Cooking: where to start?

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Magnitude2717 dijo:
Does anyone have any ...course/cookbook...
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You might find this video useful. It has a lot of good information about the process of cooking and some things to keep in mind that you need to learn when you cook. Also just watch cooking videos in general and bookmark them as you go. As far as cookbooks, go to a bookstore and flip through a few books to see what interests you and get two or three books you find interesting.


Magnitude2717 dijo:
Does anyone have any tips....
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Some things I suggest you being with (to cook) would be:

- Eggs (fried scrambled, omelets, boiled poached etc. ) eggs are a simple ingredient that will let you practice the various techniques for cooking. It's one of the first things I learned to cook and I still am learning new ways to make them.

- A couple of simple soups of your choice i.e. lentils, chicken etc., learning to make a couple of soups will help you make many meals that are easy and tasty and will also lead you into learning how to make stocks and sauces.

- Learn to make a tomato sauce, you can do a lot with a simple tomato sauce. It is a foundational sauce in cooking and will help you learn how to make sauce in general.

- Learn to cook white rice. Rice is an easy thing to cook that can elevate almost any dish. You don't need a rice cooker or a pressure cooker to make it either as some people suggested. A sauce pan can make rice just fine if you don't want to purchase extra appliances.


Also some more general advise I have would be:

- Keep it fun, cook things you like or find interesting and don't get discouraged if you mess something up (because you will). But just keep trying and try to figure out what you did wrong. Watch videos of people cooking the dish you're interested, preferably in real time to see how they do it and compare it what you're doing to figure out what went wrong.

- A lot of people in this thread are suggesting you buy appliances, I disagree. Keep things simple for now, you can make a lot of things with just a frying pan, sauce pan, a spatula, a large pot, a knife and a cutting board. I will make some suggestion below about some essentials, but those few things can get you by just fine. Keeping your investment low at the beginning will help keep things stress free and let you have fun and enjoy learning the process. Your goal is to learn how cooking works, not to learn how to get a machine to cook for you.

- Have your spices, utensils, ingredients etc. together and ready to use before you even start to cook. If you recipe calls for "x" vegetable or spice, don't wait for the last minute to search your spice cabinet when you need it or wait to cut your carrots. Have everything you need for the recipe prepared as much as possible and ready to go.

- Keep things clean and organized. This one is a bit obvious, but every chef at some point is guilty of not maintaining their kitchen the way they know they should. A unclean disorganized kitchen will only make things harder for you. Have your refrigerator organized and clean, make sure you have things labeled and dated so you don't have to second guess what it is or when you cooked it (some painters tape and a sharpie get the job done).

- Taste as you cook. This was mentioned in the video I linked but you want to always have tasted your food as you're cooking it make sure you are adding enough salt.

- Learn how to clean and maintain your equipment, weather you have wooden utensils or coated/non-stick cookware and know how to clean them properly and use them so as not to damage them.

- Do not over crowd your pan. This one advise is more specific, but be mindful that if you have too much food in your pan at once it will not cook evenly.

- Be hungry to learn, not just eat. Making cooking an experience rather than just something you do to get food on a plate will help you stay engaged in the process. There is a lot to learn and it always feel great to make something you like and eventually you may want to share that joy with other who are important to you. Cooking can be a great intimate expression towards others.

Magnitude2717 dijo:
Does anyone have any ...cooking equipment recommendations?
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It is really easy to go crazy on kitchen equipment and everyone will have differing opinions on this, but this is a pretty good list to get you started.

The only thing I would suggest to add to it would be a knife stone instead of a honing steel and an apron.
 
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BongoMongo dijo:
Steer well clear of non-stick pans
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I disagree with this, having one non-stick skillet specifically for eggs is great and will make things easier.
BongoMongo dijo:
Smoked sea salt is awesome.
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Getting pretentious salts is the last thing a beginner needs, OP just needs some Kosher salt and he's good.
AnOminous dijo:
I'd make an exception for the Ramsay short cookery videos. He doesn't pull his usual bullshit persona, just deals out basics in a concise, short way where you can watch a video a couple minutes long and know where to start with something.
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Absolutely agree, I learned a lot from Ramsey videos growing up. The video by BBC "Cooking Master Class" with Marco Pierre White are also good. I would also recommend OP watch Joshua Weissmen on YT, he's very thorough and gives you plenty of information about why he is doing something. YouTube in general is a godsend of knowledge, it can be overwhelming though because there is so much and you can end up falling down the rabbit hole.
 
The first step to not being shit at something is to understand why you're doing it. Food science is more than some made up degree you get when you can't cut it as a chef. Learn why you need to rest a steak or need acid in a marinade. Alton Brown's Good Eats series covers a good chunk of this though as admitted by him, some of the techniques are out of date now. It doesn't even necessarily need to be edutainment, I can't tell you how many times something I saw on Cutthroat Kitchen saved my ass. If you don't feel like pirating, Adam Ragusea and Ethan Chlebowski also dabble in this realm.

