Fun+Mental=Fundamental

The secret that restaurant chefs don't want you to know, is there is no secret. All of cooking boils down to a surprisingly limited amount of fundamental knowledge.

You can learn about a vast array of techniques, ingredients and vocabulary, and you will never learn it all, because even as we speak, there is more invention and innovation going on, all over the world.

The truth is that all cooking, or food preparation boil down (pun) to 4 or 5 techniques;

1) Dry Heat: Cooking in an arid moisture free, or at least limited environment. Bake, Roast, Saute, Grill, Broil, Hot Smoking, Bar-B-Queing etc.

2) Moist Heat: Not dry (kinda duh huh?) Boil, Steam, Poach, Blanch.

3) Combination Heat: Start with dry, end with moist, Braise, Stew, etc

4) Denaturing: changing the raw to the ready to eat with a chemical or physical change. cured, pickled, cold smoking, etc.

5) Raw: just that, raw, just prepped, plated and presented, as is. ie veggies, sashimi, fruit etc.

So all these techniques can effect very different flavors in the same ingredient. Onions are the perfect example

Raw onion: crisp, stringent, very flavorful, great for that date you never want to see again... that was a joke, sorry honey.

Sweated onion: low to med heat, little oil, some salt, just cooked long enough to start breaking down and giving up its juices, making it softer so it and its flavors melt into the final dish better (great way to hide onions from your kids too. Cut em small and sweat em. They will virtually disappear when they are added to almost anything.)

Fried onion: lil fat, lil salt, high heat. They retain some of their crunch (think al dente onion) and the liquid released evaporated leaving the sugar on the edges of the cut onions to brown slightly to add another level of richness to the final dish.

Caramelized onion: low and slow again, very low and slow. still lil salt, lil fat, cook long enough to obliterate the cellular structure and slow enough to reduce the liquid (IE water) leaving the sugars in the pan to... ding, ding, ding! Caramelize! Very rich, very sweet, and a great way to add sweetness without adding any refined sugar. Awesome on grilled meat too. Can make a burger so good you cant decide to eat it, or spoon with it.

So you see there is not much you have to learn to get more out of your own kitchen. Go in there and get your "recess" on. Have some fun with it. Play around. Next time you are cooking, try changing some of your techniques around, and taste, taste, taste. Taste and smell are both closely related to memory, so try everything, all the time, as you cook taste often so you can correlate different levels of flavor directly to different stages in the cooking process. It will make the whole experience that much more enjoyable.

Though a word of caution, please try everything at all stages of cooking, fridge or cupboard to the plate, but use some common sense. raw meat, poultry, fish etc. please make sure you are getting some advice or professional help (lay on the couch and tell me about your mother kinda help, maybe) But it can be done, in the i=right way, with the proper guidance and advice.

Thats why Im here. Ask questions if you are not sure about something. Ask me, or ask that cook friend of yours. I know you have one, we al do, so ask. Ask and taste, taste and ask. You will find that there is a lot of fun in the kitchen, with a light sprinkle of the mental to keep you coming back.