I’ve been thinking about Jiro Dreams of Sushi lately. It’s a documentary from 2011 about Jiro Ono, the legendary Japanese sushi chef, and his tiny, Michelin-starred restaurant in Tokyo. I first watched it with Alex in 2017, and for whatever reason, it has stayed with me all these years later. Mainly, the idea of mastery of only a handful of things.
Jiro has devoted his life to doing a relatively small number of things exceptionally well. He repeats the same processes over and over, paying attention to tiny details and looking for tiny improvements. There is something almost radical about that kind of focus. And lately I’ve been thinking about what that idea looks like in my own kitchen.
We’re always looking for something new
We live in a culture that is obsessed with new. What’s the newest recipe? What’s trending on TikTok? What’s the best version of this? What should I make this week? What haven’t I tried yet? And I understand the appeal. I love food. I love cookbooks. I love finding a recipe that sounds so good that I immediately want to make it. But I also think we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that being a good home cook means knowing how to make hundreds of different things. I’m not sure that’s true.
Especially now, when the cost of eating out has gotten so high that even a quick fast-food meal can feel expensive, more and more of us are cooking at home. And if you’re cooking dinner for your family four, five, six nights a week, the last thing you may need is a constant stream of new recipes to learn. What if you just got really good at a handful of them?
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Master five to seven things
Here’s my proposition: You don’t need to know how to make everything. You need to know how to make a handful of things really, really well. Pick five to seven dishes that your family loves. Pick things you actually enjoy cooking. Then make them. Again and again and again. Eventually, you don’t need the recipe anymore. You know what the finished dish should look like. You know when it’s seasoned correctly. You know which time-saving techniques work. You know how much sauce you like. You know what you can prep ahead and what you can’t. You know how to fix it when something goes wrong. You’ve moved from following a recipe to knowing how to cook the dish.
My kitchen is actually pretty repetitive
People sometimes assume that because I have a professional cooking background, I’m constantly making elaborate meals and trying new recipes. And, yes, I can cook a lot of things. But the funny thing is that I actually like to keep our meals pretty simple. At this point, I tend to change up our menu seasonally. Summer looks different from fall, and fall looks different from winter. But within a season? I’m basically making the same ten things over and over and over. And I love that. These are things I feel confident making. I know my family likes them. I know how long they take. I know what ingredients I need. I know how they’ll taste the next day. I know how to make them without having to pull out a cookbook. That’s freedom.
The beauty of the family rotation
There is also something to be said for the mental relief of having a repertoire. It’s Wednesday. You know what you’re making. There’s no scrolling Pinterest at 4:30 p.m. wondering what on earth you’re going to feed everyone. There’s no trip to the grocery store for seventeen ingredients you’ve never heard of. There’s no pressure to impress anyone. You know what you’re doing. And once you’ve mastered the basics, you can actually become more creative. You can change the vegetables. Try a different sauce. Add a new spice. Make it seasonal. Mastery doesn’t make cooking less interesting. It gives you a foundation from which you can play.
In praise of making the same thing again
I think we’re sometimes too quick to dismiss repetition as boring. But there is something beautiful about doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. You don’t need a repertoire of 200 dinners. Maybe you need ten. Ten things that you know by heart. Ten things your family requests. Ten things you can make on a busy Tuesday night. Ten things that you’ve made so many times that, somewhere along the way, they stopped being recipes and became yours. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by meal planning, maybe don’t look for another hundred recipes. Choose five. Make them again. And again. Get really, really good at them. Maybe that’s the secret to a peaceful kitchen—not having more recipes, but having fewer recipes you know really well. And maybe that’s what has stayed with me all these years about Jiro Dreams of Sushi. You don’t have to do everything. You can choose a few things, return to them again and again, and see how good you can become.