Ingredient First Cooking

I’m often asked, “How did you get into cooking?” If I’m being honest, it started with one dish and a three-hour phone call with my grandmother. The desire to cook didn’t hit me until I was in college.

When I moved to Los Angeles after college, it was like a whole new world was opened up to me. Being from Columbia, Tennessee, and born in 1970, I was exposed to very little outside of my small Southern town when it came to food until I got out of college and got to LA. There’s really no better city in the world to be introduced to the rest of the world’s food. I don’t think there’s a single ingredient that I can think of that you can’t get somewhere in Los Angeles.

And that’s where it really started to click for me in my curiosity about food and cooking. First, it started with neighborhoods. Then it became about grocery stores unique to those neighborhoods. And then it became about ingredients. Ingredient-first cooking came very easily to me because my curiosity was so deep I just wanted to learn everything I could as fast as I could.

At this time, I was working in the entertainment industry, so weekends were all about food hauls and cooking like it was a sport. One of my favorite grocery stores in any country is a Japanese chain called Mitswa. It was right up the road from our house in Venice, and I was just mesmerized by this place. I had no clue what to do with much of the food and the ingredients available in that grocery store. But I started buying them anyway.

As fate would have it, on a camping trip with a bunch of school families, my husband and I met a young Japanese man whose name was Takashi, riding his bike down the West Coast of the United States and all the way to Argentina. Takashi ended up staying with us for two months, and he showed me how to use every single one of those ingredients. That’s how I got into Japanese food.

And in my tiny little kitchen in Venice, I absolutely would not live without a visual pantry to help me see what I had so that I could think and work through recipes in my head before I began. I created that pantry literally on a 6 ft by 8 ft wall using the Container Store Elfa system.

So before I even learned to really cook, my super-virgo ADHD personality needed a visual pantry. To many, this might be a cart before the horse kind of situation, but I would argue it’s the other way around. We’ve all become so barraged with recipes, so tied up in the notion that you have to have exactly this and exactly that to make something that’s delicious. I’m not saying that I don’t write recipes and I don’t use recipes. I’m just saying it’s not what made me a great cook.

I’ve tried to instill this concept in many of my girlfriends who are always saying, “I want to become a better cook.” If I could start a cooking school today, the first semester would be about the top ten techniques you need to know. The second semester would be about ingredients. Once you learn the basic techniques and the basic frameworks of dishes, that’s when you can really start to jam.

You can ask anyone who’s eaten at my house regularly, they’ve never had the same meal twice. And this is not because I don’t cook the same things. It’s because the way I cook is by using what I have and going ingredient first. Even if sometimes that ingredient is a steak, never in my life have I, two days back-to-back, had the same things in the fridge.

So this is not just an article about pantry. This is going to be an expanded portion of Obsessed that we’re going to build on for the next year. So now that I’ve introduced you guys to my pantry and to ingredient-first cooking, I am letting you in on just a few of the things that I think are essential in an ingredient-first kitchen. But let me preface with this; everything comes down to personal taste. If I recommend beans (which I will) and you don’t like beans, that’s cool! Doesn’t mean we can’t cook together.

Recipes are frameworks and visual pantry is ingredient-first cooking. That’s what we’re doing here.

Next week we start to dive deep, so this week I have two challenges for you:

1. Clean out and organize any pantry or drawers you have and make an inventory (yes it’s tedious, but you have an iphone, make it happen)

2. Choose one wild ingredient you have always wanted to try and drop it in the comments below

I will be taking those submissions and using them to show you guys my method and how I tackle ingredient first cooking.

So here are a few of my favorite things and a couple of PDFs to download and keep handy in the kitchen for yourself so you can build your visual pantry.

I have two PDFs for you today that you can download and print to keep in your kitchen.

1. ALWAYS HAVE ON HAND - this may seem basic, but it is for a reason.

2. ASIAN - THE LIQUID BACKBONE - I think this is a great place to start if you’re going to cook with me. Getting these flavors into your pantry and starting to play around with them will really accelerate your ingredient-first cooking.

That’s it for this week. Albeit short, lots to think about…. till next week.

Sarah