Fastest way to learn to cook?

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Cephas: May 11, 2009; Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

I recommend alternating between two types of cooking:

1. Following recipes. Find a recipe that sounds interesting to you and follow it to the letter. Read the recipe front to back before you even open the pantry. Get all the ingredients out, get your mise en place on. Cooking this way teaches you organization while cooking, gives you fully-realized dishes (if the recipe is good), and will help you learn a few things by experience.

2. Winging it. It's not that scary! Just start out simple. Choose a carb, a veggie, and a source of protein. It can be as easy as baking a potato, throwing together a spinach salad, and cooking a couple of sausages. You can replace the potato with a bowl of rice, the spinach with some kimchi, and the sausage with fish. Or go for a bowl of pasta (add a bit of butter or olive oil and some cheese), sautee some broccoli, and cook a porkchop that you let marinate for an hour in Italian dressing. Once you get this combination down of cooking a carb, a veggie, and a source of protein, you can basically mix and match infinitely. Maybe instead of making 3 separate items you make a stirfry that combines all 3. The main thing is that it's straightforward, gives you a chance to experiment with flavors in a low-stakes way, and can be done for literally all 3 meals in your day without taking much time.

# ? Apr 25, 2018 17:44

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# ? May 6, 2024 12:17

Dr. Red Ranger: Nov 9, 2011; Nap Ghost

I learned to cook using Blue Apron, honestly. Even if you have no idea what you're doing, the recipes are direct enough that if you do screw up you'll know why almost immediately and you'll remember "ok so whenever I do greens/kale don't do that" or "I should cook fish at a lower/higher temperature than what I did because it wasn't as good as some I've had". I have almost no short term memory at all and even I now can go ahead and make a nice ~something~ as long as it isn't a dessert. It also helps you interpret more complicated recipes since you develop a usable knowledge of how to handle certain ingredients.

Sometimes I like to watch the youtube cooks to see what I can learn. Gordon Ramsey (on non American television) was surprisingly informative, even on simple subjects like scrambled eggs. Grandpa Kitchen is a new favorite too. Old Indian grandpa cooks large batches of things to feed an orphanage every day, and you get to watch his entire painstaking process.

Screwing up is probably the best way to learn though. I've screwed up chopping garlic, over-cooking my seasonings, burning and undercooking every kind of meat, burning my cooking oil, using the wrong oils, etc. My most recent mistake was guessing badly at a three person portion of Chicken 65 from Grandpa Kitchen. It's my favorite appetizer at my local Indian restaurant and had to try it, but I overestimated how many eggs I would need for the batter so it ended up mushy instead of thin and crispy. Now I have a better grasp on what to do with eggs when making a fry batter.

# ? Apr 25, 2018 21:08

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Dr. Red Ranger posted:

I learned to cook using Blue Apron, honestly. Even if you have no idea what you're doing, the recipes are direct enough that if you do screw up you'll know why almost immediately and you'll remember "ok so whenever I do greens/kale don't do that" or "I should cook fish at a lower/higher temperature than what I did because it wasn't as good as some I've had". I have almost no short term memory at all and even I now can go ahead and make a nice ~something~ as long as it isn't a dessert. It also helps you interpret more complicated recipes since you develop a usable knowledge of how to handle certain ingredients.

Sometimes I like to watch the youtube cooks to see what I can learn. Gordon Ramsey (on non American television) was surprisingly informative, even on simple subjects like scrambled eggs. Grandpa Kitchen is a new favorite too. Old Indian grandpa cooks large batches of things to feed an orphanage every day, and you get to watch his entire painstaking process.

Screwing up is probably the best way to learn though. I've screwed up chopping garlic, over-cooking my seasonings, burning and undercooking every kind of meat, burning my cooking oil, using the wrong oils, etc. My most recent mistake was guessing badly at a three person portion of Chicken 65 from Grandpa Kitchen. It's my favorite appetizer at my local Indian restaurant and had to try it, but I overestimated how many eggs I would need for the batter so it ended up mushy instead of thin and crispy. Now I have a better grasp on what to do with eggs when making a fry batter.

Also, mistakes can sometimes turn out really well! I remember one time I was making some kind of crispy chicken stirfry, and the procedure was to coat the chicken pieces in egg, and then dredge them in corn starch. I put them in corn starch before egg. Then, I put them in the egg, and then back into the cornstarch. The result was way loving better and crispier than doing it "properly"!

