Transcription
I'm Jack, and I'm a chef, and I own three restaurants in London. This is how I would learn to cook if I could start again. I'm going to break it down into eight different steps that I think will help make you a better cook.
Step one: First steps. You got to find your passion for food. If you don't love food, you're not going to enjoy cooking; it's as simple as that. Now, you have to experience the dishes that you want to recreate to know what you're looking for. Or equally, if you don't want to follow a recipe and want to create your own things, you need to at least have a passion for different ingredients and coming up with new combinations and new flavors. But you have to enjoy eating, and you have to enjoy the process of discovering new tastes as a fundamental first step before you start cooking.
Step two: Start with the basics. Nobody likes doing it, but you got to learn the fundamentals: how to season, basic knife skills, uh, learning to develop your palette, learning to understand your palette. Get a classic cookbook, learn how to make all the basic sauces, um, learn how to roast uh, simple cuts of meat well, well seasoned efficiently, um, and then learn some basic preparation techniques: how to dice an onion, dice cucumbers, dicing turnips, etc., etc. Using the right equipment for the job, knowing which pan to use for certain things—which frying pans, which saucepan—using the right utensils. The utensils are designed for a reason, um, so don't be an idiot and use the right tool. Like a lot of other young cooks, is always trying to overcomplicate things too soon. Don't start making and stuffing chicken breasts with cheese and whatnot and all these other mushrooms and wrapping it in this and wrapping it in that before you've learned the basics of how to cook. Don't mess around with those basics until you have a fundamental, very strong foundation.
Step three: Find your style. You're going to cook your best when you believe in what you're cooking. So find dishes that excite you, cuisines that excite you, uh, flavor combinations that excite you. It might be a restaurant uh, you've been to that has certain ingredients that you like. Go out, buy those ingredients, buy a cookbook that has does that cuisine, experiment with those flavors that you know you're already excited by, uh, because you're not going to get excited by just cooking a cuisine because your wife says she wants that meal for dinner. It's got to excite you, or you're not going to fully believe in it.
Step four: Cook to entertain. Through honest and constructive criticism is how you're going to learn the best; you're going to learn the fastest. You're going to get honest feedback from your friends and family. We have to take that criticism on board and learn to improve through that way, exactly like we do in a restaurant where we would take feedback from customers or other employees and um, through reviews or mystery shoppers, and then you use that information to get better. Getting out of your comfort zone makes you learn about yourself.
Step five: Step up your game. Now you've mastered some fun, some fundamental basics, you can now layer your basics up with some more complex uh, sauces, garnishes, uh, meat or fish preparation techniques, but using those more advanced techniques to complement your basic foundation. So if you've just, if your basic technique is that you've learned to roast the chicken perfectly, you're then going to compliment that with a maybe a more elaborate source, and then you're just going to build levels of experience, levels of flavor. You can now invest in some useful tools. A sharp knife is an essential piece of equipment. Now that knife does not need to be expensive, but you need to learn how to keep it sharp. That is a skill that lot, lot a lot, not a lot of people have. You can also invest in something like a meat probe or meat thermometer; um, this will give you a little bit more um, consistency and precision with your cooking.
Step six: Understanding your food. A recipe will only take you so far. I say to our chefs all the time, like you can give a thousand people the same recipe, you'll get a thousand different results; um, it relies on instinct and intuition, um, and how you interpret things. You know, I can say cook an onion for 5 minutes, but it's going to depend on what heat you've got it on, what pan you've got it in, what's the surface area of that pan; there's so many variables. So you've got to cook with a little bit of uh, use your brain, use your intuition. Go to your local green grocer, go to fishmonger, butcher, and just have an honest conversation, talk to them: what's in season, what's good price, what's good value today. Often by eating seasonally, you can actually eat a lot more affordably as well. Buying out-of-season um, cabbage in the middle of the summer is going to be very expensive and and have a lot of air miles, whereas eating with the seasons will be more beneficial for your wallet, um, and also better for the environment and better for flavor. If you're used to buying chicken thighs from the supermarket, boneless skinless chicken thighs, uh, try buying a whole chicken, uh, split it into three or four meals, use the thighs one day, the breast another day, use the bones to make a stock or a soup or a ramen. Test yourself, push yourself, uh, go that extra mile.
Step seven: The journey never ends. I've been cooking in a kitchen since I was 14, uh, when I used to work part-time with my dad. I'm still learning new stuff every day from all the young chefs that we employ, from all the different cultures and backgrounds they come from. You've got to take inspiration and you've got to learn from everything that's around you. You can find inspiration in the smallest things, whether it's going to eat out in a restaurant, seeing a beautiful ingredient in a market, or having a conversation with another young chef.
Step eight: Keep cooking. For me, I love cooking because I like to be able to zone now, forget about everything else that's going on, just focus on what I'm cooking in front of me. And it's not necessarily the joy of eating that product afterwards; it's the joy of giving it to someone else and seeing their reaction. For me personally, in the restaurant, I get so, so much satisfaction is into cooking and looking around the restaurant and seeing all these people enjoying the food; um, that's where I get the most enjoyment and the most satisfaction from. Keep practicing and keep trying new things, and it should be a fun experience. Thanks for watching, and if um, if you have any questions on what we've just been speaking about, uh, please drop us a comment, and if you like our content, give us a little thumbs up and subscribe to our channel.