The goal of cooking is to bring out flavors and to layer those flavors properly. Anyone can follow a recipe, but it takes a great cook to be able to utilize all of their senses and whip up something great using ingredients they have on hand. It takes skill, experience, and practice to perfect and deeply know how each ingredient affects a dish. I hope these tips will bring you closer to being a great cook!

1. Use All Your Senses

Look at the color. Smell it. Hear the sizzle or boil. Taste the food and each ingredient. Familiarize yourself with how things taste as they cook and how they taste raw, too. Have you seen those cooking shows where chefs try the food raw to see how to cook them? Well, they're more advanced, sure, but if you make this a habit, you will learn how food tastes like and what cooking does to those ingredients. You will develop a sense of how long to cook them and how they mingle with other ingredients. Of course, taste only those ingredients that actually make sense! Pretty please, do not eat raw things that can make you sick.

2. Set Timers

This is a big thing that I changed and I very rarely burn things now (Yay me!)! I like to use my oven or microwave timer because it makes me actually have to get up to clear the (annoying) beeping. The best part is I can do things in between cooking! 5/5 highly recommend you try it too. Quick tip, if you aren't sure when to set a timer on something, start low and take note of things in your head (or write it down, whatevs). After a couple of times of cooking it, you'll have a pretty clear idea of when to set that timer for your preferred doneness.

3. Know Your Salt

Some salts are saltier than others (I believe the common table salt is labeled as "pretty darn salty" from my made up scale of saltiness level). Know what type you have and how to best use it. The salt that most chefs use in their kitchen is Kosher salt because it is very versatile, has great surface area for meltability, a neutral flavor, and it is harder to over salt food because it is way less salty than other types. The main thing is to know the taste of the salt you have and start with small quantities. This is why most recipes call for "salt to taste" because 1 tsp of table salt does not equal the same amount of saltiness as 1 tsp of kosher salt.

4. Deglaze

Whenever you're sautéing anything, there is no reason for you to skip this very delicious step. All you do is use a small amount of liquid to pour over the hot pan after you saute. The heat will quickly produce a lot of steam and sizzles and it will help you clean out the brown bits of flavor bomb at the bottom of the pan. This can result in more flavorful sauces and stews. Have you heard of Maillard reaction? Well, if not, let me fill you in. Maillard reaction--named after French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard-- is what happens when we cook food and it turns brown and tasty. This reaction happens when the heat from cooking makes the sugars and proteins in our food react with each other, creating new flavors and smells that make our food taste delicious and look more appetizing. It is very flavorful and can add +3 to your food's deliciousness level (another made up scale from my head with no basis whatsoever).

TLDR; You pour a little bit of liquid on the hot pan (water, cooking wine, actual wine, mirin) to clean out the tasty browned bits stuck at the bottom after sautéing vegetables, such as after you caramelize onions.

5. Infuse

This is a game changer when cooking plant based. Meat usually gives fatty, oily flavor into dishes, so adding delicious flavored oils (sesame, olive, and garlic oil are my faves) into your meals boost the flavor tremendously. Infusing is just exposing an aromatic (such as garlic, spices, shallots, really anything that emits that nice aroma when heated) to a liquid for as long as possible without burning it. The most common thing I infuse in the kitchen is garlic! Infuse your water, your oil, whatever you are using, infuse it with spices, aromatics and herbs. Spices are usually best infused in oil and others work best with water and some do well with both. Wouldn't hurt to do a little research and see how to best activate the spices you use a lot.

6. Taste

I am not measurer. I just taste things as I go and you can never go wrong with this method. The drawback? Well, it takes time. You taste, add more seasoning to balance it out, let it simmer to meld the flavors, taste again, repeat. But hey! That's why food blogs help a lot! I've done all that time consuming tasting for you so you can just follow the recipe and make just a few adjustments!

7. Learn to Incorporate Subtle Flavors

So you know how if the main flavor profile is sweet, and we add a tiny bit of salt or something salty (salted caramels) to accent that sweetness and it just makes it exponentially more delicious? Same concept in any kind of cooking, as in baking. For example when I cook stews or curries, or really anything. I always add some sugar or a vegetable that gets sweet as you cook it (I love using caramelized sweet yellow onions or squashes for their natural sweetness).

8. Eat around the world

This just means pick a different cuisine to incorporate into your weekly meal plans. This will allow you to learn different flavor profiles with different cuisines and incorporate spices and herbs that you may have never tried. Doing this will not only vary your diet (spices and herbs are so so good for you!) but will also unlock a whole new world for your taste buds (reminiscing about the time I first tried Indian Curries..yuummm!). There are so many different spices that it can definitely be overwhelming in the beginning but if you pick at least 1 or 2 dishes with a different flavor profile, you will have a drawer full of spices in no time--and you will know how to use them this time! I used to put the same favorite spices in everything and of course, my food was good, but it had a similar flavor profile and boy did that get boring real quick.

9. Learn how to balance flavors

Have you ever been blown away by how delicious a dish is, but also can't pin point exactly what's in the dish? Well that, my friend, is how a very well balanced dish should taste like. A great tip I got from a Thai cooking class I attended when I visited Bangkok was to balance two flavors first and then balance the third and fourth and so on to it. You have to rely on your taste buds for this.

Here is a quick general guide:

• Too Salty? Dilute water or anything neutral tasting such as oils, plant milks, and coconut creams, whichever you think is best.

• Too sweet? add something salty or acidic (vinegars, lemons, and limes).

• Too sour? add something sweet--maple syrup, sugar, dates-- to help balance the flavor a bit. If it's applicable, like when you're making soup--water, plant milk, and oils also help balance out flavor.

• Add MSG - If you use MSG, add a little bit because it does a lot to a dish in terms of balancing flavors. I know this one gets a bad rap, so here are some common natural sources of MSG: tomatoes, mushrooms, soy sauce, seaweed, and miso paste. For the record, I stopped using MSG because of all the bad rumors around it, but when I looked into it, I didn't see any credible studies that actually prove those claims so it's been a staple in my kitchen as it has been in most households in Asia.

10. Cook A Lot !

Okay, maybe not everyday (I get lazy, too) but weekly, at least. It doesn't have to be anything fancy either. Just cook. Cook and know that you will make mistakes and cook something not very appetizing once in a while. Welcome those, laugh at them, and learn from them. Enjoy the process. Mistakes and failures are very vital in learning because it can teach us many things that success cannot. Cooking takes practice and patience. Try to be actually present when you cook. There will be days when you won't want to and on those days, I either suck it up and just start (once you start, time flies anyways), or hey, order some take out or frozen meals, who cares. Take your time. The important part is you to enjoy it. We learn more when we enjoy things, you know?

How many things here do you practice already? I hope you learned a few new things that you can incorporate into your everyday cooking! These are the things that I changed that leveled up my dishes. They may be subtle, but they do take some practice to become a habit. Have fun cooking up a storm in the kitchen!