Following recipes is the basic starting point. Learn some food safety and taste as you go (when safe) so you learn how food tastes at different points in cooking and with different levels of seasoning.
This teaches you how different seasonings work over time in the dish and how they taste when cooked just a little or cooked a lot. And how they work in combination.
This also applies to the main ingredients, not just seasonings. You'll learn which are complementary, which offer desirable contrasts and so on.
With that knowledge, you can start to improvise and change things on the fly to suit your tastes or just what you happen to have on hand.
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The Cake is a Lie! |