10 Cooking Skills I Wish I Had Known...

[Music] i started my cooking journey a little over a decade ago and like many of you i was just an amateur home cook with no proper training no culinary school i didn't work in any kitchens under head chefs i was just learning on my own through videos through common sense through trial and error a lot of messing up in the kitchen and over the years i gained so many skills and became a much better cook and that's what today is all about i'm gonna be reflecting back to those early days in the kitchen to really see how far i've come and i'm picking one dish where i can break down the 10 most impactful skills that i've learned over the last decade of my cooking career that have made me a much better home cook so for today's meal i've got some beautiful beef short ribs i got about two pounds here and short ribs are a tougher cut of meat so to cook them well you either have to slice them really thin and grill them up like a korean style short rib or you've got to do a low and slow cooking to get them nice and tender and break down all that connective tissue which we'll be getting into later but the first tip is all about seasoning this cut of beef and we're going to be using a dry brine which is something that i didn't know about when i was younger and for some reason i always used to just marinate meat i felt like putting meat in a flavorful liquid just made sense to me like i was gonna get the most flavor that way but it turns out that's actually not the best way to season a cut of meat because a liquid marinade takes an extremely long time to penetrate meat so unless you have days to let that liquid penetrate into the meat it's really not worth it you're better off doing a dry brine so the question is what is a dry brine there's only two steps to dry brining salting and thyme so what we're gonna do is we're gonna heavily salt the outside of our beef short ribs now what's gonna happen is over time through osmosis the salt is going to pull moisture out of the short rib so in about a half hour you're gonna start seeing some liquid on your meat and then once that liquid has been removed the salt on the exterior is going to dissolve into that liquid and then slowly this salty liquid is then going to penetrate back into the meat brining your meat which is wonderful because over time that salt is going to start breaking down some of the tougher muscle proteins in the meat and also you're going to have a nice even salty seasoning throughout the entire piece of meat rather than just on the exterior back when i was living with my brother and we were catering together we had a friend across the hallway who worked at a two michelin star restaurant and he would come over to our apartment and be pretty much horrified by the chaos that was happening in the kitchen it was just a disorganized cooking experience there was no structure to the way we cooked we didn't really prep anything we just kind of went for it which works totally fine but what i realized over the years from my friend who worked at this restaurant and just from watching other people cook that it's actually super helpful to prep out your ingredients and there's actually a french term for it [Music] misonplast basically having all of your ingredients in place ready to go before you cook so whether it be washing them peeling them and of course cutting them up to the size you need this is going to be super valuable when you go to actually prepare the dish because you can focus on the actual cooking process and not have to worry about running back to the cutting board chopping something up peeling something washing when you take a little extra time beforehand to prep the ingredients before you get the flame on and start cooking that final prep is going to pay off big time so for this dish the base aromatics that i'm going to be using are carrots celery and onion i'm also gonna slice up some garlic and finally i've got about five or six smaller ripe tomatoes that i'm going to dice up into small pieces and look at that all prepped and organized feeling so much better about the upcoming cooking process the next skill is brazing which i'm sure a lot of you have heard of maybe some of you have mastered it but for me when i was younger i didn't really understand how brazing worked and it's quite simple and once you master brazing well it is a huge game changer in the kitchen because it opens up the world of stews which every pro home cook should know how to make now we're going to be using the braising technique for these short ribs and it's pretty simple it's a two-part process so we have our short ribs which have been dry brining for around six hours and a lot of that liquid has now been absorbed but there's still some liquid on the exterior so you want to make sure that meat is extremely dry because we are going to fry these short ribs first so once the short ribs are dried off i put a pan on about a medium to medium-high heat and then dumped in enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan now we're on to phase one of braising which is first searing off that meat and getting a nice crust which is very important because one we're going to be activating that mayar reaction which just equals flavor all of that beautiful browning on the exterior of that short rib that is going to equate to extra flavor into our final dish and also by searing off that crust you're going to be developing more texture rather than just having a soft meat that falls apart in your stew now we're gonna have a little extra texture in our stew which is always a bonus in my book so once you've seared them off on every side you can remove the short ribs and we're gonna be moving on to the next skill which is caramelizing and i thought i understood it when i was younger like i would stir-fry some onions and they would get brown and they'd be delicious but there are different levels to the game of caramelizing and what i didn't understand when i was younger was the low and slow process to really get a beautiful texture and some sweet sweet aromatics that are going to end up flavoring the rest of our stew so i'm going to take all of our aromatics which are all loaded up with natural sugars and dump them into all of this fat taking advantage of all of that flavor left over from the short rib of course and i'm gonna turn the pan down to a medium low heat