Home cooking is not as hard as you think, especially for home cooking beginners and attempters.
- Do you know what is the right inner temperature to grill a tasted steak?
- Do you know how long to cook an egg for its best taste and nutrition?
Here are three critical factors that help you cook successfully and easily at home.
- Recipes;
- Cooking temperature;
- Cooking time;
The First Critical Factor: RECIPES
Recipes are like the guidelines or SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for home cook, helping home cook understand the ingredients, the cooking steps and the notices much easier. Most of recipes are easy to get and follow.
It is very common for most of us, especially those cooking beginners, to mess up cooking or even ruin the cooking because of incorrect cooking steps.
So, it is wise to put the recipe at hand while you cooking;
Where to get the recipe you need or prefer? Just Google it.
The Second Critical Factor: COOKING TEMPERATURE
The COOKING TEMPERATURE is the factor that getting your food cooked and it is one of the two direct factors to decide if your food is under cooked or over cooked.
If the cooking temperature is not high enough, the food will be under cooked; while on the contrary, the food will be over cooked; If the food is under cooked or over cooked, we are wasting the food, the energy and harming our cooking confidence.
So, please monitor and control the cooking temperature during the whole cooking process.
How to monitor and control the cooking temperature?
Yeah, the very traditional way is to touch the cooking food with fingers and to keep touch the food with fingers during the cooking process for temperature monitoring, or we can judge the cooking temperature by watching the status of the cooked food or the juice.
But here, we strongly you not to follow the traditional or outdated methods, because your fingers are easy to get burned and it is not unhygienic, AND it is not accurate.
The Third Critical Factor: COOKING TIME
Do you know how long do you need to BBQ the steak when you put it on the fire to make sure that you can get your favorite taste? Or let’s put it with another easy way, do you know how long will you cook an egg?
COOKING TIME is another one of the two direct factors to decide if your food is under cooked or over cooked.
Even though, we can follow the recipe right to its every step and control the temperature to the precise level, but if we fail to control the cooking time, we still fail our cooking, why?
If the cooking time is shorter than the needed, the food is under cooked and the taste is not enough; while if the cooking time is longer than the needed, the food is over cooking and the taste is ruined.
How can we monitor and control the cooking time?
There are three ways:
- The traditional one is to sense the cooking time by instinct or experience, but it is the most inaccurate one, which will cause under cooking or over cooking very easily. If we would like to take this method to control the cooking time accurately, we need to a very sophisticated chef, however, it is not everyone who can be a home chef. So, we do not recommend it.
- Place a clock in the chicken and count the cooking time based on staring at the clicking. It is feasible if the cooking time is short such as seconds or minutes, but if it is longer, it is hard to count the cooking time accurately and the clock does not have an alarm to remind you when the cooking time is finished. So, we do not recommend this method, either.
- The easiest way is to take some kitchen timer to monitor and control the cooking time such as JIMUTO kitchen timers, they are easy to use, well-designed and nice alarming function.
When we review our home cooking, we can take these three critical factors for consideration:
- Recipes;
- Cooking temperature;
- Cooking time;
Products recommended from JIMUTO:
JIMUTO instant read thermometer;
