20 The Most Common Cooking Mistakes
Learn how to avoid these common mistakes for successful cooking every time.
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1. You don’t taste as you go.
Result: The flavors or textures of an otherwise excellent dish are out of balance or unappealing.
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2. You don’t read the entire recipe before you start cooking.
Result: Flavors are dull, entire steps or ingredients get left out.
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3. You make unwise substitutions in baking.
Result: You wreck the underlying chemistry of the dish.
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4. You boil when you should simmer.
Result: A hurried-up dish that’s cloudy, tough, or dry.
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5. You overheat chocolate.
Result: Instead of having a smooth, creamy, luxurious consistency, your chocolate is grainy, separated, or scorched.
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6. You over-soften butter.
Result: Cookies spread too much or cakes are too dense.
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7. You overheat low-fat milk products.
Result: The milk curdles or “breaks,” yielding grainy mac and cheese, ice cream, or pudding.
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8. You don’t know your oven’s quirks and idiosyncrasies.
Result: Food cooks too fast, too slow, or unevenly.
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9. You’re too casual about measuring ingredients.
Result: Dry, tough cakes, rubbery brownies, and a host of other textural mishaps.
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10. You overcrowd the pan.
Result: Soggy food that doesn’t brown.
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11. You mishandle egg whites.
Result: The whites won’t whip up. Or, over beaten or roughly handled, they produce flat cake layers or souffles with no lift.
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12. You turn the food too often.
Result: You interfere with the sear, food sticks, or you lose the breading.
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13. You don’t get the pan hot enough before you add the food.
Result: Food that sticks, scallops with no sear, pale meats.
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14. You slice meat with?instead of against?the grain.
Result: Chewy meat that could have been tender.
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15. You under bake cakes and breads.
Result: Cakes, brownies, and breads turn out pallid and gummy.
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16. You don’t use a meat thermometer.
Result: Your roast chicken, leg of lamb, or beef tenderloin turns out over- or under cooked.
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17. Meat gets no chance to rest after cooking.
Result: Delicious juices vacate the meat and run all over the cutting board, leaving steak or roast dry.
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18. You try to rush the cooking of caramelized onions.
Result: You end up with sautéed onions, which are nice but a far cry from the melt-in-your-mouth caramelized ideal.
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19. You overwork lower-fat dough.
Result: Cookies, scones, pie crusts, and biscuits turn out tough.
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20. You neglect the nuts you’re toasting.
Result: Burned nuts, with a sharp, bitter flavor.
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