# ? Apr 25, 2018 21:17

Dr. Red Ranger: Nov 9, 2011; Nap Ghost

That does sound good. GK's chicken 65 does something like that but with multiple different kinds of flour. I'm not really sure what the difference is but I'm willing to try it now that I've found a place where I can just buy them. Turns out the indian place has a mini-grocery with all the masala and rice flour I need anyway!

# ? Apr 25, 2018 21:27

bird with big dick: Oct 21, 2015

Pretty much the only two cookbooks I use anymore are The Food Lab and America's Test Kitchen. If I were starting out I'd get those, read all the non-recipe parts, and then dive in.

Some of the recipes are pretty insane in terms of prep though, but I'm also an insanely slow cook. I think it took me 3.5 hours to make ATK's shrimp pad thai.

My wife uses those and also Smitten Kitchen a lot.

My tips, some of which are born out of the stupid poo poo I did when I was learning how to cook:

1. Don't be afraid of high heat. If you're sauteing onions on medium or even medium high you're probably closer to steaming them in their own juice than anything. I think I learned this bad habit from my parents but I spent years doing that until I realized you're really supposed to put it on the Super Boil gas burner cranked to max and just stir it more frequently.

2. Get a whisk. If you're trying to thicken up a sauce or something with some extra flour a spoon just doesn't really work. Along those lines, if you're stirring a big rear end pot of something make sure you're scraping the bottom while you're doing it, or poo poo will settle.

3. Don't buy non EZ Peel shrimp, it isn't loving worth it no matter how cheap they are. Also never buy pre cooked shrimp they're goddamn garbage.

4. Most recipes would probably be better with chicken thighs than chicken breasts and they're cheaper and easier to cook consistently (more uniform thickness).

My favorite recipe type advice:

1. Braised short ribs are goddamn amazing and nearly impossible to gently caress up. Don't trust any recipe that doesn't have at least 1/2 a bottle of red wine in it. Make mashed potatoes as a side.

2. It might be a result of the time/place I grew up, but everyone had a red pasta sauce recipe they made but no one ever made a white sauce, despite alfredo being dead simple (like 4 ingredients not counting salt/pepper) and really drat good. A basic alfredo is also a great place to start throwing all kinds of poo poo in there to make something you like. I have a recipe that Ive been making more or less the same for 10 years that's a brie/gorgonzola/spinach/seafood pasta that started out 15 years ago as a basic alfredo and just adding whatever to it.

3. Reverse searing a really thick steak is an awesome way to make a steak, doesn't require a grill (though it's a great way to grill it also), and if you've got a temp probe is basically impossible to gently caress up. It's going to keep rising in temp after you pull it from the oven though, so you're going to want to pull it at least 5 degrees early. Then let it rest for 15 minutes or so before you sear it, so the searing doesn't really cook it further. I like getting a ~2.5" thick ribeye from the butcher, baking at 275, pulling it ~10 degrees early, then letting it rest for 20-30 minutes before searing. Sear it on the side too, not just the top and bottom. And the pan really needs to be cast iron and hotter than the surface of the sun.

4. The ATK pad thai recipe is the best pad thai I've ever had in my life. I can't order it at thai restaurants anymore because it's never as good.

5. This is an awesome chicken tikka masala recipe but we use garam masala instead of cinnamon and about half as much salt cause it's salty as gently caress (and I love salt).
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/4...Id=cardslot%201

6. I love "fancy" mac and cheese dishes but from my experience you can't really get it right just throwing whatever cheese you want into a roux with some cream. You might get something that tastes great but getting that super creamy texture is unlikely to happen using just cheddar or something. I think ATK has a recipe along these lines.

7. The Food Lab's fried chicken recipe is the love and the light. Follow it precisely. If my dad had made this when I was a kid instead of whatever crappy recipe he learned from his grandma I wouldn't have beat him to death with a shovel when I was 14.

# ? Apr 27, 2018 02:02

WhatEvil: Jun 6, 2004; Can't get no luck.

JacquelineDempsey posted:

I'm gonna guess "no", since he's got a more recent A/T thread about the best way to keep his gf's favorite foods from a restaurant take-out warm in a 30 minute car ride. Plenty of goons suggesting "learn to make it yourself?" with no response.

