Transcripts
1. Welcome to the Class: Have you ever wondered
why chefs are able to create a
meal out of nothing, or how people who know how
to cook or seemingly able to look in their fridge and
create a meal from scratch. It turns out there
is a simple set of formulas you need to know and you can cook
without recipes. Hi, my name is Matt. I'm a YouTuber and a
self-taught home cook. I've been cooking or more than
20 years and I've learned the exact formula that you need to know to cook
without recipes. I made thousands of
recipes at this point. Some of them have worked
out really, really well, and some of them not so much. Frankly, there's more
recipes out there now than you could
possibly ever go through. There's recipes on the internet, there's videos on YouTube. I know I make cooking
videos on YouTube. A lot of the recipes
that are out there just frankly are crap. It's super frustrating when you spend all the
time trying to cook. You buy expensive ingredients
and things don't turn out. And you think to yourself, why should I even bother cooking easy just
to order pizza, order delivery, but that
gets really expensive. So that's why in this class, I'm going to teach you how
to cook without recipes. I know it sounds too
good to be true, but after 20 plus
years of cooking, I've discovered what really, really great chefs use all the way down to
fast food restaurants use the formula that they
use to create their dishes. So this isn't like your
traditional cooking class. If you just want a
couple of recipes, you're probably going to
want to go somewhere else. This is going to dive into the fundamentals of how to prepare delicious meal
in your home kitchen. We're gonna do this in
a few different steps. Number one, we're going
to start off with the formulas that
you need to know in a couple of principles I think are important
for home cooks to use, then we're going to
dive into flavor. Why do some components just
seem to go well together? Why does lemon juice
and sugar water to things that aren't very good, combine to make lemonade, which is just way better
than those two ingredients. Once you understand the fundamental building
blocks of this, you'll be able to create
almost any dish that you want, but you also need to
know some methods. In the third part
of this course, we're going to dive into a
couple of core methods and talk about how to use these
methods in your home kitchen. Finally, we're going to
talk about creativity. Creativity means having
fun in the kitchen, whether that's creating a
30-minute weeknight meal or creating an elaborate
dinner party for your friends or your family. The power of what I call
the home chef formula and cooking without recipes
is that you'll save money. Most importantly, you'll have a lot of fun in the kitchen. So whether you're a
complete beginner and intermediate home cook or
you're an advanced home shaft, you will learn something
in this course, we are still going to give
you some recipes to jumpstart your creativity and get you cooking immediately
in this class. So if any of that
sounds interesting, I'd love for you to take this class and we'll see
you on the other side.
2. The Home Chef & Principles: Hello and welcome
to the first lesson in our cooking without
recipes course. In this first lesson,
I want to talk a little bit about principles. I want to talk a little bit
about this phrase that I use, which is the home chef. In the first part
of this course, we're talking about formulas. And it's specifically
we're going to talk about the home chef formula. What is a home chef? On one side of the spectrum, we've got professional chefs, people who have gone
to culinary school. They working fancy kitchens. They put together a really
complicated dishes. They're serving it to
guests and customer. This is their profession. On the other side, have what
I would probably call cooks. We're talking about
people that cook at home. They're people that
don't necessarily want to cook and wouldn't do
it if they didn't have to. Somewhere in between there
is what I call a home chef. You want to be creative
in the kitchen. You want to try out new things and explore
different recipes, explore different cuisines, explore different
ingredient fundamentally, you want to be creative
in the kitchen. It's someone who appreciates really great food and wants
to make it themselves. I'm not necessarily even talking about really expensive food. Some of the best food I've ever had has been
really, really cheap. Now that we know what
this home chef is, this course is dedicated to people who want
to be creative in the kitchen that want to create great meals for their
family and friends. That we need to start exploring
some of the fundamentals, why certain foods go together
and how to cook them. Thankfully, it's not
all that complicated. And that fundamentally
is the joy of cooking. And really cooking
without recipes, is that once you get this, once you understand the
fundamental building blocks, you can start creating
food that you like. You can start creating
food that is personalized to you and that gets all
the flavors that you like. It doesn't matter if someone else likes, it, really matters. Gave you like it. And that's what
this is all about. That's what being
a home chef is. It's creating food that you, your family and your friends, things that are perfect for you. And these are the
core principles that when I make
food in my kitchen, I try and live by it.
