Cooking is not made easy when you’re still guessing. In fact, guessing at cooking increases the stress because guessing makes you unsure of the results to come. I’m going to give you a little cooking help by offering some tips on how to end your guessing.
One of the reasons that you guess is because it’s hard to believe something until you can actually see it. But I want to help you to wrap your head around the idea that you have to believe it first and then you’ll see it.
Quantifying your portion sizes, temperature and testing are great ways to allow you to stop guessing. Let’s go ahead and look at how that might work.
4 Ways to quantify your cooking and eliminate guessing:
Cooking Tip #1: Temperature
Temperature is important in cooking. Some foods will make you sick if you don’t cook them at the right temperature. Other foods will be utterly destroyed if you cook them much above “medium heat”.
Use water as an indicator of temperature. Water evaporates at 212 degrees F, so if you are using a saute pan, if you sprinkle a little water in the pan and it evaporates, you know that the pan is at least at the boiling point of water. The quicker the water evaporates, the hotter your pan is. This works on the grill as well.
You can also test a small piece of your food to test for temperature. For example, maybe you’re going to fry some chicken in oil on the stove, but you can’t tell if the oil is hot enough or not. Don’t ruin a whole breast by putting it into oil that’s not hot enough. Instead, take a small piece of the chicken and drop it in the pan. You’ll know right away whether the oil is hot enough or not to cook your food.
Cooking Tip #2: Test a Small Quantity
Sometimes, you just need to test a small quantity of something before cooking the whole thing. This is especially helpful in roasting. I can tell you that when I had my catering business, sometimes we would have to make hundreds or thousands of crab cakes in one big batch. Well, we would take one crab cake, cook it and test it. This would allow us to make adjustments on the rest of the batch and make a superior product! Cooking or roasting a small piece of something is a great way to see if your plan is going to work without sacrificing all of your ingredients during one of your guessing adventures.
Cooking Tip #3: Portion Size
Get a digital scale and begin to understand your raw portions sizes. Let me tell you a story about how I discovered the importance of this tip.
- When I used to make spaghetti for myself and my wife, I would cook a whole pound of spaghetti, basically one whole box for the two of us. When we sat down to eat, because so much spaghetti was available, we ate more than we should. After finishing our meal, there was always spaghetti left over, we would put the leftover spaghetti in the refrigerator and a few days later throw it out because we wouldn’t eat it.
- With my digital scale, I started by weighing 8 ounces of dry pasta for the two of us. I cooked the 8 ounces and still had some leftover, so I adjusted it down until I knew EXACTLY how much dry pasta to cook for the two of us…5.3 ounces is our perfect amount. Knowing this finally made cooking pasta easy, we don’t overeat and we don’t have leftovers.
Understanding and knowing your portion sizes will also help you to not overbuy at the grocery store because you’ll know EXACTLY how much to buy of a product to feed your family for a particular meal. And make sure you stick to the portion sizes. If you’re cooking frozen shrimp from a bag and the portions end up leaving 3 shrimp in the bag, don’t just dump them into the meal and cook them. NO, you’ll be feeding too much to your family! Leave them in the bag and cook them the next time. You don’t have to “just make the whole package.”
Cooking tip #4: Test Spices
If you are making a pot of something and you need to add spices, don’t start throwing in the spices and guess what it’s going to taste like. Get the spices that you’re thinking about using and put the “concoction” in a small ramekin or a small soufflé cup first. This will help you to know how the flavors work and give you the confidence that the combination is going to work.
So, by using these quantifying cooking tips, you can stop guessing at what’s happening to your food. Observe your results and purposely alter your steps for the next time. You will be amazed at how starting with these little visual cues can help you to stop guessing and be confident that what you see is what you believe will be true. This isn’t guessing, this is cooking made easy!
Or is it?
Hi Todd, thanks for the tips I really can’t wait to discover so much more from you and you and your professional cooking for years. Nnanke
Hi Nnanke!
I look forward to taking the culinary journey with you. I’m glad to answer your questions along the way.
The water in the skillet to see how hot your skillet is I already knew. For Chicken or anything breaded with flour I sometimes test the oil with a pinch of flour. If it foams, it usually is hot enough, but the water evaporation method is better. I really liked the spice idea. Something so simple, but most people would not think to do this. It’s a tip I will certainly use. Measuring and cooking a sample of your food I also knew about. Keep the tips coming. I’ve been cooking for a long time(I’m 66yrs old, married and raised a family) and still can learn something new.
All the tips are very useful to me. Thanks a lot.
Thanks for the comment, Sheela.
I know the frustration with written recipes and recipe guessing. I’m glad this helped you.
As a sub-point to #3: Understand the effect of cooking upon the portion size of your finished product versus the size of the raw ingredient. Example: You plan to have Corned Beef and Cabbage for you, your wife and another couple and you decide that a 6-ounce portion size would be good for the corned beef. Six times four is 24 ounces or 1 1/2 pounds, so you buy a 1 1/2-pound, raw corned beef brisket. Well, by the time the you’re done boiling the brisket with the cabbage, potatoes and carrots, you will end up with 3/4 pound of meat because you lose half of it to cooking shrinkage. That means that you’ll only have 12 ounces of corned beef to divide among the four people, or just 3 ounces each, instead of the originally intended 6. If you know, ahead of time, that the raw meat will shrink about 50% (of course, this varies, depending upon the cooking method and the type of meat), you would know to buy a 3-pound brisket to end up with four 6-ounce serving portions. On the other hand, the exact opposite is true of rice. So, if you plan to serve 1/2 cup of rice per person, start with 1/4 cup of uncooked rice (this can vary, some, depending upon the type of rice; some may only need 1/6 cup).
Hi Chef, you’re right! I have been doing this in my cooking. . .I always have extra foods and everything goes to the garbage after eating one meal. . . Thank you so much, I hope you will send me more tips and educate me more in Cooking and Baking because I will share this to my students in our community! You know I a Livelihood Skill Instructor for the less fortunate individuals in my country. . .
Why I can’t see video in the tips you’re sending me?