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April 21, 2020
Cooking Projects Make You a Better Cook
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Roll up your sleeves and get ready to butcher a fish, churn your own frozen yogurt, or fry a batch of doughnuts.

Even the 15-minute meal can be a worthy lesson. Learning to perfectly salt a burger patty, or poach a perfect white orb of an egg, or transform the outside of a grilled cheese to the just the right shade of gold. But nothing gives home cooks a technique crash course like cranking the music, rolling up your sleeves, maybe even opening a can of Grimm Super Swoon, and digging into a slightly ambitious cooking project.

Maybe this means butchering the whole snapper you were able to score from the fish market—finding a way to use each and every part of it, from the eyeballs to the tail. Maybe it means making your own pâte à choux and constructing a Paris Brest worthy of a Parisian pastry shop from scratch. Or maybe it’s as simple as wanting to make your own soy milk for breakfast tomorrow. You can live this truth.

Here we’ve brought together some of our favorite TASTE projects—home cooking endeavors that will engage your creativity, teach you a few new tricks, and hopefully offer an excuse to stop refreshing the news on your phone. And at the very least, when all is said and done, you might just have something good to eat. And if not, at least you tried. —Anna Hezel