3. The Home Chef Formula: So this lesson, we're
going to be what we call the home chef formula. Three-star Michelin
chefs use the fanciest of the fancy chefs all the way down to fast
food restaurant. This formula is what they use on a regular basis to create
food for their customers. I'd watch reality
television shows like a top chef or chop, master, master chef or
whatever they're called. But it was always in all
of these people that were able to in what seemed like
just a couple of minutes, come up with an entire sort of concept in dish they
were doing was following this simple formula and
using their experience in using some of their training to apply this
formula to the food. But let's jump right
into what it is. So the first part, you need to pick your protein, your vegetable, or
your carbohydrates. So pick one of
those depending on what part of the dish
you're focusing on it. You'll actually have
this three different times as you work through
creating your dish. Don't worry, it's
not too complicated. Add a flavor and a method. What we're going
to talk about for the remainder of this course is those two pieces
flavor and give you some examples of how this actually works and
give you some sort of tangible examples from food I've cooked and from some
fancy restaurants. One of my favorite things
to make is whole chicken. There's lots of benefits. It feeds four to six people. It's relatively easy to
make and fast to make. One of the most popular
ways to make that protein, chicken or a whole chicken in
this case, is to roast it, put it in the oven
at 375 or 45 min to 60 min really depends
on how big the bird is. A roast chicken is a classic
way of making foods. We're almost there,
but the thing that we forgot is our flavor component, but really classic way of making a chicken as a
mustard rubbed roast. Check there it is. We've got all three
of our components. We've got our protein check-in, we've got our method roasting. And we've got our
flavor component, which is mustard, mustard,
broad roast chicken. That's one example of using this formula to create a dish. And you can see how
you could substitute out roast chicken to grilled chicken or substitute the flavor out and say you want
a lemon time chicken. As opposed to foster, this is how you can start
making these dishes your own. It doesn't just work
with chicken or meat. It works with seafood as well. I went out for dinner the other night and
one of the restaurants I went to had this on the
menu of Codd was the protein. And what they were
doing was poaching that fish, poaching. So we're, we're
submerging and in water and it's
cooking in the water. It's in a more of an
advanced technique, but poaching is the
methods they were using. Flavoring that they
were using was a MISO marinated, poached black caught. This was what was on the menu. This is the exact formula
that they were using. Then there was another
component to it, the vegetable component in
the carbohydrate components. But this was the main part of the dish and this was a
really fancy restaurant. They're using this exact formula that I'm teaching you now. Sometimes the order of these things get put
in a different order, but don't worry about
that roasted cauliflower or with gray hair cheese. Same thing, just the
components are switched. Roasted is our method. Cauliflower is r, In this case, vegetable ocher tan is
really a way of cooking it. So sometimes the method will appear in a few
different places, but it's also really the flavoring because
ocher tan talks about the gray hair cheese and how the grilled
cheese is prepared, but Greer cheeses are flavoring. And there's a few things
that are missing from that. There was a cream and nutmeg
and those types of things. But in essence, this
allows you to follow that simple formula just by moving a few
components around. And sometimes the flavorings
get omitted if they're not fancy and offer they're
just assumed like a grilled rib-eye steak. Grilled is the
method in this case, the rib-eye steak is
obviously the protein. What they've left off is that salt and pepper is the
flavoring that you would see. So this is the
home chef formula. Start looking around and
if you don't believe me, at some menus and
you'll see that most of the time follow
this exact formula. What we're going to talk about
for the rest of our time together is those two
components of flavor. What is flavor and why do
certain things work together? And what are some core methods? We're going to talk about
the two core methods that I use in my home kitchen. So that's all for the formula.
Let's keep moving on.
