Are cooking videos making us better cooks?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
He straps a go-pro to this head and you see what he sees while he cooks. There's no cuts or retakes (unless he's waiting for something to cook or gets interrupted by his kids). There's no swaps. And it's all real- he's cooking dinner for his family.
And it doesn't always go perfectly. (See the excellent video titled "Doesn't matter, still pizza").
I'm a better cook for what I've learned watching him cook.
Last time I googled around, it wasn't clear to me.
Don't get me wrong I'm not anti home cooking or massively pro restaurant, I love cooking & food, large categories of restaurant (and especially 'restauraunt') are no longer interesting to me due to the cost vs. taste relative to what I can do, but I don't kid myself, there's plenty of places I can eat the food of professional cooks and be impressed, inspired, enjoy it, find it good value; especially with company. And without touching the Michelin guide.
FWIW, I suspect your comment is getting downvoted because of the nasty tone, not because of the larger point your making.
As for writing comments, it helps not to worry about internet points :).
There are gems in his videos, but it's a few tidbits here and there compared to the content in his written articles.
Particularly since Alton delves straight into the scientific 'why' things are happening. I don't remember exact recipes well, but processes and how things work I can hold well so his explanation of what's happening with the mallard reaction or gluten in bread or any number of topics have made it possible for me to execute very simple meals very well.
In hindsight, most other cooking shows at the time were basically just food porn. Watch me make this simple recipe, trust me it's easy in 30 minutes! (Ignore prep instructions, ignore how to pick produce, ignore any explanation of why you're doing what you're doing).
Mid-week meals involve one of us prepping steps during the day depending on who has free time at the right moment. We do the final steps together while catching up on each other’s day. Maybe an hour of total prep time but usually less than half of that time requires active involvement.
And when you're doing this kind of thing for family dinner you and up using shortcuts like bagged premixed salad, bottled dressing, rolls from the bakery, premade desserts, jarred sauces and gravies which all hide the real time it takes to put something like that together by outsourcing it. I think the miracle of modern logistics being so normal makes people forget how much of home cooking is shortcuts that weren't always available and were marketed toward homemakers who labored over a hot stove and needed a break.
At what point is something no longer a shortcut? Do you also consider the time it takes you to track, shoot, carry, & butcher an animal? Or do you take the shortcut of buying your meat? Do you grow your own wheat? Grind your own flour? Or are those shortcuts too?
* A cut of meat is atomic, that cut pre-marinated isn't.
* Flour is atomic, a Jiffy box is composite.
* Oil is atomic, bottled dressing is composite.
* Potatoes are atomic, frozen french fries aren't.
* 5 spice powder is atomic, but cinnamon sugar is composite.
* Cream is atomic, bottled Alfredo isn't.
* Hidden Valley packets are atomic, but bottled ranch isn't. But when bottled ranch is used as an ingredient in a larger dish it becomes atomic again.
* Rice is atomic, Uncle Ben's isn't. Same rule as ranch when it's used in a larger dish.
* Bread is composite until you make a sandwich with it.
* But this rule doesn't apply to jarred pasta sauce when made into spaghetti. But it does apply to jarred pizza sauce when made into pizza.
Like sure the rules are organic and messy as all cultural norms all, but if you cook with any regularity you just "know" them because it defines when you're allowed to say "I made this" when presenting the dish to others.
In the context of healthy diets for living to 100 I wonder what the best axioms are.
Why is cinnamon sugar "composite" whereas 5 spice is atomic? Who defines these? Are you suggesting that if you use packaged cinnamon sugar on donuts you can't claim to have made them?
For reference, I mostly roast and grind from whole spices. If I need garam masala, Chinese 5 spice, Lebanese 7 spice, etc, I'll make it from scratch. If I new cumin or coriander powder, etc, I'll grind them in my spice grinder.
Are you suggesting that jarred pasta sauce and pizza are different to each other? Following your criteria, I'd classify both as composite.
