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Comment by ilyt | Hacker News Reader

> “Want to learn to cook?”asked my mother, as she handed me a damp yellow kitchen cloth. “Start with learning how to clean.

My start of the adventure with cooking was making pizza dough and in first year the most visible progress was smaller and smaller amount of kitchen covered in flour after finishing

The breakthrough was going from "follow the recipe" to "understand how it works" (even if only on the very surface) and a bit of experience of what tastes good with what, and that was pretty much transformation from "I can make a decent food from recipe" to "I can pick what I have in fridge/pantry, maybe go buy one or two extra things and make something half-decent".

Never really experienced cooking with my parents (just helping around the food) but that's coz at that age my cooking was mostly "well I want to eat some pizza" and I only started cooking more stuff once I moved out.

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> The breakthrough was going from "follow the recipe" to "understand how it works" (even if only on the very surface)

+1 to this.

I had the traditional learn-to-cook-from-mom/grandma experience. You help around the kitchen, ask how to make a thing, and get "Oh that? That one's easy, you just take a bit of this, a bit of that, simmer here, simmer there, add a dash of this other thing, wait for a while, and voila. Couldn't be simpler". Then you do it and it's like you made a completely different dish.

Repeat a few times and voila, you can make the thing. The thing barely has a name, let alone a recipe. Oral tradition passed down through generations.

You'll learn what it's called when you go abroad and wander into a restaurant based on your corner of the world. Oh _that_'s what I've been making this whole time! Yeah you forgot <secret ingredient>, restaurant, my mom makes it better.

Reading recipes for this sort of dish is always funny. It's like people don't even realize that half this stuff is based on "Whatever is easily available in the area during $season". Oh you're making risotto in summer? Sure! Use these spices. Oh it's winter? Use these other spices. Oh you're in Tuscany? Add this. Oh no it's France? Use these. But it's all the same underlying structure.

I wish recipes instead of usual waffle just had a paragraph of "why". The experienced can skip it, the novices will learn.

Like how you should only use 00 flour on pizza if you have hot enough oven while more usual flour works better if your oven doesn't go that hot.

I guess I should start looking for cookbook that goes into detail about process and not just dumps recipes on me.

A sibling comment mentioned "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" by Samin Nosrat.

I cannot praise this book highly enough. If you enjoy food but don't know the fundamentals of cooking, it may actually change your life. Part 1 alone took me from "I need a recipe to make anything other than grilled cheese" to "I can go to a farmer's market, see some ingredients I like, and make something delicious with it".

She explains in great detail the "why" of flavor combinations, balance, different cooking techniques, when and how to season, and is full of obvious-once-you-read-it advice like using the right kind of fat and acid for the cuisine you're making. (e.g. olive oil and red wine vinegar: perfect for Italian dishes, totally out of place in a Thai stir fry — you want vegetable oil and lime juice)

I do sometimes search for recipes to get a vague idea of what proportions make sense, but I don't feel lost without them anymore.

Tangential thought.

Olive oil has been in Italy for a long time, you can make it manually and I guess the high quality stuff sold in nice stores is roughly equivalent to making it manually in terms of final product (maybe not as fresh or whatever but close).

Vegetable oil though… modern vegetable oil is generally very processed AFAIK, and it’s not at all like what Asians would have used to cook with before industrialization when most cuisines developed I think?

I wonder what sort of fat would be used, like, classically, in Thai cuisine? Still vegetable oil?

Possibly coconut oil or other nut oils, if it was possible to press it manually prior to industrialisation. If not then animal fats like lard and tallow.

Good point, those are both very common in tropical Asia. Also palm oil. I was mentally putting all of those in the 'vegetable' category.

That book absolutely changed my life for the better. I went from basically never cooking before (but loving food) to what’s turned into a years-long cooking and baking obsession.

Can’t recommend it enough!

You might enjoy https://www.seriouseats.com or The Food Lab by J. Kenji López-Alt.

Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking is the classic in the genre of explaining how cooking works. Rather dry textbook style.

I believe Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is such a book for layfolk like us.

Otherwise proper chef-ing textbooks. I used to work with a former chef and the details she could go into about why/how various processes work in cooking – wow. I learned something new every time we chatted.

You would love Cooks Illustrated, then.

+1 on cook’s illustrated. I love how it goes into the why and also describes the process on how the recipe was formed.

"and a bit of experience of what tastes good with what, and that was pretty much transformation from "I can make a decent food from recipe" to "I can pick what I have in fridge/pantry,"

This is where I'd love to get, but I have no idea how. I guess it's just experience and trying things out, but this is definitely the goal.

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