Know your brands. Two different brands of rice noodle with the same exact ingredients and instructions cook differently - one gets mushy and the other doesn't. I use the non mushy for soups, the other for stir fry. I personally bounce a lot from brand to brand due to medical restrictions and manufacturers constantly changing shit, it can literally come down to which facility it was produced in. Just because two products are identical in ingredients and appearance does not make them the same at all.

You can make quality food with shit cookware. Good cookware makes it easier, but don't fall for 500$ knives and 1k$ pan sets. Peep second-hand stores for pans and pots. Here's a handy list of different cookware and the pros and cons of each material.

You can always add more of something but never less. Underseason before overseasoning, taste as you go. Add acid or sweetness if it's too salty. If it's too spicy- acid, sweetness, dairy, or dilute. If it's too sweet, add something tart or bitter.

Measure by weight if baking. I cannot stress this enough. I don't care if cups are more convenient, your muffins will be shit.

Fresh herbs will always taste better than dried and grow well in a sunny window.

Invest in a knife sharpener and know how to use it, it will make things much faster.

Everyone and their mom has a way to make hard boiled eggs easier to peel and they're all lying to you. Cook them by gently lowering them in simmering water, don't put them in then turn the stove on. One or two might crack a little, LEAVE THEM. The outer membrane cooks first and makes it easier to peel the shell off after an ice bath.
 
Guess I didn't realize how I lucky I was my parents taught me to cook as a young child. Now I am capable of cooking better than most women. I was able to cook a full course meal from scratch by the time I turned 15. For me personally the key is patience, cooking can feel like a overwhelming and often insurmountable task especially if the recipe is complex and calls for a lot of ingredients and prep. Alot of cooking is just following a recipe but once you get comfortable and know how things pair together you can make your own recipes with confidence. Me and my dad made a chili recipe when I was 16 or so and it's been in my family ever since I swear it's the best chili I've ever had in my life.
 
I went through this journey myself about 2 years ago. You should generally start with simple recipes and work your way up to more complex ones as you start to get competent. For example, one of my first "serious" meals on my own was a simple chicken and rice meal, with frozen veggies. I diced the chicken ahead of time, and did simple seasonings. This will let you get used to juggling things in the kitchen, without anything too complicated.

Afterwards, I stepped up to making soups or stirfrys. Unlike the frozen veggies you can microwave, this will require you to saute your veggies, which takes a bit of practice.

All along the way, try experimenting with seasonings. Don't buy the pre-mixed seasonings (e.g. italian seasonings, various bbq mixes), all of these can be made from a mixture of about 15 "core" seasonings. Eventually, you will get a feel for what works with what.

Once this is all comfortable with you, try challenging yourself. For me, I usually tried to make copycat recipes of various restaurants.

After that, you can basically cook anything. All of cooking comes down to a basic skillset of: sauteing veggies, cooking meats, cooking starches / grains, making sauces / glazes, and combining. If youre competent with this, you can easily do 95% of recipes out there.

And of course, you will mess up your cooking as you learn. Important thing is to not give up, and try to understand what went wrong.

Good luck
 
Basics:

- Learn to cook an egg as many ways as you can. Eggs can be cooked in basically any core cooking method except like, roasting.
- Understand how to make a roux and what it's used for.
- Learn how to cook pasta and rice.
- Learn how to make, at the very least, bread dough.
- Learn one of the many ways to tell how cooked meat is-- or use a food thermometer. Always test the thickest part of the meat.
- Cooking is never an exact science and there's always room for improvement, improvisation, and innovation.

More advanced but still beginner tips:

- Salt. Salt is a flavor enhancer that brings everything else out, not just making things salty.
- Always taste your food as you're cooking!
- Season as you cook, not right before or right after. You can always add more, but you can't remove it, and you want the seasoning IN the food, not ON it.
- Learn how to use scraps like bones and stems to make a stock. Don't throw these away if you can make a stock with them!
- Use SHARP knives and try to keep them sharp. It keeps you from crushing the food trying to cut it and is actually much safer by lowering the risk of a slip. Get a sharpening block if you must.
- Things will continue cooking even after you remove them from the stove. Learn when to remove early (ie scrambled eggs), or when to cold-shock (hard boiled eggs, blanched veggies).
- Let cooked meat REST. A few minutes of leaving it alone will let the muscle fibers "relax" and keep the juices in when you cut. If you cut it right away you'll let all the juices out.

A good channel to try: https://www.youtube.com/@epicurious
 
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Xarpho's Return dijo:
Most basic recipes don't require making a roux. It would not be what I would consider basic cooking.