4. The 5 Core Tastes: So this is the first lesson
in the flavor component. If you recall from
our previous lesson, we're taking the home chef
formula of a flavor and a method added to our protein or carbohydrate
or our vegetable. If you follow this formula, you can cook whatever you want. But we need to understand a few core components
before we move on. And flavor is an essential part that I feel like a lot of
people aren't taught about. We were talking about
this from a fundamental perspective in this first lesson because we're talking about taste when you're
thinking about food, I think the primary sense
that you have is taste. Now certainly site is important. How things look is really important using your
sense of hearing, hearing a crunchy vegetable
as you cut into it, I think amplifies
that experience. Certainly smell dish that
just smells good is going to create a great atmosphere
for you to eat by taste, your tongue is fundamentally the most important
piece of cooking. It turns out there
are five core tastes that your tongue can detect. A way for us to know about
these tastes and amplify them, we can make better
tasting foods. So let's go through
five of them. Number one is sweet, we all know sweet food. Its first thing you
might think of is sugar, and that certainly is a very, very big part of tongue tells our brain that this is sweet and our brains like yes,
we need more of this. So you get a
pleasurable sensation from eating sweet things. But it's not just white sugar
or those types of things. There's lots of other
things that are sweet. If you think about
milk, milk has lactose, and while it's not the
sweetest thing in the world, it definitely fits under that component of
being a bit sweet. If you think about carrots,
carrots or a vegetable, they are undoubtedly on the sweeter side of
a type of vegetable. There's lots of different
things that are sweet, that aren't just sugar
or candy or those types. Thanks. So sweet. That's tastes number one. Tastes number two is salty. Salt is a really
interesting one. I'm going to talk
more about it in one of the next lessons. Salt amplifies the
flavor of food. That's why in almost
every single recipe, I, it's hard to think of
a recipe that doesn't include salt when you're
grilling a steak, like we talked about
a few seconds ago, you're gonna put salt
on that because that amplifies the steak taste. But even in baking recipes, in a cookie recipe that
is supposed to be sweet, you'll see a little bit
of salt in there and that is not to make
it taste salty, but it's to amplify
that sweet flavor. That's why you see salt
in almost every recipe. And we're going to talk about in a future video on what types
of salt to use it tastes. Number three is sour. So this is acidic or
that moat puckering sensation that you get when
maybe you eat a lemon. A lemon is very sour,
it's very acidic. Hear that word of
mouth, move in. That's the type of thing that sour gives you the sours
really interesting. One of the best
things that I took away from a chef who
was telling me how to cook is that you
need to make sure that you're adding a sour
component to your food, which I thought was
a little bit weird. And he said it does
a couple of things. One we're going to
talk about at the end. The other is that it just
makes food taste fresher. So if you put a little bit of
lemon juice into your salad or add a little bit of vinegar into a sauce
at the end of it, you're going to get
something that tastes fresher and that tastes
fundamentally better. Sour doesn't just come from citrus fruits
like lemons or limes. It comes with things
like vinegar, white wine, vinegar, sherry
vinegar, champagne vinegar. These are used in recipes
and top end cuisine a fair bit because
they're trying to make food taste fresher, sauerkraut or yogurt, for
instance, or sour things. These sour things really make food taste brighter and
take tastes fresher. Number four, I was a
little bit weird as a kid because I really
liked broccoli. My parents were
just shocked that I was eating broccoli
all the time. And it turns out that one of
my favorite tastes, bitter. Bitter is a bit of
a weird one because many bitter components are
found inside of toxic food. It's a way of us knowing, well, we shouldn't eat this
because it might kill us. So let's make this
tastes bitter and potentially case not very good, but we can rely on hundreds and potentially thousands
of years in some cases of people who have
tried this before us to know that broccoli is
it going to kill us? Despite what my brothers
and sisters were saying when they didn't
want to eat their broccoli. When you think of
bitter compounds, It's all things that I
really like broccoli, I still like a lot, but black coffee is
very, very bitter. But the hobby tasting
beer that's bitter, we often add something to it. And again, we're going to
talk about that in a second. To balance out some
of the flavors, you're going to see
that word come up a bunch over the
next few minutes. Dark chocolate, very bitter. Lots of these components, if you've ever wondered
why you don't like some of these things like black
coffee or dark chocolate, you prefer milk chocolate. It's because it has
this bitter component. Don't worry, you're not alone. A lot of people
don't like better. Last but not least,
number five is umami. Umami is a relatively new one. It's basically savory
or a meaty texture. It comes from meat gets
that steak that grilled whereby we just talked
about yes, is media. It has lots of
umami flavor to it. Doesn't have to only
be meat to be umami. Mushrooms are very, very high in Mommy soy sauce
or war Chester, war chest or sharp or chest, whatever that sauce is called, is very high in blue, mommy, it's why I always have a
bottle of soy sauce or worse, to share sauce in my fridge. And I add them to sauces
because it just amped up Doumani flavor similar
to when we were talking about adding
salt to dishes. This is a place where
you can add things to amplify the umami
or the savoriness, the meeting as if you
will of your dishes. Those are the five core flavors. Sweet, salty, sour,
bitter, and umami. Understanding these
core tastes is fundamental to you getting that flavor component of the
home chef formula, right.