Not to say that I disagree with most of the list - there's a distinction between highly processed and cooking dishes from scratch, but it's more nuanced than what you've presented here.
> I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples.
> I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums.
> I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real.
> I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own.
> I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it.
> I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat.
> I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here.
> I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
I cook a fairly standard south Indian dinner of daal stew, rice + stir fried veggies a couple times a week in ~30-45 minutes of total work. Nothing preprocessed, premixed, or premade other than (and these are really stretching the definitions thereof):
* Asofoetida powder that's been preground and dried for me
* The rice has been polished and debran-ed (ie, turned into white rice)
* pressure cooked lentils (I make a big batch every weekend or so and freeze it into dinner sized portions)
It's admittedly been years since I last watched Good Eats, but that is not how I remember it all. Almost everything he demonstrated was just as applicable when throwing together a quick pasta dish as it is to making a full 7 course dinner.
An added component is how many meals we are talking about. Making breakfast, lunch and dinner can be very painful unless you meal prep or get quick and easy items (readymade salads, overnight oats, frozen food etc.)
OK, sure, baking bread takes a while.
The more you cook something the quicker it is.
There are many shortcuts, such as:
- cooking rice in the evening before.
- Cooking extra.
- Using a pressure-cooker.
- Using a mini oven.
- Using the griller for more heat.
- Sometimes using the microwave to pre cook things can lead to faster times. (Not often for me).
- Purchasing partially prepared items. Pre cut carrots etc.
- Using a deep fryer.
He continues on in a similar, if more modern, tradition as Alton Brown, I enjoy his videos and I have learned a lot from his videos.
Hacked his pyrolysis oven into a pizza oven (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJjr9lmUhZE)
If you think you'd like to cook, you should watch 20 or 30 videos from his channel.
I've cooked several Chef John recipes to great results (real aioli, peanut butter fudge, beef stroganoff), but Kenji's decision to always provide weight measurements makes cooking easier for me.
It claimed with confidence that the only way to make pork skin crunchy (ie into crackling) is to fry the pork after it's been roasted (ie turn it upside down in a pan of oil/fat)
I didn't even watch the rest of the video. I don't know if they're catering to people who can't work the knob on an oven or if they themselves are just incompetent but that one claim was enough for me to never watch their shit again.
It took me about 30 seconds to find this: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/recipes/8116-crispy-slow...
That isn't the video I saw, but they still happily fry it:
> Finally, we fry the skin, which causes it to dramatically puff up and crisp.
I don't care how long they've been doing whatever it is they do. If you need to put pork in oil to make the skin crispy you suck at cooking.
> We tried to get that skin crisp in a hot oven and under the broiler, and it just didn't work. The only way to get it crisp was using hot oil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ucXLDX_xrE&t=390s
No need to apologise, I'll just take you deleting your original reply as apology enough.
On video you can actually see the consistency of things as they are cooked and maybe even hear what the process sounds like (frying spices in oil has a distinct sound if the oil is at the correct temperature).
You can also see the proper cutting technique, hopefully saving your fingers from pain later on.
[0] https://www.danielzarick.com/uploads/2018-05-draw-the-owl.jp...
But even then they might assume too much about my competence.
I am trying to figure out how to use a specific tool to correct hinches with.
And in each video I find the carpenter is like "then you bend in this direction" and stuff gets alligned.
But I have no idea how they know which direction to pull on my door and they skip those steps while trying to explain.
I'd say 90% of being a competent chef is just down to knowing how to balance the basic flavor components; and to figure out how these things change during the cooking process.
With practice and experimentation you can learn to infer what is lacking by taste and make anything go from bland to amazing.
Spices and ingredients are much less important. They aren't unimportant, but they aren't what makes something decent into something great. You can make a head cabbage more delicious than most what you'll find in a cookbook if you get this right.
