Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

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I got into cooking via Youtube. Youtube cooks became a thing about fifteen years ago. People like Jamie Oliver started promoting first themselves and then others on Youtube and I sort of started watching that stuff to relax. The genius of this was that Jamie Oliver was of course famous but the people he promoted weren't. They were just ordinary people that pointed a camera at themselves while they were cooking stuff. Quite a few of them are still on Youtube and have successful channels now. And of course others have come along. There are many thousands of people regularly uploading stuff. These days if I want to learn how to make something, Youtube is the first place to look.

It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that I could do some cooking myself. If you are a programmer (like me), my realization was that if I can follow instructions and implement some complex algorithm, cooking is a lot easier. And even the failures can be tasty.

Julia Childs was basically doing the same thing as these Youtube chefs but about half a century earlier. You can find quite a bit of her shows on Youtube. But it's got a similar vibe to it: shot at home, very passionate about what she did, very relatable, etc. And it necessarily follows a similar format. She was funny, and no-nonsense. Very unglamorous too. And obviously very skilled. She was a middle aged woman by the time she got on TV. It was all about the food and her character.

I can't say she was a huge influence for me because I never knew she existed until some Youtube chefs kept referring to her and I checked out some of her stuff.

Anyway, I loved the bit of information about her WW II career as a high level intelligence officer. Only makes her more awesome.

Big difference being Child went to France to train as a cook and spent a long time there (she learnt French). There were techniques and recipes that simply weren't available to the English speaking world at the time. It's different nowadays, especially with English being so much more dominant. It's easy for us to find someone French doing a video in English. As of about 10 years ago there was still a bit more to learn if you learnt French, but the amount of stuff left is shrinking.

For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes (this book incidentally sets out the ingredients better than any other cooking book or website I've ever seen). Where YouTube shines is the techniques. Books do an admirable job of describing kneading, but nothing beats seeing someone do it. That's how we really learn this stuff, and must of us don't have a parent to learn from these days. So watch YouTube videos, but pay extra special attention to what they are doing, more so than what they are saying (you could have just read that part).

> For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes

Hard, hard disagree here. Learn some recipes, enjoy eating some food that you've cooked for yourself. Cook some recipes you like for 6 months and _then_ start learning the techniques and fundamentals.

I didn't say don't read or follow recipes like some kind of culinary monk. Using recipes is as important to a cook as reading programs is to a programmer. But the focus, if you want to learn to cook, should be on ingredients, tools and techniques. For a start, you will not enjoy making any recipe without a good knife. What's more, your execution will be terrible if you don't know what "finely diced onion" is supposed to be or how to make it, or how much "salt to taste" is. You won't enjoy it and will forever think restaurant/takeaway food is better than your own creations.

Recipes are always written at a particular level of abstraction. Most won't tell you how to dice an onion, but many will tell you explicitly how to make a roux, without saying the word roux. Learning the basics means you can skim and assimilate recipes at a much higher level. Plenty of people can follow recipes but few can learn a recipe from first principles as there are far too many details. To learn a recipe you need to first learn the basics, then you find a recipe is rather easy to learn. Then once you can do that you have the power to tweak them or substitute ingredients etc. as necessary and/or desired.

I feel much the same way about food recipes as I do about tech how-to's which describe steps but not reasons.

A simple statement of ingredients, processing, times, temperatures, etc., should get you something serviceable. But a guide which tells you what each ingredient, step, etc., is doing to the finished product is far more informative. Also those which let you know whether a value is a minimum or maximum, and how much flexibility there is to it. Much the same as a step-by-step systems admin guide works if everything goes right, but is entirely useless if you run up against a problem, in which case what you desperately need is troubleshooting and compensation/correction guidance.

For example, if a sourdough bread-making recipe gives an instruction "autolyse for 30 minutes", is there any indication that going shorter or longer is possible, or even preferable? (In practice you can autolyse for hours if you choose to do so, 20--40 minutes is a minimum.) How sensitive is dough to overfermentation? What will more, or less, salt do? How does starter change its behaviour in warmer or cooler conditions? What's too warm? Is there such a thing as too cold? How should you adjust hydration for different doughs (whole wheat, rye, spelt, einkorn, semolina, etc. --- something I'm still learning FWIW, though generally WW more, rye less, spelt about the same). How does dough change with a longer cold ferment (1 day vs. 2, 3, or more)?