5. The Art of Flavor: We're moving on to balancing
dishes. Balancing dishes. You probably have heard this, whether it be on YouTube, watching, watching a recipe, whether it'd be watching one
of those reality shows I talked about or even
shafts talking about it. They're always talking
about balancing their dishes and essentially
what they're talking about, balancing each of these tastes
so that things taste good. Flavor is the combination
of two or more of these to create something that's better than those
two things on there. Well, what does that mean? That's a lot of words, but
let's give you an example. Lemonade is a great
example at its core. If you wanted to make lemonade, you need sugar water, and you need lemon juice, you need something sweet, and you need something sour. Those two things on their own are frankly pretty terrible. You couldn't drink a
glass of lemon juice and you probably wouldn't want to drink a glass of sugar water, but combine them together. This combination
of two cases makes this flavor of lemonade and make something
that is better, that is significantly better than those two
things on their own. It turns out there's
tons and tons and tons of these
combinations of two or more tastes combining together to make something
incredible like lemonade, if you think about
dark chocolate, we talked about a
few minutes ago as being a bitter taste. Put a little bit of sea salt on their little bit
of salty flavor. Butter and salt combining together makes it
taste incredible, makes it tastes so much better than those two
things on their own. Coffee is really popular. I like black coffee, but not a lot of people do. It's very bitter. If you don't enjoy
that bitter taste, you can get a cafe Ole graphic
on let j, a cafe latte. These are all things that
are very, very popular, but it's essentially
just coffee and milk better and a
little bit sweet. Combine these two together and it creates something
really, really incredible. There's a reason people add milk or a bit of sugar
to their coffee. Adding that sweetness,
combining bitter and sweet make something incredible. There's a whole list
of these things that we could go through all
of these combinations. We're going to talk about it a little bit more in the course, but start thinking about these combinations in
your home kitchen. And you'll really amp up that flavor component of
the home chef formula.
6. The Magic of Salt: This lesson is about salt. Salt is such an important
ingredient for the home cook. You'll notice that salt is in
almost every single recipe. That's because it
amplifies flavors. When you're trying to figure
out how salty it should be. It should be just salty enough, which isn't really
all that helpful. If you have a dish that
tastes a little bland, and you should always
be tasting your food before you serve it. It tastes a little bland. It doesn't taste sweet and umami and bitter enough
or sour enough. Adding a bit of salt
little by little, you'll notice that the food just starts tasting a lot better. That's why salt is such
a magic ingredient. And it's really one
of those things that you must have
in your kitchen. But what kind of salt
should you have? This can confuse
a lot of people. I know it confused
me a lot when I was first setting
up my home kitchen. There's basically
three kinds of salt is iodized salt or table salt. Kosher salt, which you'll see in a lot of chefs style recipes. And there's sea salt
or finishing salt. So those are the
three general cuts. Let's go through
them one-by-one and talk about when you
should use them. The first two are
particularly important, table salt, kosher salt. There's virtually no
difference between these two, but when using it
in the kitchen, there are some minor
differences of why you might choose
one or the other. Table salt has very,
very fine grains. If you put it under
a microscope, it would look like,
sort of like cubes. Where the difference
comes is in kosher salt, it's the shape of
the grain there. They're jagged,
which means when you pick them up with your fingers, which has an easy
way to season things and season things properly. It's much easier to hold onto those little cubes that
we're talking about with table salt just mostly
just fall out of your fingers and
that can lead you to over salting your dishes. But when you pick up
hinge of kosher salt, very rarely going to fall out of your hands unless you drop it. So that's the main appeal of kosher salt and allows you to season or more precisely and get the exact amount
that you want in there, which is pretty important
when you're creating dishes. I would always recommend
using your hands to season things as opposed
to a salt shaker. Just get a little
dish. Assault pig. I just have mine in a jar with with a lid on
it and then you can start seasoning with your fingers gives you a
lot more control of things. If you can get kosher salt, I would recommend getting that. It's just easier to
season with your hands. But at the end of the day,
kosher salt, table salt, very, very little difference where there is a big difference is in our third category of salt as a sea salts are finishing salt. These are usually
extraordinarily expensive depending on what
type of salt you're getting. We're talking about
the Himalayan salt, are talking about the
French for the soul, or of any variety
