Comment by globular-toast

Comment by globular-toast 3 hours ago

Big difference being Child went to France to train as a cook and spent a long time there (she learnt French). There were techniques and recipes that simply weren't available to the English speaking world at the time. It's different nowadays, especially with English being so much more dominant. It's easy for us to find someone French doing a video in English. As of about 10 years ago there was still a bit more to learn if you learnt French, but the amount of stuff left is shrinking.

For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes (this book incidentally sets out the ingredients better than any other cooking book or website I've ever seen). Where YouTube shines is the techniques. Books do an admirable job of describing kneading, but nothing beats seeing someone do it. That's how we really learn this stuff, and must of us don't have a parent to learn from these days. So watch YouTube videos, but pay extra special attention to what they are doing, more so than what they are saying (you could have just read that part).

maccard 3 hours ago

> For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes

Hard, hard disagree here. Learn some recipes, enjoy eating some food that you've cooked for yourself. Cook some recipes you like for 6 months and _then_ start learning the techniques and fundamentals.

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globular-toast 2 hours ago

I didn't say don't read or follow recipes like some kind of culinary monk. Using recipes is as important to a cook as reading programs is to a programmer. But the focus, if you want to learn to cook, should be on ingredients, tools and techniques. For a start, you will not enjoy making any recipe without a good knife. What's more, your execution will be terrible if you don't know what "finely diced onion" is supposed to be or how to make it, or how much "salt to taste" is. You won't enjoy it and will forever think restaurant/takeaway food is better than your own creations.
Recipes are always written at a particular level of abstraction. Most won't tell you how to dice an onion, but many will tell you explicitly how to make a roux, without saying the word roux. Learning the basics means you can skim and assimilate recipes at a much higher level. Plenty of people can follow recipes but few can learn a recipe from first principles as there are far too many details. To learn a recipe you need to first learn the basics, then you find a recipe is rather easy to learn. Then once you can do that you have the power to tweak them or substitute ingredients etc. as necessary and/or desired.

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dragonwriter 2 hours ago

> For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques.

For anyone who wants to learn ingredients, tools, and techniques, my advice is to start by learning recipes, preferably from a source that explains both rationale and variations (America's Test Kitchen cookbooks are pretty good for this.)

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jillesvangurp 2 hours ago

You are not wrong. Watching people on Youtube go through the process is how I absorbed knowledge. The fun thing with people like Jamie Oliver is that he is very loose and imprecise. He doesn't use table spoons, cups, and what not to measure things out. I don't print out or read recipes, ever.

It's all about techniques and ingredients.

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