#31: Don’t just taste-test at the end
Everything you cook with has a taste: each and every ingredient. Once you’ve gotten the basics of cooking down, you’ll start combining flavors to create new dishes or jazzing up your favorites in new ways. This poster’s advice is phenomenal. After years of tasting different ingredients, it becomes easy to tell what recipe could use a dash of this or that.
Keep in mind that flavors change when combined or when cooked. Raw garlic mellows, but things like cayenne pepper become sharper and hotter the longer it stays in a dish. Also, lemon tends to change the texture of dairy over time, often curdling it, so you’ll need to take these things into account.