We made night meals planning easy with 8 weeks of free meal plans for dinner with recipes for your company. When we set out to cook a meal, be it for our family or a romantic evening for two, we always have a vision in our minds of what we want the finished product to look and taste like. That vision usually closely resembles what you might find at a restaurant, with elegant plating, refined flavors, and precise cooking. Unfortunately, what ends up on the plate in our homes rarely (if ever) comes close to what you’ll find in a restaurant, and there are several reasons why.Why Home-Cooked Food Never Tastes Like Restaurant Food (Slideshow)
Restaurant kitchens run like well-oiled machines. The equipment is heavy-duty, the tools are the perfect ones for the job, and the cooks know every recipe like the back of their hand — or, more precisely, know how to make all the food on their menus without consulting recipes more than once, if that. Home kitchens may look nice, but they’re almost never well-equipped for turning out restaurant-quality meals. [related]
Aside from the fact that in restaurant kitchens everything is prepped and ready to go ahead of time, at home the knives aren’t as sharp, the recipes might not be memorized, and, well, the person cooking the food isn’t a professional chef. And there’s a big difference between someone following a cookbook recipe step-by-step and a chef turning out a dish he or she has made a thousand times before.
So don’t despair, home cook. While the skin on that piece of trout might never be as crisp coming from your nonstick pan as it would be coming from a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet, a home-cooked meal still has advantages over ones from a restaurant kitchen. For one, it’s made by you and meant to be shared with friends and family. And at the end of the day, if it tastes good and is made with love, it doesn’t need to look like it came from a restaurant. In fact, that might even defeat the purpose of it. Read on to learn why home-cooked dishes will never taste like restaurant food.
Salt
To paraphrase Alton Brown, “salt makes food taste more like itself,” and in restaurants the cooks aren’t afraid to have a heavy hand with the salt shaker. They season every component of every dish, at every step of the cooking process, and only the most sensitive customers are likely to complain about a dish being too salty. Especially when cooking whole pieces of meat (like steaks or pork chops), always add a little more salt than you think they might need.
