African soup; Photo Credit: @chef_amakaa Twitter
If you are great cook in the house, say hi. I am too, at least after experimenting with many new recipes. I even found a way to make roasted water and fried salad.
You already guessed I was over-hyping myself, right? Lol
When it comes to teaching cooking, I may not be the best to do that. But I’ve learnt some great tips to make food taste better. These are basic secrets of cooking that any known expert cook out there is applying in one way or another.
Once again, I’m willing to show you these great tips to make your food taste better, hoping that we can all become great cooks in a few months. But before I show you these great tips, let’s see some reasons why you need to be able to make good food yourself.
Benefits of Making Good Food Yourself
- Better satisfaction
- Adequate nutrients balance
- Better health and wellbeing
- Prevention of obesity and underweight by specially regulating intake of junk food
- Saves cost
- Better food quality
- Enhanced memory
These benefits of being able to make good food yourself are quite self explanatory, aren’t they? But if you need some clarifications, drop it in the comments below.
Before we move on to the very meat of today’s matter, shall we consider one persisting debate about who cooks better? Boys or girls? Of course, we know what to expect already but let us see what some statistics have to show in that regards.
Debate: Who Cooks Better Between The Sexes?
Guys are not generally seen as domestic people, and society does not expect much culinary skills from the boys. So now, the heated question of who cooks more presents itself again.
According to a poll I conducted on Twitter on the 31st of January, 2021, 59% of voters were in support of ladies being better cooks than guys, 23% voted for guys and the other 18% stood neutral to the question.
This statistics look close to what is expected, women are more careful and meticulous after all. I am a guy but I won’t dispute that result. However, I have come across many people, both guys and ladies, who cook as though they do not fully understand what cooking is all about.
Just as a reminder for something I think you already know, cooking is not only a way of making food taste more delicious, it also facilitates the digestive process. So, one quick one to remember here is that you want to cook your food well enough to make it taste better but not too much to destroy the nutrients. Many people do not understand this and many more great tips to make their food tasty better and preserve nutrients. So, let’s head right into it.
Getting Started
Before you start cooking, there are some pre-requisites you must put in place. These are usually not the major problems to most people and they include the following:
- The right instruments/utensils
- The right ingredients
- The right raw food materials
- The right knowledge
I shouldn’t have to tell you that you need to get your cooking materials, utensils, and ingredients ready before you begin cooking.
Maybe you already have the first three pre-requisites above but your food doesn’t go well every time you make an attempt. For the right knowledge, I guess you may have to follow these tips very closely. Here we go with the great tips to make your food taste better.
Tips To Make Your Food Taste Better
Becoming a great cook requires that you understand certain basic concepts of the art of cooking. Once you are able to grasp these concepts, your cooking skills will revolutionize by a lot. Without further ado, let me jump right into those concepts I refer to as great tips of making your food taste better.
Note that, I may not specifically state or describe the procedures of cooking but these tips will help your cooking skills stand out by more than a 100%. Here are the great tips to make your food taste better, like I promised. Looks small but they are the tiny little secrets of understanding cooking and mastering the art.
- Texture/consistency
- Flavour
- Colour
- Taste
- Order
- Measure
- Temperature
Texture/consistency
This refers to the achievement of a perfect or near perfect softness or hardness for your food and the ingredients used in cooking it. It also refer to how well-mixed your food components are.
Making food that has some parts too hard or too soft would affect the overall taste of your food and the digestibility after eating. Here are some great tips to make your food taste better by maintaining good food consistency:
- Adequate time to cook: Knowing the right amount of time to cook food is very important. As a rule, raw food needs pre-cooked or added early in the cooking process. Raw meats and/or fish should be cooked properly. Also, vegetables are easily destroyed on over-cooking. Thus, they must not be overcooked.
To achieve these, setting a timer or using a clock would be useful for beginners. But as you advance in the art, you can then easily estimate the amount of time needed to properly cook food.
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Adequate water: There is no single particular rule for the amount of water needed to properly cook food without making too soft or too hard, because every food have its own water requirements. You should check for water ratio to food for the kind of food you want to cook.
Flavour
One other great tip to make your food taste better is to be able to tweak the Flavour or scents. Taste is a combination of the actual taste of the food and the scent or flavour.
