2. The 80/20 Cooking Philosophy

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My goal with this course is to equip you with the knowledge and skills you need to feel confident in the kitchen and cook well at home. This course is called 80/20 Cooking because it’s named after the 80/20 Principle, which states that 80% of your results in any given endeavor are driven by 20% of your efforts. In general, this means that you can make a lot of progress in anything that you want to learn by focusing on the few high-leverage skills that actually drive results. This course is my attempt to identify and distill those down.

I’ve spoken to tons of home cooks over the years, and I’ve noticed some familiar patterns. A lot of people feel stuck when it comes to cooking. Sure, they can follow a recipe, but it doesn’t always turn out how they want and they don’t feel comfortable expanding beyond that. They can follow instructions, but they don’t understand how to cook.

To get good at cooking, you have to understand that it is a sensory, intuitive process— not one that’s guided by directions in a recipe. Great cooks don’t follow instructions— they use taste, smell, feel, sight, sound, and touch to guide them. They know how to adapt, improvise, and use their instincts. Anyone can follow a recipe, but true cooking goes beyond that and requires sensory awareness and an understanding of the process that’s happening.

The good news is that cooking well requires only a few foundational skills that anyone can learn. Once you have those, you just have to get into the kitchen, get your reps in, and practice. This isn’t a guarantee that every dish you cook will turn out exceptional. I’ve been cooking regularly for well over a decade and I still make mistakes and have dishes that turn out poorly. But even those mistakes help make you a better cook, provided you use them as an opportunity to understand what went wrong and course correct in the future.

Once you’re armed with an understanding of the fundamentals of cooking, those mistakes become much more rare. In this course I will teach you how to think like a chef so that you can move beyond a process of following instructions and into one that’s intuitive, creative, and fun. You’ll understand what’s happening in the cooking process, learn how to build and balance flavor, and acquire some practical skills that make the cooking process easier and less stressful.

In order to do this, you need to start by thinking beyond recipes.

Cooking based on senses and intuition can feel like a big leap for people who are used to following recipes, but it’s essential to becoming a great cook. One of the first steps is to stop thinking just in terms of recipes and start thinking in terms of techniques and methods.

Let’s define some terms here.

Recipes are step-by-step instructions for creating a specific dish. They tell you what to do, in what order, with what ingredients, and in what proportions.

Recipes are great for learning new dishes, passing along info about how to cook something, exploring new cuisines, and understanding flavor combinations. They’re especially useful when you’re just starting out and don’t feel confident cooking something from scratch. But recipes have a lot of limitations.

I’ve written hundreds of recipes, and I know as well as anyone that nothing translates perfectly. The person who wrote the recipe was cooking in a different kitchen, using different equipment, and cooking with different food. Even if you’re using the same ingredients, there are always subtle variations because no two carrots, onions, or ribeyes are ever exactly the same.

When you follow a recipe exactly, what you’re really trying to do is achieve the same outcome (in terms of flavor and presentation) as the person who wrote the recipe. But once you recognize that recipes aren’t always exact and that you’re always working with slightly different variables, you’ll realize that you often need to adapt in order to be successful. The real way to ensure that you’re going to get the same outcome isn’t by blindly following the recipe, but by paying attention, tasting continuously, and adjusting based on what your own senses tell you.

This is perhaps the one thing I need to emphasize most to newer cooks who are used to following recipes to a tee— in the long run, following recipes too strictly actually makes you a worse cook. You need to learn to rely on your own senses, rather than the specific instructions of a recipe, and you need to be able to deviate from the recipe at times.

This can feel really intimidating at first, and that’s okay! It’s a gradual process, but there are some things you can do to help you make this transition. The first is to learn to think in terms of techniques and methods rather than recipes, and the second is to focus on building your kitchen intuition via pattern recognition. We’ll dive into both below.

Instead of focusing on recipes, I suggest that cooks focus on techniques and methods.

Techniques

Techniques are individual cooking actions that produce a specific result.

Examples of techniques include searing (which develops browning and texture), boiling (which softens, cooks, and adds moisture), deglazing (which lifts the fond off the bottom of a pan), and a bunch more. Techniques are important because they allow you to connect specific actions to specific outcomes. Techniques transcend individual recipes— you’ll see the same technique show up in many different recipes— and even when it’s in a totally different context, it tends to produce a similar result.

Once you’ve learned a particular technique, you can start to apply it widely. Take the technique of searing— you get a pan ripping hot, add in a high-heat oil, and then cook your food in the pan to develop texture and browning. You do this when you cook a steak, when you brown short ribs before braising them, and when you cook pork chops. Once you’ve done that repeatedly, you learn that you can apply this same technique any time you want to develop texture and browning. It works for fish filets, chicken thighs, tofu, or cauliflower steaks. You can utilize the sear technique any time you want to achieve that same outcome, even if you’re cooking something new or don’t have a recipe.

