I doubt it's all that unusual, but I find one of the most important elements of cooking to be the seasoning, particularly salt. Too little and the food can be bland; too much and the food is a wasteland.
And you can clarify large amounts of butter and freeze them in cakes so you don't have to go through the trouble of clarifying your butter each time you want to use it.
Favorite steakhouse: Ray's the Steaks in Arlington, VA. The decor is non-existant and no reservations are taken. And if you want to get in during the week you probably would get in with only a 20-30 minute wait and on the weekends it'll more than likely be more like 45-60 minutes. The reason is that the steak is so superb.
What I order: For an appetizer, it's almost always the Scallops with Diablo sauce. Perfectly seared and served with caramelized onions and a nice spicy, tangy diablo sauce. A very close runner up is the crab bisque.
For the steak: If I'm hungry, then it's the cowboy, typically with some blue cheese. If I'm not quite so hungry then it's usually the hangar steak. Both come perfectly prepared with a slightly crusty, caramelized outside and a butter soft inside. Both are easily the best steaks I've ever eaten.
Dessert: Always the key lime pie. Crumbly graham cracker crust and a lovely tart pie without too much sugar. The GF always gets the mousse (white chocolate or dark chocolate, depends on what they are making that night).
The best part: Also one of the cheapest steakhouses in the DC metro area. Wines are $10-$15 over retail for an interesting list that matches well with the steaks. The steaks themselves are around 2/3 or a bit less of the price of a similar steak at the other steakhouses in town, and they would not be nearly as well prepared.
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ride&cook
The single most important ingredient is shopping -- or sourcing. Finding really great quality... or unusual ... spices or condiments or whatever you want to put together. Eventually. So for me, I have a pantry of exotica... that I use to augment the freshest basic ingredients I can find.
You can't improvise if there are no ingredients to improvise from. And if the ingredients are second rate, the results show up on the plate.
You can have great technique, but if a box of instant oatmeal is all that's in your pantry, you're not making anything much more exotic or interesting than oatmeal.
The single most important element in cooking:
Fresh and high-quality ingredients. Even the simplest recipe or technique benefits and is enhanced by what you put in as much as what you do to it.
I feel the most important element, other than that quality of the food you purchase, is your attitude towards it. If you love food and love to cook, it shows. If you are having a bad day and you are frustrated, that frustration will turn up in your finished dish.
Techniques mean nothing if there is no love.
To me the most important element of cooking is never giving up on yourself and what you are capable of. Not even the top chefs in world succeed everytime. Sometimes it may take multiples failures (I like to call them carry out nights) to get the dish where you want it to be.
Through each of those failures is a chance to step back, mentally replay the dish, and learn something that will carry you forward.
That lesson could be something as simple as create a slurry instead of throwing the cornstarch into the sauce you want to thicken to write down your entire step process before starting the dish to avoid missing a crucial step.
It's about balance, contrast and composition within each dish, and of the dishes in an entire meal.
A balance and contrast of:
1) taste - sweet, sour, savory, spicy, etc;
2) cooking techniques - sauteed, poached, broiled, fried
3) texture - crispy, tender, chewy
4) rich/light
5) temperature - cold, room, hot
The most important element? ENJOYING IT! If you aren't having fun and expressing yourself through your food...you shouldn't be cooking. That's not to say there aren't bad days/nights/shifts/ingredients/bosses/customers/co-workers...but you should still enjoy it because if you don't...it will come through in the food.
cheers!
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