SOME BASICS
Volumes could be written about the basics of cooking. Bibles even. Maybe even an entire book or possibly a whole chapter, such as this one. This chapter isn’t meant to be comprehensive, just comprehensible. I will not attempt to cover all of the basics, but I will mention a few things that will set you up to cook most of the stuff in this book.
In addition, this information will also set you up to make three to four hundred thousand recipes not in this book. Those recipes can be found in other books, on the Internet, from friends and relatives, from enemies and strangers, scrawled on old withering parchment in thrift stores, dreamed up inside your own mind, or whispered in your ear by dead people. Recipes that come from any other source are not to be trusted and should be immediately discarded.
If you’re brand new to cooking, this is the part of the book where I overwhelm you with information to the point of frustration and you don’t bother trying. If you are prone to that kind of response, the best way to approach this section is to skip it entirely and go straight to the recipes and try them out. If you insist on reading this chapter, just know that there isn’t anything in here that’s crucial, except for all of the stuff that is essential, not to mention the few bits that are vital. What I’m saying is, don’t feel like you have to go out and buy all of the stuff mentioned in this chapter before you start. There are workarounds for almost anything and I believe in you. Or I am at least willing to say that I believe in you even though I know nothing about you.
THINGS YOU MIGHT NEED
TASTE BUDS
Everything that has ever been cooked has been made to taste. Someone’s taste. In other words, a recipe is just, like, someone’s opinion, man. Try out the recipes as written and adjust parts of them at your leisure. If leisure isn’t your thing, adjust things according to your uptight intensity.
Don’t like an ingredient? Swap something else in, or don’t swap anything in at all. Maybe it will still be good, maybe not. There’s one way to find out. And that way is to convince a friend to make it for you, and then try it and see what you think.
The way you can tell if something you made is good is by tasting it. If you like how it tastes, then it is good. If you don’t like how it tastes, then it is not good. At least not right now, although it might be good one day, or it might be good right now for someone else. I used to hate onions, but now I can’t live without them. That’s not an exaggeration. I am hooked up to an onion juice IV in order to keep me alive, because without onions in my blood I have no will to live. High-end chefs might make scrambled eggs that have the texture of hot custard. But if I want to eat something with the texture of hot custard, I’ll eat hot custard. And maybe that hot custard will be made of eggs cooked by a high-end chef. Maybe not. The point is, trust your taste, but be open to it evolving. Or don’t.
A HEAT SOURCE
Cooking, by definition, involves one or both of two things: combining ingredients and heating them. There are many heat sources to choose from, each more dangerous than the next. Excessive heat can cause pain to any part of the body that contains skin, bones, or living cells. Make sure you choose the heat source that is just dangerous enough for you. Consider the following choices.
FIRE
Using this yellowish, orangish, pointyish, shapeshifting, gas-like substance to cook is a tradition that goes back dozens of years. You really have to keep your wits about you when working with this unpredictable stuff, as many variables affect how it behaves—particularly how angry you’re feeling. Also, fire is contagious, so be careful when you get close to it. Luckily, fire usually burns upward as heat normally rises, so you can mostly count on that. I recommend using fire contained in a hard metal box, such as a barbecue. If a barbecue is not available, try cooking over a wild prairie fire.
THE SUN
Cooking with the sun is the trickiest approach, on account of the surface of the sun being almost 10,000°F. This method requires you to expose the food to the sun for no longer than a few millionths of a second, either with quick hand movements or with an astronomically fast rotating rotisserie (best operated by the gusting winds of a Category 5 hurricane). If you cook with the center of the sun, the temperature is closer to 27,000°F, which requires a slightly shorter cooking time, and a very good pair of gloves. Forearm guards are also recommended.
The Kitchen Hot Box is the box inside your kitchen that gets hot. It does so by rapidly removing all of the coldness until there is nothing left but heat. When operating a Kitchen Hot Box, you can choose to make the top hot, the inside hot, or both hot at the same time.
STOVE
A stove is the top part of the Kitchen Hot Box that has burners, which provide you with a controlled source of heat. This can be in the form of flames (see above: Fire), magnetic induction, or electrons moving through metal coils. The stove gives you a safe place to control heat easily while meticulously applying it to food. Many consider using a stove to be cheating, since you don’t have to work too hard to make the heat appear. But keep in mind that cheating is the quickest way to get ahead in life so it’s probably worth it.
MICROWAVE
The microwave is a neutral-temperature box that heats up the food you put inside it. It does so by hurling very tiny sunbeams at the food, which cause the water molecules inside it to exercise involuntarily until the food is hot.
OVEN
The oven—also known as The Onion, also known as The Undo (pronounced un-doe), also known as the Sizzle Cube, also known as the Danger Cave, also known as the Chamber of Blazing Secrets—is the box part of the Kitchen Hot Box that has a door. If your cooking has so far been limited to the stove and the microwave, get excited to learn how to use one of the most versatile and universal of heat sources. If you already have extensive experience using The Undo, then get excited to continue taking it for granted, even though it continues to be low-key awesome despite your indifference.
Befriend the oven. Sit down with it and tell it your deepest, darkest secrets. That way you’ll know you can trust it. If you listen closely, the oven will tell you its deepest, darkest secrets, too. It may sound like nothing because ovens have no secrets.
