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.
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.
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?
Can’t recommend it enough!
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.