Reading "Salt, fat acid heat" demonstrates this really well. Maybe almost to well, it takes away some of the mystery I guess between cuisines. Everything is the same, just different aromatics/spices added
That book changed how I approach cooking, I always wondered how people just make recipes, and now I can mostly do it
You may wish to look at cookbooks produced by America's Test Kitchen. They try to create instructions that are clear and easy to follow.
This is done via a 'beta testing' program which you can join:
> As a recipe tester, you will be emailed in-development recipes. Recipe testers will receive one recipe per month on average. You can choose what to test; you are not required to test any or every recipe (but we hope you’ll want to!). When you test a recipe, please take the survey that accompanies it to tell us what you think. We will ask you questions about ingredient substitutions, recipe clarity, yields, and timing. And you get to rate the recipe.
> Occasionally, we’ll ask you to help us check ingredient availability at your local grocery store. We do this to ensure that the recipes we develop use ingredients that are widely available to all of our readers.
* https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/5237-join-our-c...
* https://www.americastestkitchen.com/testing
* https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/7096-you-are-th...
I wish we had a similar system in Europe, especially for reviewing kitchen equipment.
ATK is one of the few digital subscriptions I'm thrilled to pay for -- it pays for itself every year just in bad equipment purchases.
(E.g., knowing that their top picks for kitchen timers will last many years despite being twice the price as cheapo ones, or knowing that buying the cheap bamboo wooden spoons is actually preferable.)
I just used her fast caramelized onions technique last night actually. I like that she explains why she's doing everything and how it contributes to the flavour of the meal.
It's also like 20lb and over a thousand pages and usually sells for textbook prices, so only invest in it if you really want to level up and have the time to read/work through it.
I find cookbooks completely ignore is "kitchen management"--preparing a meal with entree and sides being cooked concurrently so they come to the table at the same time or reusing leftovers into new meals and meal prep. Thankfully, there's a bit of this on YouTube (mostly meal prep).
Like you mentioned knife skills are a giant ignored thing. I'm a huge proponent of sharpening your knifes (because odds are they've never done it) and taking a knife skills class. It pays dividends almost every time you cook, cuts prep time at least in half, and reduces frustration and friction to cooking.
- Ethan Chlebowski https://www.youtube.com/@EthanChlebowski
- Adam Ragusea https://www.youtube.com/@aragusea
I tried numerous recipes from both and learned quite a bit about the technique as well.
- Townsends https://www.youtube.com/@townsends
- Tasting History https://www.youtube.com/@TastingHistory
My main mistakes back then were simply using too high a heat (though on rare occasion not high enough, like when pan-searing fish), cooking too long, and not using enough oil. All of these things could have been corrected with basic technique videos.
On a somewhat related note, a long time ago I learned how to make gnocchi from an elderly Italian woman. Her teaching technique was immersive: she simply made a batch of it with me standing at her side. There's an art to how quickly you knead the flour into the potatoes: if you don't knead it in rapidly enough you work it too much and it gets tough. You also don't want to overshoot and knead too much flour in. She would work a certain amount in, then have me poke the dough to feel it, and she'd comment on the consistency and where in the process we were; things like "this is what it feels like when you're almost there" and "now it is ready". These things were remarkably hard to put into words, it was a much more immediate thing, like she could detect and point out to me how different it felt from thirty seconds ago. These were things like resilience, just how resistant the dough was to being poked and how quickly it popped back. I can't see how this kind of thing could be conveyed in text or a video, or any way other than in person.
The thing I love about his later stuff especially is that it is practically freestyle. Ming Tsai has a bit of that too.
The person who got me into knife skills was Martin Yan who had a show called "Yan Can Cook" (not to be confused with Wok with Yan by Stephen Yan from Canada).
Is there anyone focusing on recipes and how to cook that minimises / reuses cookware and through to a reset clean kitchen? When I cook I enjoy getting into a flow where I’m ordering the prep or modifying the recipe so I’m able to reduce dirtying extra dishes and aim to have minimal clean up afterwards. Ideally the clean up of the cooking is essentially done by the time food is being served.
I’m half serious and half amused at the idea of a cooking competition style show where participants must plate up, serve and then scrub.
