Learn To Cook: A Down and Dirty Guide to Cooking (For People Who Never Learned How)

If our nose is blocked by a cold or pinching fingers, it’s hard to tell the difference between an apple and a pear. So most of what we experience as flavor is odor, or aroma. Herbs and spices heighten flavor by adding their characteristic aroma molecules.

Understanding the ingredients in terms of functional grouping will help us internalize the structure of the recipe:

Q. Chicken stock is made with chicken, water, and what other category of ingredients?

A. Aromatics.

From here, we might ask:

Q. What are typical aromatics used in chicken stock?

A. onion, carrots, celery, garlic, and parsley

But unless you’... See more

There’s no match for the flavor of a vegetable picked one minute and cooked the next. Once a vegetable is harvested it begins to change, and that change is almost always for the worse. (Exceptions include plant parts designed to hibernate, for example onions and potatoes.)

By simmering the vegetables until soft, the cook breaks down their cell walls and releases the cell contents into the water. These contents include salts, sugars, acids, and savory amino acids, as well as aromatic molecules. Carrots, celery, and onions are almost always included for their aromatics, and mushrooms and tomatoes are the richest source... See more