46 Cooking Mistakes That Make Professional Chefs Cringe

Sharpen your knives.

Most people are terrified of letting things get real color. Browning creates flavor. Pale chicken tastes like sadness.

1) Following a recipe religiously and not using common sense or adjusting to suit your taste. My chef released a book that called for too much salt for a sourdough, which destroyed the yeast.


2) Investing in dozens of single use gadgets. I think Alton Brown said the only single use kitchen item everyone should own is a fire extinguisher. Do as Marco and Gordon do and invest in a good pan and a few knives.


3) Trying a dish for the first time when entertaining. Practice, practice, practice! Trial it with your family or neighbours before you attempt to make souffles for the first time for 30 guests.

Sharpen your knives. 


Learn how to hold your knives properly. 


For the love of god, stop with glass "cutting boards" and enamel covered knives. 




I could go on for hours, but those are the first three.

Owned a restaurant for 15 years: Mistake Number 1. Expensive ingredients are necessary. Start with the cheapest ingredients and work your way up. I used incredibly cheap cream cheese and expensive butter. Play around and find your brands.

Mistake Number 2: Getting discouraged when cooking / baking because it doesn't turn out right. Life happens, and food doesn't always listen to our expectations. Pick one recipe and do it a hundred times. I highly recommend starting with Molly's Adult Mac&Cheese with Bon Appétit. Watch the video and practice. We practice and explore with curiosity. Play and explore with one recipe.

Mistake Number 3: Complicated = Yummy. Simple recipes are ninjas. I have a four ingredient biscuit recipe that could carry a breakfast menu. My grilled cheese sandwiches can increase soup sales. Life is celebrated with big meals. However, life is lived between the day to day meals. Finding joy in these small task moments while cooking is simply bliss.

- Don’t throw garlic in the frying pan too soon, it will burn before seasoning the food.
- Olive oil, Onion, and then the garlic once the onion is soft. 
- Bay leaves are not used enough. They make rice, stews and meat better. 
- Low and slow always beats high and fast. .

1. Thinking they can caramelize onions in 10 minutes
2. Thinking they can caramelize onions in 20 minutes
3. Thinking they can caramelize onions in 45 minutes.


Yo that stuff takes forever to do properly and if it doesn't, you didn't actually caramelize the onions.

A lot of people dress up their dog in a chef costume and try to teach it to act as an assistant chef, walk on hind legs, etc. Rarely work. The dogs eat everything.

Either not preheating pans or going the other way and getting pans too hot, people seem to be obsessed with cranking the heat up to the max in the belief it will cook faster.

Sharpen ya knives.

learn to season as your cooking and not just at the end.

Organise your area before doing anything else, if your area is cluttered your gonna have a hard time.

Clean as you go.

Most of the time you need a lot more herbs and spices than you think.

ALLLLLLL THE BUTTER!!!

Don't use olive oil to deep fry food, it's smoke point is very low.

Eh that's all I can be bothered thinking of off the top of my head. I did 20 years in the industry, it was enough. I wouldn't wish being a chef on anyone.

Keep it simple, keep it clean.

Don't muddle every dish with the same sauces and mixed spices.

Realize that cooking is subjective and not objective. Doesnt matter if its the worlds best recipe, sometimes grandmas meat balls is what hits right.

I'm NOT a professional, but I am pretty good.

1.) Not enough salt

2.) Not enough fats

3.) You're not cooking hot enough. Your pan is too cold and the food is too crowded in the pan. So instead of nice browning and searing, you're steaming your food and cooking it throughout too uniformly (think steak).

4.) Add an acid when you feel like the salt isn't helping. You are probably missing acidity. Citrus, vinegar, tomato sauce, etc.

5.) Try to mix textures. If your dish is soft, try to add something with a crunchy texture to give the whole dish a more pleasing composition.

Professional cooking involves a lot of butter.

Others have said it but salt, acid, fat and heat.

I’m a pastry chef and I even salt and acid pastry dishes, a lot of people think you don’t need to but you do. Vinegar in a sorbet can help make the flavour shine.

Scraping the chopping board with the sharp side of the knife. It INFURIATES me.

Mise n place!! You wont be frazzled and will have easier clean up.

Professional baker here:

1a) believing the baking times on the recipe. Every oven is different, every time you use that oven is different, etc. Timers are useful for reminding you that you have something in the oven, but beyond that you have to know what done looks/feels like. Probe thermometers are your friend.

1b) believing your oven is the temperature it says it is. It probably isn't. It certainly isn't that temperature everywhere.

1c) Trusting the recipe. Sometimes recipes are wrong about things, even from otherwise solid bakers. Baking intuition takes time to develop, but if something seems wrong, it very well might be. It's okay to throw in an extra handful of flour or a couple tablespoons of water if it seems like you need it.

2) Underkneading and overworking. Can you overknead the bread dough? Probably not. You will melt your muscles or your mixer before that happens. But after the bulk ferment and now it's time to shape? People mess things up here all the time. Do not make it into a shape that you don't want it to stay. Don't make the dough into a ball and then try to roll it out into a pretzel or a baguette. Only touch the dough to make clear, specific progress towards the shape you want.

3) Underbaking things. Home bakers (and particularly Americans) are so terrified of overbaking things that they wildly, tragically underbake them. Some things (brownies, snicker doodles) are best if you just barely bake them, but a lot of things (particularly breads, viennoiserie, some cookies, etc) need to get properly, richly browned. Color is flavor! Raw flour doesn't taste good! Gelatinize your starches, caramelize some sugars, and crisp up that crust, people!

1. Too much reliance on and adherence to recipes. Recipes are your starting point as a home cook, but over time they should help you develop techniques and intuitions so that you're adaptable and no longer need a recipe to cook anymore or find ways to improve a recipe to your liking. Also just because you're missing an ingredient doesn't mean it's time to give up (less true in baking and pastry) but adapt.


2. Not tasting a dish as you go and developing a sense of taste to help drive your dishes and help build intuition for what's missing. Too many people want clean measurements for adding salt, spices, or peppers but everyone's taste is different and you need to get comfortable with your own sense of taste to know what and how much of a thing a dish is missing. 


3. Not realizing failure is your teacher and not your enemy. You will mess up seasoning a dish, over or under cooking a dish, or some other technical matter but too many people let those experiences dissuade them from experimenting or getting outside their comfort zone in the future to try more difficult dishes and improve. When you fail still ask your what worked and what didn't work in the thing you made; those lessons will help improve your cooking going forward.

The number one thing I see the average home cook do is alter a recipe they are following because they “feel” like it’s too much or too little of an ingredient. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “I only put half the salt in because it seemed like too much” or “I put twice as much butter into it because I like butter”. And then it doesn’t come out right and they don’t understand why.

My husband fancies himself an amateur chef and there are a few dishes that he does well, but there are also things that drive me up the wall and I am not even a chef.

1) never rests the meat. Steak goes from the pan straight onto the plate and is cut. Bleeding merrily all over the sauce.

2) ignores the difference between oils. If I never see another pan with thick smoking extra vergine olive oil…

3) is mortally afraid of colour on onions. If the recipe says “brown the onions”, you can bet his will be barely translucent and mostly still raw.

Use full fat dairy.