How is adding salt more advanced than making a roux?!
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Roux are a central building block of gravies, sauces, and thick soups. It's also one of the simplest things you can ever make, since it's just two ingredients (equal parts flour and fat), but the process is something you have to learn for a lot of other, unrelated dishes.

"Adding salt" is itself not an advanced tip. It's knowing when you want to add salt. If you're making a chocolate batter, and you taste it, and you don't taste the chocolate as much as you want to, most people are not going to think "I need to add salt to this". But that's what you do. Salt enhances and brings out non-salt flavors if used right.
 
Jamie Oliver's "Meals in Minutes" is quite decent for a beginner.
 
There's plenty of good general advice so far in this thread. But for people just starting out, a lot of the typical (however well-meaning) advice can be overwhelming. @reptile baht spaniard rid mentioned this and I will quote it here again for emphasis:
reptile baht spaniard rid dijo:
There is ZERO SHAME in starting with hamburglar helper boxes and other such things.
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Did your friends ever talk about how they made a pack of instant ramen more palatable or filling by adding a boiled egg? Believe it or not, you can take those cheap instant ramen packs or other pre-packaged things, and turn them into a proper light meal with just a few additions and a little creativity.

Let us take the classic Maruchan or Nissin package of beef flavor instant ramen. By itself, it is a boring, salty, vaguely-beefy snack of noodles and broth. Somewhat palatable, but not very filling. You could eat one, and then be hungry again an hour later, and you're not getting much nutrition from it. Now, what happens if instead of going from the basic package instructions of:
  1. Bring water to boil
  2. Add noodles to boiling water
  3. Boil for 3 minutes
  4. Remove from heat
  5. Stir in flavor packet
  6. Serve
...we instead added some actual beef, mushrooms, a green onion, and a boiled egg, with a process that looks like this:
  1. Bring water to boil
  2. Add sliced beef, sliced mushrooms, and noodles to water
  3. Boil for 2 minutes
  4. Add sliced green onion
  5. Boil 1 additional minute
  6. Remove from heat
  7. Stir in flavor packet
  8. Add boiled egg
  9. Serve
With just a few extra steps, and maybe a few extra minutes before hand to cut up the beef, mushroom, green onion beforehand, you've turned a cheap snack into a full blown light meal, with more flavor and nutrition that will keep you sated for more than just an hour.

Let's take another example: a chicken-flavored Rice-a-Roni. Again, this a salty somewhat-chicken-flavored package of carbohydrates. Useful as a side-dish, but not a meal unto itself. How could we make this fancier, into a proper meal? The Rice-a-Roni packages actually used to have tips on the box for just that.

Following the instructions on the package, at the step when it's time to add water and the spice packet to the rice and bring the whole mess to a boil, what about adding some slices of pre-cooked chicken breast and some mixed vegetables from the frozen aisle of your grocery store? Now we're talking. With the small addition of meat and vegetables, we've added more flavor and nutrition to what was just a pile of salty carbs.

One more example: McCormick and other brands of chili spice packets usually have instructions that call for a can of tomatoes, a can of beans, and a pound of lean ground beef. Usually they'll have you brown the ground beef in the pot, drain the fat, then add the spice packet, tomatoes, beans, and then bring it back to a quick boil before serving.

What if we were to instead go with a fattier ground beef (80% lean instead of 93% lean), not drain the fat off (because fat is a flavor carrier, and makes meals more filling), and then also add a couple chopped poblano peppers, an extra chopped onion, a couple cloves of garlic, and then a little bit of extra cumin to bring the typical chili flavors back into balance? We might have to simmer it a little longer to let the fresh peppers and onion cook, and to let the extra fat get more evenly mixed throughout instead of floating on top, but the result will probably taste better.

Let's bring this back to something you have experience with.
Magnitude2717 dijo:
the most advanced thing I've cooked has been spaghetti.
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I am guessing your spaghetti process goes something like this: Boil noodles. Drain noodles. Add jar of spaghetti sauce. Serve.

Try this instead: Put your spaghetti sauce in a pot on the stove and bring it up to low heat. Add in some chopped onion, chopped garlic, and some fresh basil. In a skillet, fry up some Italian sausage until brown. Pour the tomato sauce that's been simmering with extra onion, garlic, and basil, and pour that over the browned meat. Mix them together. Then, once you've got your noodles boiled and drained, pour your meaty tomato sauce atop the noodles.

If you're paying attention, you might notice a pattern. Starting with some pre-packaged thing, adding a few extra ingredients can turn it into a proper meal with better flavor and better nutrition. This is an excellent way to train up you cooking skills from zero. You don't have to stress out about working complex recipes, or inventing them from scratch. You have a cheap base upon you can experiment and learn what flavors go well with what other flavors. If you fuck up, you've only ruined something cheap instead of something super expensive.

