13 mistakes amateur cooks make that professional chefs don’t
Chef training is about much more than a crash course full of useful tricks. And that difference becomes especially clear in the kitchens of amateur cooks. They aren’t good with knives, put vegetables in pans that are far too small and randomly sprinkle a handful of salt over their food to season it. These are 13 mistakes professional chefs would never make…
Kettle
Richard: ‘Professional chefs use hot water intelligently. They don’t start with cold water, because that takes too much time, but get it from a kettle.’
Anti-slip
Grace: ‘Always secure your cutting board on the countertop so it can’t slide around. Professional chefs always do this by placing a tea towel or a piece of damp kitchen paper underneath it.’
Hard-boiled
Keith: ‘Most home cooks boil their eggs far too hard. An egg with that blue-green colour is inedible.’
Savoury bite
Kenneth: ‘Far too much salt in a dish. You can always add salt, but you can’t take it out again. And also: not cleaning your workspace as you go. That means you spend a very long time tidying everything up once you’re finished cooking.’
Liar
Jeffrey: ‘Are you kidding? Professional cooks make mistakes too. Letting bacon burn should be punishable by corporal punishment. Or forgetting to put the lid on the blender and then splattering the entire kitchen, right up to the ceiling, with tomato sauce. Any chefs who say they never do anything wrong are lying.’
Understanding
Mikka: ‘Doing exactly what the recipe says. It’s not paint-by-numbers. Understand what a recipe means and why you need to add your ingredients in a particular order. That’s better than blindly following the instructions.’
Taste test
Richard: ‘Taste, taste, taste! You should always taste before putting a dish on the table.’
Almost the same
Mark: ‘Some amateur cooks believe that with the right recipes and the correct YouTube video, they can make exactly the same thing as a chef in a restaurant. That’s not true.’
Rock-hard
Sarah: ‘Replacing ingredients with something else. You can do that, but you need to know what you’re doing. Butter is butter, not margarine. You can replace gelatine with something else, but then you need to understand how to recalculate the quantity, otherwise your panna cotta will be as hard as a brick.’
Read-ing
Lisa: ‘Many people don’t weigh their ingredients properly, don’t read a recipe carefully and replace ingredients at random.’
Bluntness
Emily: ‘It’s difficult to point to one major difference, but I think I especially need to mention good knives. Most people at home don’t have good kitchen knives, or their knives are blunt, bent, and home cooks don’t know how to cut properly with them.’
Fits just fine
Jean: ‘Using pans that are too small, or much too large. It’s probably because people only have a few pans in the cupboard, so they have to make do with what they have. But vegetables are usually cooked in a pan that’s far too small. So invest in a good set of pans.’
Wannabe
Pam: ‘The biggest mistake is thinking you’re a professional cook. You’re an amateur. You can make a delicious curry, poach fish well or cook a steak, but that still doesn’t make you a professional chef.’
Also read:
- Come into the oven with us: chef training in seven lessons
- 5 ways your oven can go wrong
- 10 tips from chefs that will make you better in the kitchen