Eh, the advice here might help someone else out, though.

Haha fantastic.

Oh another good tip re: winging recipes. A good book to get is The Flavour Thesaurus: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flavour-Thesaurus-Niki-Segnit/dp/0747599777/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524814987&sr=8-1&keywords=the+flavour+thesaurus

It's basically just a list of what ingredients go well with what other ingredients and it's fairly comprehensive. It's really useful if you've got a meat or a vegetable and you don't know what goes with it, whether it's other veg or herbs and spices etc. then it'll give you tips. Alternatively just googling ""What herbs go with [x]" works most of the time. Or if you have two ingredients you want to use together you can just google for e.g. "kale and lemon recipe" and if you turn up recipes using those two things, a) it tells you they work and b) you can look at what other ingredients go with them.

Whenever I have an idea like this it's often the case that the recipes you find have other ingredients in them that you don't have, so I usually look at a few different recipes and come up with some sort of compromise because it's often the case that, once you know what you're doing a little bit, you can get enough of an idea of what you should be doing from different recipes that you can cobble something tasty together. Like you might end up using the sauce instructions from one recipe, but the other recipe says to add toasted pine nuts so you add those in too. Or you have two recipes with similar ingredients but recipe "A" says you want carrots and zucchini and recipe "B" says you want peppers and tomato but you only have peppers and carrots so you use those. That kind of thing.

After a while you will just get a sense of what goes with what, but checking always helps. My wife likes to tell the story of the time before we met that she made sweet potato pasta with dill because they had dill left after making salmon, and it was the worst thing she's ever made and it's put her off dill to this day. Those two flavours do not go together. If she'd checked the flavour thesaurus or recipes online she probably wouldn't have tried it.

WhatEvil fucked around with this message at 08:59 on Apr 27, 2018

# ? Apr 27, 2018 08:31

Edgar Allen Ho: Apr 3, 2017; by sebmojo

PT6A posted:

Also, mistakes can sometimes turn out really well! I remember one time I was making some kind of crispy chicken stirfry, and the procedure was to coat the chicken pieces in egg, and then dredge them in corn starch. I put them in corn starch before egg. Then, I put them in the egg, and then back into the cornstarch. The result was way loving better and crispier than doing it "properly"!

This is how a lot of fried chicken in restaurants is done, at least ones I've worked at, except you'd do double egg as well.

# ? Apr 27, 2018 16:46

JacquelineDempsey: Aug 6, 2008; Women's Circuit Bender Union Local 34

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

This is how a lot of fried chicken in restaurants is done, at least ones I've worked at, except you'd do double egg as well.

Yeah, we do dry--->wet--->dry, but buttermilk instead of egg.

# ? Apr 27, 2018 17:54

ToxicSlurpee: Nov 5, 2003; -=SEND HELP=-; Pillbug

PT6A posted:

Also, mistakes can sometimes turn out really well! I remember one time I was making some kind of crispy chicken stirfry, and the procedure was to coat the chicken pieces in egg, and then dredge them in corn starch. I put them in corn starch before egg. Then, I put them in the egg, and then back into the cornstarch. The result was way loving better and crispier than doing it "properly"!

Yeah don't be afraid to experiment. That's probably the best way to come up with new recipes and every recipe that exists came about because somebody, somewhere said "hey what if I...?"

# ? Apr 28, 2018 02:38

RuanGacho: Jun 20, 2002; "You're gunna break it!"

I think that the food services like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh are probably their core useful purpose, I have done Blue Apron for years now with some breaks and I like their slightly adventurous semi fusion food style. To be clear it doesn't save you money and it certainly doesn't save you time unless you really start practicing with that express purpose, but I now understand all the basic cooking methods.

They put out a book last Oct that I got on a whim and it's actually very good for "ok you don't know anything, here's how we begin"

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Apron-Cookbook-Essential-Lifetime/dp/0062562762/
Book is only $2.99 Kindle but the hard cover is really nice quality. If you're not sure it's a good low cost entry place

# ? Apr 28, 2018 18:08

BarbarianElephant: Feb 12, 2015; The fairy of forgiveness has removed your red text.

What's a good cookbook that's easier than that? My husband wants to learn to cook but doesn't really have more than 30 minutes to cook, and a Blue Apron 30 minute recipe looks like an hour to a beginner to me.