Once you've gotten a handle on cooking like this, it is a lot easier to branch out into using more fresh ingredients, picking up some more cooking techniques, throwing stuff together from scratch. And even after you've become skilled at inventing tasty things from scratch, being able to throw together a quick meal with decent flavor and nutrition from an off-the-shelf package and a few extra ingredients is a useful skill unto itself, and will put you miles ahead of all the retards out there who somehow manage to burn water.

Good luck on your cooking journey, OP.
 
Serious eats/kenji/food lab recipes are often quite fussy and over the top but they help you understand how different ingredients and cooking processes work together to result in a good dish, even if you don't follow the recipes as written. I've probably learned more from reading Serious eats than any other cooking media.

For a really basic can't fuck it up recipe try Marcella hazans butter, onion and tomato pasta sauce.
 
Magnitude2717 dijo:
I'm happily married to my wonderful wife, so no need.
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If she cooks, learn from her
If she doesn't cook, show her the advice from this thread. Always great to further a bond via cooking! :feels:
Seriously, an extra pair of hands releases the burden cookibg may give you, even more so the more complex you make. Plus, having a goal like "make a nice meal for both of you to enjoy" can give you another reason to keep trying!
 
Magnitude2717 dijo:
Does anyone have any tips/course/cookbook/cooking equipment recommendations?
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You missed out on learning to cook as a kid, so the number one piece of advice would be: start simple. Learn how to cook different things in a simple way, various vegetables, staples like potatoes, rice and pasta and of course meat (in various forms - chicken breast, sausages, chops, steaks). A lot of cooking relies on you knowing how "done" something is, so if it's your first time cooking it as part of a multi-stage recipe you might fuck it up. Once you've got an instinct for the basics move onto more advanced things. The goal should be to look at something like this:
lemonyrisotto.jpg
and be able to do it. Not perfectly from the get go, but there's various aspects here - it's not telling you when to chop up the rosemary, just that it's going to get added while the rice is part cooked. It's giving you approximate timings; you want the vegetables to "soften" but make sure it "doesn't catch" (so you need to get a feel for what's meant by "softened" in this context, and what sort of heat they tend to catch at). It's observing that you want the rice "al dente" and not giving you an exact measurement of stock, but telling you to check the rice yourself and adjust the amount of liquid you're adding. Likewise you're checking to see when the rice is "no longer chalky but still has some bite". You get the ability to do this through practice and experience - not specifically of making this dish, but cooking these sorts of ingredients. Likewise experiment with seasoning to taste rather than relying on exactly one teaspoon of salt (or whatever).

Think about timings. If you're doing steaks with stir fried vegetables and potato croquettes, when do you need to start cooking the different parts to get them all ready to eat at the same time? If you're fussing with steaks (and letting them rest), do you have time to stir fry vegetables and fry the croquettes? Can you make the croquettes in advance so all you have to do is fry them? How long are the stir fried vegetables going to take? If you're new to cooking, maybe try swapping out some of the sides for something easier. Simpler food that's all hot on the plate at the same time is preferable to "complex" or "impressive" dishes that have parts that have gone cold or are overdone because you misjudged the timings (it doesn't matter if a recipe says 15 minutes - add on how long it takes for your pot of water to come to a simmer, and work out when you'd put that on if you're eating at 6pm).

Home economics is another part of it. If you're making a pork bulgogi on Monday, Spaghetti Bolognese on Tuesday and Thai Green curry on Wednesday, your food bill's going to be a lot higher. Consider what fresh ingredients you'll be using and spread them across multiple meals so you have less to buy and less to worry about going off. Roasting a whole chicken (or butchering it into separate bits before cooking) will give you chicken meat for other meals and is cheaper than buying individual chicken pieces. You can do bulk meal prep, but you might not want to eat the same thing multiple days in a row and you may be low on fridge/freezer space. Consider getting some storecupboard/pantry recipes as well - dried spaghetti, frozen spinach and tinned sardines can be turned into a meal with the addition of a couple of other items for very cheap.

Do not worry about learning to bake or make sweet stuff in general. It is far more important to learn how to cook savoury food, over the few times you will ever need to bake a cake or bread from scratch. That's something you can get into as a hobby, and it's far less forgiving than cooking.
Xarpho's Return dijo:
Most basic recipes don't require making a roux. It would not be what I would consider basic cooking.
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It's maybe a little more advanced, but a roux is the basis to a lot of sauces - if you're making mac and cheese, you'll probably want to make a roux. Maybe more of a beginner+ skill.
 
I've been cooking a few things, but I have a question...

Is there a good way to test what spices you like? I never paid attention to it/I'm kind of mouth blind so the only spices I really know of are salt, pepper, garlic and seasoning salt and its getting to the point where I put seasoning salt on everything because I'm a manchild. I don't wanna cook up an entire meal just to test one spice.
 
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