Whether you’re a beginner who has never turned an oven on, mechanically or otherwise, or an experienced chef who has put many things inside the oven, becoming closer to it has many benefits. Primarily, the feeling of closeness.
SOMETHING TO CUT WITH
Choosing a cutting tool is a very personal decision. Before the 1940s when knives were invented, people would simply smash ingredients against the wall. Today, walls are not strong enough to survive being pummeled by onions, let alone potatoes and cabbage. Many houses have been lost to cooks from earlier generations who refused to change their ways. Fortunately, we now have a number of tools at our disposal to dismantle our food:
LASERS
Lasers are a powerful cutting tool. Their application within various industries is widely known and they are highly effective for cutting through most materials, including other lasers. When using a laser to cut food, it is important to have a bunch of disposable countertops on hand, unless your countertop is a mirror, in which case you’ll need a disposable kitchen.
TORNADOES
These swirling funnels are composed of fast-moving air, also known as “wind.” When wind gets moving in a circle, it can be fast enough to send playing cards through the air at such a high velocity they can cut through trees, which is also fast enough to cut through most fruit and some vegetables. The downside to using a tornado to cut your food is that you are at the mercy of local and international weather systems, and you also risk spilling your food. Effectively using tornadoes in the kitchen requires years of study in order to predict and track tornadoes, as well as a kitchen with a retractable roof.
KNIVES
Knives are most often used to modify the size of objects, particularly if you want to make an object smaller. To cut an object bigger requires elite skill and the ability to move time backward. Until self-chopping vegetables become a thing, we are basically stuck with knives. Attempts to engineer self-chopping vegetables have largely failed. The main approach has been to weave knife DNA into vegetables, which has been consistently rejected by the vegetable DNA because of its preference to survive.
There are two major types of knives: handled knives and handleless knives. I recommend handled knives, as handleless knives often result in too-much-blood in your food, as well as a sore hand. Handled knives are also more widely available and less expensive.
If you’re only going to buy one good knife, buy a chef’s knife. Also known as a BFK. This is a great knife for chopping onions, other produce, meat, and anything else you put beneath the blade, including other knives. An 8- or 10-inch chef’s knife will get most of the jobs done most of the time. A 30-foot-long chef’s knife will allow you to dice 16 pounds of vegetables in one chop, but it’s very difficult to find a 30-foot-long cutting board, which makes this knife largely useless.
If you’re going to buy a second knife, I recommend a paring knife, which is a knife with a flat blade a bit smaller than a steak knife. You can use it to peel things and to get into smaller or trickier places, such as nooks, crannies, crevices, corners, curves, and cracks.
More About Knives
Honing and Sharpening
Using a dull knife sucks. You may not know just how dull your knife is until you use a sharp one. A dull knife is, in some ways, more dangerous as well, as your knife can easily slip off the surface of something you’re cutting and lodge itself into something you didn’t think you were cutting, such as your common palmar digital artery, which can result in sudden stress on your larynx. So let’s keep that knife sharp.
There are two ways to make your knife sharp again: honing and sharpening. Honing is done using a honer. A honer is something that hones. You drag both sides of your blade against it and it straightens out the edge of the blade, making it temporarily sharp again. A honer barely removes any metal, so you can hone a sharpened blade over and over again until the edge is gone. Once the edge is gone, it’s time to sharpen, which creates a new edge by removing metal from the blade.
You can take your knives to a professional to get them sharpened, or you can buy a sharpener. Many sharpeners are used by dragging the blade through them, which creates a new edge. You can also get a sharpening stone. This involves imagining how cool it would be to learn the meditative process of sliding your blade against the stone over and over again until it’s perfectly sharp, trying it once, then putting it in a drawer where it will sit untouched for six years.
My approach is to use a honer regularly, then take my knives to get sharpened by someone who knows what they’re doing every few months. Or much, much longer when my shawarma addiction takes over my life, making me realize my knives have been sitting idle, neglected, and covered in dust. Fortunately, a protective coating of dust keeps the blade in tip-top shape.
The Claw Grip
Learning how to use your chef’s knife properly is the single most valuable skill you can learn in the kitchen that will make the biggest difference in terms of how quick, easy, and fun it is to cook. When chopping turns from a chore into something you enjoy, cooking becomes a blast. And if not a blast, then at least not-so-difficult and time consuming. And if not not-so-difficult and time consuming, then you need to work harder on your claw grip.
The Claw Grip helps you keep all human body parts out of the blade's direction of travel.
If you’re right-handed, make a claw shape with your left hand, the food-holding hand, so that your fingertips are tucked under, and your second knuckles are sticking out. Use that hand to hold whatever you’re chopping—let’s say it’s a scallion. Hold your knife in your right hand, sharp side down with your thumb and index finger gripping the blade where it meets the handle, and press the side of the blade up against the protruding knuckles of your left hand. Slice the scallion, then work your left claw along the scallion, while keeping the blade pressed against your knuckles. If you are left-handed, do the same thing, but the opposite, or take a picture of this page in a mirror and follow the instructions as written.
By using the Claw Grip, you rely more on feel, rather than vision, when chopping. You also keep your digits out of the way of the blade 100 percent of the time, which is scientifically known to be the correct amount. This method feels awkward at first, but like most new skills, it starts to feel normal very quickly. Commit to learning the Claw Grip and you will be surprised by how rapidly you improve and how easy chopping becomes.