And yeah, number of dishes matters to me too, much of the time. Most of the stuff I make can be done with one, rarely two, and that's about where I draw the line.
Do not clean up after - clean during!
Maybe annoying at first but it quickly turn into a habit
There is plenty of time (as a home cook!) during prep to clean the knives, bowls boards etc. What will seem like a huge mountain if left to linger will be a breeze when you learn to keep your station clean. And you never see this very simple fact of life in most videos.
I really used to optimize how few bowls etc. I would use as I hated the dishes afterwards. But quickly cleaning a bowl after use only take seconds and I no longer dread reaching for another if it ease my process.
This usually only leaves a pan and maybe a pot to clean when done eating. Not too bad even though I do them by hand as I am particular with what goes into the dishwasher
That. And doing mis en place rather than running head first into it. Absolute key lessons for me.
Sparks joy ;-)
EDIT: And if you stack things in the sink we cannot be friends. Sorry. Stack them elsewhere and keep them low.
But, this also means managing sub-tasks through the day, like making sure clean items get pulled out of the dishwasher when it's done so that, to your point, things don't stack up in the sink through the day. There's nothing worse than trying to quickly throw a meal together and realizing the tool you need is at the bottom of the sink under a stack or pile. Things quickly turn to yak shaving.
Cooking and cleaning go hand and hand in my mind. I don't always have everything clean when I'm done cooking, but I'm proud when I'm able leave things at a good stopping point. That said, go eat the food you just cooked while it's hot. I think it can be difficult for people new to cooking to balance all these things, it takes practice. As you get a better sense of timing when things will be ready, you find time to clean something. [The more clean and organized your workspace is, the easier meals come together.]
I won't put my nice metal bowls through a full cycle, but a rinse during prep makes the later hand wash a breeze.
When we build our next home, I desperately want a pair/trio of those drawer-style dishwashers.
Yes. Watch chef Jean-Pierre. I wouldn't say he minimizes the clean up, but he cleans as he goes and gives tips and general remarks on the overall process beyond just the recipe.
But much closer to what you’re looking for - I cannot for the life of me find the website, I thought it was owned by NYT, but all of the recipes are ~5 ingredients max. It negates tons of pans/etc when you only cook/cut a couple things.
https://www.epicurious.com/search/%22Weekly%20Meal%20Plan%22...
The clean as you go method works well with most recipes though. There are dishes that come together really quickly and you can’t walk away from or others that must be monitored constantly but most dishes have some downtime built in.
Prepping all of your ingredients ahead of time makes a huge difference. I used to try and slice the veg for step 3 while step 2 was simmering and it became a stressful race to get it done in time. Now I prep all of my ingredients ahead of time in small bowls or on my cutting board. It’s ready before I need it and the extra “cleanup” involves adding a few more dishes to the dishwasher.
Big proponent of cleaning while cooking myself.
I've learnt lots from both books and videos. Being a "good cook" requires a few things:
* Skill in common techniques,
* Knowledge of ingredients,
* Good tools,
* Repertoire.
Videos are great for learning techniques. I've got books that do an admirable job of teaching how to knead or whisk etc., but nothing beats seeing someone do it. Some techniques are impossible to replicate without the right tools, though. You won't be able to replicate the chopping techniques you see with a cheap, blunt knife, for example. Videos often fail to mention this.
Books are the best for knowledge about ingredients. Videos could do it, but I've never seen one and it's probably not good for TV or the Youtube algorithm. You just need to know a few key things about ingredients like how to buy them, how to prepare them (which bit to peel, which tools to use etc.), how ingredients interact with each other (for example, a video will show you cooking the onions before putting in acidic ingredients like tomatoes, but will it tell you why?) Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is a must-have.
Repertoire comes with time and I think you can get that from either books or videos. The best cooks don't really follow recipes after a while. A brief skim is often enough to assimilate a new recipe and it can then be carried out using existing knowledge and skills. For such a cook, a video can be a very inefficient way of learning a new recipe.
