How To Cook With Basic Herbs And Spices

The Must Have Seasoninge To Cook With

Salt & PepperIn over 99% of whatever you cook, you will need to season with salt and pepper at nearly every stage of the process. There are two of your ingredients. You do not even want to turn on the stove without salt and pepper. With these two ingredients alone you can cook a lot of dishes and they will taste good.

Basic Herbs To Enhance Your Recipes

The first group of herbs I recommend for your recipe foundation can be found prominently within the lyrics of an old folk ballad, Scarborough Fair, "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme". Recipes almost always call for some combination of one or more of these ingredients. You can't help but improve your cooking results with these at hand.

Many recipes include herbs and spices that are nice to have, but not vital to the success of the dish. For example, if you find you don't have the tarragon a recipe calls for, don't panic. Just go on without it. Your dish won't taste the same as it would if tarragon was added, but it most likely will not suffer, either.

BasilWhen it comes to cooking with herbs, there is no doubt that fresh herbs are best. What if you can't or won't maintain your own herb garden? Or, perhaps you are just starting out on your own, and your grocery budget doesn't allow for the constant purchase of fresh herbs . Dried herbs will do just fine. You can find them in the spice aisle of your favorite grocery store. And, while cooking with dried herbs is fine, don't garnish or top your dish with them.

Roux

Finally, the roux (pronounced roo). The roux is the foundation for many sauces and gravies. It is a thickening agent that is extremely easy to prepare.

In a hot pan or pot add equal amounts of fat or oil or butter with flour. Cook it a few minutes to extinguish that raw-flour taste, you now have a blond roux. Cook it a little longer and the roux becomes a peanut butter color. A little longer and it becomes a nutty chocolate brown - great for gumbos and such. The longer a roux cooks, the less thickening power it has.

Gravy

As an example, whisking in chicken or beef broth into your roux creates chicken or beef gravy. The drippings from the chicken or beef greatly enhance the flavor of the gravy. Then, season to taste. (Salt and pepper at least)

Cooking Oils

Light oils such as Corn Oil, Vegetable Oil, and Canola oil are used in dishes where you do not want the oil to greatly impact the flavor of your dish. Examples of this include hash brown and some fish dishes. These are the oils of choice for deep fryers and southern fried stuff

Olive Oil and Extra Virgin Olive Oil are widely used in the cooking process because the flavor enhancement is desirable. (Trivia: You may hear the term E.V.O.O. for Extra Virgin Olive Oil. This term crept into our language compliments of Rachael Ray. So much so that it is now part of new editions of Webster's dictionary.) E.V.O.O. is the oil of choice for many salad dressings and Italian cooking.

Butter burns easily. However, mixing butter with a little oil in your pan raises the burn temperature. Speaking of butter, I have yet to find a margarine product that, in my opinion, holds up to butter in the cooking process. Foods just taste better and look better with butter. Just ask Paula Deen.

Challenge for you : Find a recipe you want to cook and separate the ingredients into the groupings I made here. Chances are there is not much left in the recipe beyond the proteins. Once you do this, I suspect that the cooking instructions, no matter how badly written, will suddenly have more clarity.

The following video by Kraft is meant to show how easy cooking really is. Note that outdoor grilling is not the only way to cook a flank steak. One can use an indoor grill, grill pan, skillet, griddle, broiler, and even the oven.

Now, go forth and have fun with your cooking adventure. What is the worst that could happen? You don't like the results and throw it away. Big deal. That is how we learn. Trust me, the world will not end because of a misstep in the kitchen. Cooking is not an exact science; it is a matter of taste.