I am mastering Mexican cooking. My first corn tortillas were an "experience." Now, after months of practice, I know how to make the dough, how thick to press the tortillas and how long to cook them. And, importantly, how to recover when something goes wrong. Yes, practice makes perfect-ish.
I bought my first tortilla press not too long ago. Loved the fresh corn tortillas! But later they started sticking to the plastic wrap. Ugh! Did some research and found out that if they stick they have too much moisture. Solved.
Notes,Notes, Notes. Without notes I end up reverting back to the same mistakes(either mine or in the original recipe). I even have a DO NOT list on each recipe to keep me from reattempting failed experiments.
Yes yes yes! Especially if you don’t do the recipes days in a row. It’s amazing how much you forget about what you did right and wrong after just 72 hours.
OH MY GOSH THANK YOU! I did not think this was gonna be the topic of an entire video. This info is massively helpful and I am so looking forward to applying it!
When Covid 19 was novel and everyone was rushing to buy toilet paper and hand sanitizer I got into baking bread. I knew heading straight to, say, a sour dough loaf would be too much. So I looked up easy breads to make and I initially made focaccia. I figured with my Italian heritage I could follow a recipe, allowing my years of trained Italian taste buds to guide me; I'd make loafs that were a little better each time, from one that turned out into a cracker (somehow), to another that had crispy edges but a stretchy delicious crumb towards the center. I got better. Then I stopped baking as priorities shifted. I was also going through some things. Fast forward to now and I want to bake some bread again! This time I'm going to buy a loaf pan and make a standard loaf of bread using your tips: once I understand the basic techniques for baking, I'll try some other forms of bread like Brioche, the back to Focaccia, and maybe some day I'll make some sour dough. Thanks for the video again!
this is really good advice of the type that’s almost never given about cooking (except maybe in salt fat acid heat). i think it would be amazing if you could do a video (or series) where you document exactly what the process of learning a new component is like-so much cooking content online for some reason seems to focus on providing an objective/scientific pitch that if you set your stove to 350 your chicken will turn out correct. very little in terms of describing *what* proper caramelization looks like or what it sounds like when you move from softening to sautéing vegetables
I feel there are different skills involved in cooking and fits well into Helen's suggestion of practicing components: 1. food prep, which with practice will translate to improved cooking time. I used to spend lots of time chopping until I got better with using knives (and invested in good knives) 2. understanding your appliances like stovetops, ovens and grills to better control heat 3. experimenting with parts of a recipe so you find what you (and your family) enjoys the most 4. having good help and knowing their strengths and weaknesses in a kitchen
Helen, your straight shooting always puts a smile on my face, and I appreciate your scientific approach/direction to cooking. I love your no BS approach to teaching! And yes, one day if I'm in the Boston area, then I too hope to be in one of your classes.
This is one of the most brilliant and useful cooking videos I've ever seen - and I watch tons. Thank you so much, I shall send it out to the world and recommend to everyone! ❤
10:35 Indeed. Actually, I was told by also a Russian-immigrant student at college that “practice doesn’t make ‘perfect’ - practice only makes ‘permanent’ -; practice of the right thing is important.”
Oh SO much of what you say here resonates with me. Working backwards, I have a saying, practice makes perfect only if you practice perfectly. Next, notes. If you don't record your variables, how can you tweak them? And.... I've forgotten what was last. Aka things you said in the beginning of this video...😳 See, notes are important. LoL OH I remember. Making a recipe more than once! Absolutely. I've decided to delve into Italian cooking and I tried a quick and easy tomato sauce that I was told would be fast, cheap and good. The first time it was okay, but I did it again and it was much better and I understood more.
I keep my recipes on computer. When I make the recipe I keep a log of what is great, and what needs improving. The next time I make the dish, I incorporate the changes. Repeat until satisfied with results. That way over a period of time I get exactly what I want, no need to make the same dish every day for 1 or 2 weeks.
Your channel is a great starting point for learning techniques and varying them. I am an experienced home cook - a owned my own cafe for 10 years- and love your channel. Any interests we have can always be improved upon by seeking knowledge. The one thing I think you may have missed here is meal planning - for the home cook this can be as key part of variety and technique. At this point in my life I'm cooking for 2 but I still cook some things that are more than enough for one meal. If I cook a roast pork you can't make it just the size for 2 or it will be dried out by the time it roasts - so I plan on the leftovers being different - like pork fried rice, or pork in a creamy mushroom sauce with broccoli as a second night dish. Maybe a video about "tastes like new" leftovers is in your future? I love you channel. Thank you for all the inspiration. '
Thank you for an informative video. I've been a home cook for quite some time. I found a few additional things over the years. I pay attention to how people eat, their full experience from the moment they taste something to their reaction after they finish it, what they do on their plate. It helps to finetune dishes the next time I make them. Also I ask questions, "what was your favorite dish, why ?", "if you would have this dish again, how would you change it?". It puts people as ease to be honest and open about their feedback.
