6 cooking tips to boost your confidence in the kitchen

Cooking is easy or so it seems in recipes written with scant directions and TikTok videos that result in expertly prepared dishes in a matter of sec...

Cooking is easy - or so it seems in recipes written with scant directions and TikTok videos that result in expertly prepared dishes in a matter of seconds. But if you’ve never really sauteed onions or seared a steak, it becomes a daunting task, and the final meal might be less than picture-perfect. It’s no wonder that cooking novices might turn more often to delivery than to a cookbook, especially after wistfully watching a celebrity chef gleefully chopping, whisking and frying on TV.

The fault isn’t yours. Every chef began with the same skills, or lack thereof, which means every home cook also has the potential to prepare a meal with the same fearlessness as Julia Child, Gordon Ramsay or Hilda Baci. Heck, Child didn’t have a clue how to cook an omelet before she was in her 30s - so there’s hope for us all.

"I wish I could cook like that” is a sentiment that regularly fills the classroom at Home Cooking New York, where founder Jennifer Clair has been teaching a popular back-to-basics cooking class since 2002. "People decide quickly that they are terrible cooks,” says Clair, whose book, "Six Basic Cooking Techniques,” is based on the class. "I’m always trying to undo trauma. People give themselves a lot less bandwidth to learn cooking as a skill than they would something like learning a language. It just takes practice.”

Clair frequently sees students who are timid in approaching the stove and only gingerly poke at the contents of a pan. "When I ask for a student volunteer,” she says, "they tend to stand two feet away. I tell them to move up to the stove and own their space. No one is in charge here but you.”

Building confidence in the kitchen won’t automatically turn a beginner into a five-star chef, but understanding basic techniques can mean the difference between beautifully browned onions kissed with just the right amount of caramelization and a pile of charred onion bits. "Once you learn very small things, you can up your game very quickly,” Clair says.