Wednesday, February 25, 2009

How To Handle Long Cooking Recipes

By Dianne Logan

If you are a beginner who is just trying out new recipes every day in the kitchen, then you must be getting flummoxed now and then when a recipe simply does not perform the way it should or when you actually forget to carry out certain important steps in spite of going through the recipe twice or more. It is true that cooking recipes can often be complicated, but long cooking recipes are generally detailed and simple, provided you get the hang of handling them. Some tips and tricks that will help you handle all kinds of cooking recipes and turn cooking into a successful and enjoyable affair for you are listed here.

Start With Simple Recipes: You might argue that this is besides the point when all you want to know is handle long recipes, but you need to remember that just like in every other discipline, with cooking too, we need to go one step at a time. Jumping too high up will often have you landing flat on your face. So if you just started cooking tomorrow, then do not start making lasagna that requires three homemade sauces, four cheeses and two types of meat. Start with plain old pasta! As you get the hang of smaller, simpler recipes, you will easily be able to handle long and complicated ones naturally within some time.

Go Through The Recipes A Number Of Times: Just reading through a recipe once, specially a new one is a recipe for disaster! In order to get a recipe right, you will actually need to go through it at least two to three times in order to understand the steps properly. And of course, you will also need to keep going through it time and again while cooking.

Assemble All The Ingredients Before You Start: You might have seen your parents assembling their ingredients after they put the pot on the stove, but even though it looks really easy to do, it can be tough for a newbie. If you do not want to mess up your recipe, go through the list of ingredients and assemble them before you start cooking. If you are using vegetables or meats, make sure that they are chopped in the right way and that the meat is washed and duly prepared to be tossed into the pan before you put the pan on the fire.

Use The Right Proportions: We often see chefs on TV and in real life tossing in ingredients by the fistful only to deliver gourmet delicacies within minutes and the carefully listed proportions in a recipe start feeling redundant. Trust me, they are not. Most beginners have a long way to go before they can start doing this, because experienced cooks do not ignore the proportions given in a recipe, but rather they know how much a fistful is due to years of experience. So whenever you try out a recipe, try and do justice to it by using all the ingredients in the exact amounts provided. Of course you can scale it all if you are cooking for a larger or smaller number of people, but following proportions is mandatory if you want your recipes to turn out well.

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