OOOH, my tai kwon do instructor (who was an Olympian coach and referee) taught us that "practice does NOT make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. He was also a musician - in the Army Band. He knows about sloppy practice being useless!
One reason I also like to watch “America’s Test Kitchen” on you-tube for recipes, too. They test and test and test...... to find the best and easiest way to get a recipe or “component” to be the best it can be. Between you and them, I have a decent arsenal..... and I still practice “all of these”.... maybe not weekly.... but it does take a while to perfect even something that someone else has perfected. BTW, “Preppy Kitchen” has GREAT dessert recipes..... I’ve tried them. VERY good and easy to follow. Thanks, Helen! I look forward to your videos! Always find at least one pearl of cooking wisdom! :)
@@laner989 That is smug, precious nonsense. I know some pretty good chefs whose food is anything but bland who say exactly what Lisa does. ATK does as much work as necessary to come up with recipes that are reliably excellent. My wife, who grew up in East Africa, says their East African recipes are as good or better than what you would get in most restaurants over there. And that food is not bland by any stretch of the imagination
Thanks Helen. I approach my pizza and bread making in a similar fashion. Once a week I make a pizza dough. That and the following day we eat pizza. There are variations, experiments, ups and downs but definite improvements. Similarly for the bread, but I bake that only about once a week as I wouldn't know what to do with it otherwise and it's also a bit more involved. For the bread I keep a diary, for the pizza it doesn't feel necessary so far. I've been doing this for a few months now and it's fun.
My music teacher used to say “practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent.” Definitely one of the things that’s stuck with me all these years later
I practice by feeding my neighbors, the first time I try a recipe it is for the family, if it is good enough but not quite right I invite the neighbors over for a tasting where I make multiple version of the recipe, maybe not multiple version but rather various tweaks to the recipe, I have my neighbors provide feed back to what they like or don't like. They bring the wine, I buy and cook the food and it is fun for all and you get to learn a lot about your neighbors. Lets just say some are more honest about your cooking then others, so be sure to have thick skin especially if you are asking for their opinion.
Such thoughtful advice! In line with this, I keep a pad of jumbo post-its stuck to the fridge, and I stick each recipe I'm working on on the cabinets above the counter -- makes it really easy to make adjustments and notes as I cook, so I don't forget stuff. Once I'm happy with a recipe, I just "graduate" it to a clean post-it and stick it to one of the kitchen walls. A little more old-fashioned than a Google doc, but works for me :D
This is a wonderful video! my issue is what to put with what. I've been cooking long enough that most of what I make has been refined and perfected to our taste oh, but I'm not very good at coming up with sides. I have one or two meals that I make with three or four sides that everybody likes, but a lot of the things I make are like princess beasts 2 which I've been making for years. But all you get with it is maybe a green salad and a roll. I've learned over the years that a few science is actually way more satisfying than just one or two. Much more filling. And desserts! Neil actually seem to go further if you get something sweet the end. They're putting all that together? I suck.
In every art or craft I've learned there comes a point where the Master says "You've made a pretty thing. You have to be able to make the pretty thing ten times in a row exactly the same."
Helen, I'd love to hear your take on using the tangzhong method for bread doughs, especially as we head into the holiday season. I may not be able to see my friends and family this year but I'd still like to bake for them and I've heard that this method ensures fresh breads & rolls for days.
Helen, thank you for always posting quality, well thought content. I can't wait for your Falafel recipe some time in the future. I just made my first falafel a week ago too, in fact it was the first time I ever deep fried anything! It was so much fun. I suggest watching a great recipe by The Mediterranean Dish on youtube.
4 hours straight in a professional kitchen? Ha! I used to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week as a Sous Chef. Burned me out totally. The grueling pace and intensity of professional kitchens are one of the few things not exaggerated by media.
