Cooking as an exact science
Cooking may seem easy. After all, your mom does it all
the time, several times in a day. But try stirring the
sauce in the pan and frying the meat and you will soon
find out that there is more to cooking than meets the
eye.
Cooking is actually quite hard not because it is an
arduous task but because it is an exact science. This
means that you cannot just put any ingredients you
want in any amount. In order to arrive at the taste
that you want for you dish, you need the exact amount
of ingredients, from the number of veggies that you
include to the number of times you load the salt. A
little more than what you should be putting can be
disastrous to the taste palate. This is especially
true with flavorings like salt, sugar, and other
spices.
This is why measuring the ingredients is an important
part of the cooking process. Without knowing how to
measure the ingredients right, you cannot make a
perfectly tasting dish, unless of course you have that
natural gift and instinct for cooking that you can
just put anything you want and still arrive at an
unusually flavorful dish.
Measuring cups are there to help any novice in
cooking. And of course, there are the cookbooks, which
will tell you the exact amount of each ingredient that
you have to put in. Although most veteran cooks swear
by on following your own instincts and making your own
measurements, for the first time cooks and the
not-so-new in the field, it is first important to
follow the directions to the letter and then as you
gain experience, experiment with different tastes. But
whether you follow what the cook book says or you
follow your own recipes, you are still in a way
measuring ingredients in an exact way.
There are a lot of measuring tools available in the
market that will help you in cooking. One of the most
important ones and the set that you should not cook
without is the set of measuring cups and spoons. These
are the staple of recipe books. Without a set of the
cups and the spoon, you will not be able to determine
just how much ingredients you should put because
often, cookbooks will indicate the number of cups or
how many teaspoons.
Another important tool in the kitchen that you should
invest in if you are really serious in your cooking
career is the weighing scale. This is not the scale
that you use to look at your own weight. Rather it is
the kilo scale where you often put meat, fish and
vegetables to determine how they weigh. These are
sometimes also referred to in recipe books. Although
not as often used as the measuring cups and spoons,
weighing scales are used in professional cooking
recipes and also when cooking for large number of
people. This is because as the number of servings you
are cooking for increases, so does the ingredients and
sometimes the cups and the spoons are just not enough
to measure the ingredients that you need to use.
Cooking, as they say, is not only an art but also a
science- an exact science. And though you don’t
exactly need a math degree to make the perfect pasta,
you need precision and balance to make one delicious
dish.
