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Comment by jfoutz | Hacker News Reader

Try cooking. The skill cap is high, it doesn't take much to make things OK, and you gotta eat.

it has helped me a lot. Plenty of times I don't want to do it, but it's hard to put off for long. You can screw up a lot, and the results are still edible.

Every damn meal I make has problems. Usually it's pretty good, but there are things I can do better with the output and the process. No matter the outcome, I feel better after eating. I'd suggest keeping a small stock of premade stuff on hand. a stack of crackers and some soup. Sometimes I just can't get it together.

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Cooking is one thing I'm terrible at: there is no feedback loop at all. No matter how much time I spend on 'experimenting', I don't get any better.

Many people simple cannot fathom this. They deny the existing of any such possibility.

Tasting what you cook while you cook is an incr/edible/ feedback loop

Only if you have a good sense of how things should taste and intuition for how what you put in affected it.

Not necessarily true. Taste is super subjective, only you can decide whether you think something tastes good.

And of course, it takes a long time to taste something and realize exactly what it misses or what causes it to taste good, but as long as you are able to test out different recipes you'll eventually end up with quite a few dishes that taste great.

The point was plateauing, not that what you make doesn't taste great to you. Making stuff that tastes great to an average person isn't hard, you'll reach there really quickly, it is improving after that point that is hard.

Yes, my wife can do this. I think most people could learn the technical skills, but my wife can taste something and decide on exactly the right thing to add.

And how it should taste at this stage of the process. It needs experience to try some dough and extrapolate from it how the cake/bread/... will taste after baking it. Same with many sauces, for example. Things change when mixed with pasta, potatoes, veggies, meat. A sauce is much stronger without them. If you taste it and are inexperienced you may think "just right" and the dish will end up terribly bland.

Right, so you correct that for next time? It's an iterative process, and like any skill -- it takes time.

Don't overthink. If it tastes good to you, fantastic. Only after that, if you want it, should you spend time trying to figure out how to make it taste like it is "supposed" to taste.

These things are not innate, they are learnt. You are essentially saying you can only learn to cook if you already know how to cook. Obviously this is not true otherwise no one would ever learn to cook.

To develop the intuition for flavour and quantities you have to be willing to ruin your food. Add too much salt and you'll find out pretty quick. You'll also learn pretty quickly that the "right" amount is somewhere between too little and too much.

Exactly, it doesn't get much clearer than this whether you failed or succeeded!

@silvestrov: just try easy recipes and buy good and fresh ingredients, and continue with harder recipes once you get the hang of it.

I think there is a lot of implicit knowledge and skill in even “basic” cooking that people tend to massively undervalue. Anyone who tells a beginner cook to “experiment” is falling for this. Beginners should copy, as fastidiously as they can!

Yeah, experimenting is the worst thing to do until you've mastered a few things like temperature, fats, amount of liquid etc. I made so many horrible experiments.

it's a skill. get a book, take a class. I made the same eggs on the same pan for a long time. Do the same thing over and over. Treat it as a hobby, not an obligation. It really is something you can get better at. You'll learn how heat transfers over time. Furthermore, your gear is different. It has it's own special set of tolerances so no one can give precise instructions, because your tools are different.

I've burned soup. I believe you, it can be super hard. There is a feedback loop, you're maybe not seeing it yet. Look at all the things, try lower temperatures, let things take longer.

Experimenting is a later skill. Follow the recipe as well as you can, and observe the outcome. I want to say you'll know where the errors are, but that's not realistic. Maybe your oven is poorly calibrated. Maybe it's too hot for too long. or not hot enough.

The main point is, this is a place you can try and fail, and try again tomorrow. If you don't like the product, figure out why it's bad and fix it. Lots of room to try stuff out, and even if you're vaguely close, you get food. For me, eating changes my mental state. even if the food isn't good, it has this weird effect of ending hunger.

You do you. If cooking is too hard, don't do it. But kinda the point is; try, fail try, fail, try ok, try good. You can figure it out. 7 billion other people did, you can too.

Absolutely the same. Some people just naturally improve when iterating on something (for me, coding is this way) while other just stay at "incompetent" forever - for me, most other activities such as DIY, playing guitar, cooking, and so on.

I always fail to remember this when getting frustrated at programmers who don't seem to improve

Because all of those require level of knowledge that is hard to acquire without external resources. You wont get better just iterating.

I think this highlights the difference between practice and good practice. You won't get better at something by merely doing it over and over again. You have to practice something difficult or foundational to the skill with intention, using techniques that are designed to help you improve your skills.

For example, if you're trying to get better at playing drums, playing the same beat poorly for an hour probably won't do much. A technique like starting to play at a slow tempo and gradually speeding up, cleaning up the mistakes as you go, is a technique that can help you practice more effectively.

The same is true for programming. Implementing a simple TODO app, while a good intro problem to solve for beginners, is probably not going to make most programmers better or more knowledgable at programming.

