Previous Story
5 Ways to Make Any Meal Look and Taste Restaurant-Quality
Everyone loves to eat meals cooked in a restaurant. However, replicating those dishes at home can be quite difficult. No matter how hard you try, you probably have trouble getting it just right like your favorite restaurants do. Thankfully, you don’t have to go to an elite culinary school to learn how to cook homemade dinners that taste and look like the ones from your favorite restaurants. Below are some pointers that can make a huge difference.
Get the Right Tools
If you want to reproduce restaurant quality food, you need the right tools to achieve that level of cooking. Accuracy is important for restaurant quality food, so get an instant read thermometer. To make the best sauces and liquid components, you’ll need an immersion blender. A vegetable steamer can do wonders with your veggies. You might even want a Dutch oven. It can be cheaper and easier to get lower quality tools, and while those may be fine for easier recipes, they simply won’t cut it with more complex recipes.
Get the Best Ingredients
Cooking restaurant quality food requires using quality ingredients. Always try to use fresh fruits and vegetables if you can. Freshly cut meat from a butcher will be superior to meat that has been frozen for an incredibly long period.
Get your bread, buns, and rolls from a high quality baking company, like Klosterman Baking Company. If you start with great ingredients, you’ll be much more likely to create great dishes.
Treat the Dish as a Canvas
Restaurant quality dishes have a certain look to them on the plate. They look tasty and actually have strong visual appeal. Recreating that aesthetic quality with food does take some practice, but it’s achievable for a home cook. Use the white plate as a canvas and try to arrange food and sauces in a way that visually pops.
Season for Success
One difference between restaurant quality food and mediocre home cooked food is that often the homemade food is under-seasoned. Keep in mind that without salt and pepper, most dishes simply won’t be good at all. You should also buy a spice rack and become familiar with everything from allspice to tarragon. You might not like all of them, and there are some that you might use only rarely, but try them and experiment with different combinations.
Learn from the Pros on the Internet
Amateur cooks of the past had to rely on family members and cook books to learn how to make dishes. Today, technology has bridged the gap between professional chefs and the home cook. There are endless hours of videos on television and YouTube with professional chefs teaching watchers how to cook restaurant quality food. The amount of recipes and articles on blogs and other websites from professionals is also endless.
There is really nothing preventing a home cook from making restaurant quality dishes at home. All it requires is the right ingredients, the right tools, the right instruction, and a lot of practice. Keep working on your cooking. Eventually, you will improve to a similar level of quality that you would see in a restaurant.
