11 Tips From A Chef To Help You Cook Recipe-Free At Home

It's generally understood that there's a big difference between a home cook and a professional chef. Of course, a professional chef working in a restaurant may have a wide range of specialist cooking equipment and unusual ingredients at their disposal. Plus, unless they're cooking an ever-changing chaotic menu like Carmie in The Bear, they're probably practicing the same dishes day in and day out. However, being a chef isn't an easy job — all that time spent in the kitchen translates to a deep knowledge of food and cooking.

A chef's experience allows them to cook faster, with less stress, and with better results. It can also allow them to cook recipe-free at home, trusting their instincts and training to guide them toward deliciousness. Not only can cooking without a recipe be truly liberating, but it can also give you the flexibility to adapt as necessary, course-correcting any issues to ensure the finished dish hits just right. 

Over the past few years, I've retrained as a chef, gaining experience in various Michelin-starred restaurants and completing a master's degree in Culinary Arts. This article will share some of the tricks and tips I've learned that have helped me to cook recipe-free at home. With my guidance, you will feel less pressure in the kitchen and learn to trust your instincts a bit more.

You don't need to be an expert in the kitchen to cook without recipes, but it definitely helps to understand some basic culinary concepts. Emulsification, sautéing, roasting, braising, steaming, poaching, deglazing, basting, blanching, and marination all follow simple rules that can be applied to a wide range of recipes or ingredients. When you understand the principles of these techniques, you can trust the process without relying on the measurements and timings of a specific recipe.

Deglazing simply involves pouring liquid (often in acidic form, like wine or vinegar) into a hot pan in which you've cooked something else. You do this to release any remnants stuck to the pan and create a sauce infused with the flavor of what you first prepared in the cooking utensil. With this knowledge, you can freestyle deglazing at home. 

For example, pan-sear a chicken breast, remove it, add a splash of white wine to the pan, and scrape any residual food in the cooking vessel. Then, add a little mustard and a dash of cream, and you will have a delicious creamy mustard sauce for your chicken. Do the same with a steak. This time, add some butter and red wine to the pan (along with any juices from your resting steak), and you will have a rich, glossy steak sauce. Precise measurements don't matter: You can easily adjust based on what you're cooking and for how many people.

When cooking, your senses are the best ally to judge if things are going well or if something needs adjusting. If roasting potatoes in the oven, for example, your eyes will tell you whether those potatoes need another 10 minutes to become golden or need to be removed right away! Similarly, your sense of smell will indicate if something's burning, but it is also your best tool to know if an ingredient has gone bad and should be thrown away. 

When making fried rice, the sound of the rice crackling in the hot pan is your sign that it's starting to change texture. If you hear no sound when an ingredient you're sautéing first hits the pan, it's probably best to remove it and give the cooking utensil more time to heat up. Touch, meanwhile, is a good way to tell the tenderness level of a steak (although this meat hand trick isn't foolproof). Just remember to wash your hands before and after.

Most important of all is taste. If you only taste your food once you've finished cooking, it is nearly impossible to correct any major issues other than seasoning. It's good to get into the habit of tasting sauces and other preparations while still cooking them to make sure they're headed in the right direction. Having a good supply of teaspoons on hand will make it easy to taste and adjust quickly during preparation.

Regardless of our meal preferences, our tastebuds all look for the same things in food. The importance of salt, fat, acid, and heat as the bedrock of cooking has been highlighted by chef and food writer Samin Nosrat, who named her James Beard award-winning book and Netflix series after them. Understanding how to balance these elements for harmony or contrast is one of the secrets to creating a depth of flavor in your home cooking.

Salt doesn't only make things salty: It can be used to intensify other flavors. Try a ripe tomato sprinkled with a little sea salt, and you'll taste the difference. Counterintuitively, salt can bring out the natural sweetness of an ingredient and can deepen umami flavors. Also, using salty ingredients such as anchovies in a puttanesca pasta sauce or soy sauce in a marinade adds complexity, depth, and seasoning.

Fat is an important part of our diet and a great carrier of flavor. It adds richness, creating a buttery mouthfeel that lingers on the palate but can also balance acidity and impart its own flavor. Arbequina olive oil is particularly fruity, for example, while the rendered fat of matured meat is humming with a satisfying umami flavor. 

