thermometer: perfect steak every time. Also, nailing frying oil temperature.
  • Pans and pots:
    • You can make do with just a standard antistick pan and a pot, but an extra set of a small pan and pot is very convenient.
    • A heavier pan is nice, but your choice of pan isn’t the most important thing in the world when you’re starting out.
    • An oven-safe pan with tall sides is nice to have because these can double as baking dish
    • If it’s antistick, it’ll thank you for never touching it with a spoon or fork or anything metal
  • A strainer, unless you like accidentally dumping all of your spaghetti into the sink when trying to get rid of the pasta water
  • A chef’s knife, and knife sharpener (Ikea has one for 10 bucks)
    • Knives quickly become dull, and dull knives aren’t fun to use. Sharpen weekly or so.
    • You will use this knife a lot, so splurging a tiny bit is okay
  • Mealprep containers, if you’re into saving time and money while eating healthy
  • Immersion blender: unlocks a huge number of recipes, plus it’s cheap and takes little space
  • Tongs: I personally prefer tongs over wooden spoons because they’re so hard to flip things with.

You should be able to get everything in good enough quality for roughly 100 bucks total.

You should also have a small pantry. These few things are going to get you pretty far already:

  • Flour
  • Baking powder
  • Vegetable oil
  • Canned tomatoes
    • if you got these 4 things, the only thing standing between you and a delicious pizza is some cheese!
  • Sugar
    • congrats - now you can also make pancakes
  • Basic sauces like ketchup, mayonnaise, Sriracha, Worcestershire
  • Generous supply of ramen for those days
    • Also, ramen can actually be really nice if you spice them up with some fresh vegetables, actual meat, and a soft boiled egg maybe

Recipes#

Generally, when you’re just starting out, you suck at improvising. You may not think you do, but you probably do. For example, one of my staples back in the day was minced beef with broccoli. (Yup, that’s literally it.) Add a tendency to underseason and you end up with a plate full of disappointment and a longing for McDonald’s fries.

So don’t improvise. Follow a good recipe, and you’ll get one of those “holy shit I just made that?” moments. It’s like a cheat code for a mind bendingly delicious meal. Some places to start looking:

I also recommend making your own cookbook, in the sense of keeping track of any recipe you like, and any modifications you’ve made. It keeps you from losing track of your favorites, and deciding what to cook is easier when you have a huge list of meals you loved. A text file (or a physical notebook) is enough to get the job done, but I personally use a table in Notion because it’s got a few powerful features for organizing the recipes, for example I can filter by ingredients.

Conclusion#

I’m hoping this could help you get on track with cooking decent dishes for yourself.

If you find that cooking is fun to you and want to dig deeper than just following recipes, I can only recommend Salt Fat Acid Heat again. It’s a nice introduction to the science behind cooking. Afterwards, The Food Lab is a good place to continue. Finally, you might also enjoy making cocktails, or baking. But be warned: both are rabbit holes in their own right.

Finally, practice a lot! Learning by experience works best, and it’s cheap to experiment in the kitchen - worst case you have to order food.

© 2020