of these sea salt. And that's not just a name. This is evaporated
seawater from really, really dry climates and
it's harvested and sold. That's one of the reasons
it's so expensive. These are usually the lightest
and the flaky assault. And what, what does that mean? Well, they're called
finishing salts for a reason. This is a great thing to add
to the top of your dishes as essentially a garnish or a flavor enhancement and
a texture enhancement. Because again, they'll
give you a salty taste, usually very light like I said, they'll also give
you some crunch on the top of your dishes, so they're very desirable. What you shouldn't do
is cook with this. You shouldn't salt your
pasta water with flaky salt. They're very similar in
taste to the first two. There are some differences, but the benefits are
that crunchy genus, that lightness, that texture, that amplification of flavor. It. He just put it
in past of water. You put it in your student or your soup as you're making it, you're throwing away all of the benefits of
using a sea salt. You need to pick one of the two. Having iodized salt or
hopefully kosher salt, sea salt is completely optional. It, depending on how you'd
like to finish your dishes, you can have it, but
make sure that you only use it at the
end of cooking. But that's the basics of salt. Make sure you have one. If you ever find that
your dishes blend out a little bit of salt to it sort of little bit by little bit, and you'll see it
start to come alive. If you find that your dishes too salty, it's a savory dish. Try adding a little
bit of vinegar, adding one of those other
tastes that we've talked about. And that will balance the
flavor that will ensure that all five of those tastes are appropriately balanced
by bringing things up. So it's a great way to
fix dishes as well. But that's salt and important ingredient
in the home kitchen.
7. Types of Heat: So we're moving onto methods. If you recall, the
home chef formula is built off of the protein
carbohydrates or vegetables, and then applying a flavor and a method to them to
make them incredible. We've already talked
about flavors. We've talked about
the core taste and combining two or more of
them to create a flavor. Now we're going to
talk about methods. I could spend hours
upon hours and Skillshare class on Skillshare class
talking about methods. There are just tons of them. You likely already
know a few of them. We're going to
start at the core. We're going to start
talking about what separate these and how
can we categorize them. And then talk about
the two methods that I use the most in my home
kitchen and that you really should know
and know how to do it properly so that you can
cook without recipes. It's the first day we're
talking about is dry heat versus waiting the
methods and cooking stuff almost all the time is about applying heat to
something to cook, or a few other ways of
cooking things with an acid, for instance, if
you're making so VJ. But most of the time you're
going to cook with some heat. And there's two types of heat. There's a dry heat
and a wet heat. Let's talk about wet heat. Wet heat is about cooking
something in a liquid. A lot of times that's
cooking in water. You're thinking
about boiling past. You're boiling it in water. That is a wet method. Cooking. You heat the water up,
you add your pasta, you leave it for eight to 10 min and then your past it is cooked. There's other types of waste
heat methods, poaching, for instance, very similar except you're going
to lower the heat, put an egg in there, let it sit for 3 min, 4 min depending on
how you like your egg and that has now
cooked your egg, the liquid has cooked your head. Brazing is another wet heat
method where you cooked beef or chicken or vegetables or really
anything in a low, low heat, but typically a
stock or something flavorful. So it passes on that flavor
over a long period of time. There are many, many other
examples of wet heat cooking, but all of them involve cooking
and some type of liquid. The second type is dry heat. Dry heat is the absence of those cooking liquids
and instead relies on the circulation
essentially of warm air around your food to cook it as opposed to water
or stock or broth. The very obvious one here is when you're
talking about roasting, for instance, you've put
something in your oven, you heat up this box that we all have in our
kitchens up to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
or 180 degrees Celsius. Air is in there. Sometimes
it was a fad for convection, basically circulates
the air around, transfers heat to your food. It's a classic way
of dry heat cooking. So another way of dry heat
cooking is searing your food. And this might seem weird
because you do put a little bit of oil on the
bottom of your pan. Oil doesn't count. Basically what he
cooking method, it's a fat, you
heat up that oil, you put your steak,
for instance, in, and it cooks and allows you
to break down your food. So we're going to talk about
that in a few minutes. So you can't get that browning when you cook
inside of a liquid. So there's some textural
component as well as some flavor components
as you choose what type of cooking method
that you want to use. In the next couple of lessons in the method lesson where
we're going to focus on the dry heat methods because they're just
used so much more. You can really amp up your
food really, really quickly.
