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Comment by dwoozle | Hacker News Reader

Cooking is great but you cannot learn it in an hour.

Seriously. I moved out of home with 0 cooking skills and after a few years of having to feed myself I feel like I'm becoming just average. It's amazing how many variables there are to control when doing even the most basic task like sautéing onions:

Sautéing in oil allows you to really crank the heat, using butter you have to be more careful. Cutting in larger chunks is great for some dishes and bad for others. The whole timing thing is probably the hardest to nail, going easy on the heat allows you to get in some other prepwork while the onions are doing their thing, but you also don't want to spend hours cooking so you want to crank it to the point where your prep and the onions will be done at the same time.

How far do you take the onions? How far do you take them if you want to throw in more veggies into the same pan? When do you add spices if you want them to get a bit toasty aswell? And sautéing large amounts of onion (1kg+) is a whole different calculus.

Cooking is this endless fractal of problems to solve and optimize. Kinda like programming innit.

I actually don't have too much experience in cooking, but with every meal I make I get better. Cooking is not programming. Some of the best meals I actually made were made without precise measurements, just by gut, sometimes in a hurry. Sure, I might have measured things by the gram the first time I made them, but on next attempt the closest 20g or 30g is more than enough. Oven 45 minutes? Sure, but it looks brown already and it has only been 35, just pull it out.

Taking a single hour cooking class will drastically up your game. Ideally you'd take more than one, but in most cities you can find classes like:

* Knife skills * Overview of cooking methods * One-pot meals * Quick meals

You can also usually find classes specific to cooking methods.

I highly recommend a knife skills class, as it'll cut your prep times down considerably, which makes cooking a lot more enjoyable.

As someone who cooks a fair bit, I tend to agree that someone could go from how to boil an egg and incrementally add things like organizational skills, knife sharpening, simple sautes, etc. in useful one hour chunks. You can't learn to cook in any meaningful way in an hour, but it's definitely a skill that you can usefully develop on a skill-by-skill/recipe-by-recipe basis pretty effectively.

I'm not sure how many cooking classes are aimed at rank beginners but there are tons of videos these days. It might even be useful to subscribe to something like Cooks Illustrated for a more structured approach rather than wading into YouTube.

Cooking is a skill one can develop their entire life, like most skills. But in my opinion it's perfectly achievable to go from zero to one or even a few basic meals in an hour. Even more so if you have a slow cooker and follow a recipe.

Except you have to go to the store to buy ingredients, and then you have to have the right utensils (you mention slow cooker).

It's not really an hour and doesn't meet the criteria.

I taught all my kids how to cook. You are right, you can't learn _everything_ about cooking. But you can learn one meal you really like.

I pick a new one I want to perfect every few months, look up recipes and try them out over and over until I get it the way I want. (you have to eat anyways) And after doing this for years, I am always told I should open a restaurant. (but that is silly hard work, and everyone can cook)

Sure you can. If you said 10 minutes I'd agree. But if you can learn a bit about programming in an hour, you can learn enough cooking in an hour to make a yummy meal.

The simplest example is a pork steak. Throw it on the skillet and wait awhile. Turn it over and wait awhile. You now have a pork steak. It's delicious.

That's not cooking, that's following instructions. It's like saying that you can learn programming by opening Visual Studio, clicking "new console project", typing in printf("hello world\n"); in between the braces and hitting play is "programming". It kind of is, but you've learnt nothing.

With the pork steak how long is "wait awhile"? 10 seconds? 60 seconds? 10 minutes? All of those yield completely different results, and only once you've had plenty of experience cooking pork steaks, you will be able to judge what "wait awhile" is. Also you missed adding some salt and pepper to the steak - without those it just tastes like....unseasoned meat. Which is ok if that's what you want, but I doubt many people do. But you need to somehow know that salt and pepper are things that you would normally add to a pork steak, but not cinammon or sugar.

I think the only way to "learn" cooking is repetition, repetition and repetition. Not going to do a lot of that in an hour unfortunately.

Whoa, that took me back. That's literally how I learned programming when I was 13 or so. (I'm completely serious; I begged my mom for a copy of Visual Studio off of ebay. It was called Visual C++ 6.0 back then, or something. Nehe legacy tutorials were the shit! https://nehe.gamedev.net/)

I think everyone learns differently. The first thing you'll learn is that as long as you're standing next to the skillet, it's very hard to cook a pork steak too long. It'll always end up delicious.

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