I would say that many new cooks also under season quite frequently.

Another good one is use the correct knife for things.

I have two:
1. Don't crowd the pan. It may take a bit longer but cook foods in batches so you get even browning and a nice crust. And this goes for veggies and meats.
2. Don't be afraid of salt. Salt everything as you go and then when the dish is finsihed, taste again and salt some more if needed.

Cooking everything on high heat because you think it'll get it done sooner.

@inchbranch, yup! That's #4 on Cheese' list!

@rosebud I wish more people would be afraid of salt. Too many people oversalt food while cooking it and you can't take salt out of food. I personally find the taste of salt horrible. A little used to sharpen flavors is fine but some people really don't like salty food - and its always awkward to not eat much and then have to decide if I want to be honest when the host asks what is wrong. (And yes, I'm often told that no-one else at the table finds the food oversalted.)

I was totally guilty of #2. If garlic is good, more garlic will be awesome! To a point, yes, a point I frequently sailed beyond. My husband is now learning. Inchbranch called it: high heat, everytime, everything.

My family would say my current mistake is too much variety. I'm always interested in trying something new. They, however, are interested in having that delicious meal I tried last week again sometime soon. Soon as in this week, not in 8 months when I stumble across the annotated print-out while decluttering my recipes.

I would say not checking the doneness of poultry. It's just gross to cut into some raw chicken or turkey. Yes, this has happened to me when a roommate did not check what she made. Thermometers are helpful because you can't always just cook it for the time the recipe states. Sometimes it takes a shorter time, sometimes longer. Thickness can vary and affect cooking time.

More posts like this please! I'm a new cook as well.
1. Leaving out the salt or using the wrong salt is a huge mistake. Read Salted.
2. My boyfriend (former sous chef) says new pans will burn hotter than old ones and that's why I kept buring the food.
3. Get to know each ingredient. Practice cooking it, read about it and try diff techniques.

@Amy-in-STL of course it's up to you whether you want salt or not, but industrial salt is disgusting. Check out the webpage of The Meadow, Mark Bitterman's salt shop. He buys artesinal and there's dozens of different kinds, all high quality and some very mild.

assuming substitutions... my boyfriend is the master chef in our house, and i took the reigns for trying out microwave cake in a mug a few nights ago... we were out of veggie oil and egss, and i substituted with OLIVE oil and simmered ground flax seeds and water.

SO bad, but we both ate the "cake" (if you could even call it that) because i went through so much effort to get our chocolate fix when it was too late to go to the grocery:

http://www.beyondthestoop.com/2012/08/recipe-fail.html

New cooks tackle big recipes without knowing the basic techniques and the time involved. Deciding to do an elaborate meal--like the ones Gourmet magazine used to feature in their major article--is a true recipe for disaster. Start small and then work your way up--and learn what you can make ahead of time.

J&H that's funny - after I developed a gluten allergy I was ecstatic to see that there were still mixes for chocolate chip cookies. But the recipe called for no eggs. What? I thought cookies always included eggs! So I defiently added them to the recipe; the cookies were fluffy and actually had giant bubbles in them. My boyfriend called them, "cookie cakes".

@Rosebud, Amy and Emmi..

I think oversalting is a problem for many people, including those with heart conditions. For me, I've been noticing lately that a lot of restaurant food seems overly salty. I think this is connected to the fact that many chefs smoke, so their taste is not as sensitive as someone who doesn't.

Using good quality salt with consideration is fine, but "salt[ing] everything as you go.. and salt some more if needed" really doesn't sound like very good advice to me. At least leave the "salt some more if needed" up to the person who is about to actually eat the food.

I was so excited when I learned #1. Not touching/fiddling with something that is grilling or frying is so important. Leaving things in the oven without opening the door every 3 minutes... I think learning that has had the biggest impact on my cooking over any other skill.

@Carrotsticks it's true that some people are supposed to be on a low-salt diet. But just to clarify, salt does not cause high blood pressure. I don't think there has been a cause identified. It's just that people with high BP can artificially reduce their BP by depriving themselves of salt. Salt is the only mineral we actually need to survive. I'm not saying eat huge amounts; but if someone died directly from salt, it would be from toxicity, not because it causes heart problems.

Agree with number 3 - most dishes benefit from being left alone. Also, multitasking is not a good idea in the kitchen, especially for novice cooks. Do one thing at a time, slowly, and do it well. Or delegate. Unless you're working in a pro kitchen, there's no need to rush. That's how accidents happen.

