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12 Practical Cooking Tips For Relying Less On Recipes

No recipe? No problem! Check out these helpful cooking tips and you'll be A-OK.

Cooking without a recipe can be scary. Will the food be overcooked? Undercooked? Will it even taste good? It's not an easy task.

But with a few simple tips, you can learn how to rely less on recipes and more on your intuition — and soon enough, you'll be confidently cooking without ever having to look at a recipe again.

Here are 12 helpful tips for confidently cooking without a recipe:

1. Feel free to substitute ingredients that are similar in size, shape, and flavor.

2. Keep in mind that for most recipes, the first step is to cook your aromatics, so start there.

3. Memorize your basic cooking ratios.

4. Season your dishes with both salt and acid.

5. Learn how to make a few simple sauces and tweak them to complement whatever you're cooking.

6. Keep your pantry stocked with staple ingredients so you can cook off-the-cuff.

7. Keep in mind that not all ingredients cook at the same time, so the order you add them is important.

8. Remember: Dried herbs are added towards the beginning of the cooking process, and fresh are added at the end.

9. Keep a list of internal cooking temperatures for meats and seafood handy so you can go by temperature rather than time.

10. Know which cuts of meat take a long time to cook, and which can be cooked rather quickly.

11. Don't use olive oil for everything. The smoke point may be too low and the flavor can be overpowering.

12. Try to reimagine your favorite flavor combinations in new ways.