8. Fats & Oils: So we need to talk
about fats and oils. Oils are really essential
to have in your kitchen. And just like how we
talked about salt are fundamental to using
the method component, particularly the dry heat
method of cooking food. But what types of oils do
you need in your kitchen? This can get really complicated. There's flavor profiles of
oils, there's smoke point. There's just a lot of different things that
you need to know. But it turns out there's three oil that you absolutely need to
have in your kitchen. The great thing is, is
they're usually very cheap. Let's talk about them. That oil number one, this is going to
sound a little weird, is you need a neutral
flavored oil in your kitchen. Well, what's a
neutral flavor oil? Well, there's tons
of the benefits of a neutral flavored oil. And the ones that I'm
going to suggest for you are they have a
high smoke point? At what temperature does the oil start to
smoke and to Bert, Bert oil is no
good for anything. You need to have a neutral flavored oil
with a high smoke point, because it allows you
to do things like searing meat or
serine vegetables. Because you're gonna do that
at a very high temperature. These are usually
very, very cheap. I use sunflower oil
in my kitchen because sunflower oils
just cheap where I live when I lived
in Canada before, canola oil was
very, very popular. Peanut oil is sometimes popular depending
on where you live, but can be a bit expensive. Sometimes you want to
avoid things that are just called
generically vegetable oil because that's usually a combination of a couple
of different oils. Look for canola oil, sunflower oil, safflower
oil, peanut oil. All of these things are very, very good and they provide
you a neutral tasting oil. The second oil that
everyone should have in their kitchen Is a bottle
of extra virgin olive oil, is a bunch of different
kinds of olive oil. There's regular olive oil, there's light olive oil, there's virgin olive oil. Extra virgin olive oil is
what you're looking for. It's usually moderately priced. It's gonna be a little bit more than the neutral flavored
oil that you buy a second ago should not be one of those really expensive
finishing oils. You'll see a trend coming here. So the same thing when
we're talking about salt. You use this when
you're sauteing things. For instance, when you don't
have that really high heat and you want to add a
little bit of flavor. Olive oil has a very
low smoke point. You can't do things
like searing food in it because the Euler just going to burn in your food is not
going to taste very good. But you can do
things like saute. You have that at a lower
temperature plus it adds a little bit of
flavor if you want that. We don't always want to add that olive oil flavor to things and we can use our neutral oil
if we don't wanna do that, you can make salad
dressings with this oil. Add some more depth and
tastier salad dressings. There's lots of uses for it. It's definitely the
second oil that I used. And you need to have it
in your home kitchen. The third is an
optional ingredient. This is the fancy
bottle of Baltimore. This is the olive oil
that you're going to pay a fair bit of money for. The really important thing here. Just like with the
flaky sea salt, we don't cook with this oil. This oil should never see. I have a bottle that I
use intermittently on my kitchen table and I
use it for garnishing. If I make a bowl of pasta, sometimes I'm going to add
that at the end just to give a little bit
more fat to the dish, that's sort of shininess and obviously a fair bit of flavor. If you start cooking with most of that flavor is
going to disappear. That's the third bottle up. So make sure that you have
at least the first two, a neutral flavored
oil and a bottle of extra virgin olive
oil in your kitchen. And then if you want to have
one of those fancy bottles, a last thing that we'll talk
about on fat Is butter. I love butter, It's delicious. There's lots of other
fats that are similar. There's things like
large can come from cows are from pigs make, if you're making Mexican food, adding a pork lard to
your tortillas is really, there's things like
vegetable shortening, which is basically
just lard as well. It's another type of fat
you can use really useful in baking because it's
more neutral flavored. Things like margarine, which
I don't know why people eat, but you might have a
reason for eating it. But all of these things are
the other types of fats that you might use in
your home cooking. But I always have butter
in my fridge because it is tremendously useful in a
lot of different contexts.