@emmi,

If course, I'm not suggesting that we should never use salt, but it should be used sparingly.

You would never guess it, but my partner has high blood pressure (and a history of heart trouble in almost every blood relative). Friends who cook for us usually don't know that he's on daily blood pressure meds because he doesn't look like someone who would have that problem since he's otherwise very healthy, fit and relatively young. It's not like a salty meal will kill him, but it makes controlling his blood pressure more difficult. My comment was to counter the advice given by @rosebud that salt should be used with abandon. I know that's not exactly what they said, but it comes across that way and really isn't very helpful.

Anyway, I mentioned you since I totally agree that cheap salt can ruin a meal. Good salts are available where you don't need a lot in order to punch the flavour enough. Too much salt is just gross though, and following @rosebud's advice could lead many new cooks to an extremely salty meal.

I'm so happy this article was linked here- I love Cracked!

@Carrotsticks I also think Bitterman in his book probably shouldn't have said that people will know how much salt is too much. At the same time, I think most of us know that diet advice from a blogger or food author should not be considered medical advice. I do wonder if different artesinal salts have different levels of compounds and how those affect our health. That could be a topic for a Ph.D. dissertation!

Consult recipe, make a bunch of changes and substitutions, wonder why it didn't come out well.

I think the biggest skill in going from a new cook to a good cook is learning to identify what sounds like a good or bad idea. As you learn about how ingredients respond to each other and to different techniques, it becomes very easy to realize "No, a microwave cake would clearly be an abomination" or "I don't think we want to broil that fish for an hour" or "That would be a bad oil for pan-frying at high temperatures" or "I won't buy short ribs on the way home for dinner tonight." Those all seem really obvious, like 2+2 obvious, to me now . . . but they weren't when I started cooking. The more often you cook, and the more notice you take of the results, the more quickly you can develop this skill.

Oh, and don't trust cooking reality shows. "In Hell's Kitchen, their challenge was to make beef Wellington in half an hour! So I can certainly do it in 45 minutes, right?" Wrong. It's okay to watch these shows (I certainly do); just pretend that they take place in a totally different universe.

And plating. Can we blame pinterest for this? It's okay to fool around with plating, if you want, but it's like 10% as important as the food itself. If I had a dollar for every time I was handed some careful, bizarre arrangement that tasted really unfortunate. . . .

Last thing, I promise: When you're flipping something, don't stab it. Tongs! Stab wounds really won't do your steak any favors.

My tip for baking: get an oven thermometer and check you oven's temperature.
Most ovens are off by quite a bit. Very useful especially if you move frequently. Case in point, my oven runs hot by 100* F, but otherwise works fine.

Get The Flavor Bible! It's a great way to guide you when you want to try spice/food combinations.

I learned to cook literally at my grandmother's knee. She lived in our household & prepared all our meals. I could put an an entire meal on the table, including dessert, when I was 12. Consequently, I don't recall my own stupid mistakes as too much time has passed. (well, except for learning the dif between plain & self-rising flour - that was a biggie, lol). I do recognize many of these, however, from when I taught the dh to cook. This self-professed coffeeholic could not even make a pot of coffee when we married! Anyhoo...

The biggest was, sometimes, less really IS more. Yes, there's a reason recipes specify measurements. Just because 1/4 tsp is good, does NOT mean 1/2 tsp will be better.

Close runner up: high heat cuts down on cooking time. This was the most difficult for him for some reason. I have a crockpot roast recipe that gets requested often. Succulent & tender, no knife necessary. Cracks me up. It's so simple a four yr old could make it. (actually my 4 yr old g-son has made it several times-to rave reviews-but he follows directions better than dh, lol). Every single time, dh makes it, it's too tough to cut with a knife, never mind the taste. I could never figure it out. Then one night, I caught it by accident, or divine direction perhaps...

I had put on a roast for a family reunion the following day & headed to bed before dh, exhausted from baking all day. Got up later to check one more detail & discovered he'd adjusted the temp from low to high. Aieeee!! Saved my roast & he never did that again. His roasts are now perfection every.single.time.

And in the interest of full disclosure, dh has now surpassed me in the kitchen. Da man can cook! Whodathunk?

How do you become a good cook? The same way you get to perform at Carnegie Hall — practice, practice, practice! And assume that there will be some real disasters along the way.

One of the problems new cooks often have is not understanding how eggs work, which makes custards and Hollandaise almost impossible. There are things that can't be rushed.

