30 People Share The Most Common Cooking Mistakes So You Can Be Better In The Kitchen

Apparently pork. Discovered last christmas that the minimum cooking temp that has been advised for a long time is actually wrong and results in dry, leathery meat. Had someone mention that wasn't needed, looked it up online and followed the recipe as intended. Who knew I actually did like pork tenderloin? Apparently 135°F is about the goal, not 180°F.

Cookies. I have to restrain myself on cookie forums. The mistakes people make give me a twitchy eye and angry typing fingers, lol. Using butter substitutes and not understanding instructions like creamed and softened. Mix until incorporated does not mean beat the ever living life out of it. Then coming to a forum to ask what went wrong. What went wrong is you didn't follow the instructions! Baking cookies is simple but also technical. You have to know the terms and why you're doing them.

One of the worst that too many people make wrong... hamburgers. Look, they're supposed to be tender grinds of beef, not cooked to 400 degrees, left to cool to be used as drink coasters or table shims. Same thing goes with almost all ground meats. Ground beef is NOT supposed to be crunchy.

Fried plantains.
For green ones, first of all you have the people who don’t cook them enough on first fry. It’s the same concept as French fries. You are cooking through on the first fry and crisping on the second. If you do not let them cook enough they will break when smashed and come out greasy. The second thing is people smash them too much and they’re too thin. You want them thick enough that you have a fluffy interior to contrast the crisp exterior.

And now for sweet plantains, which are almost more egregious. One, plantains are often not ripe enough. They need to be streaked with black rather than bright yellow. Two, they’re cut into these huge hunks that give you tons of mushy innards that don’t get any exposure. The best fried plantains are made with thinly sliced planks about 1/4 inch thick. These have tons of surface area which caramelizes and you get these really crispy caramelized sugar edges. Three, they need to be cooked at moderate heat so that the sugar really caramelizes. Too high and they brown without that happening. Four, you need to go fairly dark to really take advantage of caramelization. Not burnt, but a slight bitterness gives complexity. Five, you don’t need a lot of oil to do this. Shallow fry is best! You could deep fry, but they’re fragile and would likely stick to each other tossed in oil.
Restaurants deep fry in a fryer where other items are fried. The heat is too high, they brown quickly, and often they’re not cooked on the inside since they’re thick hunks.

Lots of Latin restaurants serve terrible fried plantains. Pio Pio for example serves absolutely awful ones.
Bad homemade tostones tend to suffer from the sin of not cooking enough on first fry.

Browning meat. Most people over crowd the pan and grey the meat by boiling it in the meat water. The pink disappears and they think it’s done.

It’s cooked, but you get much more flavor from browning it. You can add less meat to the pan or wait for the water to boil off and the leftover fat will brown it.

Eggplant seems to be something that can easily go bad for people when cooking.

New York bagels. People look for instructions online, which are either way off (most common), or they're in the ballpark but fail to emphasize the key points of how they're really made.

Whenever I go to restaurants, a huge pet peeve of mine is when people fiddle with a Cuban sandwich. Everyone is trying to add stuff like micro greens, chipotle aioli, pulled pork etc. it’s a simple, perfect sandwich people, you don’t need to mess with it.

A ton of cafes don't make a proper cappuccino

Pad Thai. I've tried it from at least 6 different restaurants in different cities in Canada, and every single place has just ruined it.

I don't know why, but they all make Pad Thai with what I am 95% sure is Ketchup.