The Hands on Cooking Class, How to Become a Cook

The journey of becoming a good cook usually begins with a hands on cooking class. For me growing up in a family of 8 kids, the journey started early. After so many years of simply being in the way in the kitchen I was finally given a job to keep me in one place. As time went on each of us kids were taught at least one recipe that we could put together for a family meal and soon we had a cooking team that was responsible for one meal each week.

Learning to cook was fascinating; I was always amazed at my mother's ability to walk into the kitchen, look in the refrigerator pull out something for the entree and then an hour or so later have a meal on the table. She never seemed at a loss to figure out what ingredient went well with another. I rarely if ever saw her use a cook book, and when I did she would simply scan the ingredients, head for the cupboard and start putting things together.

The process of becoming a good cook is like that, learning to know your ingredients and quantities so well that you are able to select your main entree and build your meal around it. The best way to learn is through hands on cooking.

I started working in a professional kitchen as a dishwasher, when I was 14. My first cooking tasks were of course peeling potatoes. I graduated to peeling and deveining shrimp and eventually boning trout. As time went on I was given a knife and taught how to use it to cut vegetables for soups. Finally I was given an opportunity to actually make a soup. What a thrill that was!

As I had discovered at home, so I discovered in the restaurant kitchen; cooking is a formula or rather a bunch of them. A good cook or chef does not use recipes, or at least use recipes the way they are usually intended. The recipe is simply a guideline or springboard to get the process of cooking started. By learning a set of formulas and techniques a good cook can substitute different taste combinations and textures to get completely different meals out of that same boring breast of chicken.

Fortunately for me I had some very good trainers who were patient enough to explain the basics to me as I went along. The best advice that I got came from a chef who told me to get very close to anyone I saw who knew more than I did.
There is really no mystery to cooking. Once those you learn the fundamentals.

It starts with learning enough of the fundamentals to be able to know what to do with the ingredients, to change them to suit your tastes. Along the way you will need knife skills, and some kitchen tools. Next you need to know about methods of cooking, like saute, bake, braise, grilling and frying. As you learn the techniques you will begin to acquire a knowledge of the properties of certain ingredients. Learning how to combine things to get different results will lead you into learning about the whole world of herbs and spices.

The knowledge I have described used to be locked up in the heads of a few chef's. They would only share it with a few of their trusted employee's in a hands on cooking class. Today we live in an age of instant communication; we no longer have to wait or spend years looking through cookbooks and experimenting to learn how to do these things. They are available at the click of a mouse. See the video below.