# ? Apr 29, 2018 02:58

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

BarbarianElephant posted:

What's a good cookbook that's easier than that? My husband wants to learn to cook but doesn't really have more than 30 minutes to cook, and a Blue Apron 30 minute recipe looks like an hour to a beginner to me.

I think this question gets into a philosophical problem of "what is cooking". For a novice, making a meal from scratch in 30 minutes is just not going to happen. "Cookbooks" like A Man A Can A Plan exist, but I'll leave it up to the reader on whether that constitutes cooking.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/man-a-can-a-plan-david-joachim/1005041678#/

# ? Apr 29, 2018 03:18

DrGonzo90: Sep 13, 2010

BarbarianElephant posted:

What's a good cookbook that's easier than that? My husband wants to learn to cook but doesn't really have more than 30 minutes to cook, and a Blue Apron 30 minute recipe looks like an hour to a beginner to me.

Easy recipes and fast recipes aren't really the same thing. There's some overlap, but the simplest recipes often involve braising, which is cooking with liquid over low heat for a long time. Soups are also often fairly easy but require more time.

I don't own a ton of cookbooks, but for a beginner I'd probably recommend Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It's basically a reference book and you can use it to look up a specific ingredient (what the hell do I do with this eggplant that was on sale?) or think of a dish you'd like to try and check out all of the possible variations (you can often change a dish dramatically just by adding or subtracting a couple of common ingredients).

# ? Apr 29, 2018 03:23

BarbarianElephant: Feb 12, 2015; The fairy of forgiveness has removed your red text.

DrGonzo90 posted:

I don't own a ton of cookbooks, but for a beginner I'd probably recommend Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It's basically a reference book and you can use it to look up a specific ingredient (what the hell do I do with this eggplant that was on sale?) or think of a dish you'd like to try and check out all of the possible variations (you can often change a dish dramatically just by adding or subtracting a couple of common ingredients).

Thanks! But this book has a lot of padding on the theme of "What is a chicken?" - I was more thinking of one-page recipes like "Chicken and Vegetable stir fry" - basic home cooking.

# ? Apr 29, 2018 04:12

Shooting Blanks: Jun 6, 2007; Real bullets mess up how cool this thing looks.

-Blade

twodot posted:

I think this question gets into a philosophical problem of "what is cooking". For a novice, making a meal from scratch in 30 minutes is just not going to happen. "Cookbooks" like A Man A Can A Plan exist, but I'll leave it up to the reader on whether that constitutes cooking.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/man-a-can-a-plan-david-joachim/1005041678#/

This, unfortunately, is pretty true. There's a certain baseline of knowledge you need for that to be possible - and even then, some things just take longer (for instance, roasting a whole chicken). 30 minute meals from start to finish really require either memorization of recipes, or enough experience to know what you can get away with (i.e. break down a head of cauliflower into florets, toss with olive oil, S+P, curry powder, garam masala and a bit of paprika, roast for 20-25 minutes on a baking sheet until crisp) without having to resort to a recipe.

# ? Apr 29, 2018 16:06

PIZZA.BAT: Nov 12, 2016

Dunno if it's been mentioned itt yet but cooking any one individual dish isn't that difficult as long as you can follow instructions and set a timer. It only starts to get tricky when you're trying to prepare an entire meal with several separate dishes. Getting the timing down so that everything is ready at the same time takes experience.

# ? Apr 29, 2018 17:43

JacquelineDempsey: Aug 6, 2008; Women's Circuit Bender Union Local 34

BarbarianElephant posted:

Thanks! But this book has a lot of padding on the theme of "What is a chicken?" - I was more thinking of one-page recipes like "Chicken and Vegetable stir fry" - basic home cooking.

I mentioned it earlier itt, but the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook (dunno if they've changed the style, but the cover has always been red-and-white gingham check, if it helps you spot it) is imho a great beginner book. No frills, meant for busy moms, nothing too fancy, elaborate, or needing special ingredients. It was my first cookbook back in 1993 when I got my first apartment out of college. That cookbook held my hand for about a year until I was ready for Joy of Cooking and then a 20+ year subscription to Cooks Illustrated and now I cook for a living. I recommend it highly as babby's first cookbook.

# ? Apr 29, 2018 18:12

BarbarianElephant: Feb 12, 2015; The fairy of forgiveness has removed your red text.