Do not be confused…… cooking is simple

Today we are overwhelmed with so many cooking shows, whose purpose is not to teach you haw to cook, but to promote products and some personality.

When you watch a cooking show everything is nice and shiny, clean, no mess in the kitchen and everybody is so calm.

Well cooking is not like that at home. You will make a mess, something will finish on the floor, you will forget to add some ingredient on time, something will burn or stay raw, overcooked, too much salt or blend.

It takes time and lots of repetitions before you master a recipe. But everybody can do it.

If you are interested in home cooking, you must invest in time. Time is essence of good cooking. If you go to a restaurant and you ask for a risotto and you have not been advised that you will have to wait for your order 20- 25 minutes order something else. Cooking is a physical- chemical process and it takes time. If you rush it, it will explode.

When you understand basic of cooking and time that is involved you will be able to place a hot meal every day on the table for your family.

This is a reason why I will advise you to make a list of recipes of style of food that you like and stick to that for a while. Concentrate on what kind of pots and knifes you need, cutting boards, potato peeler, strainers and other utensils.

Ones that you are sure what kind of food you are interested in cooking, stick to it and be ready to repeat it many times. In time you will be become more confident and your meals will become eatable. Once you have mustered 10-20 recipes you basically know now how to feed yourself or your family on monthly basic. Such way of cooking is also good for your budget. According to your cooking you will buy in supermarket only groceries that you really need, not something that is on a special today

In time when your confidence becomes big and strong you will be ready to cook without looking at the recipe’s books. You will be ready to make the best dish ever, just by opening your fridge, seeing what it is in it, and create your own recipe.  You will be ready to make your menu according to your abilities, wishes and health.

If you look around the world you can find that all cuisines have something in common. They all start with the base of the dish. In Italy very often you first make sofrito. It is a combination of equal parts of chopped onion, celery and carrots, fried on a small amount of olive oil. Then you add some meat, tomatoes, wine and whatever goes in the recipes.

Another way to start Italian dish is to fry 2-3 cloves of garlic gently crushed, 2-3 salted anchovies and then continue with the recipes.

French cuisine and the rest of the Europe start with frying shallots, or onion, then other vegetables and meat, living it on a pane until very concentrate mixes of juices start to make a dark coating on the surface of the pan. By removing ingredients from the pan, you unstick those juices by adding slightly acid liquid, usually wine. Now sugar from those juices mix with acid liquid and they unfold and you have just deglazed you pan. Which is a base of all pan sauces.

When you are deglazing your pan try not to pour the wine on top of your vegetables or meat. Always try to pour liquid on the side of the pan. This is how ingredients will not be infused with alcohol and use your nose before starting adding other ingredients like stock of some kind or cream. Until you are smelling wine then mean there is to much alcohol in the pot. You want to preserve in the dish aromas of wine not alcohol.

Very often if you will proceed with this cooking in an attempt to get very dense liquid, like goulash, stew, you can coat peaces of meet with flour and fry it on the pan as well. Flour will later act as emulsifier.

In French cooking like in the rest of the Europe to make something dense, less liquid, they are using a roux. An equal part of flour and butter, fried on the pan for minimum of 2 minutes. If you fry roux less then 2 minutes, your roux will have taste of the flour, which is not desirable. There are also other combinations of butter and flour that can be added to your pot to achieve desirable density. Other than that, there are other modern emulsifiers like Agar or Xantan gum.

In Asian cuisine they very often start with frying ginger and garlic, very quickly for about 30 seconds. After that you add your veggies, meat or fish. Everything should be finally sliced that you can on high heat cook very quickly. This is a way to preserve the texture, colour and valuable nutrition and vitamins. Some time you add some of the Asian sauces directly on top of the ingredients in the pot (WOK), or you remove them, let them rest and dry, you add and cook a mixture of other sauces (soy, oyster fish sauce, hoisin, black bean sauce and etc) and quite often little bit of corn starch. Corn starch is almost always main thickener in Asian cuisine, special in Chine’s.

I honestly use a corn starch in lots of my cooking. Per example if my Fijian curry is too runny, I add at the end 1-2 tea spoon of corn starch.  Also, for some French sauces to thicken them I use also corn starch. Just be careful do not cook it for more then 20 min, because in time it loses its ability to glue things together. In that case Xantan gum or Agar are better.

What I wanted to say in this blog is that where ever you go on this planet you will find some similarities on how people are approaching cooking. Different ingredients and tastes yes, but basically everything comes down to pot or pan on the heat.