4 Cooking Tips Will End Your Recipe Guessing

Cooking is not easy when you're still guessing. Actually guess cooking increases the stress, because guess makes you unsure of the results to come. I'm going to give you a little cooking help by offering some tips on how to complete your guess.

One of the reasons why you guess because it's hard to believe anything until you actually see it. But I would like to help you wrap your head around the idea that you have to believe it first and then you will see it.

Quantification your portion sizes, temperature, and testing has great potential to allow you to stop guessing. Let us go further and look at how they can work.

4 ways to quantify your cooking, and eliminate guess:

Cooking Tip # 1: Temperature

Temperature is important in cooking. Some foods will make you sick if you do not cook them at the right temperature. Other food will be completely ruined if you cook them well above "medium heat".

Use water as an indicator of temperature. Water evaporates at 212 degrees F, so if you use a saute pan, if you sprinkle some water on the forehead and it evaporates, you know that the pan is at least water boiling point. The faster the water evaporates, your the hotter the pan is. This works on the grill too.

You can also test a small piece of your food to test the temperature. For example, you may be on its way to fry some chicken in oil on the stove, but you can not say whether the oil is hot enough or not. Do not destroy an entire chest by putting it into the oil is not hot enough. Instead, take a small piece of chicken and release it into the saucepan. You know right away whether the oil is hot enough or not to cook food.

Cooking Tip # 2: Test a small amount

Sometimes you just need to test a small amount of something before cooking it all. This is particularly useful in roasting. I can tell you that when I had my catering business, sometimes we have to make hundreds or thousands of crab cakes in a large batch. Well, we would take a crab cake cook it and test it. This will allow us to make adjustments on the rest of the party and make a better product! Cooking or roasting a piece of something is a great way to see if your plan is to go to work without sacrificing all your ingredients in one of your guess adventure.

Cooking Tip # 3: Portion size

Get a digital scale and begin to understand your raw portions sizes. Let me tell you a story about how I discovered the importance of this tip.

• When I used to make spaghetti for myself and my wife, I'd cook a whole pound of spaghetti, basically an entire box for both of us. When we sat down to eat, because so much spaghetti was available, we ate more than we should. After finishing our meal, there was always spaghetti left over, we would put leftover spaghetti in the fridge and a couple of days later, throw it out because we would not eat it.

• With my digital scale, I started by weighing 8 oz Dry pasta for the two of us. I cooked it 8 ounces and still had some residue, so I adjusted it down until I knew exactly how much dry pasta to cook for us two ... 5.3 oz is our perfect amount. With this knowledge, finally boiling pasta easily that we do not eat too much and we have no leftovers.

Understanding and knowing your portion sizes will also help you to not overbuy the grocery because you know exactly how much to buy a product to feed your family for a particular meal. And be sure to stick to the portion sizes. If you're cooking frozen shrimp from a bag and parts end up leaving 3 shrimp in the bag, do not simply dump them in flour and cook them. NO, you will be feeding too much to your family! Leave them in the bag and cook them next time. You do not need to "just make the whole package."

Cooking Tip # 4: Test Spices

If you are making a pot of something and you need to add spices, do not start throwing in spices and guess what it comes to taste like. Get the spices that you are thinking of using and putting "concoction" in a small Ramekin or a small soufflé cup first. This will help you to know how the flavors work and give you confidence that combination will work.

So using these numbers on cooking tips, you can stop guessing at what happens to your food. Observe your results and deliberately change your step next time. You will be surprised how starting with these little visual cues can help you to stop guessing and make sure that what you see is what you believe will be true. This is not guess, this is cooking easy!