Introduction

Whether you fancy yourself a hotshot home cook or someone who wouldn’t know a whisk from a Weimaraner, Cooking Basics For Dummies, 4th Edition, can help you.

Unlike most cookbooks, this one is more than a compilation of tasty recipes. We also focus on cooking techniques like broiling, steaming, braising, and roasting, as well as ingredients like different kinds of grains, cuts of meat, and types of pasta. You learn the best way to mince garlic, peel a tomato, and truss a chicken (if you want to!). After you master these techniques, you’re no longer a slave to recipes. You can cook with imagination and creativity — and that’s the sign of a skilled cook.

Furthermore, this book is structured around the way you live. For example, it includes information about cooking economically, making a delicious meal when you don’t even have time to get to the market, and throwing a party or celebrating a holiday when you’ve got all the time in the world.

Most of all, you actually have fun as you explore the endless pleasures of cooking. And that, after all, is what this book is all about.

About This Book

We start at the very beginning: your kitchen and your equipment. What basic tools do you need? How do you use these things? We help you stock your pantry, refrigerator, and freezer with basic staples so you know what to have on hand. Then we move on to cooking techniques to get you up and running as soon as possible. Doing simple things well offers great personal satisfaction, as you will see.

Depending on your needs and cooking skills, you can start at the beginning of the book and work your way through, go straight to the chapters that interest you most (the table of contents and index point you in the right direction), or read the book backwards, if that’s your thing.

Conventions Used in This Book

Here are some non-recipe conventions you should keep in mind to get the most out of this book:

Italic is used for emphasis and to highlight new words or terms that are defined.

Boldfaced text is used to indicate the action part of numbered steps.

Monofont is used for Web addresses.

Before charging ahead to make any of the recipes in this book, you should know a few things about the ingredients and instructions:

Milk is always whole. You can substitute lowfat or skim milk, or even soy or rice milk, but these products give soups and sauces a thinner, less creamy consistency and may influence the texture in other dishes (although not necessarily in an undesirable way).

Butter is unsalted so you can control the amount of salt in a dish. We don’t recommend substituting margarine, which has just as many calories and just as much fat as butter, unless you are avoiding dairy products. Margarine’s flavor is generally inferior to butter.

Unless otherwise noted, all eggs are large.

All dry ingredient measurements are level. Brown sugar is measured firmly packed.

All measured salt is common table salt, and pepper is freshly ground. We don’t mind if you use sea salt or kosher salt when a recipe calls for salt “to taste.”

All oven temperatures are Fahrenheit.

And keep the following general tips in mind:

Read through each recipe at least once — including any tips at the end — to make sure that you have all the necessary ingredients and tools, understand all the steps, and have enough preparation time. You can also consider whether you want to try any variations.

Be sure to use the proper size pan when a measurement is given.

Preheat ovens and broilers at least 10 minutes before cooking begins and preheat grills for at least 15 minutes. Place all food on the middle rack of the oven unless the recipe says otherwise.

T If you’re looking for vegetarian recipes, you can find them in the Recipes in This Chapter list, located at the beginning of every chapter. Vegetarian recipes are marked by the tomato bullet shown here.

What You’re Not to Read

We’ve written this book so that you can 1) find information easily and 2) easily understand what you find. And although we’d like to believe that you want to pore over every last word between the two yellow-and-black covers, we actually make it easy for you to identify “skippable” material. This information is the stuff that, although interesting and related to the topic at hand, isn’t essential for you to know. In other words, it won’t be on the test!

Text in sidebars: The sidebars are the shaded boxes that appear here and there. They offer personal observations and fascinating facts, but they aren’t necessary reading.

The stuff on the copyright page: No kidding. You’ll find nothing here of interest unless you’re inexplicably enamored by legal language and Library of Congress numbers.

Our extraordinary biographies: You don’t need to know who we are to know that this is the best cookbook out there. After all, all For Dummies authors are considered experts in their fields. Still, aren’t you curious?

Foolish Assumptions

We wrote this cookbook with some thoughts about you in mind. Here’s what we assume about you, our reader:

You love the idea of cooking. You’re a crackerjack at boiling water. But you just aren’t quite sure how to actually organize a meal, make lots of things at once, or combine foods or flavors in ways that make your family members sigh with satisfaction after they put down their forks.

You’ve cooked before. Sometimes it was pretty darn good. Sometimes you were glad you didn’t have company. Sometimes the fire department had to be called. But really, sometimes it was pretty darn good! You’re almost positive you have potential.

You sometimes daydream about going to cooking school or impressing people with the way you chop garlic with your very expensive chef’s knife. But you don’t yet own a very expensive chef’s knife.

You have basic kitchen equipment on hand, including pots and pans and measuring cups, but you aren’t sure whether you have all the right things you need for efficient cooking, and you probably don’t know what all those different pots and pans are called.

You bought this cookbook for yourself so you can finally gain the skills you need to earn the title of “really great cook.” Or somebody gave you this cookbook as a gift, and you assume that it was a hint somehow related to that interesting casserole-type thing you attempted last week.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is organized around cooking techniques and real-life situations. Major sections are called parts. Within each part are chapters that address specific subjects. Following is a rundown of each part and what you can read about there.

