I take pleasure in precision—making my knife cuts uniform, in peeling asparagus cleanly, taking off just enough of its outer layer to make it tender while keeping its shape. Naturally, I bring those habits with me into my kitchen at home. But must a home cook strive for the precision we do in restaurant kitchens?
No. When we’re cooking at home, we can be and should be more relaxed. Does every piece of diced potato need to be identical? Of course not. Should you throw away half of a carrot in order to achieve six perfect batons? That’s probably not the best use of your time or your carrot.
But I’m not saying that you should throw precision out the window. We still need to be precise about time and temperature. When you’re sautéing a piece of meat, the pan has got to be hot, and you need to cook the meat for the correct amount of time to bring it to the right temperature. And then you need to let it rest. (For more on these subjects, see How Much Oil? and Tempering & Resting.)
You must be precise about time and temperature when cooking vegetables too, whether you’re roasting them in a hot oven or blanching them in boiling salted water. And sometimes cutting vegetables precisely does matter. If your sliced carrots are different sizes, the small pieces will be overcooked before the big pieces are tender. But if you’re making a one-pot meal such as a roast chicken with roasted root vegetables, you don’t need to worry about the tips, which will get overcooked—you may even want that caramelized flavor.
The bottom line is this: in order to be a good cook, you have to be aware of everything around you. It’s an ongoing process, one you should take pleasure in. The more pleasure you take from cooking, the more fun you have in the kitchen, the better your food will be!
One of the great things about cooking is that no single task is particularly difficult. But cooking can seem difficult when you try to do too much at once, when you attempt several unfamiliar techniques at the same time. Instead, try one new technique in combination with ones you’re familiar with. If you’ve never cooked a duck before, for example, don’t also try to make glazed turnips for the first time.
Another way to make cooking more satisfying is to cook the same meal over and over, because practice makes you better and more efficient in your actions. Many home cooks try a new recipe once and then move on to the next, but the fact is, you really only begin to learn the second time you prepare a dish.
Yet another way to improve your kitchen skills is to cook the same kind of fish or cut of meat in different ways. If you like salmon, for example, learn all the various ways you can prepare it, and discover how it’s different when it’s grilled, sautéed, or poached. The same techniques can be used with any thick cut of fish, from halibut to snapper to bass.
Learn to judge by touch when a piece of meat or fish is done. Pay attention to how it feels when it’s rare and when it’s cooked through. No one can tell you how to do this. This is something you can learn only by cooking, by touching and remembering. Pay attention to each cooking experience.
If you’re a novice or if you simply want to become a better cook, I recommend learning the handful of tasks professional cooks do over and over and naturally get better at over time through simple repetition. Following are a few of those important basics as well as a few particulars helpful to the home cook.
learn to use salt properly Seasoning food is one of the first things we train new cooks to do at the restaurants, and it may be the single most important skill a home cook can develop. Learning both when to salt your food and how much of it to use are critical in achieving maximum flavor in virtually any form of cooking.
Think about what you’re salting and what will happen when you salt it. Is it a thick steak or a thin fillet of fish? Is it a sliced raw vegetable or onions in a frying pan? Each responds differently.
Salt used for seasoning (as opposed to a finishing salt) needs time to dissolve. Salt meat well before cooking it; if you don’t salt it until just before cooking it, you’ll leave a lot of salt in your sauté pan. Salt steaks, chops, and other smaller cuts 15 to 20 minutes before cooking them, and larger cuts (chicken and roasts, for instance) 40 to 45 minutes before cooking.
I’d like to mention pepper here because it’s so often grouped with salt. It’s important to recognize that salt and pepper are almost opposites, pepper being used for a completely different reason than salt. We use pepper to introduce a new flavor to a dish. You should be able to taste it. By contrast, salt only enhances flavors that are already there—if you can taste the salt in a dish, it’s too salty.
