HFF Speculates: Why We Fuck Up Cooking

I'm not saying I fuck up cooking. By and large I'm a competent home cook. But it took a long time and many many pots of overcooked pasta, burnt onions, and virtually raw vegetables. How did I figure out what I was doing? I'm not sure exactly. Trial and error, problem solving, attentive reading, and knowing what I like and why, I guess.

In my own personal experience, and in talking with friends, here are what I think our the main reasons that we fuck up cooking:

1. Impatience. Impatience manifests itself in two ways--we use too high of heat and we cook things for too short of a time. We just turn on our burner (worse if its electric) and throw on our food and next thing we know the garlic is black and our chicken is charred. But then after charring our chicken we pull it out of the pan--only to enjoy a blackened chicken breast that is raw in the middle. The lesson? Cook over medium-low to medium heat. Use a good pan that heats evenly. Don't let your oil get too hot. Keep your food moving (unless you want to blacken/brown something). The burner never needs to be past medium unless you're boiling water or searing meat.

2. We don't follow instructions. There's a reason that recipes and cooking techniques require specific orders. There's a reason a soup tastes better if you cook your bacon in oil and then you cook your onions in the bacon and then you cook your carrots in the onions than if you just cook everything separately and mix it together at the end. Flavors integrate and build on each other. Wine added early on to deglaze a pan and form the base for a stock serves a different purpose then wine added later to supply aromatic liquid for steaming food. Crushed red pepper cooked in the oil plays a different flavoring role then red pepper added at the end of cooking.

3. We don't know what we like. Knowing what you like--and being willing to explore--is fundamental to home cooking. When you combine competency with basic cooking techniques with culinary curiosity, you're going to steepen your learning curve. Plus, if you try cooking something that you know that you should like, you'll have a clearer sense of whether or not you fucked up what you were trying to cook.

4. We follow recipes. Okay, so this sounds contradictory to some of my earlier notes, but hear me out. Recipes only work if you have a foundation in basic cooking techniques. When you combine uninvolved recipes with a plethora of Food Network shows that teach you how to assemble ingredients in a pan rather than teaching how to cook you get a lot of people trying to cook beyond their abilities. Once you learn how to roast chicken, scramble eggs, pan-fry fish, steam broccoli--once you learn the basics--then recipes can be great for teaching you new flavor combinations and cooking approaches. Attempting a buche de noel before mastering a sheetcake is like trying to take on an eight-way interracial gangbang when you've never even masturbated before.

So what then do I recommend?

1. Cook and cook a lot. Experiment. Fuck up. But pay attention to your fuckups and learn from them.

2. Learn the basics. I recommend Mark Bittman's seminal cooking text How to Cook Everything. Bittman's book presents introductory sections on types of food and then breaks those down into specific food items--always teaching the basics on how to prepare and cook those items before he delves into more elaborate recipes. It's the best book for learning the whys and hows of cooking pretty much everything. Honestly, there've been maybe three things that I haven't found in the Bittman....

3. Get the right equipment. I don't mean you need to spend a fortune, but spend $20 on adecent knife and $30 on a good frying pan. Nothing All-Clad or Le Creuset or Henckels--just stuff that isn't scratched, warped, dull, and paper thin. Get a sharpening steel for your blades. A gas range should be a deal-breaker when you're apartment hunting, too. You can't learn to cook on electric. You just can't.

4. Learn your spices and seasonings. Don't be afraid to use salt. Practice and see how different dried and fresh seasonings behave in cooking. A pinch of aleppo sauteed in olive oil makes for an estrus-inducing pasta sauce. A teaspoon of dried herbs turns scrambled eggs into a romantic post-coital breakfast.

5. Never watch the Food Network again. Except Iron Chef and maybe Good Eats. Maybe. Gone are the days when actual chefs with actual talent (Mario Batali) taught you about cuisine, culture, and cooking. Instead you get a bunch creepy career women trying to make other creepy career women feel less guilty about not having time to actually cook for their families by teaching them how to open some cans and dump then in a casserole dish. That's not cooking. You don't need a tv show to explain that to you, you need the recipe on the back of the can of Hormel chili. Maybe I'll start watching again if they come up with a show that combines Giada de Laurentiis' tits with Rachael Ray's ass and Emeril Lagasse's blowjob skills all under Paula Deen's benevolent, watchful eye. So much cream cheese. I'd also watch Marc Summers straighten fringe at the French Laundry.

Seriously though, between that giant head and her spectacular rack, Giada should not be able to stand upright. It's a paradox of physics. Like bumble bees.