> Some people just naturally improve when iterating on something

I don't know if framing it as "natural" is super helpful. I think you're right that some people stumble onto the right feedback loops for some activities. But that doesn't mean that the feedback is unattainable for others. You may have to hunt around, but it's still there. And once you find it, you can make progress on the skill.

My experience is that the most important tool that affects your success at building some skill is being mindful of your narrative around it and how it relates to your identity.

Humans naturally pick and fixate on identities. Once we feel an attribute is true about ourselves, we tend to choose behavior that reinforce that attribute even if it's an identity we don't like. If you define yourself as someone who is incompetent forever at cooking, then you will naturally overlook or avoid actions and input that doesn't confirm that.

You won't cook as often. When you do cook, you won't pay as much attention to the process or results. You won't remember the details of what you did last time (since it was such an unpleasant experience that you shut out the entire memory) and how it differs this time. Without that stuff, there's no way to actually get better.

But if you define yourself as, say, "someone who is not naturally gifted at cooking but wants to learn and is perserverant", you may find it to be a more attainable goal.

There are two ways to learn something.

Copy an established method from someone else.

Try something random until you run out of ways to mess up.

The latter is extremely time consuming but if you get through the initial hurdles you will have a complete understanding why the "established method" works in the first place.

Eat the food you cook?

I found my cooking improved massively when I focussed on more scientific methods. For me personally The Food Lab and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat were both great. Reducing the variables to a couple of axes made it much easier to decide what to add or change to get a result. For example if a sauce tastes too greasy, add the appropriate acid to lighten things up

> Many people simple cannot fathom this. They deny the existing of any such possibility.

Frankly I never thought about it before since I self learned cooking quite easily. Maybe it's my French genetics? ;)

I thought cooking was easy, pastry on another hand requires much more dedication and precision, I would say it's the last 20% of cooking.

> there is no feedback loop at all.

Smell the spices before you try them out, use small amounts then taste the food while it's cooking. This works for almost anything that isn't baked. Google to find out what spices intensify through cooking (Fenugreek, Cayenne Pepper, etc.)

Also check out The Food Lab's book for information on what different things do, so you can construct a mental model of it.

Are you experimenting with many dishes at once? Pick one you like, cook it once a week (or whatever your boredom tolerance is), and experiment with that. Try throwing in alternative spices or ingredients, varying salt amounts, cooking times, etc.

IMO, cooking is best learned one or two dishes at a time. After some experience, you'll start to get a broader picture of the art. Think of it like trying to learn "music" from scratch by picking up a different instrument each night - it could work eventually, but you're probably make better progress with a little focus.

The secret to cooking is to test the food and know some basic things which may seem awkward at first but are simply learnable. Everybody who started cooking had a moment when they didn't know what they were doing and a lot of practice made them good. As a beginner I would concentrate on a few dishes and get good at those then slowly progress to more

Well if you know to do stuff like bake an egg there's are numerous recipes out there on YouTube & the rest of the web that are superior to what ~80% of people make.

Buy a pan without a non-stick coating (eg stainless steel or enameled cast iron) and try and fry as much as you can in it.

The feedback is straightforward: If your food sticks, you've messed up. It teaches you loads about the right amount of heat and patience.

Mine is bicycling. To me, a bicycle is a device built to convey me a short distance before humiliating and injuring me. I am comically bad at it, capable of flinging myself into unseen ditches and then having the bicycle land on top of me in a painful manner. Since childhood, I essentially look like one of those self-evolved neural net programs trying to propagate some kind of "vehicle" of randomly distributed wheels across a terrain: flailing, flipping upside down at the tiniest bump, hopelessly mal-adapted for the task.

Pick a recipe you want to learn.

Do it ~3 times as the recipe states. sometimes I even do it 3 days in a row.

After that, write it up based on what you learned that you fixed between each attempt. After that, try making some changes. Note - if you're baking don't experiment too much especially as a beginner, but if you're making cinammon rolls you can experiment with the filling much more than the dough, or you can find dozens of different kinds of dough recipes for cinnamon buns.

There is a lot to learn when cooking, but there are a ton of resources online (youtube and otherwise). You need to actively be trying to get better to get better at most things, I've found, unless you're doing it for 8 hours a day at which point you kind of have to become better just by time spent.

I didn't start experimenting for about the first decade after I started cooking. I followed recipes, and learned the basics. After you're feeling good about the outcome of a certain recipe, then comes time to tweak some parameters. Or, reframe what you consider "experimenting" to look like. Pick a dish you want to master, and find 10 recipes. Do each one (depending how much variety you want in life, this can take 10 days or 10 weeks). Take notes about what went right, what went wrong, what directions were unclear. Try and draw conclusions. That's an experiment! After that, maybe try and wing it, or mix&match parts of different recipes, to find what works for you.

Take a class. It can be fun and an instructor can show you what you could do better.

Try a food box delivery service. We’ve been going through a few and having all the ingredients and instructions literally brought to your door will give you cooking reps without having to research and make choices. I’m more of a food “assembler”, and people like my food, but I have no skills or knowledge beyond what I’ve developed as a relatively clean eating strength athlete.

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