When cooking, your senses are the most important tool. They’re going to help you cook with confidence and achieve great results.   

Once you’ve done the groundwork (reading the recipe several times, checking you have everything and doing your prep), you’re ready to cook.

Instead of relying solely on what the recipe is telling you in terms of how long to cook the ingredients, use your senses because your oven, hob, pans and ingredients are likely to be different to those of the recipe writer’s.

How does it look? How does it smell? How does it feel? These are all great questions to keep asking yourself as you cook and great indications of whether it is time to stir, turn over, to turn up or down the heat, to move on to the next step, to taste or to finish cooking.