I think of repertoire as like a giant Makefile in my head, I wrote about it in a bit of a silly article on my blog: https://georgek.github.io/blog/posts/cooking-with-make/
I love McGee, but we only tend to pull it out when we have a history or science question, not so much when we're cooking.
A book we lean on heavily is 'The Flavor Profile Bible', Dornenberg and Page. The bulk of the book is an index of ingredients, listing ingredients/herbs/spices that pair well with each ingredient. We've profited from the videos mentioned here and we have our favorite cookbooks, but when we go to spice up the routine, this is the place we turn most often.
I don't want to follow a cooking video to make the same recipe. What I want is to learn these things. I tried MasterClass, but felt it was just more of the same. Well produced, but in the end still recipe-follow-along. Which I enjoy watching, but in the same way watching Veritasium or Numberphile it is mostly entertainment, and doesn't make me a mathematician.
A couple decades ago, there was a tv show called Good Eats by Alton Brown. If you can find the reruns, it has a lot of information for newbies, but it will take a long time to watch it all.
I'm not an amazing chef but I do okay when I put my mind to it. Like anything else, it takes some up front effort to learn the basics and experience to learn the rest.
When you stir-fry vegetables, salt the oil before adding the aromatics. That's basic. How many years was it until I figured that out? How many pro chefs have never figured that out? What's pro?
What about mincing your meat with one cleaver and one chef's knife? Not two cleavers. Not two chefs knives? That's basic. For a certain type of mince. How many people figure that out? It's basic once you know it. I'd bet that isn't taught in a masterclass.
There's no end to basics. There's a great chance your tomatoes don't come from the same vine as mine. Make it your own.
The reverse side is food engineering. When you're controlling for consistent results to ensure every loaf of bread of today's batches of 100,000 loaves are identical to yesterday, or last year. That's another ball game, and perfecting today's 100,000 loaves doesn't transfer much to making a pesto.
Are you sure? What is it for, evenness, or are you playing with the chemistry? I never got this memo and a search suggests otherwise:
https://magnesol.com/six-enemies-of-oil-salt/ https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...
I still don't know how salting the oil would improve anything though. Maybe it's a salting just before cooking vs later and not related to the oil?
What helped me a lot was starting to work through "On Cooking", which is geared towards culinary students, and at least has a more useful progression of skills (e.g. starts with equipment, knife skills, etc.) and techniques, and then starts building up from there. e.g. you learn to make sauces before starting on full dishes, etc. But doing something like that is a pretty large commitment (and all of the recipes have to be scaled down to non-restaurant sizes).
At one point in my early 30s I considered writing a cook book based on trying to teach my housemate to cook, starting with the assumptions that the person in question hadn't ever cooked and didn't own any reasonable cooking stuff, and trying to establish a baseline of recipes that could all be cooked from the same 20-ish ingredients that one could reasonably always have around.
There are definitely recipe-based and intuition-based approaches to cooking, and while I think teaching intuition is difficult, learning a particular vocabulary of skills in a certain order can help.
At the end of the day, it's like learning a language: it's easy to get stuck in the learning/drilling/practice phase. Your actual goal is almost certainly to get to where you can immerse yourself in the skill and enjoy it as quickly as practical. If you want to make something fresh, give it a shot and be sure to taste things as you go. Sometimes it takes trial and error.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSDeoKpIsAk&list=PLnbzopdwFr...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uf3OmSyG6A&list=PLnbzopdwFr...
Edit: after posting this I realised that video doesn't necessarily mean online but those don't have the same reach.
[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Geeks-Science-Great-Cooks/dp/...
I never ever cook from a recipe, either. Cooking is very much like programming. You have a goal (what you feel like eating that day), a framework (what you have laying around and your cooking skills) and you just execute something that approximates your goal. And just like programming you have to learn by doing.