You also might garner a few compliments from people watching you, such as “Say, you’re really good at chopping,” or “Impressive, the way you’re able to chop that scallion even though your hand is all clumped up in a weird-looking ball,” or “It seems you are far better at chopping than you are at being a good friend.” Comments such as these will help to set you up for success and will confirm that you made the right decision to learn a new skill to improve your life rather than investing more time in your personal relationships.
Claw Grip Haiku
Hand in the claw grip
Slicing up my enemies
Or at least onions
WANGJANGLER
A good wangjangler, also known by its more offensive and inappropriate name, “spatula,” is a great tool for manipulating food in a hot skillet while not burning your hands (which is both painful and dangerous, also known as paingerous). Another tool that can be used to manipulate food is psychology. But who really understands the mind of a tomato? That’s why the wangjangler is the first choice for food manipulation among chefs worldwide.
Metal wangjanglers are good for pans without a nonstick surface, such as cast iron or stainless steel. Plastic or silicone wangjanglers are good for nonstick pans. Wangjanglers with an entirely flat surface, with no grill (see diagram, opposite), are easiest to clean and my favorite for cooking eggs, which tend to stick like glue in the cracks of the grill. Wangjanglers also come in the shape of a large spoon. In fact, anything that is used to flip, mix, wrassle, or stir your food is a wangjangler. Because wangjangling is a state of mind.
Wangjangling Pro Tips
Wangjanglers are magnetic, which is why food sticks to them. Use a fork to scrape the magnetized food back into the pan.
Use the wangjangler to flip hot things.
Do not form your hand into the shape of a wangjangler and attempt to flip hot things while saying, “Look at me, I’m a wangjangler!” with a high falsetto.
OVEN GLOVES
An oven glove is useful when holding things that are very hot, such as pans that have just been inside the oven, or my triceps. You can use a kitchen towel to handle a hot pan, but an oven glove gives you far better protection and is way easier. Unlike the kitchen towel, the oven glove can also be useful when shaking someone’s hand, to avoid contamination and intimacy (both of which can ruin a great meal). If you’re cooking a lot, consider also getting oven pants.
SAUCEPAN
The saucepan, also known as a “pot,” is a handled, metal, heat-resistant tub that’s great for making sauces, soups, anything liquidy, and giving small objects a bath. Its high, protective walls shelter the sauce from the outside world, allowing it to bubble away without sputtering and splattering all over your perfect life. It looks like this:
Storing several stacked saucepans on standby for simmering soups, stews, stocks, or sauces is stunningly smart for satisfying your stomach when you are seriously salivating or slightly starving.
THE SKILLET
A skillet is a pan with slanted sides. Like all pans, it keeps the food above the heat, preventing it from falling into the space beneath the burner, which sometimes happens when you cook with no pan at all. It’s also easier to clean a skillet rather than putting the entire stove into the sink, which is especially dangerous if you have electric burners.
The reason a skillet is called a skillet is because it takes more skill to keep the food inside it than a pan with nonslanted sides. Those non-slanted pan walls allow you to wrassle with total abandon. The skillet teaches you the physics of responsibility.
The proper way to use a skillet is to hold the handle, then place the flat, round, slanted-edge part onto the burner. The improper way to use the skillet is to hold the flat, round, slanted-edge part and place the handle on the burner. This improper way is also very ineffective, unless you are cooking a single piece of asparagus and are good at balancing.
What kind of skillet should you get? For a beginner, I recommend a nonstick skillet as your go-to stovetop pan, mainly because it’s easier to clean. If you have a frustrating time getting gunk off your pan, you might never cook again. But there are many options. The variety of pan choices available is so extensive that it’s beyond my ability to summarize, let alone comprehend. So good luck with your research.
BAKING SHEET AND PARCHMENT PAPER
The baking sheet is the simplest and most versatile cooking surface used inside your oven. It looks like this, except it's usually larger:
Parchment paper is a paper that won’t burn in the oven (but will burn if you take a lighter to it, trust me) and that keeps you from having to scrub gunk off your baking sheet every time you use it. Actually it will also burn if you have it on the top rack on broil for too long, or if you’re baking over an open bonfire. It greatly reduces the amount of water needed to clean the pan. If you are concerned about wasting too much paper, choose a brand of parchment paper that comes from 100% Certified Evil Trees.
A CUTTING BOARD
A cutting board is a board that you cut things on. It keeps your counter clean and scratch-free. Often confused with a baking sheet, it looks like this:
When selecting a cutting board, make sure you don’t use one that is too small for what you are chopping, as it ends up making more work for you since you have to use extra dexterity to keep your ingredients from spilling off the board. And we all know how much dexterity you have—not very much. While a small cutting board is easy to wash and can be useful for chopping items with a very small volume, such as scallions or garlic, it can also unconsciously hold you back while chopping larger items, which is mentally exhausting. I recommend an 18 × 12-inch cutting board at minimum, for chopping onions or anything larger. Feel free to build a cutting board arsenal for various purposes.
MIXING BOWLS
Mixing things together when ingredients are nearly spilling over the edge is annoying and slows you down. It’s not just a bowl. It’s a vessel of wangjanglitude. If you’re someone who likes to wangjangle with an exceptional amount of passion, forcing your food into a smaller bowl will leave you emotionally stunted. Get some bigger bowls and really go to town. Put your hips into it. Into the mixing, not into the bowl.