The other side of this, is, of course, not getting your pans hot enough, and not using enough oil. You need to coat the pan. You can always pour off excess oil. I used to do this when cooking fish. My pan was never hot enough, so I didn't get a good sear, and I moved it too soon, so it was always broken up, almost like I tried to make a fish stir-fry.

Knowing ingredients is important as well as cutting items so that they cook in the same time. If you have chunks of potatoes and small dice of carrots cooking in the same pan, then of course by the time the potatoes are done, the carrots are mush.

Timing is something you will learn as you go. Get mise en place together, and you can concentrate on cooking your food, not prepping and cooking as you go. Once you get the hang of it, then you can multi-task this later.

Pet peeve: people who think there is only 1 temperature to cook everything on the stove. Some roommates of mine ruined a non-stick All-Clad pan of mine that way... by ALWAYS treating it like a wok and just cooking everything on the highest flame. No matter how many times I politely reminded them that mid to mid-high flame was fine for nonstick, I'd always walk into the kitchen with oil spattering all over the place. UGH.

I agree completely about knowing your pans - there was a lot of dry chicken in my early years. I also wish I had known much earlier how useful a cast iron skillet can be!

Salt is only a seasoning in the midwest and TGIFs. You only want enough salt to enhance the original flavor.

Washing Fruits and Veggies

Getting the water off of veggies after you wash them: When my husband started to cook, this was an ordeal because he was easily adding an extra 1/2 c of water to everything he made because of wet, just rinsed veggies. Then of course when I pointed it out to him, he washed a few bunches of arugula and wrung them out like a wash cloth. Saddest, limpest, most torn up arugula I've ever seen. I love him.

I've made the mistake of washing berries ahead of time for a huge party (dessert for 70!) Mistake.

^how about, don't put your record player on the counter next to the stove?

Around here, I keep advising the novice cook to do two things: FOLLOW THE RECIPE (oh, those substitutions) and USE ENOUGH OIL (but I don't want to add too much fat!). For the latter, if you don't want to add ANY fat (which is crazy...), then grill it or bake it. If you're going to put it in a pan, you're going to have to get the oil bottle out (or the butter dish).

I've been cooking since age 9 and I've made all of Cheese's mistakes. Like gardeners, cooks are always learning. For example, until I watched season 1 of Top Chef, I never heard of "resting" meat.

Mistakes we still make in our house: (1) Not reading the recipe all the way through. This is especially maddening when you get to the bit about marinating overnight -- 30 minutes before dinner is to be served; (2) Not using ingredients at their peak which relates to (3) Buying too much food.

This is a great post and even greater comments, which has given me the confidence to try this ‘cooking’ thing again. Anyways, I was getting tired of eating cardboard boxes scorch in the microwave.

Carrotsticks, I liked your comment about chefs smoking and its affect on their taste buds.

I agree with whoever said don't crowd the pan. Very important! The other thing I learned recently that I've been doing wrong for ages is to scrape your cutting board with the back side of your knife not the sharp side. I've been blunting my knives for years!

One thing that drives me nuts when I see novice cooks is the way they waste so much. And very few of them grow herbs. On the salt debate, I never use salt, ever. We don't eat meat or fish so we eat more cheese than most people probably do. I think (don't know if I'm right) that most cheeses have salt, as do most of the few prepared things we eat (bread, crackers, flour tortillas, chutneys etc) so we get enough nutritionally.

Salt, if I remember correctly, is necessary for sweating and as we live in South Florida with no AC I think we probably get enough!

Cracked and AT/Kitchn? My internet worlds are colliding.

@thorndale
... maybe invest in a salad spinner, then?

@EMinCHICAGO
I blew my friend's mind with this when I made a stirfry for her in undergrad. She thought I was the most amaaaaazing cook ever. orz That said, All-Clad! I hope they paid you for it or found you a proper replacement! :|

You don't need a salad spinner. All you need is a clean kitchen cloth and you can spin it yourself.

Ah-hem. Herbs and spices ARE ingredients. Why am I supposed to prefer the taste of some vegetables/meat/whatever? If I enjoy the flavor of some herb or spice--or even (gasp!) a combo, why shouldn't I completely slathered it over compatible carrier foods?

These purported chefsI are not only wrong, but way wrong.

Many spices and herbs have very beneficial and health-giving properties.

Calling them "seasonings" is what started all this nonsense in the first place.

This was some funny stuff. He truly said it like it is. The one i've seen the most is messing with your food too much. I once had a friend help me in the kitchen. I had her flip chicken breasts and at one point i caught her using the spatula as a panini press on the poor slab of meat. She said i always see my mom doing this...SMH.