4 Important Things You Should Know About Food Preparation
Great meals start with proper food preparation skills and know-how! Delicious dishes all begin with good food preparation habits too. Of course, while some foods seem easier to prepare than others, it’s all about developing the right skills.
Regardless of your cooking skills, proper food preparation will bring out the better chef in you and your dishes. When you properly prepare your foods, you’ll save time and money too. And always step one step ahead when it comes to meal planning as well.
It All Begins With Proper Food Preparation
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Typically, folks prefer preparing their meals by shopping ahead of time and then prepping their foods on the weekends. More so, this allows them to have everything ready to go for the workweek early. Also, when dieting, it’s easier to keep tabs on your carb and calorie intake.
However, food preparation takes time, patience, planning, and you can forfeit the joys of food freshness as well. While we love the ease of leftovers, they can taste less fresh and a little monotonous. But don’t fret!
Below, you’ll discover some food preparation tips that will help you avoid the doldrums and become a better cook too.
1 – Handling & Storing Food – A Food Preparation Must!
Believe it or not, the handling of your food, especially delicate foods, is super important. For example, take a look at any produce section of your grocery store. Those nasty bruises all over the fruits and vegetables are the result of too much handling.
Too much handling of your food before prep will take a toll on them, resulting in not-so-delicious dishes. Always take care when handling your food before food preparation, even your meats as well.
Once you prep your food, always stow them away in the proper containers before cooking. Also, tell everyone in the house hands-offs! You don’t want anyone touching your carefully prepped food either.
You want to make sure you use air-tight meal prep containers as they will keep your food nice and fresh! While plastic storage containers work fine, you’ll discover glass containers are great too.
2 – Keep Foods Separate During Food Preparation
Another great tip for food preparation is to keep your foods separate as possible. Doing so ensures you will preserve the integrity of each food type. Cross-mixing certain foods can cause adverse reactions, so you’ll want to avoid doing this.
Therefore, good food preparation habits include this tip as well. Try and keep foods separate when prepping. Plus, you don’t want flavors to crossover either. You’ll find doing so will allow you to bring out the best of each flavor on its own. Then, when you are ready to cook them, you can bring all the wonderful aromas together nicely!
3 – Cooking Settings
When it comes to food preparation, your cooking settings will determine how your meals turn out. For the most part, even more so when preparing delicate foods like fish or poultry. You can easily damage your food if your cooking settings don’t meet the recipe standards.
For example, pressure cooker settings can be helpful when preparing things like delicate food. It’s easy to adjust the settings you need depending on the requirements of your recipes. These types of cooking appliances can create a make or break-it dish at the end of the day.
When you have detailed and exact control over temperature settings, you can fine-tune any dish to turn out perfectly. Regardless, any appliance you use to cook your meal, you should always pay close attention to temperature.
4 – Combination Of Flavors
When it comes to food preparation, it’s all about the combination of flavors as well. Pairing flavors when creating a recipe is a science! Think about certain flavor pairing like chocolate and peanut butter or chocolate and mushroom? It’s a good idea to think about flavor pairing when doing food prep.
Moreover, food has certain chemical compounds called aromatic compounds. These compounds create the aromas we interpret as flavor. Our nose detects them and our brains tell us to eat them! Remember, taste and flavor are not the same.
For instance, cocoa features a very similar aromatic compound to steak and porcini mushrooms. We call these natural pairs. Before you do your food preparation, think about flavor and aromatic pairing. Ask yourself what key elements you want to feature in your dish.
Now, It’s Time To Serving Your Delicious Recipes!
Now, you completed your food preparation and patiently cooked your food, and it’s time to serve it up! Of course, you want your dish to be visually appealing and aromatic, and with the right food prep, it is! Keeping these food preparation tips in mind, every meal will turn out great and the leftovers even better!
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