9. How to Sauté: So let's talk about sauteing, which is one of the most, if not the most
important methods that you will use
in your kitchen. I can think of very
few times when I'm making dinner, for instance, that I'm not going to saute something, whether
it's vegetables, whether it's a piece of meat, you do it all the
time and sometimes it's the heart of the way
of making your addition. Sometimes it's the core
method that you want to use. So it's really important
that we understand what sauteing is and how
to do it properly. I remember when I
first started cooking, It's just said sauteed
vegetables and I had no idea how to do that. So we're going to talk
about it right now. So tang is basically
cooking your food in a small amount of
fat, oil, butter. It's going to depend a fair on what you're trying to cook. A relatively shallow pants. So there's sort of a fry pan or a saute pan times they'll
have some slides that go up. But usually it's a, it's a fairly shallow pan over
medium to medium high. When you get up and you start
using really high heat, that's when you're going
to start tearing things. Medium to medium high heat
will do the two things that we're trying to
accomplish when we're saw him. First and foremost,
remember we're using a thin layer of oil. If you add inch or two or even just a few
centimeters of oil, you start doing
another technique which is called shallow fry. If you completely submerge
your food and oil, you're now deep fried. So this is how quickly
some of these things can change and each of them has a different reason that you
would use these techniques. But sauteing thin layer of oil, shallow pan, medium
to medium high heat. Why do we suck caters to
one is to remove water. Sometimes you'll
see this is called sweating or cooking
without color. What they really mean
is that we want to take the water and why do we do that? Well, water is in almost
everything at differing levels and water is tasteless
by taking it out of, by removing a fair
bit of the water, we amplify the natural flavor of our ingredients.
Think about mushroom. If you ever put mushrooms
in a pan and saute them, you'll have the whole Penfield. But after five or 6 min, the amount of time it
takes to saute mushrooms, they're taking up
half the pan or a third of the pen because
the water is all disappeared. Now when we eat those mushrooms, the mommy flavor of the
mushrooms is gonna be amplified because all
of that water is gone. This is true with a ton of different ingredients, in
particular vegetables. When you're starting to
make soups or phrases, or even side dishes like mushrooms are those things
that I just talked about. Sauteing removes the water. Secondly, that you want
a Sontag helps us. Brown browning food does is it starts to change
the characteristics. What will happen is the
sugars that are in, and a lot of foods have some
component of sugar in them, will start to caramelize. So if you think about
those mushrooms that I just talked about
a few seconds ago, the first thing that'll happen when you start sauteing them, you'll see you'll literally
see the water come to the surface and start coming out and really
you could hear it. That's one of the clear side. Once all the waters god, you'll see that
the mushroom start developing this brown
color on the outside. And what that is is the
main artery and it's basically the caramelization
of the sugars. The natural sugars gives a very, very pleasing and desirable
tastes to a lot of our foods, so on were sauteing
something like mushrooms or chicken
breast for accomplishing these two goals of removing
water and brown in our food.
10. How to Roast: The next method
that we're going to talk about is roasting. Roasting is incredibly
popular and it allows you to cook a large protein
or vegetable, put it on the table for
your families and friends. I talked about roast
chicken when we're talking about the home chef
formula earlier, you can cook a roast
chicken in 45 min an hour depending on the size of the chicken and it feeds
four to six people. So relatively easy to do, you can think about making
a Christmas dinner, right? Making Christmas turkey or a prime rib or
something like that. You can feed a lot of people by roasting a big cut of meat. I love roasting fish. For instance, if
you can do it in 15 min or so, a whole fish, everyone has an oven
in their home kitchen. Let's talk about how you roast. Sort of some of the
principles behind it. Roasting again is
a dry heat method. We're heating up the air inside this box,
inside our oven. And that hot air is
going to transfer to our food and cook our food, that temperature that you use and how long you're
going to put in there is going to be dictated by a lot of different factors like
what you're cooking. Let's talk about a few
tips for roasting. And again, this is going to
be the same tips if you're roasting a 16 pound
Christmas turkey, five pound piece of prime rib, or way too Pao chicken, or a one-pound piece of fish. All of these are
going to be the same. Number one, Take your time. This is not a fast
method of cooking foods. Chocolate that Christmas turkey, you can take hours upon hours, even the piece of fish, it would cook faster if I
just sauteed it in a pan, it would be done in
a minute or two. Roasting takes longer,
so make sure you have enough time to cook things because it's just going to