Sometimes it is worth following recipes when you want to cook something new from a foreign cuisine, but I rarely do that. I cook almost exclusively European food, so I know instinctively how to combine the ingredients together to get the taste profile I am yearning for, and I also know how to cook each of the separate ingredients individually.
I really don't "get" people who seem to lack this cooking instinct. In my family there is nobody who doesn't know how to cook. My father rarely cooked when my mother was in good health, but once she fell ill, he picked it up at the ripe old age of 70, and is now able to cook pretty much everything. Baked savoury goods are his favourite.
If you don't know how to cook, you probably need to cancel your food delivery subscriptions and just force yourself to cook your own food. You'll pick it up amazingly quickly. I messed up quite a few times, but I don't remember ever having to throw food away. You always get something edible if you are creative enough.
A couple of weeks ago I had one of my worst disasters. I was attempting a Georgian savoury pie and my dough was a bit too highly hydrated and my filling a bit too warm due to my impatience, and I tried using a new technique for forming the pie instead of the usual one of sandwiching the filling between two pre-rolled layers of dough. The bottom of the pie tore apart and I was left with a mix of filling and raw dough. It seemed like a write-off, but I quickly added a bit more flour and mixed it all thoroughly together and baked it as a bread instead, and it turned out a bit dry but delicious.
Anyway, there is definitely value in cooking videos.
Absolutely, but the more relevant question is if a particular cooking video or series, out of the vast set of "cooking videos" will make a particular viewer a better cook.
Probably not. I'd suggest a few questions to determine if that's true.
What is the specificity of the video? Some "cooking" videos only pretend to be about teaching cooking but they're actually about something entirely different. I love watching old episodes of Iron Chef but I don't expect to learn anything practical. Some cooking shows are about a particular aspect of cooking; a video on cooking with Spam won't make me a better cook because I don't cook with Spam. A video on how to make cakes look attractive with fondant won't make me a better cook because I like food made of food ingredients rather than construction materials.
Does the author know their subject matter? Many videos tell you stuff that's just plain wrong, or even dangerous (don't make popcorn on a soda-can stove with methanol or it could blow up in your face).
Are they level-appropriate? When I left for college, my mom gave me a copy of "How to boil an egg". I got a lot of benefit out of that book but something similar would be useless today. By the same token, years later, we got a lot of great information of of Rose Levy Beranbaum's "The Bread Bible", but it wouldn't have helped me at all as a freshman with a communal kitchen and minimal cooking ability.
There's also the question of what the viewer is going to do with it. You can watch videos all day long without getting any better at cooking. If you want to get better at cooking you primarily need to cook. Some videos may aid that effort but even the best ones will only help to the extent that you're willing to implement what they teach and practice it.
It's much harder to describe the proper motion in text than to just show a video. A still image of dough doesn't show you the elasticity as well as a video does.
Areas they're particularly bad for is anything involving data; recipes, ratios, times. Those are all much easier to see in text.
They're both pretty bad at teaching "feel". There's no way around tasting and poking at any recipe you're not familiar with. Neither videos nor text will teach you how to do that. They'll tell you it's important but you really just need to do it a bunch.
I learnt to cook legitimate indian cuisine watching www.vahchef.com videos. I learnt to cook legitimate korean food by reading www.maangchi.com recipes. And i learnt bonafide Persian cooking from "Food of Life".
I think books, websites and videos all make for better cooks...so long as the recipe writer is aware of their assumed knowledge and can consisely deliver the tricks of the trade within a recipe that holds the cooks attention, be it on the page or in the video.
The written recipes from Vahchef were actual legit trash - with missing ingredients and steps. But his videos...un believable!
Maybe take a basic culinary class at the local community college to learn how to chop and dice and slice and other basics.
But just cook. You get better by doing.
Edit: I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
We watch something, think of something, read something.
Then we try it out in practice.
Then we observe or have someone else observe the practice and result.
Then we take suggestions and improvements into account from that observation.
Then we start over at one of the points above.
If you only just repeat the "practice" step you'll get set in your ways, get used to doing the same mistakes all over, etc.