MEASURING CUPS AND SPOONS
Measuring devices are great for wasting time in the kitchen by making you check several drawers to find the proper teaspoon that is perpetually lost. The best approach to this ubiquitous problem is to make a Measuring Cup Bracelet™ and to wear it at all times. This solution has the secondary benefit of making it easy to measure your water usage when you are in the shower, so you can make sure you are wasting the appropriate amount. This solution has the thirdiary benefit of making a constant jangling sound when you’re walking around, which keeps you safe from bears, and lets your friends know when you’re coming (so they have ample time to hide). It also has the fourthiary benefit of starting a new fashion trend. But beware: Once the fashion trend comes and goes and everyone is throwing their measuring cup bracelets in the garbage, you’re going to look like an unfashionable loser. But at least we’ll look like unfashionable losers together.
Just kidding. I would never wear a measuring cup bracelet.
INSTANT-READ THERMOMETER
An instant-read thermometer is mostly used to measure the temperature of meat, although it’s sometimes used to measure the temperature of inanimate animals. The last two words of that sentence come from one of the sickest bars I’ve ever dropped during a rap battle, which took place in 2004, in a dark basement club inside the Metro Detroit area of my mind. Yes, it was a taxidermy-based burn.
SOME IMPORTANT INGREDIENTS
SALT
Salt is a mineral that comes from the ground, sea, or air. All salt is chemically identical, composed of the elements sodium and chlorine. However, combining sodium and chlorine is not a suitable salt substitute. The only suitable substitute for salt is salt.
Table salt is ground salt, which is really sea salt that’s been in the ground so long it has forgotten where it came from. It is often iodized, meaning iodine, a critical micronutrient, is added to it. This is often seen as the least-good-tasting salt by people who are into salt, and people who are into salt are often the most susceptible to marketing hype.
Kosher salt, which can come from the ground or seawater, usually has bigger, uneven crystals. It is less refined than table salt and is used for all parts of the cooking process, but is especially good for adding salty crunch. Fine kosher salt is similar in crystal size to table salt.
Sea salt comes from the sea. It is very similar to ocean salt, since it is made from the same substance: salt. These two types of salt also spent most of their lives bathing in the same liquid: salt water. Sea salt comes in a variety of crystal sizes, including coarse and fine. Fine sea salt is what I use for the recipes in this book, but table salt and fine kosher salt will give you a similar result.
Air salt is the rarest salt of them all. Much like dark energy, it is so difficult to detect that it has yet to be photographed, let alone tasted.
The main thing to keep in mind when swapping out one salt for another is the difference in the crystal size. One teaspoon table salt or fine sea salt will contain a lot more salt than 1 teaspoon kosher salt or course sea salt due to the larger size of those crystals, so adjust accordingly. Or just do what I did and use fine sea salt. As someone who’s really into salt, I can assure you that sea salt definitely tastes the best.
Food can be salted before, during, or after cooking and is often adjusted throughout the cooking process. When using ground salt, be mindful that the salt was already buried for millions of years, so reburying it inside your food may be considered disrespectful.
PEPPER
Also known by its scientific name, Pepper pepper pepper, pepper is one of the world’s most common spices. Sailors used to have pouches of it tied to their belts because the food they ate didn’t taste good without it, much like many foods today, and also because pepper shakers would slide off the table whenever their ships hit a wave. Carrying the pepper this way also created a localized spice barrier, which was effective for repelling mermaids.
Freshly ground pepper tastes much better than preground pepper, objectively speaking. It’s one of the simplest ingredient changes you can make to improve the taste of your cooking. But if you’re sticking with preground, good for you. Don’t let anyone boss you around.
While I am normally a stickler for using the scientific name for ingredients, I will be using the term “pepper” throughout the book as opposed to the more correct Pepper pepper pepper. The reason is because of the printer ink cartels. They have been steadily driving up prices for decades, and I refuse to give them more money than necessary. That’s also the reason this book sticks to the facts, and only the facts, and writes them in the quickest, tidiest, and most efficient way, whenever it is even remotely possible to do such a thing, but never when it’s not possible to do that thing I just mentioned in this very sentence, which you are currently still reading on account of the fact that you are still looking at these words while your brain processes the information and your mind creates meaning out of these shapes and symbols so that you might understand what is being talked about, or written about rather, as there is no talking happening whatsoever unless you happen to be speaking this out loud in which case you are in an excellent position to appreciate the rhythm and cadence with which this sentence has been meticulously constructed in terms of it not only being straight to the point but also well crafted, at least in your opinion, which is a good one.
COOKING OIL
Extra virgin olive oil is one of the most common cooking oils and is great for most things. But for high temperatures, extra virgin olive oil isn’t the best since it has a lower smoke point and will generate free radicals when it gets too hot. That might sound awesome, on account of them being both free and radical, but they’re actually not good for you.
Extra-light olive oil, vegetable oil, avocado oil, peanut oil, grapeseed oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, and safflower oil are some of the oils that are better for cooking at high temperatures. Coconut oil is another popular cooking oil that is good for a variety of temperatures, but beware: It tastes faintly of coconut.
