What I Learned From Cooking Badly for a Decade

For most of my twenties I cooked constantly and not very well. This is a difficult thing to notice about yourself. Nothing I made was inedible. Friends ate it and said nice things and went home. I followed recipes exactly and the results were fine and forgettable, which I now understand is the natural and entirely predictable consequence of following recipes exactly.

What changed was not a technique or a pan or a knife. It was working out that a recipe is a record of what somebody else did once, in their kitchen, with their ingredients and their stove, and that the useful part is never the numbers. It is the reasoning underneath them. Here is what took me ten years to learn and would have taken about a month if anybody had put it this plainly.

Salt, and when

The single largest change I made was salting earlier and tasting more often. Not more salt overall, necessarily — earlier salt. There is a real difference between food that has been seasoned and food that has had salt added to it at the end, and once you can taste it you cannot un-taste it.

Vegetables salted at the start of cooking taste seasoned. Vegetables salted at the end taste of salt. The reason is time: salt needs to move into the food, and that happens over minutes, not seconds. Salting an onion as it goes into the pan also pulls moisture out of it, which helps it soften and brown instead of steaming in its own liquid.

The other half of this is which salt. I switched to kosher salt for cooking years ago and it made me measurably better, not because it is superior but because the crystals are big enough to see and to feel between your fingers. You can watch how much you are adding. Fine table salt disappears the instant it leaves your hand and is roughly twice as salty by volume, which is how most people end up over-salting the one time they try to be generous.

Heat, and the crowded pan

I was frightened of high heat for years. I turned things down when they started to sizzle properly, because sizzling sounded like something going wrong. The result was that everything stewed in its own liquid instead of browning, and I could not work out why my food tasted flat when I had followed the instructions.

Browning is not cosmetic. It is a chemical reaction between proteins and sugars that produces hundreds of new aroma compounds that were not there before — it is, quite literally, where a lot of the flavour comes from. If the pan is not hot enough, that reaction does not happen and no amount of seasoning afterwards will put it back.

The other half of the problem was crowding the pan, which is the same mistake wearing a different coat. Too much food in the pan drops the temperature, the moisture coming out of it cannot evaporate fast enough, and you end up boiling. Cook in batches. It takes longer and it is worth it every single time, and I still have to talk myself into it.

If it is not making a noise, it is not cooking. It is just sitting in a warm pan getting sad.

Acid was the actual problem

Here is the one that took the longest. Nearly every dish I thought was missing something was missing acid, and I kept adding salt instead. They feel similar in the mouth — both make food taste more like itself, both make you go back for another bite — so I would salt, and salt again, and end up with something that was too salty and still somehow dull.

A squeeze of lemon at the end of a soup. A splash of vinegar into a pan of braised greens. A spoonful of the pickling liquid stirred through a bean stew. These are not garnishes. They are the difference between a dish that stops at your tongue and one that carries.

The test is simple: if something tastes flat, put a little acid in a spoonful of it and taste that spoonful against the pot. You will know within a second. I do this constantly now and it has saved more dinners than any other single habit.

Tasting as a habit, not an event

I used to taste food twice: once somewhere in the middle because a recipe told me to, and once at the end when it was too late to do anything. Now I taste continuously, and I taste with intent — not “is this nice” but “what does this need”. Those are completely different questions and only the second one is useful.

Keep a spoon by the stove. Not a clean one every time; just one spoon, rinsed. The friction of getting up to find a spoon is enough to stop you doing it, which is a stupid reason to cook worse food.

And the recipes

I still use them constantly. What changed is that I read them for the method rather than the amounts — what goes in when, what is supposed to be happening in the pan at each stage, what the thing is meant to look like when it is right. Then I cook, and I taste, and I adjust, and the numbers become a starting position rather than an instruction.

That is genuinely all of it. Salt earlier, get the pan hot, use less of it at a time, reach for acid before more salt, and taste constantly. Ten years, five sentences. I am not bitter about it, but I would have liked somebody to say it in 2015.