Top 5 Cooking Mistakes and How To Avoid Them

Dull knives, crowded pans, over-mixing, there’s lots of important tips I could give you to help improve your kitchen game. From resting meat and cutting against the grain, to properly blanching veggies or salting pasta water, this Top 5 Cooking Mistakes list could be a Top 10, Top 20, or even Top 100.

But honestly, most problems in the kitchen, whether a person is an experienced home cook or a beginner, stem from just 5 things.

We’ve all been there. Excited to try out a new recipe or dish. We’ve purchased ingredients with hopeful hearts, but once the food is done cooking, we are sadly disappointed with the results. For some, the uncertainty they feel when cooking inspires fear. Others avoid it altogether. And even for experienced cooks and chefs, I’ve seen, tasted, and even committed the following crimes.

Don’t be a victim. And don’t be afraid. Here are the Top 5 cooking mistakes people make along with tips to help you avoid them in the first place.

 1. Improper Seasoning

Seasoning is more than just salt and pepper, but lets be honest, nothing makes or breaks a dish like salt. Too little and you’re left with bland, boring food, but too much can be completely inedible. The first tip is that seasoning a dish starts at the very beginning. While you cook you need to be adding salt (and pepper if the recipe or your palate calls for it). Not a lot, but a sprinkle here and there throughout the cooking process allows the seasoning to permeate the dish. If you wait to season until the very end, you’ll have a meal where all you taste is salt.

And don’t think that only savory food needs salt. In small amounts, salt just allows food to open up and taste more like itself. So if you are making dessert, a little salt will actually make your sweet taste sweeter. I add a tiny pinch of salt to just about everything, from chocolate ice cream to raspberry sauce. And don’t forget the desserts where salt is meant to play a main role – salted caramel anyone?

Be mindful too that seasoning is also often about balancing flavors. If a dish is spicy hot, dairy or sugar can tame the burn. That being said, sometimes what a dish is missing when it tastes bland isn’t salt at all, but rather, acid. Acidity makes food pop and there are some dishes that go from bland to salty with nothing in between because what you are really missing is acid. A squirt of citrus juice or a few drops of vinegar can often separate the boring from the delicious. But the biggest reason many people make mistake number 1? It’s because they are already making mistake number 2.

2. Not Tasting As You Go 

How much salt you are adding at each stage needs to be gauged by tasting. If you wait until the very end to taste your dish, you are setting yourself up for disaster. This not only goes for salt and acid, but spices, sugar and more. Maybe the taco recipe you are using was written by someone with a taste for heat. Maybe the marinara sauce needs a touch of honey to balance out the brand of canned tomatoes. Taste, taste, taste. And not just the dish, but the ingredients you are using as well. Two jalapeños may look the same but can have very different levels of heat. One might need you to add the ribs and seeds, the other, maybe not. Making peach cobbler? Taste your peaches. The recipe may say 1/2 cup of sugar, but if your peaches aren’t ripe, you might need to add more. If they are juicy and super sweet, you probably need to add less. Nothing is more important than your own palate, and nothing can substitute for tasting along the way.

3. Failure to Accurately Measure Ingredients

I love the construction expression, “Measure twice, cut once.” This is as true in cooking as it is in woodworking. No-one likes to waste ingredientsWe’ve all done it. Shoved a cup or a spoon into the flour, or sugar, or whatever ingredient, and guesstimated on the amount. An experienced home cook does this all the time and it probably doesn’t make much difference (especially if you are tasting as you go) but when you try a new technique or, more importantly, when you are baking, accuracy counts. Without accurate measurements, soufflés won’t puff, bread won’t rise, and the final texture and flavor may be drastically different than what you intended.

The good news is, once you are familiar with a recipe or a technique, measuring becomes less and less important. In fact, you may find that many recipes require you to change up quantities quite a lot based on your tastes, or the temperature/humidity of your home. But as a baseline, whenever you start a new recipe, take the time to measure your ingredients.

4. Not Reading the Recipe Before You Cook

It’s 6 pm and you want to make this lovely pot roast for dinner. If you didn’t read the recipe and and see it requires three hours in the oven you’re going to be pretty hungry by dinner time. I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me. I needed to brine the chicken overnight? The dinner rolls need 45 minutes to rise before I can bake them? If you don’t read through the recipe completely through before starting, you could miss a crucial step, particularly when it comes to prepping the ingredients that you’ll need.

Before attempting a new recipe, I like to read through it, prep all of my ingredients and have them laid out ready to go in the order I need them. The French have a term for this, mise en place,  which means “setting in place” and implies having all your tools and ingredients prepped and ready to go.  That means chopping all the veggies, measuring out the dry ingredients, getting things like milk or eggs to room temperature, all before I need them and before I’ve turned on the heat and started cooking anything. It isn’t a hard concept, yet people struggle with it, because it feels fussy. Sure, later on, when you are familiar with the dish, you can chop vegetables while meat is searing, but right now, you might not know how long that is going to take and oops, you just now read that you were supposed to reduce the stock in half before adding in the veggies. Simple mistakes like that can throw your timing off,  leading to overcooked food, or worse, forgotten things on burners that end up, well, burned. And while we’re on the subject of burners…

5. Using the Wrong Heat/Temperature

There’s a difference between caramelized onions and sautéed onions. The flavors and textures are quite distinct and made up primarily due to heat and time. This translates everythere in the kitchen. Higher is not often better. Simmering is different that boiling, roasting is different than baking. Using heat that is too high can cause a burned exterior and a raw interior. Too low and by the time you dish is cooked, it’s either tough or dry, or both.

Don’t be afraid to turn that burner up, but remember to watch it, cause you may end up needing to turn it down again, or face the consequences. Included in this temperature discussion is also allowing time for the pan or oven or grill to preheat. Place a steak in a cold pan and you will not get a crusty sear. Start a cake in a cold oven and be ready for undercooked disaster, or extending the cooking time so long that you’ve completely dried it out.

So that’s it, the Top 5 Cooking Mistakes I see in the kitchen. What about you? What mistakes have you made or tips do you have for those intimidated by their own kitchen? Share your wisdom in the comments.

Wishing you nothing but future culinary success!