Cooking: 20 beginner mistakes to avoid

Are your shortbread cookies soft and pasty? Are your meat dishes always dry and disappointing? Never mind! Here are 20 easy mistakes to avoid, so you can succeed in your dishes every time.

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Melt your butter

You may find it more convenient to melt your butter before incorporating it into a cookie or pie crust recipe. If it saves you a few minutes, however, you run the risk of spoil the texture of your recipe. Indeed, the fact of using cold or creamed butter makes it possible to obtain a paste with a texture sandy, which gives your cookies their melty, shortbread look. Conversely, melted butter will result in a soft, dry crust.

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Roll out the dough without refrigerating it

Not only will your dough be too soft and excessively difficult to work with, but you will also lose the sandy texture you are looking for. Using a cold dough, the pieces of butter inside will form steam as it cooks, which will create lots of small air bubbles. It is these bubbles that give the dough its shortbread and flaky texture.

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Discard the pasta cooking water

You may think it’s just rubbish, but think once more. pasta cooking water contains starch, an excellent binder that does not contain fat. You can therefore use it to create healthy and delicious sauces, or to make your own bread.

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Do not be wary of raw meat

It’s a well-known rule, but no one is immune to it. cross contamination. It is enough that a utensil having touched raw meat comes into contact with cooked meat without you realizing it. This can be very dangerous, as the bacteria in the raw meat might then contaminate the cooked meat. The safest way is to use separate dishes and utensils for raw foods and cooked foods.

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Forgot to read the whole recipe

You look at the title of the recipe, start cooking… and realize too late that you had to marinate the meat for several hours or that you needed several ingredients that you don’t have on hand. To avoid such an unfortunate situation, take a few minutes to read the recipe that interests you. You will save time in the end.

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Bake at the wrong temperature

The top of your cake is burnt, but the inside is not cooked? Your meat is dry and sticks to the pan? There is simply an error in the temperature. Be sure to read the recipe or search online before you start cooking any food. The baking step is so easy to miss and so simple to get right.

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Replace one ingredient with another

In the kitchen as in baking, the substitution of ingredients can lead to a total fiasco. Not all cuts of meat, all spices or all flours are created equal. Each ingredient has its own chemistry. You might be lucky and get your recipe right, but you might also mess it up completely.

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forget to taste

This may sound trivial, but it is important to taste to your dish while you cook. This allows you, among other things, to assess whether it is too spicy or not spicy enough, if the texture is good or if the temperature is adequate. If you neglect this step, you might have very unpleasant surprises when serving the meal.

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Using the wrong tools

Do you think you suck in the kitchen? Don’t forget that the secret of a successful recipe also lies in the choice of instruments. If your knives are blunt or if you’re using the wrong kind of cake pan, don’t question your skills; Go do some shopping instead to replace your equipment!

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Indulge in small fantasies

In the kitchen, you can afford to use “just regarding” the right amount of ingredients. In pastry, no way! The quantities of flour, yeast, sugar, eggs and butter have been carefully calculated. To decide to move away from it is to run to disaster. Instead, measure and weigh your ingredients.

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Forgetting to sear food before cooking

To obtain juicy food, it is essential to preheat at high temperature in your wok or skillet to sear them well. Pieces of meat contain a large amount of water. If this water evaporates during cooking, the meat will dry out. However, if the surface is cauterized by grasping it, the water will remain inside and the meat will remain tender.

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Confuse simmering and boiling

Boiling meat to a rolling boil won’t save you time, and it may become dry and tough. It is best to simmer it, because the collagen inside will turn into gelatinthus tenderizing the piece during slow cooking in sauce.

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Too much salt in your marinade

A marinade must be tasty. However, if you add too much salt to it, you may end up with dry, dull meat. Why? Because salt attracts water, so the meat loses all its juices. The best way to get juicy, flavorful meat is to salt it just before cooking.

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Prevent food from cooking

When you constantly toss and turn a meat in the pan, you prevent it from cooking. In the same way, open the oven door constantly cooking night. The best way to obtain medium-rare cooking is to respect the temperature and the times indicated in the recipe. Arm yourself with patience!

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Skip the rest stage

If you cut your meat straight out of the oven, all the juices will escape and it will be less tender. Rest is essential to enable tissues to relax and the juice to redistribute inside the room.

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Cook the fresh herbs

Fresh herbs are delicious and perfect for seasoning a dish. On the other hand, if you add them too early during cooking, they will lose all their flavor. This is why it is better to add them at the end of cooking or quite simply, directly on the plate. If you absolutely want to cook your herbs, opt for dry herbs instead.

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Overmix the dough

When liquid is added to flour, a gluten network forms. It is this elastic network that allows breads and croissants to expand while baking. In the same way, if you work a pie or cookie dough too much, it risks being too hard because of this same network. The watchword: the less you work, the better.

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Wash the chicken

It is well known, the raw chicken can be contaminated with salmonella, a very dangerous bacteria. You may mistakenly believe that washing your chicken before cooking kills these bacteria. In fact, it’s the other way around: when you rinse your chicken in the kitchen sink, you risk spread these bacteria everywhere in your sink and on your counter! The best practice is to wash your hands thoroughly with warm soapy water following handling raw meats.

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eat the marinade

If a meat has marinated for several hours, do not serve its marinade as a side dish. This might be contaminated by the bacteria contained in the meat and make your guests sick. If you want to serve it, boil it for at least a minute or set aside some before adding the meat.

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Leave egg yolk in the whites

You have just cracked six eggs, taking care to separate the whites from the yolks. Unfortunately, a small drop of yellow has crept into your whites. No big deal, you will say to yourself, because it’s only a small drop? Mistake! A simple drop of yolk is enough to spoil your egg whites. Why? Simply because the fat in the yolks prevents emulsion from occurring. So be careful when breaking your eggs!

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