take longer for you to do it. If you don't have a lot of
time, choose another method. Get a thermometer, especially when you're first
learning how to do this. And I've been cooking for
almost 20 years and I still use my meat thermometer
when I'm cooking a turkey or cooking a
big piece of prime rib, because it tells you exactly
what temperature the meters, because you can't see
outside the piece of prime rib to know exactly
what it's cooked it. So let's not pretend like
we know how to do it. Even fancy chefs have meat thermometers and
they tempt their meat. So if it's good enough for them, I think it's good enough
for us home cooks as well. They're relatively cheap. You can go on Amazon
and you can buy one, just make sure you get
one that's good because the cheaper ones don't tell
a temperature very well. The third lesson
and this button for me is the hardest thing to do, and let's keep the door closed. I have a tendency
when I see this, I want to go in time and
look at how things are going in to see if things
are being cooked properly. If you really want to do that, your oven has a light on it and you can look
through the window, but avoid opening and
closing the door. The reason for this is because the hot air rushes in and
then all of a sudden your few set your oven to 375
degrees Fahrenheit and you open the door all of a
sudden it could be 325 in there very, very quickly. And there's change in
temperature is going to have an effect on the food
that you buy your mat. You just recommended
buying a meat thermometer. You're going to have to
open it at some point, but don't be tempted
every 20 min to go in there and
open the oven door. It's going to make your
food cooked unevenly. And number four, and
this is the one that frustrates me the most by
this expensive cut of meat. They cut into the prime rib, and then all of a sudden there's juices all over the cutting
board and that's really, really bad because there's
a lot of flavor in that. What's happened is as the
meat has gotten really, really tense as it's cooking and that juice is
sort of everywhere. There's a lot of flavor in that. What you need to do
is you need to rest your meat after you're
done cooking it. And don't worry, it's not
going to cool down very much. It's not going to
cool down to the point where it's
going to be cold. But you need to let
it rest because what happens is as it relaxes, those juices all disperse
back into the meat and they're going
to end up inside your piece of prime rib, not all over the cutting tool. You know, you've spent
a lot of money on your prime rib or your turkey or any of those types of things. Have you spent a
lot of time because this is a slow cooking method. The worst thing you can have
is half of the flavor or three-quarters of the flavor
going down the drain. So rest your meat. It could be as long as 15, 20, sometimes even 30 min will allow those juices
to be reabsorbed into the meat and you're
roasting will be immediately better if you
follow even just this one step. But if you follow all four of those steps, there'll
be roasting. Anything that you want better than you've
ever done before.
11. Getting Creative: Let's put it all together. We started talking about
the home chef formula, a method and a flavor
combined with protein, carbohydrate, or a vegetable. You're gonna do
this a few times. Now that we've talked
about some of the basics of flavor and how combining a couple of tastes or more can create something better than those two tastes on their own. We've talked about a couple of the core methods that
you need to have. You probably already
know a few more. You can now start
cooking without recipe. This course is called
cooking without recipes. That doesn't mean I
don't use recipes. I think they're important. I think they're a great way
of documenting and sharing great food that
they've created by understanding what
goes into them. Basically this home
chef Formula, One, you'll be able to tell if it's a good recipe or not to give, able to start making some adjustments based
off of what you like. You will now be able to be
creative in your home kitchen. So we move to the project
component of this course. In the description,
I believe below, where this video is
somewhere on this page, you'll see a link to a cookbook. This is the cookbook
or the workbook for this Skillshare course. It's completely free. You can download it. There are a few
recipes in there to start getting you thinking
about your project. I've highlighted a few
that I really like. This project is about
you getting creative. It's about you showcasing what you like and starting
to make your own meals, starting to cook without
recipes in your home kitchen. So download the workbook
and jump in the kitchen. Use the home chef formula. Create your class project
and post it here. And ensure when you do post it, use the home chef formula
showing which method you use, which flavor you used,
then what protein, carbohydrate, or vegetable
you used to create your dish. You're looking for
some inspiration that cookbook will help
get you started. Thank you so much for
taking this course. I really hope you enjoyed it. My email address is below. We'd love to hear from you
if you have any questions. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you in
the next course.
Matt Walker, Home Cook + YouTuber
