My Best Cooking Tips!

I’ve put together a list of my best cooking tips, some guidelines I like to follow when cooking so that whatever I’m making turns out tasty.

Tip 1: Read the recipe!

I know you’ve heard it all before, but I’m going to say it again, read the recipe in full, including any notes, before you start cooking. You don’t want to start, get halfway through and realise you needed stuff to be prepared beforehand, especially if you’re short on time.

Tip 2: Be prepared.

Be prepared and have everything ready to go, your ingredients cut, sliced, diced, peeled, grated and measured out and your utensils and pots and pans set up. This is called mise en place. Having everything organised and ready makes the whole cooking experience much smoother, and it ensures you haven’t left anything out. It’s especially helpful for those dishes to come together quickly, like stir fries and omelettes. Grab some these stackable bowls in different sizes and it’ll make a world of difference in prepping for your next meal.

Tip 3: Grate your cheese.

Pre-grated cheese often comes with anti-caking agents or preservatives added that help keep the shreds of cheese from clumping. Grating your own cheese will make for smoother sauces, as the additives tend to make sauces grainy and clumpy; and it ends up being cheaper to buy cheese as a block than to buy it grated or sliced. In saying that, I do like using the pre-grated Mexican Cheese for Mexican based dishes and American Cheese slices from Costco – they’re very tasty when melted in toasties.

I also think pre-grated is fine for homemade pizza if that’s what you have on hand. I spent a year working at a certain blue and red coloured pizza shop chain, and I spent many mornings covering my black uniform in shredded cheese dust when transferring cheese from the box to a large catering container.

Tip 4: Avoid using a dry pan when cooking

Oil is essential so that food doesn’t stick or burn, and is important for even cooking. My go-to is to use a good quality mild olive oil as it has a great delicate olive flavour and a higher smoke point for general cooking. Extra Virgin Olive Oil is better for you but is best used for cold preparations such as making dips and salad dressings since extra virgin olive oil has a lower smoke point compared to a mild olive oil. I talk more about the different oils I use for cooking here. There are some instances where I would not use oil in a pan while cooking. This includes skin on chicken and streaky bacon, they have enough fat on the meat to not need any extra. These usually start cooking in a cold pan so that the fat renders out. It helps the skin on the chicken crisp up to a nice golden colour without it burning, and helps streaky bacon render out enough of its fat and provides even cooking without burning the flesh. Extra tip about streaky bacon: if you have a big batch of streaky bacon to cook, bake them in the oven. The fat renders slowly without the flesh burning, and the bacon turns out beautifully. Keep the bacon grease for something else, or add it to another dish.

Tip 5: Taste as you go

Know when to taste and season your dish. Seasoning depends on what you’re cooking and how you’re cooking it. Ground and dried spices should be added early into a sauce or bloomed in some oil because they need time to release their full flavour potential. Fresh is better added towards the end as they’re fuller in flavour and don’t need much time to flavour a dish. Be careful of reducing stocks and sauces, don’t put too much salt at the start because as it starts reducing down, it’s going to get saltier. If by the time the sauce or stock is finished, it’s not salty enough, add some in. You can add seasonings in, but you can’t take them out.

Season with little sprinkles of salt throughout the whole cooking process – in the beginning, during and at the end. And make sure to taste your dish as you go along. This applies to salt and other herbs, spices and seasoning. Salting throughout the process ensures even seasoning, it’s all about building flavour.

While us recipe creators try their best to ensure the content we publish is nothing short of amazing by testing and re-testing everything we put online to make sure it’s perfect, we are not you. We just love sharing our versions of recipes, but you may want things saltier, sweeter, less of either, or just something different, so always taste what you’re cooking so it’s up to your standards. Trust your gut with the seasoning process because you can add spices, herbs and seasonings in, but you can’t remove them.

Tip 6: Season your meat before you cook it

I like dry brining my meat before I cook it, it imparts flavour deep into the meat, so the finished product is evenly seasoned throughout. I feel like this really takes my dishes up a notch.

Dry Brining

Dry brining involves seasoning a piece of meat with salt and letting it sit on the surface for a time before cooking. Sprinkling salt over a piece of meat, and within minutes, osmosis takes over: moisture from the meat rises to the surface, drawn out by the salt. After about ten minutes, that moisture begins to dissolve the salt, creating a concentrated brine. This brine, formed from the meat’s natural juices, is then absorbed back into the meat through diffusion – the salt moves from the highly concentrated salty surface to the less concentrated meat below the surface, breaking down muscle proteins and helping the meat retain moisture.

