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Russell’s Brief, Opinionated Guide to Home Cooking

Last updated: Thu Oct 17 2024

About two years ago, I decided to learn how to cook. After much experimentation and reference to The Food Lab, here is what I learned about decent home cooking.

Table of Contents

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Assembling a Recipe

Before you cook, you have to decide what to cook. You can just pick a recipe, but it helps to understand why a recipe works the way it does.

My framework is that every recipe can be broken down into three fundamental macronutrients (carbs, proteins, and fat), five-and-a-half fundamental tastes (salty, savory, sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy), and additional flavor from aromatics or mouthfeel.

Three Macronutrients

We get most of our calories from three macronutrients: proteins, carbohydrates, and fat. These are the “building blocks” of a meal.

When you think proteins, think meat, dairy, beans, and tofu.

When you think carbohydrates, think plants; carbs mostly come from fruits and vegetables, and in particular from the core grains like rice, wheat flour, potatoes, corn, and so on.

When you think fat, think butter, animal fat, and oil (neutral like canola or flavored like olive or sesame).

Meals missing one of these elements feel incomplete. For instance, spaghetti and meatballs works because it combines spaghetti (carbs), meatballs (protein), and tomato sauce (fat); if you wanted to make this vegetarian, you’d probably want to replace the meatballs with tofu or beans, or else it would feel incomplete.

Five (and a Half) Tastes

Flavor is a complex, multifaceted combination of aroma, taste, mouthfeel, and many other attributes.

Let’s focus on taste first. Taste is simple. The tongue can only detect five fundamental tastes: salty, savory (aka umami), sour, sweet, and bitter. Spiciness can also be considered a “pseudo-taste”.

Saltiness

Saltiness detects salt, aka sodium chloride, aka NaCl. We need salt, and lots of it, or we die. Most modern industrialized diets provide plenty of salt, but it’s so important that we still crave it.

Pretty much every culture has a core salty ingredient. In French cuisine you’re often working with salty stocks; in Italian cuisine you cook pasta in salty-as-the-sea water; in Chinese and Japanese cuisine everything uses salty soy sauce; and so on.

Most beginner home cooks underuse salt — restaurant food tastes better because they use a lot of salt. If a dish comes out tasting flat, try adding a bit of salt, tasting again, and repeating until it tastes good.

Two other tips:

Umami / savoriness

Umami, aka savoriness, is famous for being the last taste to be recognized (in the early 1900s!). It detects the presence of glutamates, which very roughly track protein sources.

Typical high-umami foods include meat, mushrooms, cheese, fish sauce, soy sauce, tomatoes, and stocks, like chicken stock or Japanese dashi. You could also use isolated glutamates formed into a convenient salt called monosodium glutamate, or MSG. (MSG allergies do not exist; keeping a bottle around can be handy.)

As with salt, most home cooks underuse umami. Taste test and add more MSG!

Sourness

Sourness detects acidity, in the chemistry-class low-pH sense. When you think sour, think vinegar, citrus, yogurt, wine, and fermented or pickled foods.

Many recipes benefit from more acid — a squeeze of lime juice at the end, for instance — but I’d argue it’s a less important taste than salt or savoriness.

Sweetness

Sweetness detects sugars, as well as other compounds that mimic sugar. If you grew up in the English-speaking world, you probably know what sweetness tastes like, so I’ll skip the examples.

Sweetness is easy to overdo, but it’s often useful to balance or mask other strong flavors. For instance, many Thai sauces include sugar to balance the very strong salty/savory flavors of fish sauce, oyster sauce, and soy sauce.

Bitterness

Bitterness detects a wide range of compounds that are broadly toxic in large quantities. Bitterness isn’t that important to home cooking, though many vegetables like cabbage or kale are bitter when raw, and some dishes like Burmese tea salad use bitterness as a core taste.

Curiously, bitterness is very important in drinks — coffee, cocoa, tea, wine, the hops used in beer, the gentian root used in Angostura bitters, and the quinine used in tonic water are all naturally bitter.

