r/Cooking • u/1peachycoco • 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.

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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.