Basic Skills:
- Boiling Water - I know it seems easy, but it is an important facet of cooking, especially in college. How to: put water in a pot, put on stove. If the stove is on high, it should start boiling within five minutes. Helpful tip! If your water is boiling over (happens a lot with pasta), try adding a little bit of vegetable oil to the water.
- Dicing - This means cutting into small bits. How small is usually up to the specific recipe and your preference. Helpful tip! Chopping anything tends to be a lot quicker if you keep the tip of the knife on the cutting board and bring it down from that angle.
- Sautéing - Cooking in hot oil in a pan. How to: put pan on the stove. Turn on the burner, then add a few tablespoons of oil. Let that heat up for a minute, then put your ingredient in the pan. Stir until cooked thoroughly.
- Broiling - Different than baking. But not much harder. Often used for meats such as chicken, and a convenient way to make garlic bread if you don't have a toaster oven. There should be a button on your oven next to the bake button. I usually broil on High, and you just turn it on and give it a few minutes to heat up, then pop whatever you're cooking into the oven.
- Scalding Milk - You probably won't run into this with the more simple recipes, but it's basically burning milk. Most recipes in which you cook milk want you to avoid doing this by stirring constantly and turning off the heat before it begins to boil. How to: put milk in a pot on the stove. Keeping a careful eye on it and stirring constantly, allow it to just reach boiling point, then turn off.
- Defrosting Meat - Before cooking frozen meat, you should defrost it first. Only defrost as much as you need. There are three main safe ways to do this. How to: best way- plan ahead and put meat into the fridge a day or two before you cook it. Water method- submerge meat (in original packaging) in cold water, changing water every 20 minutes or so (to allow continued defrosting). This can take 1-3 hours, depending on the size of meat. Fastest method- remove meat from packaging and place on a microwave safe plate. Put the meat in the microwave and press defrost button (most microwaves have one) and input the weight of the meat in pounds (found on packaging) if the microwave asks for it. This can take 4-15 minutes. Keep in mind that this will not always defrost evenly, and may cook or warm some outer parts of the meat.
Basic Tools:
- Pots - Pots come in all shapes and sizes. Having a variety of sizes and shapes is very helpful in creating whatever you need to eat in college.
- Pans - Pans also come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are useful for everything from eggs to sauces to frying to just warming a tortilla.
- Wooden Spoons - My main tool for stirring pretty much anything. I know that all of the different shapes have different uses, but I pretty much use them interchangeably.
- Spatula - I mostly use this for fried eggs, because my flipping skills leave much to be desired. Also important if you want to make pancakes!
- Cookie Sheets - Used for cookies, meatloaf, garlic bread, croutons, and anything else that I feel like baking. Mostly cookies though.
- Microwave - Cooks everything! Not the ideal method for many things, but very convenient.
Basic Dry Ingredients:
- Flour - mostly used for baking, but also used in things like fried chicken. I tend to just use basic white flour. It's not the healthiest flour out there, but it's the cheapest and most versatile.
- White Sugar - also called granulated sugar. This is the sugar I use most often in cooking/baking.
- Brown Sugar - while I use this in baking a lot of the time, I mostly just use it to flavor oatmeal.
- Powdered Sugar - I know, this seems like a lot of sugar, but powdered sugar is important if you're making desserts like lemon bars or frosting.
- Salt - I usually just use a salt shaker, but having a bulk package of salt (like Morton Salt) is super convenient if you actually need to measure out an amount of salt
- Pepper - I just keep a grinder or shaker of it around. I prefer having a small grinder, but it's sometimes cheaper to buy a small shaker instead.
- Baking Soda - not only useful in cooking, but also can keep your fridge from smelling gross, and can get rid of some nasty shoe odor.
- Baking Powder - this is different than baking soda. They're similar, and both leaveners, but they have different purposes.
No comments:
Post a Comment