See also On Salt.
learn to use vinegar as a seasoning device Recipes often tell you to season with salt or salt and pepper, but you almost never see the instruction “season with vinegar.” In fact, vinegar (or citrus, or any acidic liquid, such as verjus) can be an important way to markedly enhance the impact of a dish. It’s always worth considering whether a few drops of vinegar could be added to a soup, sauce, or braising liquid to make the flavors really jump out. You don’t necessarily want to taste the vinegar, only to feel its effects. It’s an important seasoning tool.
learn how to roast a chicken Knowing how to roast a chicken perfectly is one of those great basic skills (Whole Roasted Chicken on a Bed of Root Vegetables) because it gives you an infinite number of dishes. In the spring, you can serve the chicken with peas and morels. In the height of summer, you can serve the meat cold on a salad; in late summer, with Summer Vegetable Gratin. In winter, you can roast the chicken with root vegetables. You can season it in any number of ways, or make a great sauce to go with it, or simply top it with some butter and serve it with some mustard on the side. There’s a huge amount of variety with just this one technique.
learn how to sauté Recognizing the level of heat you need is the critical part of sautéing food. A duck breast, for example, should be cooked over low heat to render the fat in the skin and make it crisp (Pan-Roasted Duck Breasts). A piece of veal or fish that is naturally tender is usually sautéed over high heat to develop flavor on the exterior through browning before the interior is overcooked. (The recipe for Caramelized Sea Scallops is an example of high-heat sautéing.) for more on sautéing see here.
learn how to pan-roast Pan-roasting combines two techniques, sautéing and roasting. It’s one of the most versatile in the restaurant kitchen, and it’s a good technique to use at home. The food is started in a hot sauté pan on the stovetop, then turned and put in a hot oven to finish cooking (Pan-Roasted Chicken with Sweet Sausage and Peppers). The initial sauté helps create a tasty seared exterior, and the ambient heat of the oven cooks the food more uniformly than the heat on the stovetop could. Finishing the food in the oven also frees up the stovetop and allows you to concentrate on other dishes you may be preparing. Pan-roasting requires a frying pan or sauté pan with an ovenproof handle.
learn how to braise Braising is one of my favorite techniques, because of its great transformative ability to develop deep flavor and tenderness in inexpensive, tough cuts of meat. The braising technique is fairly straightforward. The meat is seasoned and browned on the stovetop, then liquid is added and the meat is cooked in the oven at 275° to 300°F for hours, until it is tender. It is then allowed to cool in the liquid and simply reheated to serve (Braised Beef Short Ribs). One of the finer points of braising is to cover the pot with a parchment lid rather than a pot lid, to allow some reduction of the cooking liquid, which fortifies the flavors.
learn how to roast There are two types of roasting: high-heat roasting and low-and-slow roasting. High-heat roasting is used for foods that are naturally tender, chicken or a rack of lamb, for instance (Herb-Crusted Rack of Lamb with Honey Mustard Glaze). Low-and-slow roasting is used for either of two reasons. We rely on it for meat that needs to be cooked for a long time before it becomes tender, such as a pork shoulder or veal shanks (Slow-Roasted Veal Shanks). Slow-roasting these cuts may require some sort of liquid or a covered pot, because collagen, the connective tissue that makes meat tough, needs moisture in order to melt into gelatin. But there are other cuts, especially big ones, that we roast at a very low temperature, not to tenderize them, but rather to ensure that they cook evenly. You can’t cook prime rib in a very hot oven without overcooking the outside or undercooking the inside—or both (Blowtorch Prime Rib Roast).
learn how to poach Poaching is a gentle form of cooking—the temperature never goes above 200°F. It’s usually used for fish, but meats can be poached as well. Poaching allows you to flavor the cooking medium and thereby enhance the flavor of what you’re cooking. To poach salmon, we use a court bouillon, water with aromatics, and often an acidic element such as wine (see Poached Salmon, 93). Other stocks can be used as poaching liquids, and fat is an extraordinary poaching medium (Oil-Poached Sturgeon and Duck Confit).
learn the big-pot blanching technique Most green vegetables and some other vegetables benefit from this simple technique, which results in vividly colored, perfectly seasoned vegetables. Big-pot blanching involves boiling vegetables in what is in effect brine-strength salted water until they are cooked through (Broccolini Salad with Burrata Cheese). I use about 1 cup of Diamond Crystal kosher salt per gallon of water. I call it “big-pot blanching” because you need to have enough water so that it doesn’t lose the boil when you add the vegetables. That’s all there is to it, that and tasting the vegetables to know when they are cooked. If you want to cook the vegetables in advance, you need to stop the cooking as quickly as possible by plunging them into an ice bath until they are thoroughly chilled. Then drain them and store them refrigerated on paper towels, so that they don’t soak in water, until you are ready to serve or reheat them.