Recall how fruit juices or cocktails taste differently as the flavour differs.
Using spices to modify taste to make food taste differently is often optional to most people, this is because food recipes usually have their own flavours already. However, being able to perfectly tweak spices in food can greatly enhance taste. Good flavour also stimulate appetite.
The issue with spicing and flavour is that most people over-spice good sometimes. This is because they do not carefully measure the required amounts of spice to the volume of food being cooked. Again, knowing how much spice required is not within the scope of this article. It is also dependent on the food being cooked, the racial or ethnic preferences, individual needs and other related factors.
Colour
Colour does not contribute significantly to taste, but it does enhance appetite greatly. There are natural, as well as artificial colouring agents. Picking up one from the food store and using it, also in moderation, is one great secret of making your food taste better.
I just mentioned that colorings do not significantly affect taste but, oh yeah, they do, only not directly. Colors can make the food more appetizing and stimulate salivation. This could be referred to as “whetting your appetite”.
As a rule, natural colours seem to work better at stimulating appetite. The ingredients may have their own natural colour already, but considering using some artificial colourings is not out of place.
Taste
Making your food taste better is the ultimate goal, isn’t it? That’s why I am here. I’m sure that’s why you are here too. However, taste is a combination of many different things. I mentioned already that flavour affect how the food ultimately tastes. But that’s not all, it needs to actually taste better. So how do you achieve this, how do you make your food taste better?
Here are a few things to make your food taste better;
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Add seasonings to taste: Many people just add seasonings to food without ensuring that the desired taste have been attained. For example, they would just add a whole seasoning satchet or cube to any volume of food even if the food may require more or less of those seasonings.It is important to use seasonings in proportions that meet personal or group taste. And not simply using the manufacturer’s fixed amount of satchets. What this means is that, your desired amount of seasoning to make a food taste better can even be half or a quarter or one and a half sachet or cube, depending on what your taste specifies as adequate.
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Season food gradually: Well, maybe the more you are involved in cooking, the better you will be able to predict required amount of seasoning to use, but it is always safer for everyone at different cooking levels to season food little at a time and compare taste each time. For instance, if you need to salt your rice, you would need to gradually add it in batches of say, half table spoonfuls, while you successively reduce this amount rather than just measuring up to 3 spoons at a go. This is to ensure that you get the desired taste as much as possible.
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Spread your seasoning evenly and stir properly: Have you heard of the word “mosaic”. Mosaic is when you have different patterns on the same object, which could be patches of colour. Poorly seasoned food can also have a mosaic pattern if the right amount of seasonings is not evenly distributed, such that, you have a part of the same food tasting bland and another part tasting over-seasoned. To avoid this, let your fingers or whatever you are using to add the seasoning be made to first spread the seasoning around the food and then lightly stirring afterwards.
Order
I am going to talk about order here because it affects how much better your food ultimately tastes. What is order? Order refers to what ingredients you put first, what comes next and what comes last. This affects consistency as mentioned above, it also helps to ensure that nutrients are not lost in the process of cooking. Understanding order as a great tip to make your food taste better requires the following understanding:
- Raw food that requires intensive cooking should come first or even pre-cooked.
- Vegetables like tomatoes, onions and okra in tropical foods should come last ot very close to last.
- Flavour-enhancing ingredients like crayfish and dried fish should also come close to last.
Temperature and Heat
One major issue with cooking for most people is that they do not know how important preserving cooking heat is in making their food taste better. As a rule, food that is not being fried should
Measure
As you keep advancing in the personal or commercial chef business, as the case may be, you would need to begin recording your amounts of ingredients for different quantity of food and measuring these against how it tastes, and also the amount of time, heat used. This is to ensure that you can get consistent and reproducible results, either for personal use or for teaching others.
Measurements could be done using standard measurement materials like calibrated cups, spoons, weighing scales, and so on. But the simple idea is to obtain consistent and reproducible results.
In all, experience always teaches better. It may take you some time to finally catch up with the great cooks out there, but it’s always worth it in the end.
With these, I hope they make your food taste better. Cooked a great meal and you want me to have a taste? Contact me or message me below. I’d come anywhere you are, or probably accept it virtually. After all, I am a hungry lion looking for what to devour.
Peace! And don’t forget to comment below.
