Cooking Techniques

In this section you will find a guide on how to cook all the fundamentals components of a balanced meal. Perfecting the way you cook EVERY component of your meals is going to guarantee a delicious final result.

Our video library covers the following in depth:

Proteins:

Protein is one of the most important parts of most recipes, with it often forming the basis of your meal! To ensure that you are able to cook your protein well for each recipe, I have created a video library covering the basics of how to cook chicken, beef, pork and fish in a variety of ways to suit any recipe!

Vegan proteins:

Vegan proteins are often highly contentious and highly underrated – this is because they are often cooked wrong, making them unenjoyable. I have curated a library of videos for you as a guide on how to cook tofu, tempeh, textured vegetable protein (TVP), beans and legumes perfectly every time! You can apply these techniques to a wide range of vegan proteins – so don’t be afraid to play around with your cooking techniques!

Veggies:

Using my videos as a guide you will learn a bunch of different cooking techniques you can apply to different types of veg. For example, blanching does’t just work for green beans, you can also blanch things like carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, and peas! This goes for roasting, sauteing and steaming veg as well. When changing the veg, you will generally just need to adjust the cook time for each ingredient, whilst applying the same method.

Grains/Carbohydrates:

Who doesn’t love carbs!! Use our video library as a guide on how to cook all your favourite carb sources. When cooked right, they can form the perfect accompaniment to your chosen protein and veg sources! However, grains are also one of the most common forms of cross contamination or food poisoning, so always ensure you cool them down properly before packing them away and do not reheat them more than 1 time.

Weighing cooked vs. raw: 

One of the most common questions I get is whether people should be tracking/weighing their food as cooked or raw. Well, the answer is… that’s totally up to you! But whatever you choose to do, BE CONSISTENT! If you prefer to track your food as raw, then ALWAYS track your food as raw – and vice versa if you prefer to track your food as cooked.

When tracking your food as raw, you will need to weigh your food before cooking and after cooking in order to divide it up equally. For example, if you are baking 200g of raw potato for 2 meals, this is likely going to weigh closer to 100-120g after cooking. Divide this figure by the number of meals you are making to divide it up accurately. So whilst you will track your meal as 100g of RAW potato, the container itself will only contain 50-60g of COOKED potato.

When tracking your food as cooked, you will simply weigh it after cooking and divide it up evenly by the number of meals you have planned. HOWEVER, all ingredients will change weight once cooked, so if you have planned 100g of cooked potato per meal, you will need to buy about double this as raw. Proteins will lose roughly 20% of their weight once cooked, whilst boiled grains (such as rice and pasta) will double in weight once cooked. This is just important to keep in mind when planning your shopping list!