How to Avoid Common Cooking Mistakes

One thing that tops the list of cooking mistakes is overcooking. It ruins the food by making it lose its color, flavor, texture, and ultimately the taste.

Cooking is something more than just a routine task performed by men and women alike. It's like an experiment, which can yield different results each time in spite of the same recipe and ingredients involved.

For instance, sometimes, a recipe can turn into a lip-smacking delicacy, where everything that has gone into its making is just perfect, but sometimes it can get ruined completely.

One thing that can be clearly understood from the above point is that, what you cook does not matter, but the way you cook it makes a great difference.

Having said that, let's now understand what are the common mistakes that you can avoid, to make your cooking a better experience for yourself as well as the people around you.

When the food is added to boiling water, it lowers the water temperature, and if the quantity of food is more, the water stops boiling immediately. This alters the cooking process, and affects the texture of the food very badly. For instance, if you use a small pot for cooking pasta, it will give you a pile of gummy noodles in the end.

Solution: Don't overcrowd the cooking pan, and try to cook in batches. If you want to cook more food in lesser time, keep two pans on the stove, and cook simultaneously in both the pans.

This will provide room for the ingredients to get cooked, and also save you a lot of time. Also, use lots of water, and allow your ingredients to swim in the pan if you want a well-cooked dish.

However, it is important to note that a pan, especially of the cast iron variety, needs a considerable amount of time to heat up evenly from all sides, and cook the food properly. When you turn the burner on high, the pan gets heated only in the middle.

This kind of heating has two negative effects; one is that the pan gets damaged due to such high heat getting concentrated only at the center of the pan, and secondly, the food placed at the center of the hot pan is at a high risk of sticking to the bottom of the pan or getting burnt.

Solution: To save your pan from damage, and the food from burning, put the pan on a low to medium flame as soon as you enter the kitchen, and while it heats up gradually, prepare your ingredients.

Firstly, the veggies will lose their flavor and color because the excess water on leaves comes in contact with the hot pan and creates steam. This causes the veggies to lose their vibrant color and texture. Secondly, the hot oil does not react well with water, and may splatter after coming in contact with cold water.

Solution: To keep the color and flavor of your green veggies intact, use a salad spinner. Spin the green leaves in the salad spinner, drain the water, toss, and spin again. Ensure that the pan is hot enough before putting in the veggies.

To avoid this mistake, it is important to understand the difference between boiling and simmering. Simmering occurs when a bubble appears on the surface of a liquid after every 2-3 seconds.

When the frequency of bubbles appearing at the surface increases, it is termed as boiling. It's true that boiling cooks the food faster, but only to give it a tough and dry texture. The food when boiled in liquid, seems to be cooked on the surface, but stays raw and undercooked from the inside.

This further may make the food tough and chewy.

Solution: There is only one solution to this mistake and that is, you should only simmer the food whenever simmering is required.

When you pop the meat straight from the refrigerator into the oven, it is most likely to get overcooked from the outside while remaining undercooked from the inside.

Solution: Remember to remove the meat cuts from the refrigerator at least half an hour before cooking time. This will allow the meat to thaw, bringing it gradually to room temperature while taking the chill off, thus, making it ready for cooking.

However, like I said earlier, cooking is like an experiment, which may give different results each time, even with the same recipe. Furthermore, if you don't use measuring utensils, and toss the ingredients with approximate values, then it definitely calls for a taste trial after adding each and every ingredient to the cooking pan.

If you fail to do so, the otherwise tasty dish may turn into a ruined, messy dish.

Solution: Don't miss the taste trial while preparing any dish as it will bring correct flavor, color, texture, and taste to your food.

A well-roasted chicken will develop a nice brown crust above the soft and tender meat, but only when it's allowed to rest and cook in the pan without too much poking or flipping.

Solution: The best indicator to tell that it's too early to turn the food is when the spatula cannot slide easily under the crust. Hence, wait for some more time until you can slide the spatula cleanly under the food, and flip it.

... ignoring minute details of the recipe while reading it.
... cooking with wrong oils.
... being too casual with measuring utensils.
... not shocking the vegetables in ice water after cooking them in boiling water.

Proper maintenance of cooking utensils is also an important aspect of better cooking, and badly kept utensils can prove to be one of the biggest cooking mistakes. The cast iron pans require a special treatment while washing, because normal soap water and scrub tend to wash away the coating from the pan's surface, which works as a non-stick agent that prevents food from sticking to the pan.