Most of the time you’ll want to add ingredients to the pan when the oil is hot. One way to tell that the oil is hot is when it moves around the pan like water. Another way to tell is when the oil appears to glisten or shimmer. When the oil is shimmering like the surface of a lake under the light of the full moon on a crisp autumn night, it’s time to add the ingredients.
ONIONS
Onions can be found in 99.999% of anything that’s ever been cooked. They can also be found in 47% of anything that’s never been cooked. You may not see them, but they’re there. And even if those numbers aren’t exactly correct, I believe I’ve made my point. My point is that you can’t trust my statistics. But what you can trust is that onions make everything taste great as long as you like the taste of onions, and as long as you are not cooking something that does not go well with onions.
Onions come in a variety of flavors and a variety of shapes. Some have more sweetness, some are milder, and some, like the scallion—the green onion—deserve to have a religion founded upon them. For the purposes of this book, don’t worry too much about which onion you’re using if you can’t find the specific one that’s called for. Cooking onions are a great all-around onion, and my general favorite spherical onion is the red onion. Sure, it tastes great, but I also just have a weakness for mislabeled colors. Either it’s purple or I am color-blind. You be the judge. But also keep your opinion to yourself.
Learning how to properly dice an onion will make you very efficient in the kitchen. Use these steps below, but also see the Claw Grip on this page.
Cut your onion in half from top to bottom, cutting through the stem and root, but leaving the stem on.
Remove the peel, or if it's particularly sticky, remove the peel and outer layer.
Lay one half, flat side down, on your cutting board, with the stem toward your nonknife palm.
Make slices down the onion, ½ an inch in from the stem, ¼ inch apart.
Make ¼-inch-wide slices across the onion, and watch as your onion is reduced to perfect mini pieces.
Be careful when you are cutting on the curve closest to your onion-holding hand, because if your knife slips, it will slip toward your hand. Instead, lay the newly cut flat side of the onion down on the cutting board and continue chopping.
Discard the stem.
Use the onion.
GARLIC
Garlic has a flavor profile similar to onions. Chopping garlic can feel like it takes forever because of the size-to-accomplishment ratio. You’re pretty much using the same amount of chops for a clove of garlic as you are for an onion, but you’re getting much less volume. But the flavor of garlic is so much more powerful that the work-to-results ratio is probably similar on a taste level. But that doesn’t make it feel like less of a giant waste of time.
One approach to speed up the time it takes to chop a clove of garlic is to allow yourself to age for twenty to thirty years before making your next attempt. The more you age, the faster time feels like it’s moving. What may feel like the longest two minutes of your life now will feel like microseconds in a few decades, and you’ll actually enjoy those microseconds in the future. Einstein wrote extensively about this in his theory of relativity, I’m pretty sure.
If chopping garlic feels too annoying, so much so that you’re not going to cook something because of it, I suggest using prechopped garlic from a jar, or at least have the option on standby until you learn how to mince garlic hella quick. If you do that, 1 garlic clove is equivalent to about ½ tablespoon chopped or 1 teaspoon minced. You can also get a garlic press, which will smash your garlic up in one squeeze of a lever, reducing your chopping time to 0 seconds. You’ll spend the same amount of time cleaning the garlic press as you would have just chopping the garlic, maybe longer, but making easier choices now that end up being difficult later is part of human nature.
When a recipe calls for chopping garlic, or any vegetable, for that matter, here is what I mean:
Roughly Chopped: pieces around ¾ inch
Chopped: pieces around ½ inch
Diced: pieces around ¼ inch
Finely Chopped: pieces around ⅛ inch
Minced: pieces around ¹⁄16 inch and smeared against the cutting board with your knife to crush them further
Obliterated: pieces chopped so small you are now breathing the garlic
But what if a recipe calls for finely chopped garlic but you don’t quite chop the pieces that small? Is this something crucial that you should worry about? Well let me tell you, if you don’t chop garlic quite as small as is called for, there’s a chance it could end up slightly less cooked than intended. But is the chef who created the recipe going to come to your house and yell at you for not following it exactly? I hope so. That would be hilarious.
BROTH
Broth can be homemade or store-bought in liquid form ready to use, in liquid form ready to be watered down, or in liquidless form, ready to be watered up (bouillon). It’s the basis of most soups, but can also be used to cook rice or quinoa or make sauces, or can be consumed on its own. It can be vegetarian, chicken, beef, or some other things I’d rather not talk about.
HOT SAUCE
Hot sauce is dangerous, like a drug. Once you start using, it quickly becomes addictive and food quickly becomes bland without it. It is nearly on par with caffeine in terms of addictions that are totally worth it. If you can’t handle the heat, start with a few atoms of hot sauce and work your way up until you can eat an entire molecule, then keep going until you can eat an entire ghost pepper plant including the leaves, roots, and dirt. That’s when you know you’re cool with hot sauce.
ADJUSTING FLAVOR
Figuring out how to make something taste better can feel daunting. That’s why I have devised a simple system to guide you through the process of adjusting and enhancing flavor on the fly. When cooking, pay attention to these four simple components:
Acid
Salt
Sweetness
Seasoning
Also known as the ASSS system of food flavoring, this approach will often help you answer the question: What’s missing? (But only in relation to food. Sorry.) There are many approaches to fine-tuning a dish’s flavor, but none have the elegant simplicity of the ASSS system. Let’s take a crack at the ASSS approach to see if we can unravel its mysteries.
