If you just want to get your hands dirty and start cooking, by all means feel free to make some of the recipes before you’ve read this entire section. But the information here will ultimately save you tons of time and mistakes, and taking a few minutes to read and understand it is an investment that will pay dividends immediately.
1. Chop and prepare your ingredients before you start cooking.
Trying to keep up with a recipe can be a little stressful at first, and one of the easiest ways to stay on top of things is to handle all your prep in advance. (This is known as mise en place, which is French for “everything in place.”)
Once you’re comfortable in the kitchen and faster with chopping, and especially once you’ve made a recipe a couple times and you know what to expect, you can do much of your prep while certain ingredients cook to speed things up. But at first, having everything in place before you dive in will save you immeasurable stress and prevent many burned dishes and ruined meals.
2. Keep a garbage bowl nearby as you prep.
This is one of the simplest things you can do to speed up the preparation process. It requires almost no explanation: instead of many trips across the kitchen to the garbage can, opening and closing the lid each time, you just toss your scraps into a bowl and empty it into the trash or compost heap once the meal is finished. It doesn’t seem like much, but the five or ten trips to the trash can add up as you prep a meal, and it’s much easier to get into the flow of cooking without them.
3. Invest in one or two quality knives, keep them honed and
sharpened, and learn to use them.
You’ve probably heard that you’re more likely to cut yourself with a dull knife than a sharp one. The reason is that you have to apply a lot of pressure to get a dull knife to cut, which leads to slips. If the knives you currently own haven’t been cared for (or are cheapos), you’ll probably want to get some new ones.
I’ve found that a single, large (8- or 9-inch [20 to 23 cm]) chef ’s knife and a small paring knife are all that I need. There are a few occasions where a mid-sized utility knife comes in handy, but it’s certainly not essential for a home cook.
Your new knives will be very sharp at first, and you’ll wonder how you ever got by with anything else. But that sharp edge won’t last forever, so for any knife you’re using regularly, I’d recommend having it sharpened by a professional every few months, and that assumes you keep it honed with a sharpening steel before each use.
You should get a sharpening or knife steel (that long, thin rod that comes with a knife set that almost nobody uses) to keep your knives honed between sharpenings. Although it doesn’t technically “sharpen” the knife by removing metal from the blade, it lines up the molecules to produce a thinner edge. Get in the habit of running your knife along your steel a few times in each direction before every use, as demonstrated at the following website: http://video.about.com/housewares/How-to-Use-a-Knife-Steel.htm.
As for knife skills, there are well-established methods for chopping specific ingredi- ents, but a general chopping principle is to first cut thin strips, then line up those strips and make uniform crosswise cuts from them. Think of carrots and celery, to which most people do the complete opposite by making crosswise cuts first, and then chopping over the whole pile of cross-sections. Instead, you want to cut even strips first, then run down the pile of strips once to get uniform dice in the fewest amount of cuts.
There are a few simple safeguarding techniques, such as hand position, you can use to prevent the major injuries that are possible in the kitchen, but it will be far easier for you to learn these methods visually than it would be to try to deci- pher them from text in a book. There’s a thorough series of video- and photo-aided tutorials on basic knife skills, including knife safety, at the following website: http://culinaryarts.about.com/od/knifeskills/tp/knifeskills.htm.
4. Learn to quickly estimate amounts of ingredients.
Bill Buford, in his book Heat, says it best (you’ll have to excuse the glaring non-veganism of the following excerpt, or replace the dirty words with “tofu”):
Do you really believe the Babbo cookbook when it tells you that a linguine with eels takes four garlic cloves, that a lobster spaghettini takes two, and that the chitarra takes three? No. It’s the same for each: a small pinch.
Meticulous measurement is one of the biggest time-killers in the kitchen, so unless you’re baking, when exact measurements are crucial, stop measuring! Really, just stop. Those round numbers in recipes are just estimates anyway, and you’ll learn a lot about flavors and gain some confidence by making a few mistakes in your own estimates.
For example, instead of measuring out a teaspoon of a spice each time a recipe calls for one, learn just once what a teaspoon of ground spice looks like in your hand or how many cranks of your pepper grinder it takes to grind a teaspoon of black pepper.
For oil, a good rule of thumb is that one drizzle around the pan is equal to about a tablespoon (15 ml), but it’s instructive to actually measure out a tablespoon (15 ml) of oil and see what it looks like in the pan. Once you’ve done that, you can skip the measuring part—a tiny bit more or less oil isn’t going to make a difference.
For solids, like nut butter, coconut oil, or anything semi-solid, 2 tablespoons (28 g) are about the same size as a ping-pong ball. You can find many more handy estimation tricks in my blog post at www.nomeatathlete.com/kitchen-time-savers.