Cooking at home for the me, bros and everyone else

Documenting my approach to cooking so far since I started cooking ('19-)

Oct 17, 2023

I haven’t been a home cook for a really long time. This documents the big tricks I’ve learned so far in cooking. My cooking approach centers around an approach of making things as easy as possible and KISS. This is also what works for my life, change things according to your life, but I reckon this will be somewhat useful in your life anyway.

Tools I use that might not be in your (noob) kitchen

These aren’t affiliate links. You don’t need to buy what I show. I make no money here

Rice Cooker: Anything will work for plain white rice. I’ve been recommended by many to invest in a ~$300 Zojirushi, which admittedly cooks fantastic rice with MANY functions. During college, I used a cheaper (~$20) rice cooker which cooked very good white rice as well. Right now I use a Tiger rice cooker. All rice cookers will cook great white rice, but if you might use the other functions (steaming, timers, etc.) look into dropping a little more cash.
Quick-read food thermometer: You can skip this one if you don’t plan to cook meat. I recommend a digital thermometer which can gives you the temperature instantly. You don’t NEED it to make great meat dishes, but it makes life a lot easier for eating perfectly cooked red meat/pork dishes where you don’t want to cook it all the way through. You can find a chart online for meat temperature ranges for levels of cook. Also remember MOMENTUM of heat. Here’s a USDA video showing how to use it
Electric Kettle: This one is not just for the Brits and tea lovers. It can be very useful to have something give you boiling water in a few minutes. Faster than the stove, and more convenient than the microwave. If you are willing to drop serious cash for your coffee journey (I might write a post about it later), I recommend check out this video

Heat & Momentum

This video captures the essence of what’s something most beginner home cooks tend to forget about.

TLDR/TLDW is things continue to cook after coming off the heat. This heat curve can look different depending on what was being cooked, what it’s being cooked in. Getting an intuitive understanding of momentum will help you avoid mushy and overcooked food.

Under-cooked (possibly unsafe)—————————→perfect cook——→overcooked.

What’s under-cooked changes depending on the food, for example a steak might be perfectly safe at 130°F internal, but a chicken breast at that temperature will carry risk of salmonella. This video of

Another necessary part of understanding heat, and momentum is the usage of fat/oil as a thermal agent. I see too many people afraid of using enough oil or fat, and then wonder why their cooking comes out terrible. I recommend watching this Adam Ragusea video to understand why we cook food in oil and why vegetables in restaurants are so much better (hint: lots of oil and plenty of seasoning, salt especially)

Flavor

Arguably the whole reason why we make food aside from sustenance is to savor it. Savoring here comes in the form of flavor which refers to taste+odor. (Check here to see the difference betwen taste and flavor).

Salt is arguably the most important seasoning or flavoring that exists. It is ubiqoutous across all cultures, and enhances other flavorings. While being needed to exist, and tasting delicious in anything sweet. (Salt in ice cream/chocolate bars, etc. REALLY GOOD).

Most of the time I go with the few different flavor profiles. That I try to eat with. I do not make any claim to the authenticity for them, but you can make changes to that depending on what’s in your kitchen.

Base = Salt

Better base = Salt + Black PPP

Indian = Base/BB + Garam Masala+Coriander+Cumin+Cardamom(opt.)

Italian = Better base + (Pesto, Pecorino Romano, Tomato Sauce, etc.)

Korean = Base + Soy Sauce, Gochujang, red chilly flakes

Chinese = Salt+ white pepper+ sugar, use soy sauce, and oyster sauce on how you feel like it

Others: Better Base + whatever the recipe says

This is not a guideline or recipe, but a very bad list on how to go about the different flavorings.

Legend:
PPP = Pepper, pepper, pepper ;
opt. = optional

Quick notes on poultry

These are derived from my experiences of mostly cooking chicken, but I’ve tested this out with turkey as well and it holds up.

How moist/juicy and tender a piece of Chicken is derived on a few different things but it basically boils down to the leaner the cut, the less you have a margin of error to get the perfect cook.

“white meat” = the leaner parts of the meat, which (generally) look white inside after being cooked. Example: Breast and Tenderloins (160-165F)
|| (Water Fowl like goose have breasts which are sometimes considered red meat and can be cooked rare. NEVER cook a rare chicken breast. Water fowl typically have slightly different biology than chicken and turkey since they float around. ||
Dark meat = Thighs and legs. These are pieces with higher fat content, which gives you a larger margin of error of getting your cook right. You can generally cook them more, and in fact you might want to cook them more than a breast. Don’t be alarmed if you still some red. (175F+)

Other tips

The broiler in the oven is a very useful function. Use it frequently but be careful to not burn yourself
Screwing up is part of the process, that’s how you learn
Frozen veggies are great, already cut and ready to go for any stir fry. Frozen meat can be too Ethan Chlebowski has great tips on that. This one has some techniques that even I haven’t used, but seems like a good way to go about things:
FOLLOW KISS principle - Anything in life really: But really great for cooking

Arguably this is a very me-centric food takes. Generally based on what you can easily find in an American grocery or supermarket. These general techniques have what worked for me to take food above a mere sustenance, but hasn’t turned it into a Food Wars culinary experience every night. If you’re like me, male, 20s, cooks for self and wants better than canned tuna. This might be helpful.

For non western/non American foods, I tend to make the authentic or close to authentic foods a few times before I try to fit them to my life, and add my own changes to it. If I can, I try to find non-english lanaguage videos that are subtitled and detailed. A few honorary mentions are: Chef Ranveer Brar (Northern Indian/Punjabi focused), Bong Eats (Indian Bengali food), Chinese cooking demystified, among many others.

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