Top Chef's Gail Simmons
As a food critic and judge on Bravo's reality competition Top Chef, Gail Simmons knows good food when she tastes it. A graduate of New York City's Institute of Culinary Education, Simmons shares a few rules she says can help any home chef make a great meal.
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Take the Time to Cook
If you're taking the time to cook, you've won the battle. We all lead busy lives, we work too hard, we overschedule ourselves. If you make it a priority in your life, and you take the time to cook, your food will be good. That's just practice. Anyone can learn to cook well if you take the time to do it.
Photo: © 2009 Jupiterimages Corporation
Quality Ingredients and Patience
Find combinations of flavors you love and buy the best quality ingredients you can afford. Your food is only going to be as good as the sum of its parts, like anything else. If you don't use good ingredients, the outcome is never going to be excellent. But if you buy the freshest ingredients that are in season, at their peak, and you cook with them, you can't really go wrong. And then patience. Patience is the secret to good food.
Photo: © 2009 Jupiterimages Corporation
Read Recipes Throughly
A big thing that gets people in trouble in the kitchen is not reading the recipe from start to finish before you cook it. Before you start anything, read through the entire recipe once. If you start cooking from Step 1 without reading on, you might learn that you should have done something in a different order. Or that you will want to have something prepared before you get to that step. So read the recipe through from start to finish, before you start even chopping your first onion.
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Organize and Prep
Do all of your prep work and keep it orderly and organized. It makes the cooking process so much easier. There's a reason that instructions are laid out the way they are. Another amazing secret to cooking is getting someone else to clean up. That's what my husband is for. One of the many reasons I married him is that he is fine to clean up if I do the cooking. The secret to great marriage.
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Try Something New Every Day
Whether it's cooking something new or just tasting something new, trying something out is the secret to cooking well—and the secret to life, in some ways, is to keep tasting. Try a new ingredient every day, if you can, and do your research. There's so much out there to explore. We live in a country that has access to so many extraordinary things. So many tastes. Even me—I eat for a living, and there's a trillion things I still want to try.
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Read About Food
Read as much as you can. Read about food and read recipes. I read them like I read novels at home in bed. Cookbooks too—find a voice, a cooking voice, that you really like. Whether it's Art Smith or Tom Colicchio, two very different cooks, but they both have great philosophies on food and have so much to teach you.
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Taste and Season
Anyone will tell you this—any chef—the biggest flaw when people are cooking, whether they are following a recipe or cooking off the cuff, is that you get so wrapped up in what you're doing, you forget to taste it along the way. And then you get to the very end and you can't correct the mistakes that you've made. Taste and season as you go—don't just add salt at the very end. Add it gradually, and make sure you're adding it. But then taste it to make sure you're not adding too much or too little. It's so much easier to fix as you go than it is to rectify after you've already made the mistake. Remember to salt and pepper and that using the best possible products will always make sure your food is delicious.
Photo: © 2009 Jupiterimages Corporation
Learn the Basics
Once you learn the basic tenets of cooking, you can cook anything. There's no recipe that's too complicated if you break it down because they are all just variations on your basic techniques. There's only a certain number of ways to cook. There's sautéing, braising, boiling, frying. And once you know how to do each of them, you can do them with anything. So there's no reason to fear cooking. Finally, cook for people you love, and they'll always appreciate it. If they don't, kick them out. They're not allowed at your table!
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