Whether you’re a beginner or an expert chef, there’s one thing all bakers have in common: we all make mistakes in the kitchen. Every cooking as being human sometimes screws up in the kitchen once in a while. in the kitchen when you have not “caramelized” fruit in salt rather than sugar, you have not experienced the most embarrassing mistake.

The creative cook can often cook her way out of a kitchen error, but the smart cook aims to prevent such creativity from being necessary. But the good news is you can avoid many cringe-worthy moments with your foodie friends and family if you drive clears of these common cooking mistakes.

But despite the outcome of your cooking mistakes, don’t get sad. Because we all make our share of cooking blunders. After all, the blunder is human and any endeavor undertaken with consistency will result in a bungle or two. It’s natural, and it’s a big part of how we learn.

Here are the five usual common mistakes that are made when cooking meat, plus our best tips on how to avoid them.

1. Common mistakes when you are choosing the ingredients

You are completely relying on your recipe book that a good idea. But do you know also the best-written recipes may not include all the headline information at the top? A knowledgeable cook addresses each recipe with a sharp eye and reads the full recipe well before it’s time to cook.

Follow the habit of gathering the things step by step that is, having all the ingredients gathered, prepped, and ready to go before you turn on the heat. Before starting the dish, If you don’t give attention to the order in which ingredients should be added to a dish, you run the risk of overcooking certain items and throwing off the flavors.

For example, adding fresh herbs too early will cause them to lose flavor while adding heartier vegetables too late will leave them undercooked. Stick to the sequence suggested by the recipe so read the full recipe properly before starting any dish of your choice. It will save your time and stress later and also make the process more enjoyable.

Dry measuring cups are meant to be filled to the edge so you can sweep off the excess. If you tried to use a liquid cup, you couldn’t sweep off the excess because of that extra space below the rim. So to measure it, you’d have to pat the ingredient down or shake the cup to level it out.

Eventually, this will mismatch your measurement. Dry measuring cups are designed to measure dry ingredients like flour, nuts, and berries, while liquid measuring cups are designed to measure liquids like water, cooking oil, and yogurt. Liquid measuring cups are usually glass or plastic with a handle.

The purpose of freezing food is to prevent the food from losing its nutritive content and to keep it fresh and uncontaminated for a longer period. But if you immediately put hot food(boiling) in the fridge the salmonella bacteria can spoil the food very easily in the fridge.

In turn, you may lose its nutritive values and might just make your refrigerator work extra hard. It is okay to put mildly hot food in the refrigerator though. You should at least wait for it to cool down to room temperature before refrigerating.

Not only it will harm your food, but also if you have an old model you can choose to take some precautions like storing the hot food in airtight containers, this helps you avoid condensation and icing. Moving meat straight from the fridge to the stovetop (or even the oven) can result in uneven cooking. Because the food is cold, you end up with meat that’s overdone on the outside and undercooked inside.

2. Mistakes you are making when baking

It is always important to wash the vegetable before cooking. But if they’re not dry before they go in a pan, they can get soggy and cause dangerous splattering when the water hits the hot oil. If you’re squeezed for time, use a paper towel to dry them thoroughly.

If you are in hurry, It’s also good to wrap paneer, fish in a paper towel, and press it below a heavy cutting board to release water that reduces splatter, and the paneer will understand more flavor.

It depends on the food. Almost anything you cook on a grill should be flipped only once, remaining the exceptions sausages, corn, and hotdogs because they have three or even four sides you can burn. This is because, with meat products, you want to be heating the center to an internal temperature while sealing the juices inside by crisping the outside layer.

So steak, pork chops, chicken, burgers, and bacon should be flipped once. The more you turn a cut piece of steer muscle the more moisture you will lose, and that’s bad. Whereas, any sort of pasta should be stirred every few minutes while boiling at least to keep it from sticking or burning. So, flipping your food too often may leave your food uncooked.

Overcooking will not only result in the loss of important nutrients, but it will also drain the flavor. Light steaming, baking, and quick stir-frying are the best ways to cook vegetables. Try not to boil vegetables unless you are making soup, as much of the nutrients will drain into the water.

Exposing vegetables to heat for too long destroys the majority of vegetables’ nutrients. Boiling them is also not a solution. This method causes water-soluble micronutrients like folate and B and C vitamins to leach out into the water—which most people then pour straight down the drain. It will also result in the veggies taste mushy.

3. When you use kitchen equipment wrong

Enjoyed your piping hot bowl of stew and now going towards the fridge to refrigerate the leftover? Stop. In our busy lifestyle, you may not want to wait for it to cool down to room temperature before putting it in the fridge.

In our effort to wrap up all the kitchen work, we often end up keeping foods that are still hot in the fridge. Did you know this can actually be dangerous for you and your family? The purpose of freezing is essential to prevent the food from losing its nutritive content and to keep it fresh and uncontaminated for a longer period of time.

Whether it is freezing, reheating, or refrigerating, it’s best to exercise caution. It is always desirable to place the containers wisely, mind the spaces in between them, to ensure better air circulation and optimal cooling. Make sure you don’t keep the food out for more than two hours, the bacteria can begin to grow soon after.

Preheating your pan prevents food from sticking and assures a crisp, brown crust. Most people get impatient waiting for pans to heat and this also guarantees that the food isn’t going into a pan with oil that’s cold or not hot enough.

While adding oil before heating the pan, the higher fats heat without anything else in the pan, the faster they’ll break down and burn. If you’re cooking anything over higher heat, always let the pan heat up for a few minutes before adding the oil. As the metal of your pan heats up, the surface expands. If the pan is fully heated and expanded, there’s nothing to stick to.

A common cooking mistake is said to be overcrowding the pan. You should never overcrowd a pan when cooking. However, it is not an accurate statement. Actually, It depends on what type of cooking you are doing. When you are pan-frying, sautéing, you should not overcrowd the pan. The basic rule is that you want to leave enough room so that the food isn’t touching.

With something like chicken, that extra space ensures the heat from the pan evenly spreads, and that all sides can brown up easily and equally. If you are trying to brown chicken breasts in a fry-pan, and you cover every inch of the pan with chicken, overcrowding it, you not only reduce the heat, preventing browning but cause much more moisture to be released than can be evaporated quickly, resulting in a layer of steam and/or water, both of which prevent browning.

Too much food then traps this moisture, delaying or preventing the browning altogether. This is the reason you should avoid overcrowding while cooking.

No matter how many cooking shows we watch or food blogs we read, sometimes our dishes just never measure up to what the professionals creates on a daily basis. While we know some of the basics, we turned to the experts to find out what common cooking mistakes home cooks make over and over again.

Five professional chefs from across the country weighed in with their advice on how to improve our home cooking game and create restaurant-quality dishes. That’s the end of our look at 9 of the most common cooking mistakes, and how to correct them. So try them and happy cooking.

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