One of the goals of cooking (and something you should remember throughout this course) is to build up a mental library of different techniques. As you add more and more of these to your repertoire, you’ll understand which actions produce which results, and you’ll be able to pick and choose which to use based on your intended outcome. No recipes required.

Below is a list of some of the main techniques used in cooking. You don’t need to memorize these right now, but this can serve as a useful reference.

Methods

Methods are broad combinations of ingredients and techniques that produce a specific dish, with a lot of flexibility for variation.

Unlike recipes, which tell you exactly what to do, methods tell you generally what to do but leave the specifics up to the cook. Methods are adaptable— once you master a method, you can use it across a variety of different dishes— and they prioritize intuition, rather than following instructions. Methods more closely mimic how great cooks operate.

A simple example is the famous French vinaigrette method:

Take 1 part acid, 3 parts oil, some kind of binder (mustard, yogurt, tahini, honey, etc), and salt to taste. Whisk together, taste, and adjust proportions as needed.

This method is simple, but once you’ve mastered it you’ll be able to make hundreds of different dressings using it. You can change up the source of acidity, the oil, the binder and experiment with all kinds of flavor profiles. You can add additional ingredients or even change up the proportions— it’s simply a starting point and high-level formula to follow, but the specifics are up to you.

The braised meat method (something we’ll cover later in this course) is another example. The braising method could be described as follows:

1. Sear the meat to develop browning.
2. Deglaze the pot to incorporate the fond into the liquid.
3. Simmer the meat in a braising liquid until it’s fully cooked.

As you can see, the focus here is on a specific combination of techniques, but it leaves a ton of room for customization. You can do this with short ribs, chicken thighs, or chuck roast. You can use water, broth, wine, or beer as the braising liquid. You can add in various aromatics and flavorings. And there’s no specific cook times listed, since that can vary substantially. All of the specifics are left up to the preferences and instincts of the person doing the cooking, which is how it should be!

If you’re doing this for the first time, you can rely on a recipe to get a better sense of heat levels, cook times, or specific ingredients. But once you’ve braised a few times, you’ll get a sense of the method and you’ll be able to get a lot more creative. Most recipes are actually just methods with very specific ingredients, ratios, heat levels, and cook times listed. Whenever you cook a recipe, try to think in terms of the method being used rather than the specifics.

Methods encourage a form of cooking that’s less rigid, more adaptable to different ingredients and circumstances, and far more creative. The best way to become a great home cook is to start thinking (and cooking) in terms of methods. This allows you to cook specific dishes while also giving you a ton of room to play around with different flavor profiles and variations.

We all probably know someone who cooks in a way that feels effortless— they flow through the process, don’t look at recipes, taste as they go, adjust as needed, and never stress too much when things don’t go perfectly according to plan. These are people who have developed their kitchen intuition— a set of skills that allow you to cook based on feel and instinct rather than instructions.

Kitchen intuition can be summed up as a combination of a few key skills:

• Knowing how to use salt properly.
• Knowing how to use acidity properly.
• Understanding different flavor profiles and how to build and balance flavor.
• Understanding different types of heat and heat levels.
• Thinking in terms of techniques and methods.
• Being present and paying attention to sensory cues.

We’ll cover all of these throughout the course, but the last one mentioned is the skill you can start practicing right away.

Cooking is a process of controlled transformation. Every time you cook something, you’re taking it from one form and transforming it into another. It’s also a sensory process; you’re using every one of your five senses each time you cook, and the sensory inputs you get help guide you through the process of transformation.

The first step in building kitchen intuition is being present and paying attention to your senses so that you can develop pattern recognition. Those same cooks who flow effortlessly in the kitchen do so because they’re able to pick up on patterns that they’ve seen over and over and know what to do in response to them. They see the depth of browning on a piece of meat and know it’s time to flip. They feel the texture of a roasted vegetable and know it needs more time in the oven. They taste a broth and notice that it tastes a bit flat and thus needs more salt. All of these things can be learned over time as you get more reps in the kitchen, but they can only be learned if you cultivate a deep sensory awareness, pay attention, and start to connect the dots between the techniques you apply and the results you get. Even when you make a mistake, being present will allow you to diagnose what went wrong and how— this will actually make you a better cook because you’ll learn about different failure modes and how to avoid them in the future.

A lot of this course will be geared towards giving you the knowledge and skills necessary to develop kitchen intuition quickly. Start to build up a mental library of different techniques, how to apply them, and the results they produce. Think in terms of methods rather than specifics when you’re cooking various dishes, and start to really pay attention to your senses so that you can connect different patterns and cook based on instinct and feel.

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