If you love your food, then it’s likely that some of your favorite restaurants also serve as your own benchmark for what makes great food. If you want to reach the lofty heights of your favorite dining experiences, then you need more than talent. You have to be willing to invest in your ingredients and to pick them wisely, too.

Freshness counts

Freshness
For your health’s sake, as well as your taste buds’, you have to do away with the reliance on processed food. Whole foods have much more flavor, much more nutritional content, and much more potential for different meals. Shopping seasonally will help keep things a lot more cost-effective and there are plenty of stores that offer deliveries of ingredients that might not be as easy to find in your local market, like fresh crab. Otherwise, you’re never cooking a meal with just the ingredients you want, you’re cooking with flavorings, preservatives, and much higher salt contents than you would have if you bought fresh.

Versatility
Now we’ve established they should be fresh, what kinds of ingredients should you choose? You might be inclined to go for the most exclusive, specific options possible, but there’s a lot more value to be found, in fact, in the simpler, more versatile ingredients. Any aspiring chef will know that your skill can be summed up in how many ways you can cook an egg. But you can also learn a lot by exploring the different tastes and textures you can achieve with Greek yogurt, parmesan cheese, sundried tomatoes and other incredibly versatile ingredients.

Flavour
Just as versatile is the rack of spices and herbs that any chef worth their salt (or parsley or paprika or thyme) should have. If you want to learn as much about taste as possible, you need to learn the differences that even a pinch of the right flavorings can have. Just the change from one herb to another can make is enough to vastly expand your repertoire of meals. Learn what goes with what, how to measure a more pungent spice compared to the subtler flavors, and how certain flavorings have specific requirements, such as how cilantro can very easily go bitter when overcooked.

Options
Whether you’re a vegetarian, cooking for vegetarians, or just looking to cut down your weekly food budget from time to time, having a few alternatives to the meat base of a meal can help vary your recipes a lot. Roasted cauliflower, wild rice, nuts, and beans make it perfectly easy to achieve those savory flavors that most people associate with meat and meat alone. No meat alternative offers a one-to-one comparison with meat, of course, but it can be pretty refreshing to learn that not all your meals have to include animal products to have both the taste and the filling factor.

You don’t have to fill your fridge with only the most expensive items to create truly quality meals. There are priorities higher than price. With the focuses above in mind, you should be one more step to creating restaurant-worthy food.

Note: A guest post