Comment by schindlabua | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schindlabua | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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