Common Cooking Mistakes and How to Fix Them

1. You are too confident and do not taste the food

Confidence is a good thing, but in cooking, excessive confidence can make the dish “problematic”. For most good chefs, constant tasting is an almost automatic process. But if this step is skipped at times, the price to pay can be quite high.

Whether cooking at home or following a recipe, you still need to remember to taste and adjust the seasoning to your taste, the cooking time in the recipes is usually an estimate and not every ingredient is exactly the same as the others!

2. You don’t read the entire recipe before cooking

Glancing at a recipe and you find it simple, the ingredients are easy to find, so you start cooking right away. Then when you’re almost done, you realize that you’re missing one or a few spices. You can’t go buy more and you shrug it off: it’s probably fine! And the dish doesn’t turn out as you expected, it doesn’t have the delicious taste described in the recipe.

To avoid this cooking mistake, you should develop a habit of professional chefs: read the recipe carefully, visualize the cooking process, and prepare all the ingredients ready as specified before cooking. That way, your cooking process will be smoother and ensure that no ingredients or utensils are missing.

3. Hurrying when cooking braised dishes

Most braised dishes require you to simmer over low heat for a relatively long time so that the ingredients can become tender and moist. However, sometimes due to impatience, you make this basic cooking mistake: turn up the heat and simmer the dish quickly to reduce the amount of liquid.

Looking from the outside, the dish seems fine, but when you eat it, you can immediately feel it because the meat will be dry, tough, and lacking the moist texture of a delicious braised dish. That’s why when you don’t have much time, you should look for quick stir-fries instead of trying to make braised or simmered dishes!

4. You soften butter too much

Most baking recipes require room temperature butter. However, you forget to take the butter out of the fridge in advance, and to soften the butter faster, you wrap it back up and microwave it. This method is quite good, but you don’t always time it right, and overly soft butter will result in cookies spreading too much or pound cakes being too dense.

To avoid this mistake and still have properly softened butter when baking, you should cut the large piece of butter into small square pieces about 2cm in size, then let it sit at room temperature for about 10 minutes before use!

5. You flip/turn the food too much in the pan or pot

“Leave the food alone while cooking” is one of the most difficult lessons when you want to become a good cook. Usually, you may feel anxious while frying or sautéing, so you keep flipping the food or turning the ingredients in the pan.

Remember that stir-fries are easy to break apart or fried dishes are easy to break and the outer crust will not be beautifully golden when you keep flipping or turning the ingredients. Try to be more patient, and you will have a delicious and visually appealing dish!

6. Adding oil to a pan that is not hot enough

Inexperienced or rushed people often make this cooking mistake – they add oil to the pan when the pan is not hot enough, resulting in food sticking to the pan or fish and meat not having the beautiful sear when pan-fried.

“When you think the pan is hot enough, step back and count from 1 to 100 before adding oil” – that’s the advice from Tim Cebula, a well-known culinary expert.

---