A recipe is is a sequence with no flow or feedback logic to it. Techniques give you tools to control the process.

I will try to give an example: you find a recipe you like at first glance and try to cook it. It's from East Asia and contains tofu, so you buy tofu, and if you live in Central Europe like me there is good chance the tofu will be completely different to what should the tofu in that recipe be like. Same for the rice (and other ingredients). The result will not be ideal, to say the least, because while the recipe might have been good and you may followed it correctly, the fundamentals weren't there.

Improvisation is an art in itself. Tofu is easy, try recreating something like Osaka-style okonomiyaki with European ingredients, now that is a challenge!

So yes and no in my opinion. First, almost all recipes are written from being cooked in gas stoves and ovens. However, many people have electric. That alone will cause you a problem. Second, tweaking or hacking a little bit of a recipe is a great way to learn what techniques and ingredients do while not breaking the bank. At some point, you will have learned ingredients, tools, and techniques and you can just "cook". You know, like your grandmother could just cook somehow. It was from practice and experience and she always had her own "secret" recipes.

You learn a recipe to eat. And you learn fundamentals and techniques to cook.

Learning a recipe doesn't give you much in terms of cooking-skills. But with skills, you can create or adapt any recipe to your own demand.

Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking" is a fun intro too.

as someone who divorced and didn't want to be the 'mac and cheese dad', I found an older edition of "Williams Sonoma Cooking at Home" a really good beginner book. It goes over basic ingredients, seasonality, cooking methods, cooking tools, proper measuring, and complementary sides before hopping into recipes. I found all of these very valuable as _tons_ of recipes assume basic knowledge of it.

A lot of the recipes are quite involved though so now I tend to go for simpler ones, or pick-and-choose.

> For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques.

For anyone who wants to learn ingredients, tools, and techniques, my advice is to start by learning recipes, preferably from a source that explains both rationale and variations (America's Test Kitchen cookbooks are pretty good for this.)

The ATK cookbooks are fantastic, not only for explaining how the recipe works, but also explaining some of the things they tried that didn't make the cut and why they thought they didn't work.

They also did a cookbook devoted to recipes for two people a while back. Love that.

Also https://www.seriouseats.com/, they cover almost everything (including kitchen equipment) and offer great explanations in their How-Tos https://www.seriouseats.com/how-tos-5118034

I have that cookbook! It's one of my absolute favorites, because my wife and I don't have anyone else in the house. And like you said, the explanations are gold.

The old _Good Eats_ tv show was great for this too. You can find most of the episodes on YouTube.

Another good source is the book Ratio, which is almost like a tutorial in how to come up with your own recipes

> a source that explains both rationale and variations

This is the key right here. Not all recipes are created equal. The terse ones are for people who already know what they're doing and just need a sketch to jog their memory. If that's not you, you need a thorough guide. But a guide that explains the why, beyond the how, is far more valuable.

If you can't find such a resource, a good backup option is to search around for a variety of recipes for the same dish. By comparing them, you get an idea of what's critical, what's optional, what is safe to fudge, what you have to get right, etc.

Knowing the why and what your end goal is also helps you adapt your methods to the tools you have on hand. Your stove and pots don't heat the same way your recipe author's stove and pots do. Your fruits aren't the same ripeness. "Cook on medium-high for 3 minutes" is not a very helpful instruction, because its precision is illusory.

> The terse ones are for people who already know what they're doing and just need a sketch to jog their memory.

The day I reached that level was a wonderful feeling.

Some of my favorite cookbooks just outright skip steps or don't bother writing down important pieces of information. You should know what to do by now, so here is some general guidelines, go at it.

Getting to that point took awhile though, and IMHO the key to doing it faster is to be mindful of all the steps that are taken while cooking. Understanding why there is a wet and a dry mixing bowl, understanding why sometimes there isn't. Understanding why glazes are used vs a marinade[1], and knowing why some things are cooked low and slow vs hot and fast, etc.

[1] As an aside, I estimate that 90% of marinade recipes in the western world are pure trash - dry rubs are useless, marinades without an acidic ingredient in them are useless, and any marinades with an acid that suggests you need more than 8 hours is wrong on the math.

