Most Important Thing I’ve Learned from 'Top Chef' and My Real-Life Chefs

After more than a year working at the cooking school and a couple seasons of writing about Top Chef, I think I have narrowed down the biggest lesson I’ve learned from both activities:

Taste and adjust seasonings, frequently, throughout the cooking process, regardless of how familiar you are with the recipe.  And don’t forget to taste before you send the dish out.

This might seem like a banal realization, but since some Top Chefs have been sent home for forgetting to do it, I don’t feel so simple for feeling like it’s a valuable epiphany.

The chefs whose food I like the best at the shop taste a LOT throughout the cooking process, more than I ever would have expected.  It seems like they have made the recipe so many times, why would they need to check it so often, right?  But they do, and I admire the discipline and humility.  It shows respect for ingredients and the natural variation possible in your raw material.

In addition to the process itself, both the show and the shop have given me the questions to ask when tasting in order to arrive at a balanced dish.  Does it need more acid?  More umami?  More salt?  Something brightly-flavored?  Something sour or tangy?  Taste and adjust, taste and adjust, etc.

And another refinement of the seasoning process I’ve learned is to add some salt throughout the cooking process, too, not just at the end, since it can have a different effect if adding WHEN cooking as opposed to at the end of cooking.

I saw that in the lentils for the Lentil-Orzo Salad I made for the Fourth of July.  I checked them a ton of times as they cooked and added a few more smidges of salt as they slowly became more tender.  By the end, they didn’t taste salty, just more lentil-y and generally flavorful.

I used to be so focusing on the mechanical action of cooking I would forget entirely about tasting , and would often end up disappointed.  While I’m still frequently underwhelmed by my finished product, I’ve found the dishes where I am compulsively tasting all along are usually the ones I am most excited about.