Even though I am not a professional cook, I would venture to say I know something about the art of cooking. My curious nature is not limited to technical issues, and in the kitchen my curiosity has led me to discover a few points that I feel are essential, if you want to be confident about your cooking skills. If you feel inadequate in a kitchen, but would like to improve, this article is for you.

First thing you must realize is that being a good cook is not about whether the recipients of your cooking likes the outcome or not. If you are not so skilled in a kitchen you probably follow the recipe diligently through all the steps, and sometimes it turns out great and sometimes not. When adhering strictly to a recipe, you loose control over the meal, and the result is almost entirely dependent on factors other than your skills. This is a terrible way to learn, as you will falsely believe the resulting meal was good because you did good, or was bad because you messed something up, when in reality it was not you, it was the quality of the recipe and the ingredients.

Then you might think that I would advocate just experimenting and slap ingredients together in the hope that a nice meal comes out of it, but that is also a bad way to learn the art of cooking. You see, cooking a good meal is about the chemistry of the ingredients interacting, and the ratio of bad mixes to good mixes is extremely large. If you just combine ingredients at random, there is so little chance of success that it is mostly not worth your effort. When both extremes at the scale from strictly following the recipe to just random combination of ingredients are bad, a good bet is to say the middle of the scale is where to be, and that is exactly right.

If you have been watching Jamie Oliver or other famous cooks on TV, you might have noticed how much they talk about how this or that ingredient will add some wonderful flavour to the meal they are cooking. Partly this suggests that they are people with a very high level of sensory acuity, and gets great pleasure from the taste, smell and texture of food – but also you can deduce that they know before they add the ingredient how it will change the chemistry of the meal. This is key, and in order to be a great cook that skill is essential to acquire.

The best way I know to develop this skill, is to follow a recipe by a master cook and then taste the meal you are cooking. Not only tasting it at the end when you decide whether to add salt & pepper, but also tasting it every time you add a new ingredient while cooking. This way you will develop a good feel for changes in the food chemistry that different ingredients cause. You can also decide to experiment a bit when you are done with the recipe, if you feel adventurous and the taste of the meal is not exactly what you wanted, you could try and “save” it by adding ingredients and tasting the difference every time.

Of course you need further skills to become a good cook, like knowing what to look for when a meal is heading in a wrong direction, managing the cooking of several pots and pans simultaneously, and the knowledge of when and where ingredients are of the highest quality. But these skills are largely dependent on experience, and will evolve naturally when you regularly cook with confidence and curiosity. If you follow the guidelines in this article, you will develop the knowledge of how the chemistry changes as ingredients are added, and this in turn will give you confidence that the cooking of a meal is not something magical that happens by following a recipe – and with this confidence you will find it natural to let your curiosity experiment with new combinations and ingredients. With time you will become a great cook.