ACID
Most recipes contain some form of acid. Vinegar, lemon or lime juice, and tomatoes are among the most common sources. The reason foods are often finished with a squeeze of lemon is not just because yellow things taste good. It’s because acid, like salt, is a flavor enhancer that brings other flavors together and makes them all taste better. Acid can brighten a dish and often completes it. It’s part of the reason tomatoes and pickles go so well in sandwiches. It’s why guacamole without lime is just a bowl of green stuff. It’s why vinegar is in so many dressings. If you’re cooking a dish and you feel like something is missing, consider acid. If you’re cooking a dish and your skillet starts levitating before taking you on a multi-dimensional journey where you understand the illusion of time and the beginning of infinity, then you’ve used the wrong type of acid.
SALT
Here we go again. This stuff is crucial. Salt isn’t in literally everything simply because people like the taste of salt; it’s in literally everything because salt is made of magical flavor enhancement crystals that not only help food realize its full potential, but also help you realize your full potential because if you don’t eat salt, you die. This is why salt is the entry point of the ASSS system and should be at the beginning of this list. But if it was, not only would it create the distracting acronym SASS, it would also result in poorer tasting food since any dish can be ruined by too much attitude.
Learning how to salt your food just right is a skill, and there are several ways to go about it. If you’re winging it, start with less salt and keep tasting until the level is just right, like Goldilocks (minus the terrifying risk of being ripped apart by bloodthirsty bears who were just protecting their home from an intruder). Seek the salting saturation sweet spot. Creep up to the edge but do not go over.
When boiling vegetables or pasta, salt the water generously so if you were to take a sip of it, you’d probably gag or at least make a very sour face. With rice and quinoa, ½ teaspoon fine salt per cup of uncooked is a good general rule but trust your own taste. If you’re making a soup or stew, a lot of the salt may come from the broth or bouillon, and you’ll have to decide if more is needed. Salt is in cheese as well, so finishing a dish with parmesan or crumbled feta may be all that’s needed to complete the flavor.
If you’re making a big pot of something that needs to be salted and you’re not sure how much salt to use, try a technique I call Matrix Visualization™. Estimate in inches the height of the food in your pot. Now add salt as if the entire surface were a plate of scrambled eggs, then do it again until you’ve hit the number of inches. Then bend backward and dodge a series of bullets while watching life pass by in two thousand frames per second. Then taste and see if it’s good, or if you’ve ruined it with too much salt. If you started with broth, then that was probably too much.
If you go too far, the main solution is adding more unsalted ingredients, although you might be able to balance a slight oversalting with acid or sugar. You may find you have a higher or lower salt tolerance than someone you eat with regularly. Keep this in mind if you’re cooking for others, and leave room for the salt to be adjusted individually. Another way to deal with oversalted food that you’ve made for someone else is to create a distraction whenever they take a bite. Alternatively, break some horribly tragic news that will cause them to start crying. The salt lost in their tears will result in a salt deficiency in their body, which will balance out the taste in their mouth.
SWEETNESS
Sweetness is another important balancing factor when building a satisfying flavor. A touch of honey balances out the vinegar (i.e., acid) in many salad dressings. Acids are sour and sweetness is the antidote. If a dish is too acidic, it can be balanced with a bit of sugar, such as when making a tomato sauce. Sometimes that sugar comes from caramelizing the onions, and often that is enough. (To be clear, onions become sweet when caramelized [to be clearer, caramelizing onions means cooking them slowly until they turn brown and taste much sweeter.])
In many recipes, one type of sugar can be swapped for another. If you don’t have maple syrup, you might try honey or brown sugar instead. While you may miss the maple flavor, when the sweetness level is adjusted correctly, your dish overall should still taste good. If you have light brown sugar instead of dark, or vice versa, the change will rarely be noticeable unless you are a trained molasses expert. If you swap in brown sugar for white, make sure the brown sugar is packed into the measuring cup to match the density of the white sugar.
Don’t keep yourself from cooking something just because you don’t have the specific type of sugar on hand. Surely there are many examples where the type of sugar is crucial, but I’m feeling too lazy to look them up right now.
SEASONING
While salt is the most important aspect of flavoring, seasoning is by far the deepest component of the ASSS system. Paradoxically, seasoning can also include salt, acid, and sugar. Figure that one out why don’t you.
Seasoning is the specific flavoring you add to your ingredients. It can include herbs, spices, garlic, or anything else that tastes like anything. If you add something that tastes like nothing, then it is not seasoning.
When seasoning, you have two choices: (1) follow the recipe or (2) freestyle. By freestyle, I mean start simple and add things you think might work. If you’re not sure whether or not a flavor will work with what you’re making, take a small portion or spoonful of the dish and add a very tiny amount of the herb, spice, or sauce, then taste. You’ll know right away. You can also use this method to figure out if you need more salt.
I wish I had done that the time I decided to add dill to guacamole. That was not good. That was years ago. I still haven’t let it go. I had just discovered the magic of dill, arguably the greatest herb of all time, and I was sure that dill was great in everything. It is not great in everything. It was not great in that guacamole. It was a big mistake. I’ll get over it, someday. You don’t have to worry about me. Just keep in mind that cooking based on color alone doesn’t always work.