Part I: Go On In — It’s Only the Kitchen

What is this strange room? It’s the most popular room in the house, where friends hang out as they help themselves to your food and drinks, where parties inevitably gravitate, and where couples have their best arguments. This part is designed to help you get over your apprehension about your kitchen and what goes on in there. It touches on kitchen design and organization, helping you to arrange your appliances, kitchen space, counters, and cabinets for maximum efficiency. It also covers in detail necessary equipment like pots, pans, knives, and all kinds of gadgets. You find out which basic supplies you need to stock up on. Plus, we get you cooking right away in this part, with a simple recipe guaranteed to whet your appetite to cook more.

Part II: Know Your Techniques

Part II is where the fun really begins. We start out with a whole chapter devoted to knife skills because they’re so crucial to cooking success. Then we introduce essential cooking techniques: boiling, poaching, steaming, sautéing, braising, stewing, roasting, grilling, broiling, and baking. For each technique, we provide a number of recipes that show you how to put your newfound knowledge to work with confidence and skill.

Part III: Expand Your Repertoire

Part III focuses on meals and types of food, from breakfast, soup, salad, pasta, and grains on through to fancy sauces and luscious sweets. Here, you can read about how to make the perfect omelet, how to mix a balanced vinaigrette, and how to use seasonal fruits to create delectable desserts. Also included are illustrations and charts — like the one identifying different types of pastas (so that you know cannelloni from linguine) — and, of course, dozens of delicious recipes.

Part IV: Now You’re Cooking! Real Menus for Real Life

Part IV injects another dose of reality into the cooking experience. Most glossy cookbooks assume that you have all the time in the world to prepare a dish. Some books also assume that price is no object — “now take that loin of veal and sprinkle it with black truffles” — and that everybody lives next door to a gourmet market. In the real world, you have 45 minutes, if you’re lucky, to prepare dinner while a 2-year-old is clinging to your leg and the cat is coughing up hairballs. And the local supermarket may be closing in 5 minutes. Now that’s real-life cooking—making one-pot meals, economy meals, meals out of leftovers, and even those meals when you suddenly (without warning) have to impress someone. And, because life is also about holidays and fun, you get specific instructions on throwing a summer party and cooking for the winter holidays — because somebody’s got to do it.

Part V: The Part of Tens

Just when you thought that we had covered everything, we give you more! These quick chapters cover kitchen disasters and what to do about them, tips on how to think like a chef, and tips for cooking (and eating) for good health. Before you know it, you’ve got this cooking thing down.

We round out the book with two helpful appendixes. This straightforward reference section gives you a glossary of more than 100 cooking terms, as well as common equivalents and substitutions for those emergency situations when you discover that you don’t have the ingredient you need.

Icons Used in This Book

Icons are those nifty little pictures in the margin of this book. They each grab your attention for a different reason, and we explain those reasons here.

When there’s an easier way to do something, a step you can take to save money, or a shortcut you can take to get yourself to the dinner table faster, we let you know by marking the tip with this icon.

The kitchen can be a dangerous place. This icon, like a flashing yellow light, steers you clear of potentially dangerous mishaps.

We hope that you remember every valuable piece of information in this book, but if your brain can hold only so much, make sure that you hang on to the tidbits marked by this icon.

When we describe cooking techniques, we often refer to recipes later in the chapter that put them to the test. This chef’s hat lets you know that a related recipe awaits!

Where to Go from Here

You can start enjoying Cooking Basics For Dummies, 4th Edition, with any chapter you like. Even if you know your way around a kitchen pretty well, we recommend that you start by reading Chapter 2, just to be sure you really do have all the equipment to cook the recipes in this book, and Chapter 3, which talks about all the basic ingredients every well-stocked kitchen pantry, freezer, and refrigerator should contain.

If you’re in the process of buying a house, remodeling a kitchen, or just dreaming about your perfect kitchen, check out Chapter 1, where you can read all about kitchen design. Wary about safety? Check out the end of Chapter 1, or skip on over to Chapter 22 for a list of ten common kitchen disasters and how to avoid them. Or, maybe you just want to start cooking. In that case, check out any of the other chapters in this book. Some are arranged around techniques; others are arranged around menus for parties, for economy, or for times when you need to prepare a meal on short notice. But all these chapters are chock-full of delicious recipes with simple instructions.

One place to check out that isn’t in this book is www.dummies.com/go/cooking. The site features lots of cooking-related videos, many of them that are directly connected with what we discuss in this book. So if you’re reading our instructions for how to carve poultry or how to mince garlic and can’t quite figure out what we’re trying to say, be sure to check out the Web site for videos that bring the steps to life.

We know you’ll enjoy cooking with us. Cooking doesn’t have to be complicated, as long as you know the basics. So come on in to the kitchen, grab a pot (we tell you which one), and get cooking. We’re getting hungry just thinking about it!