and i'm gonna get some salt in there immediately because the salt is gonna speed up that process of getting the moisture out of our aromatics so we can start the caramelizing process and the next key step is patience we need patience and this is definitely something i didn't understand when i was younger you've got to give it time on this low heat to really develop the flavors so after around five minutes it's going to start looking pretty good around 10 minutes it's going to start looking even better and around 15 to 20 minutes if you give it that extra time and patience those aromatics are looking extra sexy they are nice and brown we've converted those sugars into delicious caramel which is going to equate to extra flavor in our final dish but we're not quite done yet it's time to unlock another skill when i started cooking my spice racks certainly did not look like this it was not nearly as extensive it had things like garlic powder paprika cayenne powder basic powdered spices that maybe recipes called for i saw other people using but over the years one thing that radically changed my cooking was the use of whole spices and whole spices are wonderful because once something is cracked and made into a powder it starts losing freshness over time and also you can control the texture so rather than just having a powdered spice that will just blend in smooth with everything you can actually have some texture by grinding it a little more coarse and that's what we're gonna do for these short ribs to kick it up a notch i'm gonna grind up a few of my favorite spices so i'm gonna take my mortar and pestle you can do this in a spice grinder as well and i'm gonna add a few cumin seeds i have some fresh chilies and then just a few cardamom pods and i'm just gonna give that a rough grind and at this point our aromatics are close to perfection so i'm going to add the sliced garlic with those ground spices and just cook that for about another five minutes i want to take a quick minute to tell you about today's sponsor which is mizen a kitchen tool company that i've been obsessed with over the last few months and actually that blue knife that you've seen in this video and a bunch of past videos that is me zen's all-purpose chef knife which has quickly become my favorite knife in the kitchen but i've fallen in love with this brand for a few reasons number one mizen goes direct to consumer they've cut out the middleman which lowers the price and the price you're paying for the quality is an amazing deal the chef knife not only looks good but it feels good in the hand and it's super sharp i got this thing around three or four months ago and i haven't had to sharpen it since which is great me zen has completely simplified the tool buying process you go to the site you know you can trust the products you skim through them and there's only those essential products that you can choose from and outside of knives they also have incredible stainless steel pans they've got really nice non-stick pans all of those essentials you need to get going in the kitchen mizen has them so if you're interested in purchasing some mizan products check out the link below in the description mizen.co pro home cooks for 20 off your first order now back to the video when i try other people's food and it tastes just a little underwhelming most likely it's because of two things either it's not salty enough or it's not acidic enough so if you feel like you have the salting under control it's plenty salty well then you probably have a lack of acidity in your dish and that's something that i didn't understand when i was younger and you can add acid at the end of the dish just as a seasoning like a fresh squeeze of lemon juice but in this case i'm gonna add two acidic elements that are going to cook slowly over time the first one are those tomatoes tomatoes are super acidic i'm gonna toss those in and cook those down and once those tomatoes have cooked in for about five minutes i'm gonna add my second acidic element which is some red wine which pairs so well with short ribs but of course wine is very acidic so i'm gonna pour in about three quarters of a bottle here and just let that cook for around five minutes you're gonna cook off some of that alcohol and then i'm gonna place my short ribs back in that liquid and then pour over a little water until those short ribs are just about submerged in liquid and now our short ribs are ready for the second part of the braising process which is slow cooking in a liquid so i'm gonna cover my dish to make sure i don't get too much evaporation and i'm gonna throw that in the oven at 275 degrees fahrenheit for a few hours around three to four hours and what's gonna happen is over time that liquid is gonna slowly start to break down the connective tissue in the short ribs and when that connective tissue starts to melt away the muscle won't have that glue that holds it together and it's gonna start to fall apart and get super tender so that's what we're gonna be looking for over the next few hours all right so it's been just about two and a half hours at 275 degrees and you can see look how the bone is slowly pulling away from the actual meat but the meat is still a little bit tough you can see as i kind of poke into that you know not too far apart just yet back in my friends and this is something i messed up a few times when i was younger when i was slow cooking a tougher cut of meat and the recipe told me a certain time and i checked the meat at that exact time and it felt super tough i felt like i messed something up like i overcooked the meat but meat goes through a weird journey where it's going to tighten up a bit it's going to get tense before it starts falling apart and i can tell you right now in this brazing process we're still about half hour to an hour away from getting that meat to just release when that connective tissue just starts to melt away these short ribs are going to be perfect so stay tuned on that when you taste really good food like excellent food you go to a restaurant and you're like i can't cook like this my food just tastes a little less exciting well one of the main reasons for that is you're not focusing on building layers of flavor which is something that i wasn't doing back then i was just focused on one thing the final dish but go cooking really comes down to focusing on these layers of