Improving Cooking Skill

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mathiverse
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Improving Cooking Skill

Post by mathiverse »

So, how did you get to the point where every day you can see a set of ingredients in the cupboard and come up with a meal to make that tastes good and meets your dietary preferences?

I'm going through the process of getting better at cooking and I want to hear some stories, tips, and tricks.

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Re: Improving Cooking Skill

Post by jacob »

I grew up on meat and potatoes. My parents did cook from scratch (both of them) but they were terrible at it. Think fried minced meat on top of pasta with ketchup. Shredded carrots for a salad. They've since evolved beyond that but that's what we ate back then. They always cooked from scratch though. Going out to eat was not a thing at that time. I also took mandatory cooking classes between grates 5 and 7. Americans call it home econ. For us, it was learning to cook a given recipe and clean a kitchen. (I'm lazier in that regard than they were/are.)

Take-away: Fundamental meta-lessons of cooking from scratch and cleanliness.

Coincidental with moving out from under the roof of my parents, I was interested in becoming a vegetarian from a health-nazi perspective. Looking back I was quite insufferable about it. I hope my grandmother (RIP) who was a good cook, saw it for what it was. Moving out I also had to learn how to feed myself. I was too much of a cheap ass to buy meat. I was too used to cooking from scratch to consider the university department cafeteria as an option. See where I'm going with all these apparently random values? So ... combining all these thing.

Take-away: Fundamental meta-lessons of frugality and health over tradition.

First I followed recipes from 800 page vegetarian cook books. Then I started experimenting with leaving out ingredients to see what difference it would make in the outcome. And developed a system of understanding. Focused on that for 2-3 years. Both baking and cooking. I think this approach works better in baking than in cooking. Baking is predictable like a science. Cooking is more about ingredients ... less tends to be more.

Take-away: Fundamental meta-lessons of breaking out of the box and experimenting.

I was never systematic enough to translate my experiential knowledge into recipes. I can no longer make a good "lentil soup" because I rarely eat it. I used to make a killer garlic sauce, but I lost whatever made it possible. I can still walk into a kitchen and cook something edible based on what's available.

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Seppia
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Re: Improving Cooking Skill

Post by Seppia »

A mix of passion, study, repetition and looking at other cultures.

Love of cooking: I think that’s an indispensable ingredient to go beyond “above average” but not at all necessary to get to the “good enough” status.

Books/recipes: that’s always a good place to start when one has no idea about cooking. Following a recipe though is to cooking what ikea is to woodworking. For Italian recipes I recommend “the silver spoon”
https://www.amazon.com/Silver-Spoon-New ... 714862568/

Repetition: that’s how you become faster, better at everything (from judging how long that sauce still needs to cook, at what temperature, how much salt you should put, which spice will go well with it etc etc).
You will also learn to associate ingredients together (ie fresh sage goes well with fatty pork cuts and red wine) without looking up a cookbook.

Different cuisines: this helps you broaden the spectrum of what’s possible. For example, before living in Asia I would have never considered putting ginger in a broth, now I couldn’t fathom doing without.

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Slevin
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Re: Improving Cooking Skill

Post by Slevin »

I learned what probably amounts to many dozens or maybe even hundreds of recipes over the course of a decade that use similar shared ingredients, and then sometimes I will be out of an ingredient, making me need to improvise. This improvisation helps helped me to understand which ingredients are more important to different flavor profiles, and how to adapt them. Part of this game is that I learn how to make everything from scratch just so that I know, even if I don’t do that all the time because I have a good source for one of the prepared ingredients.

Past that, you find that recipes are generally malleable and built of something like modular components. Many pastas and salads and curries etc call for something like a sauce component, and that sauce can be transferred over to different mediums. I.e. I learned to make a nacho cheese from cashew nuts and nooch and some other ingredients, but cashews are stupidly expensive so then I decided to use sunflower seeds which have an incredibly similar nutritional profile to cashews, and blend up just as well, and I can get for <$2 per lb at the bulk store (whereas cashews are like $8/lb even on sale). So then this is making a creamy sauce with a cheesy taste, but maybe I want to make a creamy sauce but one that’s pretty tangy instead of cheesy. Ok well I know I can get tangy out of lemon, garlic, and onion or vinegar in a sauce, so I’ll use sunflower seeds as the base and then throw in the tangy stuff. I never remember exact ratios on this stuff so I’ll often reference random recipes for a ballpark estimate then adjust to taste.

To put it in nerd terms I have enough “sort of known” recipes that define a number of vectors in the n dimensional recipe space that now I see the space between them that allows me to riff and combine things in novel ways and create ideas on the fly. If the vectors are too far apart in the space, or only exist in different dimensions (flavor profiles or ingredients or even food cultures), it will be tough to find crossover, thus you need a good amount of similar vectors to start gaining a feeling of the hypervolume defined between them.

This is an infinite game though, be sure to only take it as far as you want to. I want to know how to do everything, so I’m currently making my way through a bunch of simpler Asian recipes by yeung man cooking (my recipe sources are always filtered for simplicity and clarity) to try and understand a space where I don’t have enough vectors of understanding to just whip something good up in those flavor profiles with just the things i normally use / have around.

Myakka
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Re: Improving Cooking Skill

Post by Myakka »

One classic way to use nearly any meat/fish, vegetables, grains/starch/beans is soup/stew. It does take a bit of patience, but it is simple to do and works well if you make a lot and eat it for several days.

When I was a grad student, I did this on the weekends and only needed to reheat it later.

Western Red Cedar
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Re: Improving Cooking Skill

Post by Western Red Cedar »

One of the most important lessons I learned in my early twenties was to go back to the basics and simplify my meals. Knowing how to pair a few simple ingredients is a really important foundation for making more complex dishes later on. DW helped me realize that I could make some pretty tasty dishes with a simple understanding how to pair olive oil, garlic, salt/pepper.

I equate it to playing an instrument. Some of the best songs are just a few chords that work well together. Knowing the basics is pretty important. As with any skill, approaching with curiosity helps. Getting some easy wins also helps.

ffj
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Re: Improving Cooking Skill

Post by ffj »

Agree with WRC.

Stay away from complicated recipes until you are competent with basics.

Learn how to cook an egg. You would be amazed how easily you can fuck this up and as they are cheap continue until you are competent. It's going to make you pay attention and experiment which is half the battle with cooking.

Then move on to broccoli for example, or a potato, then carrots maybe. You get the idea. Do this enough and you'll come to point when you look in your fridge and it will be easy to make something tasty.

Concentrate on taste and texture on everything you create and you'll develop a pretty good palate.

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Seppia
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Re: Improving Cooking Skill

Post by Seppia »

Western Red Cedar wrote:
Sun Nov 27, 2022 4:49 pm
One of the most important lessons I learned in my early twenties was to go back to the basics and simplify my meals. Knowing how to pair a few simple ingredients is a really important foundation for making more complex dishes later on.
And I would add that the next step is going back to few ingredients :)

One usually starts with simple and easy, then gets to complex and easy, and then onwards to simple and hard.
There’s no need to go past that even to attain three star Michelin level (think about Jiro’s Sushi for a famous example).

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