Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
It's not cooking 101, it's at least cooking 102 or 103. I know you didn't do it intentionally, but when newbies get into a new subject they are often turned off by comments like yours which boil down to "oh noo you can't do it that way, you simply must do insert term of art or else insert negative hyperbole" - it's precisely what's meant by "gatekeeping". If I told my girlfriend a million Italians were crying because she made lasagna wrong she'd probably slap me. It also gets into the complaint about cultural specificity from the original comment. It might be Cooking 101 - for French…
Since you mentioned seasoning, and I’ve got this in my clipboard from another reply... Check out Salt Fat Acid Heat [0] if you haven’t seen it. It totally changed my idea of how to season things, to the point that I feel a lot more confident modifying existing recipes now. One of the most eye opening things also sounds the most silly in retrospect: taste as you go. It makes such a huge difference! For whatever reason, I would always blindly follow a recipe until the very end, and hope that the “big reveal” turned out how I hoped. Now, I try to taste as I go (add a little salt; try it; add…
Yeah, I’ve had the same experience. I really like the Salt Fat Acid Heat [0] book for this. It does have a section on recipes, but a solid half or more of the book is on technique, why certain ways work and others don’t, etc. Lots of stuff that I imagine one would pick up by working in a kitchen or going to school for it, but could take a long time to figure out on your own. 0: https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering/dp/14767...
YMMV, but I got great returns on investing in a proper chef’s knife, and learning how to use and maintain it properly. There’s a real pleasure in dicing an onion or whatever in seconds. Knowing I can do that helps lower the ‘activation energy’ of cooking versus takeout, as does just generally loosening up about cooking. My favorite meals are often thrown together in 20 minutes with zero planning, and certainly no recipe. Knowing a few fundamentals (see Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat) gets you a long way.
What helped me when learning to cook vegan was focusing on the basics. I studied a few recipes (such as Indian curry) and identified the fundamental ingredients (onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, spices, and protein), creating a list of non-basic spices and other potential ingredients. I mastered the process of this basic recipe: browning the onions with cumin and bay leaf, no salt, adding garlic and the remaining spices, introducing tomatoes with salt, then adding vegetable stock and protein, and cooking until finished. From there, I began experimenting with additional spices,…
I've been teaching my friends how to cook. Here's what I've learned: Follow the recipe, then don't follow it. As a beginner, follow the damn recipe. Read the ingredients list, buy the ingredients, and follow the instructions to the word. I know too many beginners who get lazy, don't follow the recipe and then the food doesn't taste good. Then, once you've gotten it down, start to tweak and experiment. Try adding a new ingredient or substituting something you don't have. Once you're not a beginner, you can skip following the recipe. Learn the basic science of searing, emulsions, salting and…
A sibling comment mentioned "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" by Samin Nosrat. I cannot praise this book highly enough. If you enjoy food but don't know the fundamentals of cooking, it may actually change your life. Part 1 alone took me from "I need a recipe to make anything other than grilled cheese" to "I can go to a farmer's market, see some ingredients I like, and make something delicious with it". She explains in great detail the "why" of flavor combinations, balance, different cooking techniques, when and how to season, and is full of obvious-once-you-read-it advice like using the right kind of…
As a former professional baker for 2 decades, from corner bakeshops to a hippie co-op to a large scale dessert manufacturer with worldwide distribution - as soon as I saw the recommendation to use volume instead of mass I closed the tab, nothing of value could be there. Baking is both an art and a science. If you're a home baker you can ignore the science, if you are trying to make money you have to understand at least the basics of the science/physical behavior of your materials. I take a more intuitive/heuristic approach to cooking, and the single best resource I've found for cooking…
As far as fundamentals, I recommend Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat [0]. To be clear, I've only read the salt and fat sections so far. Nosrat talks about different kinds of salt and the appropriate time to apply them (or not, if the ingredients are salty). Likewise, she describes the differences between, say lard and butter, or butter in different states (cold, room temperature, clarified). She also strongly argues for tasting the food throughout the process and building an intuition for how to improvise, thereby. [0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat/Sa...
The book "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" is fairly modern still but also considered a classic by many. The entire goal of the book is to break cooking down to these aspects. Another person in this thread mentioned the Master Classes with Gordon Ramsey and Thomas Keller and I can concur that both of those are really great in teaching technique that is reusable across just about anything you cook. Cooking is pretty easy once you get enough of it under your belt and are confident with different techniques. It's also quite liberating as many things go with each other and it isn't a mystery if something…