Comment by dragonwriter 10 months 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.)
Also https://www.seriouseats.com/, they cover almost everything (including kitchen equipment) and offer great explanations in their How-Tos https://www.seriouseats.com/how-tos-5118034
I have that cookbook! It's one of my absolute favorites, because my wife and I don't have anyone else in the house. And like you said, the explanations are gold.
The old _Good Eats_ tv show was great for this too. You can find most of the episodes on YouTube.
Another good source is the book Ratio, which is almost like a tutorial in how to come up with your own recipes
> a source that explains both rationale and variations
This is the key right here. Not all recipes are created equal. The terse ones are for people who already know what they're doing and just need a sketch to jog their memory. If that's not you, you need a thorough guide. But a guide that explains the why, beyond the how, is far more valuable.
If you can't find such a resource, a good backup option is to search around for a variety of recipes for the same dish. By comparing them, you get an idea of what's critical, what's optional, what is safe to fudge, what you have to get right, etc.
Knowing the why and what your end goal is also helps you adapt your methods to the tools you have on hand. Your stove and pots don't heat the same way your recipe author's stove and pots do. Your fruits aren't the same ripeness. "Cook on medium-high for 3 minutes" is not a very helpful instruction, because its precision is illusory.
> The terse ones are for people who already know what they're doing and just need a sketch to jog their memory.
The day I reached that level was a wonderful feeling.
Some of my favorite cookbooks just outright skip steps or don't bother writing down important pieces of information. You should know what to do by now, so here is some general guidelines, go at it.
Getting to that point took awhile though, and IMHO the key to doing it faster is to be mindful of all the steps that are taken while cooking. Understanding why there is a wet and a dry mixing bowl, understanding why sometimes there isn't. Understanding why glazes are used vs a marinade[1], and knowing why some things are cooked low and slow vs hot and fast, etc.
[1] As an aside, I estimate that 90% of marinade recipes in the western world are pure trash - dry rubs are useless, marinades without an acidic ingredient in them are useless, and any marinades with an acid that suggests you need more than 8 hours is wrong on the math.
IMO marinades are really fun to experiment with because you can just taste them. I cook a lot of veg proteins (tempeh, tofu, soya chunks, TVP, etc) and often marinade them. I'm pretty used to elaborate balances of salt, msg, acid, and other flavors. The way I test it out is just to stick a pinky in or use a tasting spoon and taste. You want your marinade to be heavily seasoned than what you're marinading of course. Acid is an essential component of a marinade.
Acid is important for meat marinades because w/o acid, penetration is just a few mm deep.
The real magic, IMHO, comes from how Indian food is spiced. Lots of contradictory flavors that are used in ways very different than western cooking. Also lots of steps involving dry roasting some of the spices, while leaving others as is, and which spices get dry roasted changes from dish to dish.
I do a lot of Indian cooking from scratch at home, and while I can slightly improvise recipes and tweak them to my taste, I am still a long way from being able to truly understand WTF is going on with some of the more complex reactions.
The ATK cookbooks are fantastic, not only for explaining how the recipe works, but also explaining some of the things they tried that didn't make the cut and why they thought they didn't work.
They also did a cookbook devoted to recipes for two people a while back. Love that.