Episode 33 - How to Cook Like a Pro

Jennifer from Savory Simple shares her tips for how to cook like a pro at home. Learn more about the 5 tastes, how to season to taste and much much more!

This week's episode is going to teach you how to cook like a pro!

I chat with Jennifer Farley, the creator of Savory Simple, a blog dedicated to well-tested, reliable recipes and tutorials. Her goal is to help home cooks be fearless in the kitchen!

Jennifer graduated from the Culinary Arts program at L’Academie de Cuisine in 2010, and she has worked as a line cook, pastry chef and cooking instructor. Before attending culinary school, she worked for 10 years at a photography studio, where she acquired her first digital camera and learned how to edit images with Adobe Photoshop.

Her cookbook, The Gourmet Kitchen, was published in 2015 by Simon & Schuster. She's written a weekly cooking column for The Washington Post Food Section, and her work has been featured by a variety of online publications including The Kitchn, Food52, and eHow. She's taught food photography workshops and classes, and has spoken at several conferences including Mediavine, Eat Write Retreat and The Metropolitan Cooking and Entertaining Show.

She works full time as a food blogger in Washington DC, where she lives with her husband, Jeff, and cat, Eleanor Rigby.

Jennifer shares some awesome techniques that every cook should know. You'll probably want to jot down a few points from this ep!

RECIPE OF THE WEEK

This week's recipe of the week is my Greek Lemon Potatoes. I made a bit of a Greek feast last week and of course lemon potatoes were on the menu. I forgot how unbelievably delicious they are - perfect little flavour bombs and they compliment chicken and lamb so well.

LISTEN IN

Listen in to today’s episode on Apple, Stitcher or Spotify.

Episode 33 - How to Cook Like a Pro

5 TASTES

Salty
Sweet
Bitter
Acid / Sour
Umami

UNDERSTANDING HOW TO SEASON

This takes practice. The reason bloggers say "season to taste" is that we all have our own unique tastes so what might taste too salty to one person won't be salty enough for another.
If a dish tastes bland more often than not it will need salt or some acid. Salt doesn't necessarily mean salt - can be salty nuts for example.

HOW TO GLAZE / DEGLAZE

Use a little liquid to scrape up the darkened bits left at the bottom on the pan when cooking onions or meat to build flavour. Great for stews, chili etc.