In conclusion, by always eating ASSS system–based food, you will ensure that the flavors of your dish turn out well. By diving into every component of the ASSS system and exploring it deeply, you will set yourself up to create dishes that are full-flavored, and you will learn to hone the taste of your meals, I hope.
REMEMBER FAT
We don’t use oil and butter to cook simply because it keeps food from sticking to the skillet. We also use it because it affects the flavor, texture, and overall balance of any dish. Know that fat is not evil and it is often a crucial part of how something tastes. Think mayo or cheese on a sandwich, oil in a stir-fry, butter with fried eggs, butter on toast, butter on noodles, butter in muffins, butter literally caked over my entire body because I heard it was good for me in a magazine that one time or at least that’s what I tell my friends, but really I just love covering myself in butter. There’s no place for judgment in cooking.
Except when it comes to air fryers. Not only do air fryers remove fat from the cooking process (which is part of what makes food taste great), but they also fry up one of the most crucial substances for both living creatures and birds alike: air. Without air, living creatures have nothing to breathe, and birds have nothing to fly in. We can only hope that the dangerous trend of frying air fizzles out (and is hopefully replaced by water frying) before air becomes too expensive for everyone.
BURN THINGS
How many times have you heard someone exclaim, with shock and sadness, “Oh no, the carrots are browning!” Hopefully never, because when food starts to brown it tastes way more awesome than it did before. Most of the time. It’s not exactly burning, mind you. That was click bait. Or in this case, paragraph bait.
When food browns, it’s called the Maillard reaction, because Mr. Maillard was the first person to articulate it, a long time ago, and he explained that something happens with the proteins in the food when it’s heated a certain amount and it ends up tasting good as a result. Think toast, toasted marshmallows, seared steak, caramelized onions, and baked cookies. Also other things. Don’t be afraid to brown the things that will taste better that way. Don’t brown the things that won’t. Also be mindful not to burn things, which is known as the Maillard overreaction.
Similar to the Maillard reaction, the Uncle Jerry reaction is another cooking-related process. It’s the quickly building tension that ruins a backyard picnic when someone wanders over after a few cocktails and tries to tell Uncle Jerry how to use his own barbecue.
THE MENTAL GAME
Overcoming mental obstacles is the most difficult part of cooking for many people. You might not want to try cooking because you’ll be embarrassed about making something that doesn’t turn out well. You also might not want to try cooking because you could find out that you’re really good at it, and then you’ll have to spend the rest of your life wrestling with your own greatness. But it’s more likely that you’re just lazy. The good news is that as you do it more, it gets exponentially easier. And while I can’t verify the accuracy of the exponentiality of the progression, I can testify to the likelihood of it not mattering that I mentioned it in the first place. Let’s address your blocks:
MENTAL BLOCK #1: It Might Suck
Here’s how recipes work: You read the recipe, you follow the instructions, and everything turns out well almost all of the time. There is so much leeway in most recipes in relation to the ingredient amounts and the cooking times that it is truly difficult to mess a recipe up beyond the point of no return. In fact, if you do mess it up past the point of no return, it’s almost more impressive than if it turns out well. Having said that, you will make something that sucks at some point. The trick is to laugh at yourself. Laugh and laugh and laugh, and then laugh some more until it is so uncomfortable that the people you are serving the food to are way more concerned about your well-being than they are about how poor the food tastes.
MENTAL BLOCK #2: Using New Equipment
I realized I had a mental block around using the oven when a friend asked me to make a yam recipe while she was at work all day. I was staying at her place, so it felt rude to say no. It felt that way because it would have been rude to say no. I immediately started making excuses in my head, but it all boiled down to one simple thought: I didn’t know how. But “I didn’t know how” simply meant “I haven’t tried.” I didn’t realize at the time that an oven was nothing more than a giant toaster flipped on its side with a large steel door, and so I stared into the abyss of the unknown.
If you’ve never cooked something you’ve wanted to cook because you don’t know how to use an oven, hand mixer, immersion blender, or anything else: JUST STOP IT. And by that, I mean, JUST START IT. Start using those things. Make mistakes. Have fun. Be less cowardly. If you’ve ever operated a common jackhammer, using any of these tools will be a breeze.
MENTAL BLOCK #3: Cooking for Someone Else
Cooking for someone else can be terrifying. It can cause your hypothalamus to jack up your adrenal-cortical and sympathetic nervous systems until you don’t know whether or not you should sprint out of the kitchen at maximum speed or attack a saucepan with no mercy.
While it may seem daunting, something is working in your favor when you cook for someone else. People are more forgiving of food that you make for them than they are of food they make for themselves, because you are making them food, and making someone food is an awesome thing to do. If they don’t love it, they should at least pretend it’s pretty good. But most important, even if they don’t love it, and even if they don’t pretend it’s pretty good, they should be grateful AF that you made it for them. And if you’ve spent a good part of your life with someone making food for you, then it might be time to return the favor.
If you’re concerned that what you’re making doesn’t taste very good, one way to balance this out is to act very obnoxious. This will make the food taste far better than your personality feels, and they will leave thinking “Man, that person really knows how to cook. I can’t wait to never see him again.” If they live in the same house as you, this strategy might need a rethink.
