Technique: Using all of our senses to cook.
Smell and taste are the most obvious senses relating to both cooking and eating. Our sight is a factor too, and it is often exploited. It has been demonstrated that the lighting, decor, presentation, and even the shape of the plate influences the perceived flavor of the dish. Restaurateurs are well aware of this phenomenon and its ability to bolster the experience of what would otherwise be a mediocre meal.
However, when you cook, you are the commander in your kitchen as well as your own senses. Direct and attune all of them to your task, and you'll find the experience of cooking as enjoyable if not more so than eating. You will cook with greater accuracy and insight than if you had mindlessly followed the steps to the recipe. It is only by being present and attuned that you begin to go from commander to master, and this attunement only occurs when you use all your senses to full effect.
Your sight is obviously useful, but once again it can betray you, especially as a novice. Food can begin to overcook long before any sign of it is visible. A fricassee or rice can appear well on top, only to be burning at the interface between the pan and the bottom. A loaf of bread can have a perfect brown crust yet offer raw dough at the core. A steak's exterior appearance in no way correlates to its rareness because the reactions that create browning (or blackening) can occur at different rates or not at all. Yet, a trained eye can tell if pasta is done without having to touch it, or precisely where a broad, shallow paella will require more liquid and where it won't. It's not what you see, its how.
Less obvious still is touch. A simple and accurate way to assess the doneness of a steak is to touch it. It will stiffen the closer to well done it is. With touch you will also unconsciously learn how to apply seasoning accurately without appearing to measure. This can only happen with practice and fingers and its one of the reasons why, when cooking, you should never apply salt from a shaker, or worse, from those awful plastic twist grinders. Save that for the table.
When you apply any seasoning with practiced fingers, proprioceptive feedback between your nerves and brain automatically detect the volume and texture of what you are holding, and engaged cooking experience will unconsciously inform you how much of what you're holding will be required for desired effect.
The result is that though you seem to not be measuring, you in fact are measuring with an astonishingly fast and accurate sensor array which is your own nervous system. Like the automatic landings of a falling cat, your hands become both the measuring tool and the application tool simultaneously. But this skill will never build on you if you don't get your hands dirty. There are indeed times when a shaker will benefit you, such as when you want to apply an even yet generous layer of barbecue rub to a nice slab. Those are rare exceptions.
Practice salting loose salt from a dish using your fingers, using small amounts at first and correcting as you go. Soon, you will develop perfect accuracy and will save yourself the time and agony of standing over a steaming pot, feebly cranking a soulless plastic salt grinder. Paul Bertolli in "Cooking by Hand" states this far more beautifully than I can. You can indeed learn this skill, just as your grandmother may have. By practicing.
Least obvious but no less useful is your hearing. Your pots and pans can talk to you: when browning or sauteeing, pay attention to the sound it makes. A low pitched gurgle means the pan is not hot enough yet or its over crowded. The gurgling sound comes from excess water, which is being prevented from evaporating by being either overcrowded, not set hot enough, or both. Ractopamine, a chemical given to livestock to plump their tissues with water, makes this issue worse as the meat will "sweat" instead of browning. If you've ever been disappointed by a watery stir fry or grey colored steak, its because of the heat/volume/water relationship in the ingredients of your pan. Remember that many fresh produce has about 80% water and meat around 60% water (or more, thanks to ractopamine). Its not always your fault. Most restaurant burners deliver heat many times hotter than residential stoves, which is one of the ways they obtain the sought after brown crust (along with other tricks such as butter and flour).
Likewise, a steadily rising pitch in the hissing or gurgling sound of a pan that is simmering, reducing, or sautéing always happens just before it begins to burn. Listen for it as it is a call to attention. Once you understand it, you can (as opposed to should) even leave the kitchen and know exactly whats going on in your pan by the pitch and tone it creates. Our pans talk to us in their own language.