Sorry. I didn't mean to mis-represent professional kitchens. Yes. 12 hour days are normal, but the actually dinner rush where you have to produce plate after plate of perfect food is about 4-5 hours. That's when the pressure is really on and you can't afford to make mistakes. Doing anything perfectly for 4-5 hours is very hard ;)
It's been a while since I watched a video I liked as much as this one. Thanks. I've been watching food RU-vid videos for years with the informal goal of getting to be decent at cooking. But somehow it never occurred to me that I'd need to take notes and practice the same recipe consecutively. Question: do you end up throwing food out a lot when you take this approach? Example: the other night I tried making quinoa and it came out too watery. I decided to toss it and to make a note that I filled the water up in my rice cooker to the 2.75 cup line and that it came out too watery, so today I filled it up to the 2.25 cup line.
I am engineer. For couple of years I tried to cook like my mother -- throw stuff together and something will come out of it. But that never worked. Then I decided to cook like an engineer. As an engineer, ability to repeat something is key to learning, diagnosing problems and designing new things. If I can repeat a dish exactly like before, I can also change something, I can observe how changes influence the outcome, I can learn from it, and in the end if I can understand how ingredients and processes create the dish -- I can design new dishes or improvise with a good chance that something edible will come out of it. Over the years I met a lot of people that criticized my measuring of everything that goes into the food. Now nobody remembers that and everybody focuses on amazing food I put on the table. Go figure. If you want to learn cooking quickly and well, focus on your ability to repeat recipes. Choose a small number of recipes that you can make over and over again that your family will not get fed up with. Perfect those recipes until you know everything about them -- you will learn a lot by observing how small changes influence the outcome. It is better to perfect a simple recipe than be mediocre and unreliable at a complex one. One of my staples is simple spaghetti with tomato sauce. Over the years I have developed perfect process and combination of ingredients. I have once dined an owner of multi-hundred million dollar company at my home. I have planned an excruciatingly complex menu and as could have been predicted, it all ended in a disaster just before the visit. So I went to make a simple spaghetti with a tomato sauce. The guy said he is in heaven, everybody tries to impress him and here I just managed to make probably simplest dish you can put on the table and make him feel like home.
I love your pragmatic and methodical approach to cooking and always enjoy watching your videos. Thank you! Speaking of smarter practice, might you have any advice as to how to make cottage/ricotta cheese pancakes (a.k.a. сырники) in the U.S.? I tried to make them several times, tweaking several things (one thing at at a time, mind you)--different kinds of cheese (ricotta, cottage cheese), different types of flour (semola, all purpose), different preparation (remove excess water from cheese or not, using non-stick or stainless steel pans). But somehow I always end up with either unflippable mush that sticks to the skillet like glue, or with what I call "cottage cheese bread" (I have to add so much flour that they start resembling pieces of bread with some traces of cottage cheese flavor). Might you have any tips? Thanks again!
It's been a while since I made sirniki, but here are some tips off the top of my head: neither ricotta nor cottage cheese will work. you'll need farmer's cheese. since the texture depends on the brand, it's a good idea to put it through a fine mesh strainer. I cook them in a teflon pan on very low heat, covered on the first side and uncovered on the second side. Here is a video that's very detailed from a Russian youtuber. I haven't tried her recipe, but the general technique looks solid: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1V1JCx14IuA.html
Another great video. Thank you! I've been keeping a cooking notebook for quite some time. I find that if I make good enough notes, I don't actually have to practice a recipe for two days at a time. My comments will guide me to improving my results. I DO follow a recipe as written (well, mostly ... I do have some experience that may guide me to different spices) the first time so I have a baseline. I also tend to explore multiple recipes for a food, say Moussaka, and take bits and pieces from each to create my own. That said, I got a meatloaf recipe from the newspaper a million years ago and I follow it to the letter every time. You can't improve upon perfection :)
Excellent advice! I knew the moment I started watching that "take notes" would be the most important principal. Unless you have an incredible memory, which I have the opposite of, how can you learn from your previous experience without storing information about what worked and what didn't work? It's critical. Thanks for the great video!
When I approach a recipe that I have never made before the first time I make it I always make it as written; after I prepare it as written I then try preparing it again with any changes I think might improve the original (one cannot say a recipe is bad if they do not first prepare it as written). I probably own more recipe books than anyone should be allowed to have (many never used ☹) but to mix up the menu for the week I will grab one of those books, close my eyes and randomly choose a recipe I have never I have never cooked before that is what is for that day's food. Try it - it can be fun 😊 Great Video, Helen. 👍👍
Solid advice, Helen, especially addressing one variable at a time, and finding a good, well tested recipe as a base. When I try a new food item, recipe, or technique, I first try to cook it to the "standard", like a mole or Bolognese ragu, and after achieving that, THEN I will work on adapting it more for my situation/conditions (time constraints, availability of ingredients and possible substitutions, budget, state of mind, or particular cravings). Thinking like a scientist in the kitchen is SO underrated!