Spiciness

Spiciness detects the capsaicin found in chili peppers. Capsaicin binds to pain receptors in the mouth and nose and causes a burning sensation, so it’s not a “true” taste. However, we might consider it a “pseudo-taste,” since it’s used like a fundamental taste in many cuisines, like Thai or some Mexican regional cooking.

Unlike the “true” tastes, spiciness is (literally) an acquired taste — whether you enjoy the sensation is largely cultural or due to individual preferences, not hardwired biological craving.

Arguably, other sensations could be considered pseudo-tastes, like pungency (think mustard or horseradish), astringency (think black tea or persimmon), or menthol cooling (think mint). However, those are easier to categorize as aromatics (see below).

Making Use of the Five (and a Half) Tastes

Let’s revisit spaghetti and meatballs. From a taste perspective, why does it work? The pasta itself should be cooked in (very) salty water, and tomato sauce usually has salt as well. Tomatoes are a bit sweet, a bit savory, and a bit acidic, and meatballs are also savory.

To jump to a different cuisine, how do stir fry noodles work? Most will include something like a 1.5:1 combination of soy sauce and Shaoxing wine. The soy sauce will provide saltiness and umami; the Shaoxing wine will provide a little bit each of umami, sweetness, and acid. If we need more umami, many Chinese sauces include oyster sauce as well.

The Rest of Flavor

As mentioned above, flavor is about more than just gustatory taste. Although there’s many, many aspects of flavor, two of the most important are aroma and mouthfeel.

Aromatics

Aroma is a massive part of flavor, and that’s provided by aromatics. You’ll usually be using these to “fill out” the flavor of a dish once you’ve balanced the core flavors and macronutrients.

Broadly, these can be divided into:

That said, the categorization is fuzzy and not all that important day-to-day.

Using aromatics is more of an art than a science and depends on cuisine. For instance, many regions of China use the “holy trinity” of garlic, scallions, and ginger as the basic aromatics for every dish.

Mouthfeel

Mouthfeel refers to the texture and physical experience of chewing food.

Mouthfeel is prized above all in Chinese cooking. There are many common ingredients, like lotus root or bamboo shoots, that don’t add much taste or aroma and are solely added for mouthfeel; there’s a strong cultural bias for bone-in meat, for similar reasons.

Although most other cuisines don’t depend nearly as much about mouthfeel, it’s still useful to think about; there’s a reason many cultures prize crunchy or crispy dishes.

Putting It All Together

A good home meal will include all three macronutrients, balance the five (and a half) tastes, and fill out the flavor with aromatics and mouthfeel.

If you’re using a professional recipe, pay attention to how it uses each of these components.

What if you want to make your own recipe? Here’s a general… recipe… for decent home cooked meals:

As mentioned above, most home cooks underuse salt, so taste that first, followed by umami levels. Balance with sweetness and sourness; you can usually ignore bitterness.

The Act of Cooking

Now that you have a recipe in mind, you have to actually cook it.

Mise en place

Mise en place is a philosophy originating in French culinary school. The idea is to have “everything in place” — maintain your tools where you can easily reach them, know how you’re going to dispose of garbage, and prepare ingredients in a logical order. If you have everything in a logical place and do everything in a logical order, cooking will be much less stressful!

There’s two major components of mise en place that I like to think about in particular.

Kitchen Logistics

You’re probably going to be using your chef’s knife for most recipes. Do you know where it is right now?

In general, you’ll want to organize your kitchen so that commonly-used tools and ingredients are close at hand. Keep counter space clear so you can actually cook; keep floor space clear so you don’t trip while carrying a hot pot of water. Take out the garbage sometimes so you don’t attract ants. A little bit of cleaning and organizing will go a long way.

Recipe Logistics

I used to get frustrated that recipes list all the ingredient quantities in a list at the top, instead of inline in the recipe.