learn to make one really good soup There’s enormous value in making a good soup. If you’re going to make chicken soup (Chicken Soup with Dumplings), you need a good chicken stock—and it’s important to feel comfortable making a simple stock too. But you don’t always need a homemade stock to make soup. A good vegetable soup can be made simply with water seasoned with aromatics. A good bean soup can be made with just a thick slice of bacon, tomatoes, carrots, white beans, and water. A vegetable soup, a protein-based soup, and a pureed soup are all an invaluable part of a cook’s repertoire.
learn to cook eggs Eggs may be my favorite food to cook and to eat. They can be prepared in so many different ways, can be served at any meal, and can be used in both sweet and savory dishes. Eggs can be featured in a dish or used as a garnish. They can be an ingredient or a tool. They are delicious, inexpensive, and nutritious. Learning to soft-cook, hard-cook, scramble, and poach eggs; prepare an omelet; or use eggs in a custard or a sauce makes you a better, more versatile cook. (Cooking Eggs and Grilled Asparagus with Prosciutto, Fried Bread, Poached Egg, and Aged Balsamic Vinegar.)
learn to make a pie crust Making a good pie crust gives you the framework for a range of savory and sweet pies and tarts and other pastries from Chicken Potpie to Cherry Pie to quiche. Baking your own pie crust allows you to choose the type of fat you want to use as your shortening. Butter adds a wonderful richness to pie crusts. Lard is also terrific, especially for savory dishes, where it adds a depth of flavor.
For those who want to improve their skills, my advice is, after learning all the above, to challenge yourself. That is the way anyone—an athlete, a doctor, a musician—improves his or her skills. Set increasingly difficult tasks for yourself. Maybe it’s as simple as focusing on slicing an onion thinner, or dicing vegetables more uniformly, or braising short ribs correctly, taking the time to understand the different ways that short ribs look and smell and feel throughout cooking. Or make your own sausage, then a pâté en terrine, then a pâté en croûte. One of the great things about cooking is that there is no end to the learning.
The second thing I always advise is practice. Do things over and over, every time just a little bit better than the last. Repetition improves the quality of your craft and broadens your capabilities as a cook. The first time you make gnocchi, if it comes out right, it’s probably because you got lucky. But if you continue to make it again and again and it comes out right, it’s because you’ve picked up the nuances of the process—how hot the potato is when you mix it with the flour, how moist the potato is, how sticky the dough is when you mix it—all those minute variations that are impossible to articulate precisely and are therefore knowable only through experience, touch, sight, and smell, through repetition and paying attention every step of the way.
We call ingredients “product” in the restaurant kitchen. If you have a better product than I do, you can be a better chef than I am. Perhaps the quickest way you can become a better cook is to buy better ingredients. And there’s never been a time in history when such excellent ingredients have been available to so many people. (Remember, too, that the tools of the kitchen are “product” as well.)
For years, chefs have been asking their suppliers for specific ingredients. Do the same thing. This is how we got shiitake mushrooms and cilantro into our grocery stores and supermarkets in the 1980s, and it’s how we’re going to get humanely raised veal and pork into them in the near future. Develop relationships with the people you buy ingredients from, show them that you care about your ingredients, and ask them for help in finding the best ingredients possible. Ask more questions, work harder to know the source of your food, and understand how it is produced and what the ramifications or results of that production are. If we continue to raise our voices, more products will become available and the products will be better.
Frequent farmers’ markets as often as you can. They can be the best source of good food, and we all want to support small-farm agriculture, an important and growing segment of our food production system. We also recommend shopping on the internet, looking for growers and producers creating or harvesting extraordinary products, no matter where they are.
But also let the market tell you what to buy. Be inspired by what you see. I wrote the recipe for what would become one of my signature dishes, “Oysters and Pearls,” after a purple box of pearl tapioca caught my eye. Be open to inspiration rather than simply picking up ingredients on a list.
Cooking is a craft, and a craft requires tools. If you don’t have good kitchen tools, you have to be a more skilled cook to compensate for that. If all you have is a flimsy aluminum pan, it’s going to be very difficult to sauté a piece of meat well. But the bottom line is that you need only a dozen or so tools for most of the cooking you will do—so buying those few high-quality items should not be prohibitively expensive.
Buy equipment and tools that you find aesthetically pleasing. Your kitchen, your tools, and your equipment can and should express your personality. They should inspire you as much as the food. Here are a few of my essentials.