Numbers one, three, four, and five happened with me organically. But number two, practicing two days in a row, is brilliant and never would have occurred to me. Thank you for that insight. With respect to taking notes, I use Evernote. This allows me to tag and file my notes search for text and carry them comfortably with me in my phone on my computer or wherever I go. So that's the only addition I can make for you. But thank you for your second principle.
I am a heavy utilizer of Evernote for my daily cooking and I don't know what I'd do without it. I use the hell out of it for every aspect of grocery shopping, inventory, meal planning, saving made and unmade recipes and adding lots of my own text, and learning. Agreed, the tags are so useful, I use them for ingredients, techniques, websites, equipment, ratings...and the Evernote Clipper (similar to how the Pinterest widget floats in the toolbar) saves most online recipes to my own notes, which can be saved individually and are easy to customize by category, recipes at the top of which I can then write dated notes for future improvements and successful serving accompaniments etc...I've used it for years and years and I'm always amazed I don't see it mentioned more. I have nothing to do with the company but I want everyone to use because a) it's phenomenal and b) I don't ever want it to go away. I just discovered these videos from Helen Rennie and I'm soooo impressed with her knowledge, wisdom and generosity. Thanks so much for all the clear-eyed, detailed info, Helen!.
"You're constantly giving them variety but all of it sucks!" Me to me when I feed people all sorts of crap when I don't want to practice that one thing I know I am bad at.
Obviously, I will give a big middle finger any time someone recommends google. Please do not give google more of your private info than they already take.
Thats good to hear. Apparently I have been on the right track. Although I don't necessarily cook dishes a few times in repetition, I do what I call "de-brief" the recipe. I re-write it as I made it. and add notes as you suggested. Then next time, I have the actual recipe I performed and the notes... like. needed more herbs, or ... was a bit dry... etc.. My Christmas turkey stuffing recipe is about 10 iterations in now with the gradual improvements added and the first question my kids ask when invited is "Are you making Stuffing?" Thanks for all the great advice and great videos. Keep up the good work.
I feel like when I find a recipe I REALLY like - meaning a written recipe card that I am using (because I cook without recipes most of the time) - I make it once in a while, and I make it often enough so that I don't need to use the recipe card at all anymore. And yes, it does get better and better and of course, easier and easier. Once I don't use that recipe card anymore, it turns out well every time! And yes, I always write down my alterations to a recipe on the recipe card. All your information is totally valid and valuable!
As a retired guy (my wife is not retired) I aim to repeat only‘extreme favourites’. It’s easy. 2 minutes of web search for recipes with ingredients you already have will 95% of the time be a hit. Novelty is critical. Not all recipes become favourites. That’s ok. Have fun.
Helen, we watched your video over the weekend and it set treated with me. There’s a restaurant chain that has a delicious beef cabbage soup I tried to emulate with a copycat recipe. Thinking of your techniques, I can’t wait to try it again first carmelizing the cabbage as well as getting great browning on the beef.
So glad you brought up the difference between a chef and a homecook. I am a studying chef and it is a completely different thing from cooking at home. Nice video🙃
There is a phrase in music which I was taught at Uni which I was reminded of here, Practise doesn't make perfect, practise makes permanent. If you practise a bad technique, you will have a bad technique!
Thank you for the tips! I end up having most of my meals out and not cooking that much, so I have to be very strategic about my practice. I love the idea of practicing components and I'm already thinking on how to apply it!
Don't they have stations in restaurants? Not sure what it's called, but I thought, that cooks mostly do something specialised. One do deep-fried dishes, another works with pastry's, another guy makes salads and somebody prepare the components that all those things above are made from. Sure, they might make few plates at a time, but they are some variations of the same. It's not like the same guy does steak and cakes athe same time.
No, the same guy doesn't make steak and cakes, but the same guy would make a red snapper and a chicken breast and a pork chop and a rack of lamb and a steak. That's a menu with 5 protein options, which is not even that much. Try getting all those to perfect doneness at the same time!
I would KILL to have access to the Google Docs you mentioned you keep. I am glad to find out that I've been incorporating these principles without really thinking about them, though. Then again, I tend to cook only for myself, and with an extremely limited set of ingredients, but I have an extremely high tolerance for repeated meals. So cooking the same thing day after day, and taking notes on how my alterations improve it came pretty naturally. Thanks for the wonderful video, Helen!
