13 mistakes you make as an amateur cook

Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the food lovers of online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat and what to cook. This time our chefs serve you: 13 mistakes that amateur cooks make.

The cooking course is much more than a quick cooking course with all kinds of handy tricks. And that difference is especially visible in the kitchen of amateur cooks. They are not handy with knives, they put vegetables in far too small pans and randomly throw a handful of salt over the food to season it. These are 13 mistakes that professional chefs would never make.

Kettle
Richard: ‘Professional chefs are smart with hot water. They don’t start with cold water, because that takes too much time, but take it from a kettle.’

Anti-slip
Grace: ‘Always secure your cutting board on the counter so it doesn’t slide. Professional chefs always do this by placing a cloth underneath or a piece of damp kitchen paper.’

Hard-boiled
Keith: ‘Most home cooks boil eggs far too hard. A blue-green egg is inedible.’

Savory snack
Kenneth: ‘Too much salt in a dish. You can always add salt, but you can’t take it out. And also: not cleaning the workspace in between. That means you’ll spend a long time tidying up when you’re done cooking.’

Liar
Jeffrey: ‘Are you crazy, professional chefs make mistakes too. Burning bacon should be punishable. Or forgetting to put the lid on the blender and then splattering the entire kitchen up to the ceiling with tomato sauce. All chefs who say they never make mistakes are lying.’

Understand
Mikka: ‘Do exactly what the recipe says. It’s not ‘painting by numbers’. Understand what is meant in a recipe, know why you need to add ingredients in a certain order. That’s better than blindly following what is said.’

Test
Richard: ‘Taste, taste, taste! You must always taste before you serve a dish.’

Almost the same
Mark: ‘Some amateur cooks believe that with the right recipes and the right YouTube video they can make exactly the same as a chef in a restaurant. That’s not true.’

Very hard
Sarah: ‘Replacing ingredients with something else. That’s possible, but you need to know what you’re doing. Butter is butter, not margarine. You can replace gelatin with something else, but then understand how to convert the amount, otherwise you’ll get panna cotta as hard as a brick.’

Le-zen
Lisa: ‘Many people do not weigh the ingredients correctly, do not read a recipe properly and randomly replace ingredients.’

Dullness
Emily: ‘It’s hard to point out one big difference, but I think I should mention good knives. Most people at home do not have good kitchen knives, or the knives are dull, bent and home cooks do not know how to cut well with them.’

Fits well
Jean: ‘Using pans that are too small, or far too large. It’s probably because people only have a few pans in the cupboard, and then you have to make do with what you have. But usually, vegetables are cooked in a pan that is far too small. So invest in a good set of pots.’

Wannabe
Pam: ‘The biggest mistake is: thinking you are a professional chef. You are an amateur. You can make delicious curry, or poach fish well or fry a steak, but that doesn’t make you a professional chef.’