IMO marinades are really fun to experiment with because you can just taste them. I cook a lot of veg proteins (tempeh, tofu, soya chunks, TVP, etc) and often marinade them. I'm pretty used to elaborate balances of salt, msg, acid, and other flavors. The way I test it out is just to stick a pinky in or use a tasting spoon and taste. You want your marinade to be heavily seasoned than what you're marinading of course. Acid is an essential component of a marinade.

Acid is important for meat marinades because w/o acid, penetration is just a few mm deep.

The real magic, IMHO, comes from how Indian food is spiced. Lots of contradictory flavors that are used in ways very different than western cooking. Also lots of steps involving dry roasting some of the spices, while leaving others as is, and which spices get dry roasted changes from dish to dish.

I do a lot of Indian cooking from scratch at home, and while I can slightly improvise recipes and tweak them to my taste, I am still a long way from being able to truly understand WTF is going on with some of the more complex reactions.

I do a lot of Indian cooking also and have for decades, and my suggestion is to just play around with tastes and smells. Dry roasting especially your nose is your friend. That or corner an established South Asian chef and talk to them about their use of spices :)

Acid is also really important for veg proteins because most veg proteins on their own have very little flavor. You can impart umami through various ways but umami without at least a bit of acid does not come across balanced on the palate, so you need to balance the acid with the umami.

The thing that gets me about how Indian food uses spices is that the flavors change so much during cooking.

If I use cumin in a Mexican or even Chinese dish, cumin will likely be a dominant flavor, it will be obvious that cumin is in the dish.

Meanwhile a similar amount of cumin in an Indian dish will get completely transformed and melded into a much more complex flavor profile.

Same goes for cardamom, I use a lot of cardamom when making American desserts, and its presence is obvious.

Meanwhile, my curries have cardamom in them and it adds levels of depth and complexity, but not in the overpowering way it does when used in western cooking.

How to Read a French Fry is the book which introduced the idea of a science of cooking to me. I'd caught a 2001 interview on Fresh Air at the time, which is available by the Fresh Air Archive:

<https://freshairarchive.org/segments/russ-parsons>

The book itself is at the Internet Archive:

<https://archive.org/details/howtoreadfrenchf0000pars>

There are far more titles and now websites on the topic, quite probably improving on Russ's effort. But the basics are sound.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic I've taken to baking sourdough bread, which is its own whole set of knowledge and experiments. Every batch is a new discovery, though all have been edible. Worst error to date has been forgetting the salt (much worse than leaving the oven temp too high).

Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is essential if you're interested in this stuff.

You are not wrong. Watching people on Youtube go through the process is how I absorbed knowledge. The fun thing with people like Jamie Oliver is that he is very loose and imprecise. He doesn't use table spoons, cups, and what not to measure things out. I don't print out or read recipes, ever.

It's all about techniques and ingredients.

I'll glance at recipes to figure out how something is done, when I don't know how to do it. Usually stuff that's from different cuisines that I'm used to. It's hard to e.g. invent a recipe for borscht from first principles if all you know is that it's got beets in it.

Most of my process is just cooking a dish (or an ingredient) over and over again until I've figured out to make it fantastic. It's a great way to become very flexible and learn how to work around missing ingredients.

> It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that I could do some cooking myself.

What were you eating before you had this realisation?

When I was around 20, I lived exclusively on takeout. And not because I couldn't cook, I am and was a solid cook, it's that cooking for one is not that economical (specifically time-wise) and I could just eat places that would allow me to eat a days worth of food in one sitting, think lots of Indian buffets, which made feeding myself on takeout pretty cost effective.

Before that, I lived on takeout because I worked in a restaurant and it was free to take home the food that was going in the trash at the end of the night.

I was cooking but not very well. Or healthily.

Most folks eat microwaved food. Not cooking, just heating precooked meals.

I'm really curious about who "most folks" you refer to are; no one in my extended family does this normally, and I don't know of any friends or neighbors who do it either (we all microwave a snack here and there, sometimes a meal, but it's not how we habitually feed ourselves and our families).

Most single professionals I’m guessing

I suspect this probably applies more to certain nations. Microwave meals are a lot less prevalent in Europe as a staple.

The first couple of years of her TV career are fictionalized in the HBO series Julia, though a lot of it is based on her extensive written correspondence to others. Her editor and her friends were interesting in their own right, as well.

> Jamie Oliver started promoting first themselves and then others on Youtube

He had multiple TV cooking shows before Youtube even launched

> The genius of this was that Jamie Oliver was of course famous

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