Saturday, May 28, 2011

Important Skills You Should Have To Become a Good Cook

By Brenda Hudson


If you think cooking involves opening the refrigerator and putting the frozen diner inside the microwave, you are wrong. It involves far more than you think and if you want to improve your cooking, you will take this to heart. It requires a lot of preparation, testing, cutting and tasting. And in some cases, even the washing after you are done with making the perfect dish.

In other words, cooking is not an easy task. You can ask a chef or your friends who love to cook and they will tell you that cooking can be difficult. Preparing a delicious dish is not a simple task because it requires precision, good timing and preparedness.

If you'd like to become an expert cook and be able to prepare delightful recipes for your family, then below are several skills that you should develop.

Measuring in precise terms Although professional chefs no longer rely on measuring tools like cups and spoons, remember that you are far from being a professional. In fact, you are just learning and until you master cooking, you need these tools to stay in the game an produce at least a passable dish that you family can stomach to eat!

Measuring cups and spoons can help your determine how much of a specific ingredinet you should include on the recipe. How much sugar, salt, pepper or flour you should mix on the bowl for the recipe you will cook. Measuring is certainly important in cooking.

Timing A lot of timing is involved in cooking. For the professionals, timing is more of an instinct or expertise. They know upon seeing the meat if boiling should already be stopped or if the vegetables should be pulled out of the pan before it becomes overcooked.

If you are still a beginner in cooking, you should know that timing is the number of minutes spent in preparing the dish. You will need a watch or even an alarm clock to keep track of the minutes spent when you cook. When you exceed even a single minute in cooking, the taste and look of your recipe will be affected so it is important that you monitor the time to avoid such disaster.

Tasting. In cooking, it is also important for you to have a good palate. Some people already have it while others need to develop a good palate like that of chefs.Tasting is essential when you cook so you will know if you need to add more flavor to the recipe you are cooking. You might need to add more salt or maybe sugar to get the perfect taste of the dish. Decision making is also important when cooking so you can determine if your friends and family will already like the taste of what you are cooking.

Have a Picky Attitude. To cook a delightful dish that your family and friends will love, it is not enough that you know how to cook. You should also learn to choose the right ingredients for the dish you will prepare. Choose high quality and fresh ingredients when you cook because no matter how good you are in cooking but if you use poor quality or stale ingredients then your recipe will not taste great.

The taste of your dish will still be affected if you use a stale or low quality ingredient. It will be useless to add flavorings if a particular ingredient is not fresh. You must develop the skill of choosing and buying fresh ingredients. Know how to determine if the vegetable or fish is still fresh or not.




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