Mindset

Three cooking misconceptions, and how to replace them.

The key to learning anything is having the right mindset.

As learners, we all start off with certain preconceived notions, biases, and expectations. The more of them we have, the harder it is to absorb anything. When I was studying martial arts my instructor called it our backpack. The more full your backpack, the less room there is to store knowledge. 

So the first step in learning is to empty your backpack. 

Since this is the first entry of a newsletter/blog dedicated to culinary education, I thought it would be a good idea to address some of the items that I’ve found clutter a lot of people’s backpacks as it relates to cooking. 

Let’s call them misconceptions. The way I see it, there are three very common, fundamental misconceptions about the act of cooking that we should clear up right now:

1. Cooking is a chore

2. Cooking requires speed  

3. Cooking results in a meal  

Adjusting your mindset to dispel these misconceptions is the first kitchen skill to learn. It’s more important than knife skills, searing techniques, or recipe development. Good cooking starts in the head, not in the kitchen. So let’s address these misconceptions one by one. 

Cooking Is A Chore

The vast majority of food media and ads today treat cooking as an inconvenience to either avoid completely or get through with as little time and effort as possible. Use this gadget. Try this “hack.” Subscribe to that service. Anything to avoid the time-consuming “hassle” of making dinner for your family. 

Cooking is treated as something to get over with so you can get to the eating part. An obstacle between you and your meal. Cooking is a confusing mystery that only those trained in the dark arts of culinary magic can decipher. But if you just try these shortcuts you can have dinner on the table in record time so you can get on with your social media scrolling and TV watching. 

Cooked/Uncooked is the antithesis of all of that. You won’t find any time saving hacks here. No workarounds or shortcuts. This is the do-it-the-hard-way blog. This is the newsletter for doing things like making fresh pasta, from scratch, by hand. For making your own stocks, tortillas, sauces, and more. 

I’m studying, researching, and writing to learn the why’s behind the fundamental building blocks of cooking, not because I want to get dinner on the table more efficiently or easily. I’m doing it because it’s fun. Because it’s fascinating. 

Some guys work on their cars rather than taking it to the shop. Others build their own furniture rather than buying it from a store. Sure, there’s easier ways of doing both. But they do it themselves because it’s a hobby they enjoy. They take pride in their own handiwork. 

Cooking is no different. It’s not a chore. It’s a craft. 

Cooking Requires Speed

Nearly every TV cooking show now is some kind of timed competition. There’s always a clock, always a challenge or a limitation. Always a winner and a loser. Sure it’s entertaining. You may even get a few ideas. But I think it creates a false expectation in many home cooks. (It sure did for me.)

We’ve been trained to think that to cook like a chef we need to be furiously chopping away at vegetables on the cutting board while the onions fry in the pan, and if we don’t finish in time we’ll burn the onions, and then we have to rush to the fridge to pull out the heavy cream that needs to be added to finish the sauce before it dries out, but there’s still the chicken to pull out of the oven and the potatoes are boiling in the pot and OH MY GOD THERE’S NO PLATE FOR ME TO PUT THIS STUFF ON!

It’s no wonder people just don’t even bother. Who needs to come home after a day of work only to face another round of stress and pressure? You’re already tired. Your nerves are already frayed. Now you have to bang out dinner from scratch in 30 minutes? 

I get it… we lead time-restricted lives. We get home from work and need to eat. Sometimes that has to happen quickly. But since we’re not able to add any hours to our days, we can instead use our hours differently. 

If you can, find a way to set aside an extra 30 minutes to prepare dinner, so you can calmly prep all the ingredients before the actual cooking part begins. Don’t rush that prep. Approach it instead as a sort of meditation… a decompressing ritual that embraces the mundane exactness of peeling garlic, or dicing onions, etc. 

Once you slow things down, the rushed chore becomes a moment of Zen that may soon become the best part of your day. (It sure beats that half-hour of Instagram doom scrolling.)

Cooking Results In A Meal  

I wrote a story recently about making pizza, which featured interviews with a few local chefs. They all had various tips about hydration, oven temp, and so on. But the one that stuck with me was the idea of baking test doughs without toppings. Just dough, nothing else, to see how the heat of your oven and the variances in your dough mixture affected the crust.  

To most people that might seem like a waste of time and ingredients. But to a chef, it’s a necessary step towards perfection. What’s a bigger waste of time… making pizzas every now and then hoping it will turn out the way you want with no idea of what levers to pull to influence the end result, or spending one weekend testing the variables to lock in a winning formula you can use again and again? 

Once you start viewing cooking as a fun hobby that you can take your time with, the idea of spending a day practicing pizza dough (or pasta rolling, or reducing stock, or whatever) suddenly doesn’t seem so crazy. Before you know it you may even return to the kitchen AFTER you’ve finished your evening meal to prep pantry items for future meals, not just to get ahead of the game, but because it’s FUN. 

There’s a Zen proverb that ends with the line “One eye on the goal leaves only one eye for the path.” I love that line and try to apply it to nearly everything I do. Try taking it to heart in the kitchen, and spend some time focusing on the act of cooking itself without expecting a meal as the sole result. 

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I’m not sure exactly how these three misconceptions came about. It’s likely from a combination of mass media/advertising, societal “advancement,” and cultural assumptions. Whatever. The point is to recognize them, determine which of them apply to you, and remove them from your backpack. 

Once empty, replace those old misconceptions with three tenets of a new mindset…

1. Cooking is a craft, not a chore

2. Don’t rush it

3. Enjoy the process as much as the result

As my culinary program approaches, I’ll be doing much the same with my own expectations for what I’ll do and learn over the next 10 months.

Until next week…

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