The truth is, many people do not have problems with recipes. They have problems with confidence. They get all the way through a recipe, they understand everything it says, but by the time they actually need to cook, they’re hesitating. What heat should I put this on? Did I add too much salt? Is this burning or not? All this overthinking makes cooking something that you do not just have to do, but have to worry about.
Here’s what I find really funny: cooking confidence is not about knowing harder recipes. It’s just about being confident in easier stuff. It’s realizing that you do not need to be correct with everything you do.
- Don’t treat cooking as if it’s that important
I think the big mental block here is thinking that you need each and every recipe to be perfect. Because of that, even the most basic things will stress you out. Cooking is actually just a process in which it is perfectly okay to be wrong with some of it. It’s just that the professionals never think that it has to all be perfect; they think that if it goes a little differently, they can just adjust for that.
- Figure out why the thing is in your recipe
That is where confidence comes from: instead of just doing what the recipe says, you actually understand why you are doing it.
That extra heat is not just heat; it is changing the texture and flavor. The stirring is not just stirring; it is changing how it looks and how quickly it’s going to cook. When you understand that, you know that it will be fine even if that stuff does not happen.
- Train your senses rather than your alarm
Most beginners will just focus on the timer, but cooking is not based on time. You have to realize that the ingredients are not always exactly alike every time based on the stove, the heat, or the pan or the amount of it.
Training your senses to recognize what is happening to the ingredients based on look, smell, or texture is what really makes you confident. After a while, you do not need to second guess what is happening in the pan.
- Recognize that errors are a part of the game
This is what makes you confident: realizing that making a mistake does not mean anything bad. If you accidentally made something over cooked or slightly under salted, that is not a problem; that is just feedback.
Each and every time something is a little bit wrong, you get a chance to learn something a little bit about it.
- Getting confidence through repetition
It can sometimes actually make it more difficult to become confident in your cooking by trying out a whole bunch of new dishes. A sense of real stability is really just the ability to be able to repeat the same few dishes until it just becomes natural to them.
When you just repeat the same thing again and again, you end up doing less thinking about it in the process, and more thinking about it in terms of how to get better at it rather than just how to get it to happen.
- It is familiarity that makes you more confident, not skill
A lot of people do not understand that confident cooks are not necessarily more talented, they just understand things a lot better based on how many patterns, times, and results they have experienced. If you can start being able to build up a familiarity of the kitchen with it, it makes you feel more sure about things more quickly.
It’s just something I realized with cooking: confidence with cooking is not something you really magically learn to have, but something you build up slowly over time based on understanding, repetition, and experience. You need to be able to not think of cooking as being something that just happens to you but something that you do on purpose; that you need to be able to be confident that it will turn out well enough because it doesn’t actually matter if you do not get everything perfect right.