These 10 dishes to master to become a better home cook include essential egg dishes – an omelette to help you perfect your pan skills and eggs Benedict to fine-tune egg poaching techniques – savoury classics such as a roast chicken and a traditional stew, Asian favourites (a Thai curry and Chinese special fried rice), and a crowd-pleasing dessert, a chocolate lava cake.
If there was something good to come from the pandemic it was that lockdowns and time spent self-isolating at home gave us all plenty of opportunities to improve our skills as home cooks, learn new techniques, and embark on cooking projects, such as baking sourdough. Just because the pandemic is over (touch wood!) doesn’t mean we need to stop learning to be better cooks.
If you’re keen to take your cooking skills to the next level, instead of just concentrating on improving one skill, such as dumpling-making, I’ve got ten dishes for you to perfect, which will enable you to become proficient in a number of cooking techniques, from poaching eggs and making béchamel sauce to learning how to use a mortar and pestle and fill pasta.
These ten dishes not only cover a range of skills and techniques, but some dishes feature several recipes and will enable you to perfect multiple techniques to prepare one meal. For instance, to make a roast chicken, you need to prepare stuffing, make chicken jus and become an expert at preparing creamy mashed potatoes.
Beer-battered fish and chips will give you the chance to learn to make your own chips, master deep-frying techniques, and teach you how to make tartare sauce. Chinese fried rice allows you to clean out your fridge and develop a zero-waste mindset while working on your wok-frying skills and creativity in the kitchen. Almost anything can go into fried rice.
Mastering all of these dishes will undoubtedly make you a better home cook and the skills you’ll develop lend themselves to other dishes. Learning to use a mortar and pestle for the Thai curry recipe provides a gateway to making other homemade curry pastes, while learning to make a hollandaise sauce opens up a world of other sauces such as Béarnaise.
If you’re just starting out, see Lara’s 12 dishes that beginner cooks should learn to develop basic skills and build a repertoire of dishes, from boiled eggs to a great salad.
Dishes to Master to Be a Better Home Cook from a Classic Omelette to a Thai Curry
These are the ten dishes to master to become a better home cook – and once you’re done with those, I’m already working on part two of the course.
Classic Omelette
Topping my list of dishes to master to become a better home cook is a classic French omelette. Mastering an omelette is a must, as you’ll get to refine your pan skills plus develop the ability to whip up a delicious meal in minutes.
Omelettes are brilliant for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and while my recipe will teach you to master a perfectly cooked plain omelette, you could then move onto this Southeast Asian style omelette, which makes a very special brunch or lunch.
A classic omelette to me is the French omelette, best demonstrated by French chef Jacques Pépin in this YouTube video. As Pépin says, the omelette should be “soft, tender, moist in the centre” and it’s not that easy to master as the omelette barely takes on any colour – and it’s cooked in less than one minute! This is one to practice.
Eggs Benedict
Mastering eggs Benedict will teach you how to make a hollandaise sauce, as well as perfect your egg poaching skills. I first realised that eggs Benedict takes a lot of skill when I used to watch the chefs at our favourite French café in inner-city Sydney make the dish on weekend mornings – all three chefs (!), over and over again, for 4-5 hours, feeding hundreds of hungry regulars.
Hollandaise is considered to be one of the French mother sauces and is a little more difficult to make than béchamel sauce because it is an emulsified sauce. Whisking clarified butter into warm egg yolks can cause the sauce to split if the temperature is wrong or you whisk in too much butter at once.
Then the sauce needs to be kept warm while you poach the eggs, a real skill in itself. Hollandaise sauce is a great sauce to learn to make, as it’s a derivative of one of my favourite sauces for a steak, Béarnaise Sauce.
Roast Chicken
A roast chicken is another one of the dishes to master to become a better home cook. It’s a classic that every home cook should know how to make. Not only will you learn to roast a chook, you’ll learn how to prepare stuffing, bake vegetables, make chicken jus, and perfect the art of making mashed potatoes.
A roast chicken is not only a satisfying dish to make, it will fill your home with amazing aromas. One of the goals of a great roast chicken is getting the skin crispy without drying out the chicken breasts. While stuffing is something I mainly remember from my childhood as a way of using up stale bread, modern recipes for stuffing are great, using fresh herbs instead of dried and, of course, bacon.
Like crispy chicken skin, chicken jus is magical. It’s like a reduced chicken stock on steroids. There are lots of different side dishes you can make with a roast chicken, but we nearly always do a tray of baby carrots or caramelised brussels sprouts – and, of course, always potatoes. The French classic pomme fondant, baked new potatoes, Hasselback potatoes, and potatoes in duck fat are some we like, but we nearly always return to a classic Paris mash that goes so well with chicken jus.
Lasagne
For me, lasagne is one of the kings of comfort food and another of the dishes to master to become a better home cook. First, you’ll start off by making a batch of ragu alla Bolognese which is a great slow-cooked minced beef and pork stew – what the Italians call a ragu.
