How to cook like you know what you're doing

Tofu Alchemy and other kitchen miracles

17 October 2025

Usually I have to do a lot of research for these newsletters, but this week’s a topic I have quite a bit of experience with = Cooking!

What follows is basically my TED Talk in written form. If I had 15 mins to share everything I think is essential to know about how to cook, this is what I’d say…

How it all began…

I’ve always loved cooking for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, my mum got me and my brother to make dinner once a week. My signature dish quickly became Nigella’s pasta puttanesca. My little brain couldn’t believe how you could open a few cans (anchovies, olives, tomatoes, capers) and make something with so much flavour, in just the time it took to boil pasta.

It taught me early on that cooking doesn’t have to be difficult to be delicious. Also, the name of the dish was naughty and made me giggle.

A more recent development: a couple of years ago, I’d just got back from a trip to the UK where I’d eaten endless amazing curries. Back in Spain, where curry isn’t really a thing, I thought: I’m not ready to give this up! I decided I was going to learn how to make curry myself. So I went to the only Indian shop in town and accidentally spent €50 on spices, plus a big box to store them all in.

To eat a good curry, it always felt like one of those things where you needed to go to a curry house and let the professionals handle it. Turns out, making curry isn’t that hard. Blend up a few spices, some garlic and ginger, canned tomatoes, and you’ve got a curry sauce. That first curry removed any doubt I may have had that good food has to be complicated.

Balancing it all out

Cooking is made to seem harder than it actually is. Now, obviously it can be taken to an incredibly high level, but there are certain rules of thumb that make it all easier. Max Halley from Max’s Sandwich Shop, for example, has a simple formula:

“Any great dish in a restaurant needs to have six elements: hot, cold, sweet, sour, crunchy and soft. If they’re all present, you’re onto a winner. I make sure no sandwich ever goes on the menu here without ticking all those boxes. It doesn’t mean you need six ingredients – a gherkin can be sweet, sour and crunchy – but the balance needs to be right.”

There’s also a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which covers all of the essential elements you want to get right in your cooking. Once you start experimenting with those, you soon develop an intuition for fixing things, for what works and what doesn’t.

If something tastes flat, it’s probably missing salt or acid. A squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar can bring a dish to life. If it’s too salty, add acid. Too spicy? Grow up.

It’s all about balance, and finding that balance is where cooking becomes fun (at least I think so).

Bene Donovan’s Perfect Food Matrix™️

There are four aspects of food that are often hard to get right all at once.

Is it healthy?
Is it cheap?
Is it quick?
Is it tasty?

Usually, you have to sacrifice at least one or two of these to get the others. You can buy cheap ingredients, but you might need to invest time to make them taste good. Or you can make something quick, but you’ll probably have to pay extra or lose out on flavour.

But you don’t always have to compromise. Our go-to formula in the kitchen at home is simple and flexible:

vegetable/salad + protein + grain + sauce/dressing

That combo never fails, and it hits all 4 points of the Food Matrix.

One of my favourite weeknight tricks is to just chop up a bunch of veg and bang them in the oven. It takes no time at all and gives you time to prep other ingredients while they roast. Sauces are where all the flavour comes from, as they’re the perfect vessel for all the herbs and spices. My sauce (or salsa 💃) game has levelled up a lot in the last few years, and once you learn a few, you can take a meal in any direction you like. Or elevate boring leaves into an incredible salad with all kinds of fun and interesting salad dressings.

I’ve always thought of cooking as a kind of alchemy. Taking humble ingredients and turning them into something greater than the sum of their parts. And what greater alchemy than transforming tofu – one of the blandest ingredients known to humankind – into something that tastes shockingly like chicken? As an almost-veggie who happens to love meat, I’ve come up with a foolproof method, and it’s surprisingly simple – message me for the recipe. (My secret = MSG. It’s not dangerous, despite what many think.)

Soup is a Perfect Food no-brainer. Just cook a load of tasty stuff and blend it up. Easy, cheap, healthy and comforting. For those of us who don’t have all the time in the world, there’s batch cooking. Mob have loads of great batch recipes – not sponsored by them, by the way, they’re just really good! It’s like Ottolenghi-level recipes without the 25+ pricy ingredients.

Another personal hack is keeping frozen ingredients in, well, the freezer. You can buy a bag of frozen chillies so you always have them ready – one bag can last me 6 months, and I like to make my food spicy 🌶️🌶️🌶️. Other rarely-used-but-useful ingredients like lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, even frozen fruit for fancy salsas, are lifesavers when you want to make something exotic without running to the shop.

How to learn?

I’m not necessarily suggesting we all learn cooking in school – giving 30 kids knives and saucepans is a recipe for disaster – but I do think we should get them in the kitchen early on.

We should also talk more about where food actually comes from. Most of us treat food like it just magically appears in a packet at the supermarket. We don’t know how it’s grown, where it’s from, or whether it’s even in season. That kind of awareness could be taught in schools. Everyone loves food, and it’d be a great way to learn about the world and broaden your horizons.

As for actually learning how to cook, we exist at the best possible time in history. YouTube has literally everything. If you’re wondering where to start, think about your favourite cuisine. Italian is an easy entry point, but more exotic dishes – Middle Eastern, Asian, Mexican are my favs – are nowhere near as hard as they seem. It can feel intimidating at first, but once you dive in, you’ll pick it up quickly through trial and error. And if you don’t have much time, just search for 20-minute recipes – there’s endless stuff to try.

Fun hack: take a photo of what’s in your fridge, drop it into ChatGPT, and ask it what you can make. Like Ready Steady Cook but for your leftovers.

You also don’t need loads of fancy equipment. Forget the kitchen gadgets. All I think you really need is one good knife, an oven/air fryer, and ideally a blender. I’d be lost without my NutriBullet – it makes every smoothie and sauce I could ever want, and I use it at least a couple of times a day.

The best part of all this is that you get to EAT at the end of it. Cooking can only really be learnt by doing, and you get immediate feedback in the form of a plate of food. You make something, you eat it, and you take notes to improve on it next time. Sometimes it’ll go wrong, but you learn by eating your mistakes.