I like to have a variety of tools on hand for turning food. Perforated spoons, spiders, and skimmers allow you to work the food gently; so do palette knives. Too often, tongs crush or tear food. Lifting food from below, rather than clamping onto it, is the way to go.
knives Knives are the cook’s fundamental tool, but you need only four of them, and if they’re good ones, they’ll last your entire lifetime: a 10-inch chef’s knife, a 12-inch slicing knife, a paring knife, and a serrated knife, used almost exclusively for cutting bread. The style or specific type of knife is up to you—there are many good brands, and the particular sizes and shapes should be chosen according to your own preferences. Whether you choose a Japanese santoku or a traditional chef’s knife is less important than that the quality is excellent and that it feels comfortable in your hand. I use my slicing knife for 50 percent of the cutting I do at the restaurant, though you will likely use a chef’s knife more often.
I can do anything I need to in the kitchen with these four knives and a steel. The steel is important to keep your knives sharp, to hone them. Learn how to use it, and steel your knives frequently. You should also buy and learn to use a sharpening stone to keep your knives sharp or find a quality knife-sharpening service. Sharp knives make your work both easier and better, and they’re safer to use than dull knives.
cutting board The surface you cut on should be forgiving to the knife: wood or a soft synthetic material that won’t hurt your blade. Avoid flimsy cutting boards or, worse, flexible sheets, which are cheap and unstable. Choose a thick surface to work on, and a large one. Small boards are restrictive. If you have the space, buy a large board, at least 12 by 18 inches. It’s helpful to put a damp cloth or damp paper towel underneath your cutting board when you work, to prevent it from slipping.
pots and pans My favorite pan is a big cast-iron skillet. When I returned from Europe in the mid-1980s, this was the first thing I bought, and I learned to do everything in it. I could roast a chicken in it, with vegetables, for a one-pot meal. I could sauté a steak or a piece of fish in it, I could poach in it, and I could braise in it. It was the perfect size for cooking a meal for two people, which back then was the most I’d be cooking for at home. In short, it was a workhorse. If you could have only one pan in your kitchen, this is the one I’d give you.
Generally, the same rules of quality and longevity that apply to knives apply to pots and pans—Dutch ovens, roasting pans, saucepans, frying pans, and so on. The outcome of a dish is directly related to the quality of your cookware, especially where heat transfer is critical: sautéing, boiling, braising, frying, and roasting. If you’re trying to sauté something in a lightweight aluminum pan, you’re not going to get the same result as you would in an All-Clad copper-core sauté pan.
I believe there is a place for nonstick pans in your kitchen, and here quality is especially important. You need good-quality pans with a coating that won’t come off in your food. It’s useful to have a nonstick pan for cooking some fish and eggs.
the big four: countertop appliances There are four appliances I especially recommend for the home kitchen: a Vita-Mix, a standing mixer, a scale, and a food processor.
> A Vita-Mix, an extremely powerful blender, costs several hundred dollars, but in my opinion it’s worth the expense. The fineness with which it can puree soups and sauces is extraordinary. We also use it for other purees and for nut butters. One of its most valuable features is a dial for controlling the mixing speed, from very slow to very fast. And don’t ignore the plunger; it’s an important part of using the machine (you’ll need it for pushing down thicker purees so that they’re evenly mixed).
> A standing mixer, such as a KitchenAid, is a workhorse appliance used for whipping egg whites, mixing doughs and batters, and numerous other fundamental tasks. Attachments for other tasks, such as grinding meat, rolling out pasta dough, and making ice cream, are also available.
> A good scale is not expensive and is by far the best way of measuring. Buy one that has both imperial and metric measures. In our restaurant kitchens, we measure most ingredients by weight, but because so few home cooks use a scale routinely, we give traditional volume measurements in most of these recipes.
> A food processor is good for many tasks, such as pulverizing nuts, making bread crumbs, mixing some doughs, and pureeing meat and fish mixtures. Do not use it for mincing onions, garlic, or herbs, because the result will be uneven, from a rough chop to a near puree all in the same bowl.
Other kitchen tools are optional, depending on your needs. I love the All-Clad slow-cooker, which has a much better temperature control than older slow-cookers. It’s great for beans, because it cooks them gently (Slow-Cooker Beans) without taking up valuable stovetop space.
idiosyncracies All chefs have their own favorite tools, and everyone is different. I want to mention some of the tools I wouldn’t want to do without.
Fine-mesh conical and basket strainers are invaluable for achieving a luxurious texture in soups and sauces or simply for straining liquids. They come in all sizes, from very small ones to the large conical strainer called a chinois.
