Cooking Skills Every Kid Should Learn by Age 10
Time to give your kids some knowledge of cooking to set them off on the right footing? It’s amazing how many children never really learn how to cook, and when they reach adulthood, they’re not able to make any sort of nutritious or healthy meal.
You don’t have to teach them every single aspect of cooking, and nobody is expecting children to be top-class chefs at the age of 10, but it is a good milestone in their development and a way for you to check that you’re imparting the right kind of knowledge to children. Besides, it’s just one of the fun activities kids can do at home as often as they like.
What Cooking Skills Should Children Learn?
Below, we’ve explained some of the crucial cooking skills that children should learn to start to understand their way around the kitchen, and most importantly, to stay safe.
Measure and Mix
Down to the very basics. Children should first learn to measure and mix food. This is great for adults who enjoy cooking and want to have that extra bit of help in the kitchen. You can recruit your children for help with the measuring, and you can handle the heavy-duty stuff like actually cooking the food.
Measuring and mixing can be the first steps in following a recipe, and this is a crucial skill for children to get to grips with. If you are able to follow a recipe, then it is unlikely you’ll go hungry due to not being able to cook, especially as we live in the age of hundreds of online recipes for baking and cooking all sorts of cuisines.
Basic Knife Skills
A lot of parents keep their children away from knives for as long as possible in the kitchen, and it is easy to understand why. It may make you very anxious when you see your child pick up a knife, and you should only start with specific safety knives to teach them skills but also remove any risk.
By making your child proficient with a knife and teaching them about the dangers, you are making it less likely that they will have any kind of accident in the future. Basic knife skills such as chopping and filleting are relatively simple to pick up. Make sure you use safe knives and don’t go straight in with potentially hazardous ones.
Baking Basics
Baking is a great way to teach your children about the world of food. For instance, they can learn about the role of sugar in baking and what makes all of those delicious treats taste so good, or they can learn about bread, what makes it rise, and how it has been part of human history for tens of thousands of years.
Baking basics don’t usually involve too much complex chopping, and you can cook things with your children that are great fun to make and fun to eat. Lots of parents love baking cookies or even bread with their children, turning it into a fun activity as well as an opportunity to learn about food.
If someone can bake to a decent standard, they are likely to always have a supply of delicious and potentially nutritious food, so it is a good skill to start teaching while children are so young.
Bake Something Sweet
This is definitely a way to keep kids interested, too. Teaching them how to bake something sweet can be really joyous and great fun for everyone involved. Why should it always be boring food that we teach children to cook?
They might not be excited at the prospect of boiling an egg, but you can definitely get kids more involved if you incorporate sweet treats into the baking. When it is somebody’s birthday, why not get your children involved in the preparation of a cake, or even let them bake a cake of their own design?
These sorts of activities are a great way to build some of the most important kitchen skills without it becoming a chore for kids.
Handling Raw Meat with Care
Another one of those skills that may not be the most glamorous or fun to learn, but it is definitely important. If you are going to have your children around the kitchen, then they really need to learn about meat safety and what can potentially spread disease.
Handling raw meat with care, and properly cleaning up wherever raw meat has been, is a crucial lesson to make sure your kids learn straight away when you are trying to teach them how to cook.
Clean Up, Pick Up, Put Away
You’re probably asking your kid to clean up and put things away all the time anyway, right? Well, in the kitchen, it is even more important.
A poorly managed kitchen that doesn’t have a good level of hygiene and organization can be a hazard as well as make your life a lot more difficult. Though this isn’t always an easy lesson to teach children, it is important to get them involved with all of the cleaning, picking up, and putting away of food and drink to make sure they know how vital it is to keep everything in the kitchen clean.
It’s not a fun job, and we’d all rather the cleaning happened magically without us, but this is never going to be the case, so it is a good idea to learn this early.
About the Author: Jordan River is an experienced baker, along with an event management specialist. She went into a marketing and customer care role working with JB Cookie Cutters to educate and share her experience. She has had her fair share of kitchen and cooking tools and knows exactly what works best and why.
Before she started writing and customer care, Jordan got a graduate degree in marketing and communications. She is a mom of two, so when not writing, she loves cooking and testing new recipes, improvising in the kitchen, and creating unique things that turn into family events.
Learn more about healthy ways to feed your kids and get them involved in the process.