Eventually I realized why — you’re supposed to prepare all the ingredients before you start the “active” cooking. If the recipe calls for half a cup of julienned carrots, cut up the carrots and leave them to one side before you even touch the stove. If the recipe needs a sauce, mix the sauce at the start, not right when you need it. Your goal when “actively” cooking should be to have everything at hand, pre-prepared, and ready to be thrown directly into the skillet or oven. You’ll be much, much less stressed this way.

You may notice, in keeping with kitchen logistics above, that you’ll need a place to put all these prepared ingredients. That’s where prep bowls come in! You should get half a dozen or so small bowls where you can leave aromatics, sauces, meat, or trash while you’re prepping.

One other tip: meat doesn’t last long in the fridge. Store your meat in the freezer, separated into individual-portion Ziploc baggies; the night before you plan to cook it, defrost a baggy or two in the fridge overnight. If you forget, you can defrost in a bowl of water for an hour or two.

Tools You Actually Need

Here’s the most basic set of kitchen equipment you’ll actually need for most tasks:

Other than these basics, what tools you might need will strongly depend on cuisine or even recipe. If you’re boiling a lot of pasta, you’ll probably want a colander to drain it; if you’re making a lot of dips, you’ll benefit from an immersion blender; if you’re making a lot of sauces or syrups, buy some squeeze bottles; and so on.

Cutting

Most recipes involve cutting up something. Learn some basic cuts, like dicing, chopping, mincing, julienning, and chiffonading.

Use a blade grip instead of a handle grip. The blade of the knife should be between your thumb and index finger, instead of resting your entire hand on the handle; the knife will be much more balanced.

Heat

Heat is pretty fundamental to cooking, partly because it kills pathogens, partly because it unlocks nutrients, and partly because it makes food tastier. In particular, heat causes proteins to denature and, at high enough temperatures, the Maillard reaction or caramelization.

The Maillard reaction, in meats, breads, and some other foods, is when amino acids and certain sugars break down and recombine into other substances. Caramelization is a related process that only involves the breakdown of sugars. Think the crispy, browned skin of a roast chicken or the caramel-y flavor of a good chocolate chip cookie.

There’s two broad ways to use heat: dry cooking and moist cooking. Dry cooking is directly applying heat, like in pan frying or baking, while moist cooking is applying heat indirectly, typically by boiling or steaming a water-based liquid. Generally, dry cooking results in Maillard / caramelization, while moist cooking results in tenderness but not browning / searing.

Sous vide is an in-between technique popular with a particular kind of foodie. It involves sealing and cooking food for long periods at precisely-controlled temperatures, resulting in a unique flavor profile and mouthfeel, especially for meat.

Heat is all about temperature over time; cooking at low temperatures for a long time is different than cooking at high temperatures for a short time. You can spend lots of time learning about different heat sources and techniques — deep frying and air frying and broiling and so on — and concepts like carryover cooking, but to start with, just follow a recipe.

Leavening and LAB Fermentation

These are two final culinary concepts that aren’t universal, but are very useful to know about.

Leavening refers to a process whereby carbon dioxide bubbles are trapped in a net of gluten, usually present in wheat flour. That causes the flour to “rise” and results in the light, fluffy texture of bread and pancakes.

Leavening requires a source of carbon dioxide to be mixed into flour, which is provided by either biological leaveners (yeast) or chemical leaveners (baking soda or baking powder). In the biological case, the yeast eats some of the sugar in the flour and emits carbon dioxide. Baking soda, on the other hand, is pure sodium bicarbonate; when it mixes with an acid, like lemon juice, buttermilk, or cream of tartar, it reacts to create carbon dioxide. Baking powder makes this process more convenient by combining baking soda with an acid directly, buffered by cornstarch or another chemical, so that they can only combine when mixed.

Lactic-acid bacteria (LAB) fermentation refers to a process whereby naturally-occurring lactic-acid bacteria convert sugars into acids, turning foods from sweet to sour. The bacteria work best in salty, anaerobic (oxygen-free) environments, so most LAB fermentation works by sealing fruit, vegetables, or dairy in an airtight, salty environment, like a salt brine. This process is the source of yogurt, pickles, kimchi, and hot sauce.

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