02181 Learning to Cook
Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn. — Benjamin Franklin
Unless you hire someone to cook for you, or eat all your meals at restaurants, or eat at a school cafeteria, most of us need to know how to cook.
By “cooking” I mean something beyond sticking a frozen entree and some side dishes into the oven or microwave, or picking up take-out on your way home from work.
Warming up a breakfast sandwich from a fast food restaurant does not count as cooking.
Many people think of cooking as a complicated deal and maybe for some people it is. It doesn’t have to be a hassle. Many tasty foods are easy to prepare. We’ll talk about them in a bit. First, let’s think about recipes.
As with anything else, there is a learning curve. Things that seem hard at first, won’t be as hard when you have done them a dozen times.
How to read a recipe.
A recipe involves a list of ingredients, measurements of those ingredients, and the steps of preparation.
To understand a recipe, read it out loud — slowly, twice.
Think about what you read. What ingredients does it require? Cooking steps? What pans and kitchen utensils will you need?
Read it again. How long does it take to cook? Is it a meal-all-by-itself, or do you need a couple of other recipes to make up a full meal?
Read it again, and this time, say "first", "second", "third", "fourth" and so on in front of each sentence or step in the recipe.
Get all the kitchen utensils and ingredients you need to prepare the food together in one spot, whatever you need to prepare this dish. Chefs call this "mise en place".
Measure the ingredients into separate little bowls.
Using the recipe as your guide, put the ingredients together as described in the recipe. Eat the tasty food you have prepared yourself.
Now that we have an overview of the process, let’s look at the three components — ingredients, measurements, and preparation steps — in detail.
Ingredients
Each recipe has a list of ingredients and you need to pay close attention to those ingredients.
While it is sometimes possible to substitute ingredients, that isn’t always true.
To take an extreme example — you can’t substitute champagne for milk if you want to make sausage gravy. You could substitute as much as half the milk with water, or you could use a smaller amount of cream mixed with water, or you could use soy milk or rice milk or goat milk. But champagne? No way.
At the end of this section there is a list of common ingredient substitutions.
Give particular attention to the specific words used in ingredient lists.
“One cup of chopped nuts” is not exactly the same as “One cup of nuts, chopped”. The “one cup of chopped nuts” is a cup of nuts already chopped. The “one cup of nuts, chopped” is one full cup of unchopped nuts, that you chopped before using them in the recipe.
Some recipes may call for particular brands. A recipe for a green bean casserole may say something like “2 cans green beans (of a particular brand)”. It is always safe to ignore the brand and simply use 2 cans of green beans, of whatever label.
Measurements
Measurements must always be done with actual measuring cups and spoons. Don’t reach into a drawer and pull out a common spoon to measure a teaspoon or a tablespoon.
In the United States, we use the traditional non-metric “English” system (although the English don’t use this system anymore, they are on the metric system). In most home cooking, we use measurements of volume — teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, fluid ounces, pints, quarts, and gallons. These are often abbreviated in recipes as:
- tsp — teaspoon
- tbsp — tablespoon
- C — cup
- oz — ounce
- pt — pint
- qt — quart
- gal — gallon
Be precise when you measure ingredients. Over-fill the spoon or cup and level it off with a butter knife. Don’t shake down or compress the ingredient in the measuring spoon or cup unless the recipe calls for that. If it does, it will say something like “packed.”
Don’t measure ingredients over the mixing bowl. It’s easy to spill something over the edge of the measuring cup or spoon and you end up with an extra ingredient amount added in a way that makes it impossible to measure.
A set of measuring spoons — in the United States — comes with the following measurements:
- 1/8 teaspoon
- 1/4 teaspoon
- 1/2 teaspoon
- 1 teaspoon
- 1/2 tablespoon
- 1 tablespoon (the equivalent of 3 teaspoons)
A set of measuring cups in the United States comes with these cups:
- 1/8 cup
- 1/4 cup
- 1/3 cup
- 1/2 cup
- 2/3 cup
- 1 cup
Sometimes you will see 2 and 4 cup measuring cups. A four cup measurement is handy if you plan to do a lot of baking or quantity cooking.
