Cooking For Beginners — How To Start Your Culinary Journey!
Why Should You Even Cook?
With so many cultures, styles and flavours to explore, cooking is truly and an endless journey that you will never get tired of. Not only that, but you enjoy it more and more every time you get to do it. It’s a conversation starter, a hobby, a brag, a profession; it could be whatever you want, but most importantly, cooking is just genuinely fun. Just recreating that tasty pasta dish that you always order from your favourite restaurant is a really wonderful feeling. Sure, you are not going to make the dish perfectly the first couple of times, but it would still taste pretty good and you would be proud that you cooked that dish yourself. Of course, there are also the added benefits of having healthier and safer meals compared to their takeout counterparts.
But Adham, where do I start?
Just like everything else: start small. Start with making omelettes, simple pasta dishes, beef burgers, chicken sandwiches; easy stuff that have recipes that aren’t complex, or procedures that do not require a lot of time and effort. Stuff like that will tell you that you do not need expensive ingredients or complicated recipes to make something that tastes good, and it will also increase your love and interest in cooking.
You have to watch A LOT of Youtube videos, and I mean A LOT. I can tell you right now that the one thing that really made me enjoy cooking even more was watching a myriad of different chefs and picking up the various techniques they use, what they have in common, and what sets them apart from each other. But watching cookery videos does not always have to be serious, a lot of more funny and easy-going chefs like Matthew Matheson or Josh from Mythical Kitchen made me realise that cooking should not be serious and meticulous, because that only makes it more stressful and less fun.
However, the ones that are going to benefit you the most are the more amateur home cooks like Ethan Chlebowski or Binging WithBabish, and that is because they are just normal people like you and me — without 20+ years of cooking experience and a big-budget production making them look good; they make mistakes, use common utensils, cook simpler and more doable recipes, so they truly help if you’re just getting started.
Basic Cooking Essentials
Looks Are Not Everything
I am sure that you always get overwhelmed by how good food might look in restaurants and on YouTube videos, but as a home cook, you absolutely should not have to worry about that. As long as you have made a dish that you enjoy eating and are proud of then that is all that matters.
Mistakes
First of all, know that you don’t always have to get things perfectly from the first time; you are going to make mistakes, mess up and even possibly not come out with a dish that satisfies you. But that is absolutely fine, you should never give up as you only learn and improve when you make mistakes.
I have burnt food, undercooked food and forgot parts of recipes, and those happy accidents are the reasons why I now know what is right and what would ruin a dish.
This is how you also learn how to improvise because you may not always have every single ingredient or follow every single step, so by the time you will know which parts can be ignored and which steps can be substituted.
Technicalities
Develop a good taste pallet:
Know what different spices are used for, how different flavours are made and created, why some combinations work and why others do not. This will help you in the future when you start experimenting with cooking on your own without strictly sticking to recipes.
Do not follow everything precisely:
Your tablespoon may differ in size from the one you saw in that video, or you may not have a kitchen balance to exactly weigh 400 grams of something, and that is fine. You don’t have to get everything exactly measured to get a good final product, those minute differences do not matter all that much.
Know what doneness is:
Some foods, like pasta or chicken, have an exact point at which they are perfectly cooked. But other foods — like steaks, burgers or omelettes — have multiple degrees of doneness, and it all comes down to personal preference. So at the beginning try to time yourself when cooking these sorts of food to give yourself a rough idea of when you could reach your desired doneness.
Basic Kitchen Essentials
Knives:
Get a good set of knives and work on your knife skills as they are very important and quite useful; they make cooking faster and help you avoid any unwanted injuries.
Pots and Pans:
A singular one of each should get the job done for almost all recipes you would ever want to cook. Get good quality pans, preferably nonstick ones so that you find them easier to cook on. A normal-sized pot — not too big nor too small — is perfect for rice, pasta, and some deep-frying as well.
Miscellaneous:
You will definitely need a spatula, a couple of large wooden spoons, a pair of tongs and a nice wooden cutting board.
As a gift for reaching the end of this article, I have prepared a simple recipe that will cover a lot of the basics of cooking. This recipe is that of one of my most favourite dishes to ever exist: Fried Rice. It is easy and quick to make and most importantly, it is quite delicious!
Bon appétit!
