Cooking can be a very demanding and tedious chore – even those times when you are only cooking for yourself. And for amateurs or beginners, it can be quite intimidating with all the recipes, ingredients and procedures they are bombarded with.
To be a better cook, learn to streamline your cooking practice. Here are three ways.
1. Preparations
How much you prepare beforehand dictates how smooth the process will go. You may be the type to impulsively cook what you fancy, but try to think ahead. Planning avoids unnecessary wastage of ingredients, resulting from spoiling.
One way to do this is to plan your menu. Plan what you want to cook, the ingredients you need, the right time to do it considering your schedule, and so on. To do steak on a weekend, for instance, buy your meat the day before so you can season it beforehand.
2. Ingredient Sourcing
When you are a cook, you need to be resourceful. You do not always have access to all the ingredients whether it because of availability issues or on a budget. To become efficient in the kitchen, you need to learn a few ‘cheats’ on ingredients so you can save time and effort. Some ingredients you can buy ready-made.
For example, while making an improvised black forest cake and cannot use an oven, you can always buy the chocolate cake bars for a base. It helped you skip the baking process and all. In fact, aside from their obvious benefit, some freeze-dried and preserved food marketed by a food storage company can be great substitutes when you are procuring for ingredients.
Master these quick ‘cheats’, and you are on your way to becoming a more efficient and resourceful chef.
3. Workspace Management
Your kitchen is your office, workshop, and playground all in one. To use it like a well-oiled machine, you have to manage it efficiently. Start with getting rid of all the clutter to free up space. A spacious counter
does wonders for heavy cooking sessions. Organize your cutlery, utensils and tools in a convenient manner. And lastly, keep it clean and always ready.
These three tips are the most basic of all to help you become a more efficient cooking machine.