Measurement equivalencies:
- 3 teaspoons (tsp)= 1 tablespoon (tbsp)
- 4 tablespoons= 1/4 Cup
- 5-1/2 tablespoons= 1/3 C
- 8 tablespoons= 1/2 Cup
- 11 tablespoons= 2/3 C
- 16 tablespoons= 1 Cup= 8 fluid ounces
- 2 cups= 1 pint= 16 fluid ounces
- 2 pints (4 C)= 1 quart= 32 fluid ounces
- 2 quarts (8 Cups)= ½ gallon= 64 fluid ounces
- 4 quarts (16 cups)= 1 gallon= 128 fluid ounces
Metric cooking measurements:
http://www.jsward.com/cooking/cooking-metric.shtml
Many US measuring cups also have their metric equivalents.
Preparation Steps
The first step in preparing any recipe is not usually listed. Professional chefs refer to this as “mise en place” — or “get everything together that you need before you start”.
POP QUIZ! How many times has mise en place been mentioned thus far? What does the frequency of the references indicate about its importance?
Find all the utensils, pots, bowls, and equipment that you need and set it out for convenient use during preparation.
Get all the ingredients — and while you can measure them as you cook, many people start by measuring every ingredient into small containers and setting them with the bowls or pans for easy and convenient access during the preparation process.
The next step is to prepare the recipe exactly as the recipe states. The first time you prepare a recipe, do it “by the book”. Later, after you have used a recipe a few times, you may decide to change the preparation sequence a bit.
Here are some common terms found in recipes and their meanings:
Baste — Spoon a liquid over a food during baking or grilling.
Blanch — Place a sliced vegetable in rapidly boiling water for a specified period, take it out and put immediately in cold water to stop the cooking process. This preserves the color and crispness of the vegetable. It makes it easier to peel and skin vegetables and fruits.
Beat — Use a spoon or whisk to vigorously and rapidly stir food in a circular manner to mix the ingredients together.
Brown — A term applied to cooking meat, where you cook the meat for a few minutes on each side in a pan, with a small amount of oil, so that the surface of the meat turns brown. This is the first step in roasting or braising some cuts of meat which are less tender.
Braise — After browning, cook the food in a heavy covered pan, over low heat on top of the stove, with liquid. This method works for both meat and vegetables.
Chop — Cut the food into small pieces, about ½ inch in diameter.
Deep Fry — Cooking a food submerged or floating in oil or fat. Because of the high temperatures, deep frying often cooks foods quickly.
Deglaze — After frying or other cooked and removed from the pan, add a small amount of liquid and stir vigorously while the pan is still hot in order to loosen in bits stuck to the pan. These little bits are delicious, and this liquid — which may be water, wine, or a marinade — becomes the foundation of a gravy or sauce or may be added to a soup.
Dice — Cut foods into pieces about 1/4 inch in diameter.
Mince — Cut foods into the smallest possible pieces with a knife. Not a puree, however.
Pan Fry — Cooking larger pieces (meat or vegetables) in a pan with a minimal amount of oil. Because of the size of the foods, they will need to be flipped and cooked on both sides.
Sauté — Cooking something in a pan, with oil, over medium or high heat. Cut the food into slices or small pieces before sautéing. This method browns the food, while preserving texture, flavor, and moisture.
Stir — Use a spoon or whisk in circular motions to combine ingredients. Not as vigorous an action as beating.
Additional Resources
This is only the barest minimum of instruction on how to cook. I suggest finding someone who knows how to cook and learning from them. Alternatively, you can go online and find quite a bit of cooking instructional material. Here are some of the better sites that can be used for this purpose.
Cooking 101 from About.com
http://busycooks.about.com/od/cookinglessons/u/Cooking101.htm
eGullet Forums. The eGullet Society for Culinary Arts and Letters is a great place to ask questions and browse archives.
http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?app=forums
Cooking 101 from Arizona, a great collection of cooking how-to’s.
http://www.azcentral.com/style/hfe/cooking101/
How to Cook from Better Homes and Gardens, video tutorials on a variety of cooking subjects.
http://www.bhg.com/recipes/how-to/
Cooking Primers from Epicurious, a collection of basic tutorials on selected culinary topics.