How To Find Cooking Inspiration At Restaurants
What is your favorite kind of cuisine? Each of us has our favorite, but there are some of us that would prefer to dine on our favorite foods at a restaurant. However, even if you enjoy cooking, the odds are that you also like to eat out on occasion. What you may not realize is that restaurants are a great repository of inspiration for your personal cooking as well.
What Restaurants Do You Like The Most?
First off, to begin using your dining experience to enhance your cooking, you will want to examine your favorite restaurants. Develop a list of the restaurants you have loved in the past and ended up visiting often. Also, think about what it is you really enjoy about them. Is it their food? Or, maybe, it is their atmosphere. What dishes did you find delicious? Simply by determining why you like a restaurant, you can start to use these same elements to your own cooking and in your kitchen.
Examine The Menu
Every cook has his or her own individual style. You can get a sense for the types of ingredients and seasonings the chef prefers, as you read over the menu. Anything that strikes you as fascinating or surprising, be sure to make a note of it and get it down in writing. Then you can apply it to your own personal cooking.
Take a steak that you enjoyed at a restaurant, for example. While you were scanning the menu for an entree, you noticed that the restaurant had listed a steak with roasted garlic, smothered in grilled onions. It sounded delicious and you preceded to order it. Once it was placed on your table, you caught a wonderful aroma of cooked onions mixed with roasted garlic and tender beef juices. You could have gotten out a note pad and took a few quick notes like, that the steak was a round steak, with about five pieces of fresh, chopped garlic pushed into the meat, and had about a quarter of a sliced red onion spread on top.
Go To Chef Classes
You might be surprised, what you can learn from your favorite restaurants by asking if the chef teaches classes nearby. If the chef does, it is a good idea to go ahead and take the class. This is a great way to learn first hand, from a pro, and to hopefully be able to prepare several of your favorite dishes from that restaurant in your own kitchen.
Experience Different Cuisines
An easy and a good way to get introduced to a different cuisine is to dine at the restaurant that specializes in it. This is a key method to help you learn about how the food should taste. If you try it at the restaurant first, you will have something to measure by as to what it is supposed to taste like. Then, if it is to your liking, you can attempt to cook the dish at home. This puts you on the right track, verses trying to guess at how to cook it first, before tasting it already prepared.
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