Important Cooking Skillsets

This blog post is about some important skillsets for cooking food quickly and well.

1) safe chopping technique: chopping is done best with a large knife, and with your fingers and thumbs tucked in, so that the blade makes contact with your knuckles rather than your fingers. As you get faster with chopping, this technique keeps you from removing your fingers accidentally.

2) always moving: don't wait for food to finish cooking. As one thing is going, start working on something else. If there's nothing to work on, clean.

3) watching heat levels and keeping track of timing: timing and heat levels are important when cooking. Not enough cook time and something ends up raw, too much and it's overcooked or burnt. It's better to cook something on low heat for longer until you've got eyes on it and attention to cook it properly than to use high heat and burn everything.

4) using a thermometer: thermometers help you control the temperature of cooking oil when you deep fry anything and to check the doneness of meat when you cook it. It's a very handy tool that takes a lot of guesswork out of cooking.

5) understanding spoilage and best before dates: best before dates are recommendations. Food quality goes down (allegedly) after a best before date is passed, but it doesn't mean food has spoiled. Spoilage has certain signs in different foods. Spoiled meat will not have a pungent smell, but also feel overly soft in texture, and have odd discoloration. Use all three signs to determine spoilage. You should never cook spoiled food for clients. However, if you cook for yourself and you have to eat it (I mean you usually don't HAVE TO, but you're just too lazy to throw out all your hard work and get takeout), try to process it through sufficient heat to kill off bacteria, and then pray that bacteria that cannot be killed through heat treatment haven't survived to do their damage. Not all bacteria can be killed through heat, so heat treatment isn't a surefire way to prevent sickness that comes eating spoiled food.