MENTAL BLOCK #4: The Speed of Time
Sometimes the effort we put into cooking feels like a huge waste of time. You may find yourself asking the question “Why should I cook when I can be doing something else?” The best answer to this question is to cook while doing something else. My mom likes to watch movies while she cooks. I like listening to podcasts or new music. Old music, too. Any age music, really. That stuff sounds good no matter how long it’s been around. Sometimes musical notes need time to mature before you really get that full sound. Especially with the bassoon.
If you’re truly desperate, you can attempt cooking while practicing the art of conversation with another human being, which can also help speed up time. However, in this situation you run the risk of developing bonds that could lead to memorable experiences and emotions. Tread carefully.
As an absolute last resort, you can attempt to enjoy cooking all alone, while practicing something called “mindfulness.” It’s a frightening form of self-manipulation where you just focus on what you’re doing without thought, which results in the feeling that you’re enjoying it without the need to distract yourself with anything else at all. Here, the danger of becoming enlightened is all too real, for if you learn to enjoy this activity by yourself, there’s a real threat of transcending time and experiencing a deep sense of peace and harmony with the world around you. This is a real hassle because it will inevitably lead to you having to replace all of your friends.
MENTAL BLOCK #5: Cleaning
Cleaning sounds like a physical obstacle, but don’t be fooled. Time slows down exponentially when cleaning if you don’t want to be cleaning. The trick is to make yourself want to clean. Multitasking once again comes into play with music, audiobooks, podcasts, or conversation, but there’s another element to timing here.
Much of the cleaning you need to do can be done while you’re cooking. You may feel resistant to tarnishing the cooking process with object-bathing, but if you make a point of cleaning anything you’re done with as you go, you’ll be surprised at how little is left over at the end. Pots, pans, and wangjanglers that are still warm from cooking are far easier to clean than when they cool down and the food hardens into cement, but be careful not to burn yourself.
Finally, consider a few tools to help you overcome this block. My most-used cleaning implement is a plastic scrub brush. I’ve had the same one for years. It rinses off cleanly and can be thrown in the dishwasher. When using this brush, you’re not washing a dish with a microscopic version of everything else a sponge or dishcloth has ever come into contact with. The scrub brush does not invoke the natural repulsion you might feel when reaching for a wet, disgusting rag. If you are going to use a rag, replace it daily, because it’s a bacteria-growing Petri cloth.
The other main tool I suggest is a pair of rubber gloves. They keep a layer between your skin and the disgustitude, they allow you to use hotter water than you can without them, and they generally remove any residue-based reluctance you might have to getting your hands in there.
While cleaning is a mental block, it is also the most important physical block to preparing food. No one wants to cook in a dirty kitchen. Make yourself a promise and make a pact with everyone you live with: We will always leave the kitchen clean.
The key to always leaving the kitchen clean is to never leave the first cup. Don’t ever, ever, ever give anyone else a reason to leave the second cup, not even your future self. Because now you have an excuse to leave the third cup, and then you’re playing a very dangerous game indeed. The game is called Dirty Kitchen and everyone’s a loser.
Now let’s say it together, out loud. WE WILL ALWAYS LEAVE THE KITCHEN CLEAN. Okay, one more time, louder. WE WILL ALWAYS LEAVE THE KITCHEN CLEAN. Now tattoo it on your face. WE WILL ALWAYS LEAVE THE KITCHEN CLEAN. Come back and continue reading once the swelling has reduced and the regret has calmed.
HOW TO COOK ALMOST ANYTHING
Let’s take a quick look at an easy way to cook most things that allows you to enjoy the natural flavor of the food. While there are instructions for every recipe in this book, you can use these methods to take your newfound knowledge outside the confines of these pages. But always, always, credit me regardless.
COOK ANYTHING METHOD #1: Roasting
Preheat your oven to 350° or 400°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and put the thing you want to cook on it. Drizzle on some olive oil, then sprinkle on some salt and pepper.
Put it in the oven for 10 to 20 minutes, then check it. Do you want to brown it for Maillard goodness, or is it good when it’s just cooked through? When it seems finished, take it out of the oven and let it cool down a little bit. Decide if it needs more salt or pepper, and consider adding a squeeze of lemon. Enjoy.
COOK ANYTHING METHOD #2: Pan-Frying
Season the thing you want to cook with salt and pepper on all sides. Consider adding an herb or spice that you think will work, or don’t. Put some oil in a skillet with the heat on medium until the oil starts to shimmer like the sun’s rays bursting dramatically through a cumulonimbus cloud in the desert during a Sunday afternoon adventure.
Add the thing you want to cook to the pan and cook it for several minutes. Flip it around occasionally while acting like you know what you’re doing. Decide if you want to brown it or get it out sooner. Taste it and see if it needs more salt or pepper. Consider adding a squeeze of lemon. Enjoy.
Types of pan-frying include searing and sautéing. You’re welcome.
COOK ANYTHING METHOD #3: Mooching
Go over to a friend’s house and see what food they have lying around. Make remarks such as “Boy I bet that would be tasty if somebody cooked that thing,” or “I’d hate to have to end our friendship on account of you not cooking that thing that would be tasty if you cooked it and therefore made us better friends.” Continue making remarks as needed until you are enjoying a delicious meal. Transcend any negative scowl energy directed toward you.
