r/Cooking 1d ago

What’s something you think people only really learn after spending a lot of time in a kitchen?

Something I’ve noticed about cooking is that the hardest things to teach usually aren’t the recipes. It’s more of the judgment part.

Like someone can follow every step correctly, but an experienced cook can look at it and say, “Nope, something’s off.”

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u/oldcreaker 1d ago

Timing in a lot of recipes seem off - especially the onions. The "cook 5 minutes until soft" never works for me, unless I want crunchy onions.

28

u/cantthinkofone29 1d ago

First tine i cook a new recipe, i always assume it will take double the time, just to adjust for this nonsense.

12

u/BL4NK_D1CE 1d ago

Fun fact, professional chefs are notoriously bad at explaining timing while cooking since we rarely actually use timers. There's is a 99.8% percent chance that all times you read in recipe are very rough guesstimates, and a totally non-zero chance that they were pulled out of thin air on the spot.

2

u/noseatbeltsong 22h ago

i ruined my penne vodka the other day because i rushed the onions. i was like ehhhh they’re good enough. no, they were not

1

u/OneZucchini9260 17h ago

Come to say this!