You could make your own egg pasta sheets – it’s a great introduction to making all kinds of pasta – or you could use store-bought lasagne sheets. But you simply must make your own béchamel sauce, the simplest of all the mother sauces of classical French cooking.
Doing everything from scratch to make a lasagne ticks off quite a few boxes of skills to be a well-rounded home cook. And béchamel in a jar is like the home-made flour-based glue that we used to make when I was a kid growing up in Australia.
Beer-Battered Fish and Chips
There’s a reason chef Heston Blumenthal devoted his first episode of Great British Food to fish and chips. This take-away favourite is not hard to make, but fish and chips are difficult to perfect, which is why this beer battered fish and chips is another of the dishes to master to become a better home cook.
Beloved by we Australians, and British and New Zealanders, we are a little forgiving when it comes to fish and chips by the beach on a sunny afternoon, but to get that fresh beer batter crunch while keeping the fish fillets deliciously moist is not easy. You’ll definitely develop your deep-frying skills.
Home-made tartare sauce is an easy affair, and it’s far more delicious than anything in a jar. Hand-cut potato chips really seal the deal and are very satisfying to make. They take a long time but not really too much effort, and it’s a skill that might leave those frozen fries in the supermarket freezer.
Stew
A good traditional stew is another of the dishes to master to become a better home cook and while I could have chosen a chicken stew for you, that’s too easy. It had to be a beef stew.
One of our favourite stews is rabo de toro, which is an oxtail stew from Jerez in Southern Spain. Every competent home cook should learn to make a beef stew and this one, while not as common as, say the French bœuf bourguignon, is far tastier as we’re concerned.
And that’s because the bones and marrow from the oxtail add depth to the sauce. This is a stew that has a little ‘rest’ overnight, just like bœuf bourguignon and the South African stew, tomato bredie, so it’s also an exercise in patience. But worth the wait!
Thai Curry
The consensus on Thai food just being good for a cheap weeknight takeaway has certainly evolved over the last 15 years or so. Thai food is now seen as one of the great cuisines of the world – helped by chefs such as David Thompson and his epic Thai Food cookbook.
If you only eat Thai food as takeout or you make a curry at home with a container of paste and a can of coconut milk, then you’re really missing out on just how fresh and flavourful Thai food, and even Thai curries, can be.
While there are loads of Thai curries that you could make – the green curry is probably the most popular – I recommend making a Thai curry that has more depth (and many more ingredients), such as this rich and complex beef Massaman curry or gaeng hang lay moo curry (Northern style pork curry).
It’s the perfect dish to hone your mortar and pestle skills, and is a far more rewarding curry to make. However, the simplicity of a green curry made well – from scratch – is something that never outstays its welcome.
Sichuan Wontons
Making filled dumplings is another of the dishes to master to become a better home cook and while you could venture into the world of Italian dumplings, such as tortellini and ravioli, Sichuan wontons are wonderful for lovers of Chinese food.
You’ll develop skills that you can also apply to Italian filled pasta making, as well as other types of Asian dumplings that can be eaten ‘wet’, in noodle soups, or ‘dry’ as part of a dim sum brunch spread that will impressive your guests.
Making Sichuan red chilli oil is also a good skill to develop. It’s a cinch but there’s something so very satisfying about it. You’ll never buy a bottle of store-bought chilli oil again.
Special Fried Rice
Learning how to make Chinese special fried rice is rewarding on so many levels. Making fried rice is a great dish for practicing your wok-frying skills – and you can use those skills to cook up all kinds of Asian stir-fries, not only fried rice.
Fried rice is a fantastic dish to make to use up leftover rice and clean out the fridge, especially the vegetable drawer. You can feel good about meeting some of those zero kitchen waste goals and develop your creativity in the kitchen in the process.
Fried rice is also a nostalgic dish that you can quickly whip up for a filling meal if you decide to invite the guests who came for drinks to stay for dinner – and you can all reminisce about those Chinese restaurant meals of your childhood.
Once you perfect a classic fried rice, try more of our Chinese fried rice recipes, some of these fried rice recipes beyond the obvious, or Lara’s Middle Eastern spiced rice, pictured above, which is made using the Asian wok-frying method.
Chocolate Lava Cake
The soft-centred chocolate cake is the last of our dishes to master to become a better home cook. We don’t make a lot of sweets in our Siem Reap kitchen but back in the day when I used to cook multi-course tasting menus for dinner parties, I often made this molten chocolate cakes for dessert.
Also called a chocolate lava cake, as the cake has a soft chocolate liquid centre that flows out on the plate after you cut into the baked exterior, the dessert is a crowd-pleaser, as it’s just so delicious.
Chocolate lava cakes aren’t all that challenging to make, as they’re typically made with just five ingredients – butter, eggs, sugar, chocolate, and flour – and baked in individual ramekins. But they’re versatile and impressive – and may lead you to attempt more complex baked desserts such as crème brûlée – one of the most exacting desserts on even a three-star Michelin restaurant menu.
They’re my ten dishes to master to be a better home cook. Do let us know if you accept our challenge, as we’d love to hear from anyone who makes all ten dishes, especially if you feel like you developed new skills in the process.