flavor that build off each other one after another to ultimately give you something incredible so layer one was that salt brine on the short ribs plus searing those off getting that crust then layer two was caramelizing those aromatics spending the time to develop the sweetness and then layer three was adding those ground spices which are going to be releasing their flavors and oils over time in the stew then we went in with the acidic ingredients we did the tomatoes and the wine which helped build out the sauce but also help to balance the savory and sweet flavors with the acidic tones and now we're at the end of the dish and a lot of people would stop here once the short ribs tender but i like adding that last layer of flavor which is just a bit of freshness or the final seasoning something that's not necessarily gonna meld in with the whole dish but rather it's just gonna give it a nice little pop so i'm using some fresh parsley and then of course just a little salt that final seasoning if you think it needs a little more saltiness and also if you think it needs a little more acidity at this point little squeeze of lemon juice will be great but i'm feeling fine with the tomatoes and the wine already in the dish my next skill which definitely took me some time to understand is zero waste not wasting any food so in this case i've got all of this extra liquid in my short ribs which is so flavorful and really i don't need that much liquid i'm gonna dump on some sauce but that would just go into a container and maybe you would throw that stuff away at some point do not throw that stuff away that is good flavor so what i decided to do was take a gander around my pantry and then i found some dal but you can use beans or rice or anything you have and to bulk that up a bit i had some cauliflower so i chopped up some cauliflower into small pieces put that in a little pot added in the soaked doll and then ladled in about two cups of that delicious braising liquid followed by a little bit of water and just let that cook for around 15 to 20 minutes and there you go you've got a nice little side dish or something to throw on that flatbread so most of you know i'm a big bread guy i've always liked bread and i'm sure a lot of you like bread but when i reflect back to the early days of my cooking career i was eating a lot of bread but a lot of it was store-bought or pre-made stuff so if i made a pizza i was using a pre-made pizza crust or if i was doing mediterranean food i would buy the pita dough and one thing that has really changed the cooking game for me is just learning how to make basic breads it's such an enhancer of a meal it's going to really impress people and there's nothing better than some fresh homemade bread and most basic breads follow the exact same steps so once you understand those steps it's really easy to expand your bread vocabulary so i'm going to be making a flatbread for this dish which is probably the easiest bread to make because there's very little shaping involved but phase one for bread is of course making the dough which usually starts out with a yeast some type of liquid usually a milk or water you've got your flour your ground wheat and salt and some breads use the addition of fat like butter or oil but i'm not going to be using either of those for this flatbread once your dough is mixed phase two is a bulk rise process this is where your dough ferments it gains volume and generally with baker's yeast you're looking for a doubling in size if it's a sourdough bread it's gonna be a little less volume step number three is shaping your dough into whatever bread you're making in this case i'm doing flat bread so what i'm first going to do is just shape them into balls let those sit for about 10 minutes to just rest and then i will roll them out in two rounds almost like a pizza dough and then the next step is taking that shape dough or roll and letting it rise into the bread or roll it's going to be giving it some more air so it gains some volume it gets a little fluffier in my case since i'm making flatbreads i get to skip this step and i can go directly into the final step which is the baking process or in this case the frying process you can also bake these flatbreads and turn them into pita they'll puff up but i'm just gonna fry them in a little bit of oil on both sides and you'll see they'll bubble up really nicely and after a few minutes when they're nice and brown i'll flip them over and fry them on the other side and boom just like that you have incredible flatbreads that will impress anyone who tries them and also just a wonderful vehicle for basically any food and my final skill if there was one thing i could go back in time and tell that younger college mike who was just getting into the cooking game i would just say to pay more attention because cooking for the most part is very intuitive all of these skills that i've taught you today you can learn them by just cooking and paying attention and messing up and being like oh well how would i fix this or oh that did that let me try something else the next time and eventually you will learn these skills on your own but the closer you do pay attention and you're just aware of what's going on the quicker you're gonna pick up on these skills and build all types of new skills i'm still learning by just paying attention to cooking you don't need to go to a culinary school to be a good cook it's great to learn those techniques that have been taught for years and years that's a good base but a lot of this stuff you really can figure out on your own so i hope you enjoyed this if you want more videos like this just cooking skills beginner cooking skills check out these videos right here thanks again to mizan for sponsoring this video you can check out that link below for your discount and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Pro Home Cooks

Views: 2,095,141

Rating: 4.9305959 out of 5

Keywords: cooking skills, cooking techniques, 10 cooking skills, how to cook, pro cooking skills, chef skills, basic cooking skills, beginners cooking, braising, how to braise, mis en place, dry brining, how to dry brine, how to be a better cook, mike g, pro home cooks, short ribs, slow cooked short ribs, red wine short rib, braised short ribs, flatbreads, perfect flatbreads, new

Id: mVKXJcpGHK8

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020