Bachelor Cooking

How cooking works, ingredients, and guides

I’ll get back to AR articles next week. This article builds on “fitness starts in the kitchen” and it is the introduction to “bachelor cooking.” The next cooking article will be “Best Cornbread Ever.”

Bachelor cooking is the ability to feed yourself a meal that you prepared from whatever foods you have on hand. Ideally, the meal is made from whole foods but the only requirement is that you cook it using whatever food you have on hand.

Bachelor cooking relies on simple principles, techniques, and ingredients.

Principles first; bachelor cooking relies on heat to transform food. Heat has been a food transformation technique since the discovery of fire. All the devices in your kitchen that produce heat are imitating fire in a controlled way – unless it is a gas stove in which case it’s actual fire.

You apply the heat to the food either directly, through an intermediary vessel, and sometimes through an intermediary medium like water. Ovens apply direct heat and stovetops apply heat through an intermediary vessel (like a skillet or a pan). Microwaves create heat through an entirely different mechanism.

Bachelor cooking uses three basic techniques to apply heat: direct in an oven, indirect in a pan or skillet, and liquid immersion. Each is used for different foods; each produces different effects; and each requires different equipment and techniques. Common terms for these are baking, frying, deep frying, steaming, and boiling but foodies have a gazillion ways to dress up the simple terms. If you get pan-sauteed flounder in a restaurant, you are getting fish that was fried in a pan. I am not minimizing the differences in ways that you can cook food in a pan but foodies obscure the similarities with terminology.

A lot of learning to cook is learning how to apply heat to the food. Optimum temperatures, temperature ramps, vessels, use of liquids, time; all these are variables that can improve your food.

For bachelor cooking the principle is always to use the simplest technique that produces results you can enjoy. In each bachelor cooking dish, we’ll explain the recommended techniques.

If bachelor cooking has a strong suit, it is using the ingredients on hand to make a nutritious and tasty meal. That sometimes makes for innovative combinations of ingredients but more often uses basic ingredients to enhance the taste.

Bachelor cooking relies on a few key ingredients for flavor. Salt, pepper, garlic, oil (olive oil is the most versatile), butter, and seasonings. Seasonings include onion powder, chili powder, garlic powder, paprika, cumin, and as many others as you like. You can buy premixed seasonings in all sorts of different packages. Premixed seasonings run the gamut from excellent to awful. You have to try them to find out.

There are some staple ingredients for bachelor cooking as well. Rice, potatoes, onions, and pasta are basic carbohydrates that provide the base for a lot of bachelor dishes. For protein, meat is the key to bachelor cooking. Tofu and bachelor cooking don’t seem to work. In fact, most any soy protein is at odds with bachelor cooking. Ground beef, beef of all kinds, pork chops, ham, venison, bacon; these are the staple proteins of bachelor cooking.

Vegetables have an important place in bachelor cooking as well. Starchy vegetables such as carrots can provide the carbs and minerals that make a dish healthy. Cabbage is versatile and can be used from coleslaw (raw cabbage with dressing and seasonings) to stir fries to soup. Tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, and more all work well in bachelor cooking.

The next cooking article will cover making “The Best Cornbread Ever.”  After that, we’ll branch out more broadly into cooking meals of all kinds.