Acid adds lightness and freshness, giving a dish more personality and creating nuance and contrast. Finally, heat allows textures and flavors to change during cooking. Wet and dry heat have different effects, and using heat cleverly will bring out the best of almost any ingredient.

A kitchen is like a science laboratory where you eat the experiments at the end. Understanding this and knowing that a bit of science takes place when you make a meal helps your home cooking in two ways. Firstly, it allows you to trust your intuition more confidently. For example, reducing a sauce is really just waiting for the water molecules within it to evaporate as it boils. The less water there is in a sauce, the higher the concentration of flavor particles contained in the ingredients. 

The second benefit to seeing cooking as a science is pure enjoyment. See yourself as a mad scientist trying to invent the tastiest version of whatever you're cooking. Suddenly, uncertainty becomes exciting. It's an opportunity to test and try something new! However, this spirit of scientific discovery only works when you know a bit about the science occurring in your kitchen. Learning about terms like the Maillard reaction and the chemistry behind emulsification will liberate your home cooking. This will allow you to follow the rules of science without worrying about the steps of a recipe.

You may be aware of the wonders of adding a splash of salty pasta water into a pan, along with your sauce and the cooked pasta. The starch-filled water helps your sauce cling to each piece of pasta and adds a subtly flavor element, while the salt adds seasoning. However, there are many uses for pasta water in your kitchen, which extend beyond adding it to the pasta, making it worthy of its nickname "liquid gold." Let your pasta water cool, then reserve it in a sealed container in your fridge. It can be used for up to three days for all manner of preparations, from softening a bread dough to seasoning almost any sauce that needs volume, thickness, and salinity. 

Pasta water isn't the only by-product of cooking that's worth holding onto. Aquafaba, the watery liquid accompanying chickpeas and other types of beans, is a perfect vegan alternative to egg white when preparing meringue or baking. It can even make foam for vegan versions of egg-white cocktails. Meanwhile, pan drippings are often discarded but are loaded with flavor and can easily be incorporated into a sauce in the same pan. Finally, leftover bones can be repurposed to make stock. Simply roast them, and add them to a big pot with a mirepoix and cold water. Let everything simmer for a few hours, remove the bones and vegetables, and strain and store them in the fridge or freezer until needed.

It's easy to overcomplicate things and get overwhelmed when trying a new recipe. Perhaps you know you want to cook something with halloumi and couscous but haven't decided which (if any) herbs, spices, and sauce you want to include in the dish. Following your culinary instincts is admirable; however, you don't want to rely too much on spontaneity mid-recipe. This is especially true when you've already got one eye on your halloumi to make sure it doesn't burn and another on your couscous so it doesn't overcook and dry out.

Instead, get most of the planning done before you begin. This starts with an idea and a list of ingredients, either physical or mental. Once you have a plan, gather all of your ingredients so they're easily accessible, an approach known as mise en place. This prevents the risk of discovering mid-cooking that you've run out of something essential and allows you to make meals smoothly without delays from, say, rummaging through your kitchen cupboards. 

It can also help to organize your ingredients on a baking sheet or muffin tray, and using just one container for all your mise en place also cuts down on unnecessary dish cleaning. You should also make sure you have enough of your kitchen basics like salt and oil and keep them within easy reach. Finally, to keep things flowing smoothly, try to get as much of your food preparation done, like washing and chopping vegetables, before moving on to cooking.

It is often said that cooking is an art while baking is a science, but this isn't strictly true. When freewheeling your way through your own recipe idea at home, it pays to have a few ratios memorized, which you can call upon when needed. Remembering a ratio is much easier than exact ingredient rates from a recipe, plus a ratio is a blueprint that allows you to easily scale up or scale down depending on how many people you're cooking for.