The dry-brining process is then completed when the liquid initially pulled out is reabsorbed, balancing the salt concentration throughout the meat. The result? A perfectly seasoned cut of meat that holds on to its natural juices during cooking. With just a bit of salt and patience, you’re essentially letting the meat brine itself using its own juices for a well seasoned and juicy piece of meat. This allows for meat to be flavourful throughout, not just the outside while also allowing for a drier exterior of your protein which adds great sear and caramelisation to your meat, just make sure to pat down your meat with a paper towel to ensure there’s no liquid left on the surface.

Brining different cuts of meat

I like using chicken breasts when cooking chicken based dinners. I slice chicken breasts in half into steaks and season them with salt and pepper on both sides and place it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Chicken thighs are small enough to not need slicing in half, so can just be seasoned on both sides and placed in the fridge for 30 minutes.

For thicker cuts of meat like steaks, they will need longer to brine, at least 1 hour, longer is preferred, if you can wait, as they need longer to impart flavour on a bigger piece of meat. For other poultry like whole birds such as turkey and chicken, a wet brine would be best suited due to the size of the bird. I will go into further detail of a wet brine soon, along with a recipe for brining a whole bird. I haven’t tried brining turkey pieces before, but I believe the same principles above would work well to add flavour to turkey, just brine the pieces for longer as turkeys are big birds. 24 hours is the usual limit for brining meat before it gets too salty.

Tip 7: Know your kitchen appliances

Know how to properly use and take care of your kitchen appliances, cookware and utensils. Get familiar with how your kitchen items should be used. For example, stainless steel utensils should not be used on non-stick pans, as they can scratch the coating and leach chemicals into your food. You don’t want to be using something incorrectly and have something you’ve spent your hard-earned dollars on to break.

Your cook top and oven come into that equation too, so make sure you know how to use them, such as not using rapid heating settings on cook tops, as rapid changes in temperature can warp and damage your pans. A gradual heat up is best; learn what the settings on your stove do and which pots and pans are safe to use in the oven and what temperature they can go up to. This is also helpful when it comes to baking. Every oven is different, and most recipes are geared towards fan forced ovens. Read up on the type of oven you’ve got and the settings it has so that you know how to use them.

Tip 8: Check your garlic cloves

When using whole cloves of fresh garlic, I like to check the size of the germ/core in the centre of the cloves. The germ of the garlic can have an impact on the taste of the garlic and can impart a harsh or bitter taste to food. It’s the size of that garlic germ that determines how much of an impact it has. Fresher garlic will have a smaller, less noticeable germ and older garlic will have more of a solid and pronounced germ/core and the tip may even start turning green; even pushing out of the tip of the clove into the centre of the bulb. The older garlic gets, the more of a chance that the germ of the garlic will impart a bitter taste to food.

You won’t know how old the garlic is without removing the peel and slicing open the centre to reveal the centre where the germ lies. If the germ is small enough that it’s hard to remove, I use it as is, I don’t remove it. If the garlic has a solid germ, I will remove it. I always check my garlic, every clove because I’ve been let down too many times that I don’t take the risk anymore.

I remove the core by smashing the garlic cloves with the flat side of a knife, or something round and heavy if I’m doing a big batch. This helps to remove the peel and open up the clove for you to check the core/germ from the centre of the clove. If the garlic is old, the tip of the germ sometimes looks green with the rest of it a similar colour of the garlic; the germ is distinct enough in shape that you should notice it. The germ usually goes from the base to the tip of the clove, so fresher garlic will start having a small germ at its base.

Tip 9: Use a kitchen scale

You’ll notice I measure most things in grams, it gives the best outcome, especially for baked goods. Savoury cooking is way more forgiving when too much or too little is added; however, desserts need to be more precise with a delicate balance between all the ingredients for a consistent result. Measuring cups and spoons will give varying weights between brands and even between countries, which can affect how whatever your baking turns out. Weighing in grams or ounces ensures accuracy, 50 grams of flour will always be 50 grams, whereas 1 cup of flour, depending on how it’s placed into the cup can vary between 130 and 170 grams, skewing the results of your baked goods.