Introduction: Even the food conscious home cooks and trendy restaurants sometimes suffer from an ignorance of cooking fundamentals. Sometimes it’s an honest mistake. Hiring Holly Hypertension for grill station can result in grossly undersalted food. Timid Timmy will destroy your expensive Tuna dish because raw = not good. We have been trained by our parents, our government, and the coked-up 80’s that we must cook all of our food “well done”, resulting in an unstoppable epidemic of overcooking. People judge ingredients by the store it is in, by the shelf it sits on, by the really hot alterna-hipster at the checkout counter you’re embarrassed to say whose actual gender is unclear, but you’d fillet them any day. And for some ungodly reason, people (and restaurants are not off the hook here either) don’t taste the food before serving. ZOMG, lol, I’ll brb after I HiT (that’s hork in toilet).

I’m going to lay it down for you old school. The “Cooking Fundamentals in Three Paragraphs” series will explore the deepest causes of bad food, and how to fix them. Sit down, get a really strong drink, and prepare for humiliation.

The Over-Under Rule: I can attribute most food problems to two things: overcooking and undersalting.

When recipes go wrong (and they do with shocking frequency), we fall back on fear.We overcook, we add a bunch of foreign spices (I bet curry powder will make it better!?), we cook it some more, we over-garnish, we insist that ‘damnit, I followed that recipe to the word,’ but the fact of the matter is that your “375″ oven was probably at 300, your stove’s idea of medium-high is like a fucking crockpot on Valium, and that fancy sea salt you bought is actually not as salty tasting as the salt that the recipe writer used. Oh no, the horror! And maybe the recipe was written by a wanker. It may not even be your fault!

Without getting intensely technical, when it comes to meat (with the exception of industrial nightmare chicken), fish, and seafood, try undercooking it at first just a bit, then less, then less, then pretty soon your eating steak tartare like a caveman, testing the quality of your salmon by taking a slice off and eating it, and secretly cooking those frozen shrimp a bit under temp because, fuck, it’s just so good. You could always become a probe thermometer nazi, but I don’t like violating the virginity of my ribeye crust with some metal rod. Did you know that most vegetables are much better LESS COOKED? That’s right! Before you know it, you’ll know how to see a done piece of anything by looking at it, by smelling it, by poking and squeezing it, and of course, by shoving it in your mouth.

Next. Salt. Kosher. Start with this $2 investment and you’ll be thrilled. If you’re not stuck with hypertension, coat your dead animal with salt before cooking, add salt while your sautees are going, and stop. This is important. Taste your food. Poke your food. As soon as it’s safe to taste it, try it – but not your steaks or roasts. Adjust it. Keep cooking. Taste it again a bit later. It’s good, it’s good, just needs a couple more minutes. Taste it before it comes out of the pan/pot/oven – add some more salt if it’s bland. You get the idea. Any halfway decent vegetable sauteed/grilled (hell even raw and dipped) in olive oil and SALT tastes really good. All the finest steak needs is salt. Pepper helps too, but not all things need pepper.

For the love of God, season your fucking food.