Cooking can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. Could it be that you’re having problems because you’re going too far into the complicated end?
If you care to share how things usually go wrong for you, maybe you’ll get some useful tips in return.
Often I overcook or undercook things, use too much or too little of some ingredient, and generally have no intuition for the quantitative side of things. These aren’t exactly recipes, just literal fundamental skills like cooking meat or vegetables for the right amount of time, at the right heat, with the right seasonings, etc.
I used to struggle with picking seasonings too, but here’s a strategy that I picked up from the internet somewhere:
Decide which basic flavor(s) you need
Pick an ingredient that will satisfy one or more of those flavors.
Here’s a baseline “basic flavors” that should always land you a flavorful meal:
heat (eg peppers, wasabe)
acid (fruit, vinegar)
salt (table salt, soy sauce)
fat (butter, bacon grease)
But there’s a few others that might come in handy, like:
sweet (sugar, honey, fruit, many veggies)
mint (thyme, rosemary, basil, black pepper)
bitter (grapefruit, many veggies)
savory (soy sauce, meats)
whatever flavor alliums have (onions, garlic)
Of course, figuring out which basic flavors you need is still a skill to develop, but this two-stage process helped me a lot. Plus, if you’re trying to stay traditional, then the second stage where you pick the ingredient may already be chosen for you. Mexican food needs acid? Lime. Italian needs heat? Red pepper flakes. Asian needs salt? Soy sauce.
TL;DR: Don’t go straight to choosing ingredients you need, instead choose a basic flavor you need then pick ingredients that will satisfy that flavor.
Cooking can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. Could it be that you’re having problems because you’re going too far into the complicated end?
If you care to share how things usually go wrong for you, maybe you’ll get some useful tips in return.
Often I overcook or undercook things, use too much or too little of some ingredient, and generally have no intuition for the quantitative side of things. These aren’t exactly recipes, just literal fundamental skills like cooking meat or vegetables for the right amount of time, at the right heat, with the right seasonings, etc.
I used to struggle with picking seasonings too, but here’s a strategy that I picked up from the internet somewhere:
Here’s a baseline “basic flavors” that should always land you a flavorful meal:
But there’s a few others that might come in handy, like:
Of course, figuring out which basic flavors you need is still a skill to develop, but this two-stage process helped me a lot. Plus, if you’re trying to stay traditional, then the second stage where you pick the ingredient may already be chosen for you. Mexican food needs acid? Lime. Italian needs heat? Red pepper flakes. Asian needs salt? Soy sauce.
TL;DR: Don’t go straight to choosing ingredients you need, instead choose a basic flavor you need then pick ingredients that will satisfy that flavor.