Amateur Cooking "Tips" I Realized During Quarantine (Newsletter No. 27)

1. “Old school” pans without non-stick coatings (like carbon steel or iron) are better than nonstick pans, they can get beaten up more, without getting beaten up.

  • You can cook with them, scraping around with your spatula,  at the highest temperature without worrying about damaging the a pan coating.

  • The old school iron and steel ones are essentially a hunk of solid metal, again, you don’t have to worry about any paint layers chipping off when you’re scrubbing the #$@! out of them.

  • In order to get the non-stick effect on these old school pans, heat the pan until super hot, heat the oil in the pan until super hot, and whatever you cook should effectively sizzle upon contact with a nice caramelization and still be slippity-slide-y in the pan.

2. Get a pan with nice insulation, usually a thick heavy bottom, so that it heats and insulates evenly and avoids those situations where there’s easily scorched food/sauce at the bottom of the pan and the stuff near the top is still cold. 

3.  If you use these hardy metal pans, then you can use hardy metal spatulas and ladles.  Metal spatulas are thinner, stiffer, and stronger than those rubbery/plastic/silicone ones. This means they can more easily maneuver  under stuff like eggs, pancake type things, giant frittatas because of their thin edge, without caving under the weight of said foods, or worrying about these soft foods falling apart mid-flip when one side is cooked and the other is still raw. 

  • Metal cooking tools also don’t melt from heat (at least not at this temperature)

4.  When preparing a dish, try to cook /parcook each element separately in the pan and then scoop them out into a “waiting bowl”  so that each element can spend quality time against the hot pan for some caramelization. Combine all elements in the pan at the end for a final heating.

  • When you’re making soups, maybe you don't need to do this with every element, you can just drop some of the stuff straight in the soup to boil.

5.  Boil pasta noodles in as little water as possible to get that starchy water you can add to sauces, boil Asian noodles in as much water as possible to avoid that starchy slimy coating.

6. Add noodles to sauce/soup at the last possible moment before eating to avoid overcooked noodles

7.  Toss pasta noodles in olive oil after boiled and drained to avoid sticking if not eating right away

8. Add leafy greens to rice and noodle dishes at the last possible moment to avoid over-wilting

9. Salt the water when cooking rice, just like you would salt the water when cooking pasta.

Some of these tips feel more obvious to me as I’m typing them, but trust me, before I might have thought some of these tips were nice, although not totally necessary if I just wanted a perfectly fine home-cooked dish. However, through trial and error, I realized how much they helped in creating a optimally enjoyable meal with little and no additional effort.

Kristy Lin