Every cook begins somewhere, and that somewhere usually involves some amount of chaos. Pans that are burnt, pastas that are not quite cooked, soups that are too salty, and the like all belong to the process. The number one mistake new cooks make is to believe that their confidence in cooking will precede their experience. In actuality, it occurs after repeated attempts, mistakes, and the resulting small advancements.
Cooking confidence is not predicated on the absence of error. Rather, the goal is to have the knowledge required to respond when events don’t unfold as you’d planned. When you know what’s happening to your food with different ingredients and when you understand how heat works on the food, your mistakes become less catastrophic and more informational. You are learning something new in each and every so called “failure”: timing, seasoning, technique.
Simplifying your cooking is one of the primary things you can do to gain that confidence. Many new cooks attempt too many complex recipes at once and then find themselves lost and overwhelmed. Real progress starts when you learn how to make the most simple dishes first: rice, eggs, veggies, simple proteins. Once these are stable, everything else becomes easier to learn and to control.
Repetition is the other component that must be mastered. Cooking the same dish more than once can be seen as uninteresting, yet doing it is among the most effective ways to become better. You learn to pay more attention to the little things you have missed: the actual cooking duration, the precise amount of salt that should be added, or how something changes texture as it cooks. This is where you learn to cook.
It is also very important to know where you’ve gone wrong in this whole process. Rather than trying to work out how to fix something or wondering what may have happened, instead attempt to logically think back to the situation. Did you have the heat too high? Were you late in seasoning your dish? Was the timing correct or not? This way of reasoning makes cooking something that is systematic to learn, not random. Slowly, you begin to be able to forecast results before they actually occur.
Your confidence increases if you are less dependent on recipes. While recipes are useful tools, they do not show you how to adapt. When you have an understanding of cooking that you are able to utilize with a recipe and can modify a recipe based on what you see, smell and taste, you have learned how to cook. Maybe it requires more acidity, maybe it needs a little salt, or maybe you should cook it longer. This is the difference between the new and the experienced.
What happens before you actually start cooking is even more significant than most people think. If the ingredients are ready and you are organized, then you are able to cook without any tension. A lack of structure during the preparation stage will create a mess in the final result. Structure is what most accomplished chefs rely on, and any organization in the kitchen can really change your experience.
Another change that needs to be made is to learn how to keep it calm. Stress leads to haste and haste leads to errors. Cooking demands both patience and observation. The more relaxed you can be, the better you can notice what’s going on and what adjustments are going to be needed.
When we do our classes here at FlavorCore, we strive to create a comfortable learning experience at each level of cooking. Rather than introducing you to new and complicated techniques, we help you to understand more deeply the basics. When you have a solid foundation for these principles, everything is much more manageable, and cooking can become much more of a creative experience than a stressful one.
Confidence in cooking doesn’t really come from being able to do something perfectly. It arises from having the experience and understanding of how to do things, and to be consistent in this learning. Once you accept that mistakes are a natural part of this learning process, you’ll see every time you go into the kitchen as just another day to learn something, rather than as another exam.