I use large spoons all the time when I’m cooking, for stirring, basting, tasting, skimming, and saucing. It’s handy to keep a few right by your stove, not just in your silverware drawer.
I need at least one wooden spoon or heatproof spatula with a flat edge for making risotto, deglazing a pan, and stirring thick sauces and soups, among other tasks.
A palette knife, a blunt knife with a rounded tip and a flexible blade, allows you to move or turn food in a pan, whether a steak or a fillet of fish, in a precise and delicate way. (I’m using one to turn the caramelized sea scallops.) Tongs put pressure on food, and you don’t have as much control with them.
A Japanese mandoline, such as those made by Benriner, is invaluable for uniform slicing and julienning. Buy the kind that has just a single screw to adjust thickness rather than a wider one that uses two screws; the latter can slice unevenly.
Whenever I travel somewhere to cook, I bring my own pepper mill. Too many pepper mills produce only a coarse grind. Finely ground black pepper is a seasoning—I don’t want chunks of hot pepper in my food. When you’re buying a pepper mill, test it by grinding some pepper in your hand. It should be powdery, not chunky.
Every kitchen should have plenty of parchment paper. We use it for making lids for stews and braises, as well as for lining baking sheets so foods don’t pick up flavors from the metal itself. All chefs use baking sheets, with their raised sides (also known as half sheet pans) for many more uses than making cookies. We use them to transport ingredients, for storage, to top with a cooling rack to drain ingredients (see lightbulb moment), etc. In addition to the half sheet pan, which fits in most standard ovens, I use quarter sheet pans for recipes where a traditional 9-x-13-x-2-inch baking pan is too deep (see Note). Cheap thin sheets will warp in the heat, so go to a restaurant supply store and buy several commercial-weight pans. They’ll last you a lifetime.
Kitchen twine is essential for tying meats, trussing birds, and tying up a sachet, a cheesecloth bundle of spices or herbs that will be removed from the pot before you serve the dish.
Last, think about your kitchen environment. How does your kitchen feel? I put skylights in the new kitchen at The French Laundry because I know the lighting affects the mood of the brigade. I’m not suggesting that you go out and renovate your kitchen, but let’s acknowledge that the environment we cook in matters. It’s far more pleasing to work in a clean, well-lighted kitchen than in a dark, cluttered one. And don’t forget music—music in the kitchen is an essential ingredient!
Being organized—as we say in our kitchen, working clean—is a skill to develop. We call it mise-en-place, French for, literally, “put in place.” The term can be very specific, referring to the ingredients needed to complete a recipe, measured out and ready to use, or it can be more general: are you organized, do you have everything you need to accomplish the task at hand?
Good organization is all about setting yourself up to succeed. It means getting rid of anything that would interfere with the process of making a recipe or preparing an entire meal. If you are in the middle of a preparation, you don’t want to have to stop to find the proper pot or dig around
in the cupboard for an ingredient: that opens you up to distractions and errors. When I’m getting ready to make a dish, I make sure everything I need for the entire process is there.
When I peel an onion, I get rid of all the onion skin before I begin slicing it. In our kitchens, we keep bowls or pans out for trimmings; everything is contained. When the cooks peel carrots, they do it over parchment paper so that they can then crumple up the paper with all the peelings and discard it (or use the peelings for compost). I recommend you do the same—use a sheet of newspaper. It saves you time and keeps your work space clean. When you finish with a pot, wash it. (Notice that in the instructions for the mashed potatoes here one of the steps is to wash the pot you used for cooking the potatoes so that you can then finish them in the same pot.) Clean as you go to avoid clutter; clutter interferes with the cooking process. Things get in your way when you’re not organized. Clear your path.
Be organized in your mind too. Think ahead, and think one step at a time. Take sixty seconds to write down a list of the tasks you need to accomplish so that you don’t waste time trying to remember what you were going to do next. As you’re finishing one task, think about what your next step will be. When preparing a meal, try to set yourself up from beginning to end so that the food that takes the longest is done when the shorter-cooking items are ready. I visualize each step of the way, almost as if I were taking a picture of it in my mind: how much oil should be in the pan as I sauté, how it ought to look, how my cutting board should look, how much liquid should be in the pot when I’m cooking potatoes, what the simmer looks like—anything, everything. Try to visualize what you expect to see as you move through a recipe. Then, if what you see differs from that expectation, try to understand why and adjust if possible.
Being organized is the first and most important part of cooking.