Learn Techniques Before Skills
There’s one major downside I can identify to devoting your time stealing from the chefs you admire and the recipes you love: that all too human urge to form comparisons. Spend any amount of time watching cooking shows, cooking alongside talented friends and family, or reading recipes, and the sheer physical skills required to reproduce the recipe will seem utterly daunting. In particular, there is no greater joke than almost any recipe’s suggestion of how long it will take to execute. Even as a comparatively more experienced home cook, I would bet that I complete any given recipe I attempt in the time the recipe claims at most 10% of the time, and often I only do so if I am intentionally cutting corners.
It’s not only time, but also the panache of the seasoned chef that has made me shy away from certain dishes that would otherwise be entirely within my grasp. I can’t slice and dice vegetables into perfectly congruent cubes at will. I doubt I will ever have the confidence in my weak wrists and poor spatial skills to flip anything in the pan without the assistance of a spatula. And to reiterate, everything — everything — I do in the kitchen, especially prep work, takes longer than expected, especially when I’ve never done it before. If I was working in a professional kitchen, you can imagine how this might be a problem.
The good news? I don’t work in a professional kitchen! And neither do you (at least, I’d be worried for both you and the restaurant in question if you did — no offense). And what I have learned is that what has been far more critical to my confidence in my ability to create tasty food is my ability to absorb new techniques rather than focusing on my ability to master any particular skill.
What’s the difference? I’m going to save you the time spent with the search engine of your choice, and share a definition of “technique” for you:
tech·nique/tekˈnēk/ noun: technique; plural noun: techniques
1: a way of carrying out a particular task, especially the execution or performance of an artistic work or a scientific procedure.
Lexico, powered by Oxford
Does being able to cut an onion into dice matter? Sure, somewhat. Cutting food into even pieces ensures it cooks evenly. But you know what also works? Knowing that you pull out the Cuisinart and toss the onion in there and get good enough results. Or knowing that dicing the onion perfectly doesn’t really matter that much in the context of the recipe. Knowing the ways to carry out the task can often help you skirt knowing how to perform any one of them.
This is why I adore Cook’s Illustrated. The “Illustrated” part of its title, promising watercolors of food on the covers and meticulous drawings inside, often consign copies of their magazine to coffee tables, bathroom magazine racks, or framed covers in kitchens. But Cook’s Illustrated also taught me that saving techniques is more valuable than saving recipes. One of my favorite cookbooks is The Science of Good Cooking: Master 50 Simple Concepts To Enjoy a Lifetime of Success in the Kitchen. I’ve made only a handful of recipes from the book, but each of the 50 simple concepts are transferable many, many other recipes.
For example, if you eat steak, you know you want it nicely and browned on the outside. How do you do that? You need to dry it out, because moisture is the enemy of browning. From that book, I discovered a recipe which called for the steak to be salted, covered in cornstarch, and then left in the freezer. The salt draws the moisture out of the steak, and the cornstarch and freezer team up to dry it out. Knowing that, whenever I need to brown anything, I suddenly have tools at my disposal. Do I need to salt it to draw the moisture out? Would cornstarch work? Or a trip to the freezer? Or maybe I can just squeeze it out or use a salad spinner?