And, of course, "there is no accounting for taste" meaning that some of the aforementioned dimensions are very subjective.
People don't do blind taste tests when they cook. They cook something and compare it to their previous memory. Then they slowly diverge and enter some crazy part of the space where no one should be cooking an ingredient that way. There's no notion of something tasting right on its own. You need to compare it against a better version of that dish.
It's easy for two people to cook exactly the same dish, following the same recipe, both of them to think it came out great, and then when they taste each other's to discover that one is dramatically better.
You can practice at something incorrectly, building bad habits, which can make you worse.
See also the idea of "Deliberate Practice":
I studied a few recipes (such as Indian curry) and identified the fundamental ingredients (onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, spices, and protein), creating a list of non-basic spices and other potential ingredients.
I mastered the process of this basic recipe: browning the onions with cumin and bay leaf, no salt, adding garlic and the remaining spices, introducing tomatoes with salt, then adding vegetable stock and protein, and cooking until finished.
From there, I began experimenting with additional spices, ingredients, vegetables (almost anything works), and proteins (beans, lentils, peas, etc.)
Always stick to the basics. Many recipes out there are needlessly complex. After all, you can make almost anything taste delicious with just onions, fat, salt, and pepper.
I'd recommend the book 'Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat' – I've only skimmed it, but it seems to ring true.
The part of cooking I'm struggling with right now, and would love some guides and content on, is how to prepare a menu and plan groceries. It's a lot of work, but I'm sure there are ways to make it easier.
Weekly menus have been easy for the family, if you plan in a few stews or rice/quinoa/bulgur/cuscus based dishes which are more forgiving with certain ratios of vegetables and stuff. So plan a few nice meals which need exact ratios, and with stuff you overbought/leftovers you can do these other dishes.
Partner 1: "You'Re watching cooking videos all day, but still can't cook!" Partner 2: "Well, you're watching pron..."
That said, on the general topic hinted at by the title: Yes, they do.
I followed Gordon Ramsay's many videos for a couple of years. I went from being able to a repertoire of eggs, rice and barbecue to cooking as close to world-class meals as I can imagine. This, to the point that we stopped going to expensive restaurants because, in most cases, the food is inferior to what I am able to cook at home. When you come out of a restaurant with your family, having dropped the equivalent of a car payment for the meal and your kids tell you "Dad, what you cook is massively better than that", well, you know you learned something.
I also helped me learn and understand about such things as sauces, spices, proper preparation and generally giving me a sense of the things I can experiment with, have fun cooking and have more variety at my fingertips than just three dishes.
So, yeah, for me, absolutely. Of course, what you get out of it is a function of the time and effort you put into it.
Edit: found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CshkecuFfMc
Another favourite of mine is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt [1], or Kenji as everyone calls him . Really nice and non-pretentious guy. Tons of great advice for beginners. His cookbook even goes into details like how to stock and organize your fridge!
I think one of his most endearing qualities is that he doesn’t hide his mistakes. He leaves them in the video and talks about them and how to recover. Far too often we see TV shows about people making mistakes in the kitchen and getting reamed out by the celebrity chef or having a meltdown of their own.
Mistakes are inevitable in the kitchen, especially when you’re just starting out. Feeling really bad about it is a pretty surefire way to lose interest in learning to cook.
Your standards for cleanliness might be unnecessarily higher, but don't you think it's a bit disingenuous to call his cooking "unclean"?
Why are you taking my observations personally? It doesn't make sense.
And I'm not taking it personally btw, I just think it's silly to claim you know more about kitchen hygiene than a literal professional.
That's my gripe. I enjoy his videos on the whole. I wouldn't eat at his house or restaurant but I enjoy his videos.
From the Hacker News Guidelines:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Next time you don't read an article, please keep it to yourself.
In this case the article's topic is fairly obvious that you could legitimately comment here.
archive.org works fine for it for me. Does the following work for you?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230904034416/https://www.nytim...
Seems to work now, thank you.