The most useful ratios in the kitchen relate to ingredient types rather than prescribing specifics. For example, with a simple vinaigrette ratio of three parts oil to one part acid (3:1), you can use whatever oil you prefer or have available, and the acid could be vinegar, lemon juice, or anything else acidic. A simple syrup consists of equal parts sugar and water (1:1), but you can select any type of sugar you want and could even swap water with a flavored liquid if you're feeling creative. Similarly, a roux can be made from equal parts of flour and fat. Biscuit and pie dough can be made from a ratio of 3:2:1: Three parts flour, two parts butter, and one part water. Learning a handful of ratios like these will allow for endless improvisation when cooking recipe-free.

Heat is a fundamental part of cooking, but different types and levels of heat will cook food in unique ways. Because pizzas are relatively thin, an oven at maximum temperature will generally yield the best results. This will cook everything rapidly without allowing enough time for your pizza to lose too much moisture and become dry or burned. On the other hand, when roasting large pieces of meat, such as a roast chicken, a "low and slow" approach ensures the meat cooks evenly throughout without an overcooked exterior. 

Similarly, perfectly boiled potatoes are achieved by placing them in a pot of cold water, letting them come to a boil, then simmering until a knife slides into them relatively easily. The water comes to boiling temperature gradually. This thoroughly warms and cooks the entire potato rather than blasting the outside with boiling water, leaving the inside undercooked and the outside mushy.

When preparing food in a pan, high heat will give you a beautiful crust, thanks to the Maillard reaction, while cooking your meat quickly enough that the middle remains succulent and juicy. On the other hand, when rendering fat, it's best to use a lower temperature as it prevents it from browning before it liquifies. Finally, when cooking meat, it's usually best to let it reach room temperature first to ensure it is an even cook. Check out the temperature tip for roasting meat.

Everyone is familiar with the nagging feeling of doing something with the leftovers in the fridge. Devising ways to use them can feel like a hassle, but leftovers often present an opportunity. With so many options for what to cook at home, it can help to practice what's known as restrictive creativity, which means deliberately limiting your options to help you create a plan more easily. 

For example, a half can of leftover coconut milk could lead you to make a curry with a creamy coconut sauce. However, it could just as easily be mixed with icing sugar to create a cake topping or dolloped on top of a spicy chili con carne to help tame that heat. When you're really stuck for ideas, there's always soup: It's astonishing how many leftover ingredients work wonders in a soup, either whole or blended into the soup itself. Not only does planning your home cooking around leftovers reduce your food waste, but it's also a great way to practice cooking recipe-free. Just remember to use whatever you reheat, as you should never reheat leftovers twice.

Creating a good meal at home is all about harmony and contrast. Ensuring you have different textures in a dish makes each bite more interesting by creating textural contrasts. Think about most classic dishes; plenty of textural contrasts have helped make it appealing. A Caesar salad combines crunchy textures of croutons and lettuce with a creamy dressing and tender chicken. Even sandwiches benefit from a textural variety. A Reuben sandwich contains soft pastrami and oozy melted Swiss cheese, with sauerkraut and grilled bread for that all-important crunch. 

Even soups are at their best when accompanied by some crusty bread, and macaroni cheese benefits from the slight firmness of cooked pasta to give body to the melted cheese, possibly with the addition of a crunchy breadcrumb topping. When cooking recipe-free at home, it's worth thinking about which textures are lacking in what you're making. Perhaps a handful of crushed nuts or some firm pickled vegetables could take your meal to the next level.

If there's one thing I've picked up in professional kitchens that changes the game when cooking recipe-free at home, it's cleaning as you go. We've all been there: You've finished cooking, but in the heat of the action, you didn't take the time to keep things tidy and organized. As a result, your cooking has been a bit chaotic. You forgot to add spice, ran out of pots, or something on the stove burned while you tried to panic-wash one you've already used. Or, you forgot about your resting meat, and now it's stone cold. You can reduce the chances of these things happening by cleaning as you cook.

Once you've finished one step in your cooking, wash any utensils you won't be using again to help keep your workspace and mind clear of clutter. It can also help to keep a container on your kitchen countertop for rubbish and waste. This prevents going back and forth to the bin so you can concentrate on cooking up a storm. Cleaning as you go is incredibly useful, and it's the single best way to reduce potential stress when cooking without a recipe. This allows you to think clearly about the next step in your plan, ensuring you have plenty of clean space to prepare whatever you have in mind.