Comment by MezzoDelCammin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MezzoDelCammin | Hacker News Reader

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OK, how about sharing some cooking resources worth looking into (this is more for future searches)? Here's mine:

1. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. Not strictly a cooking book in the sense of recipes, but the most exhaustive encyclopedia / intro into the science and mechanics of cooking

2. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. The previous, but written with a "more is more" approach and an extra focus on modern techniques. More details, more pictures, (much) more volume and much pricier.

3. Serious eats Food Lab - Probably the best resource on "why/how" a given recipe / technique works that's accessible for free on the internet. I think the main author of this (J. Kenji Lopez-Alt) is also co-author of one part of the Modernist Cuisine.

4. Good Eats by Alton Brown. This used to be a TV show running for well over a decade. Alton Brown usually tries to do one recipe / technique / ingredient per episode and explain as much as he can in 30min or so. The first episodes / seasons are a bit dated (I think he goes over some of the older stuff in his later seasons), but overall probably the best TV show on cooking I ever saw.

5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel. This is a bit of a mixed bag, but when it comes to a channel that I'd recomend to a beginner, I'd probably start with this. Second would probably be someone like some of the Adam Ragusea older episodes (I think he lately went into body buliding a bit too much), or some of the older stuff from "@FrenchGuyCooking" (I got to him through a video done by @ThisOldTony).

6. For recipes : personally I go for David Lebovitz. Old SF cook who moved to Paris some decades ago and at some point used to publish a lot of recipes on his website (though I have the impression he lately pivoted into more of restaurants reviews / social media, the archive is still good).

> 5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel.

FWIW It's a TV show (slash media franchise; see: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/ ) that happens to have a YT channel. I primarily know it from PBS.

Thank you. That comment made me feel super old :)

Kenji has an excellent youtube channel that I think should be the starting point for people who want to learn to cook. There's nothing like video to see what it's supposed to look like during the process.

Also funny dad jokes.

https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt/videos

I first have to proclaim my love for cookbooks. We have over half a bookcase full of cookbooks. Do we use all the recipes from all of them, of course not but there are some great recipes we have found in some of them. We have more than a couple that are annotated and stained and loved and repaired. I’m also a technical writer and it’s my job to capture institutional knowledge and I know how hard that can be. So yeah, I think cookbooks are important. It is very easy to make a bad cookbook. Sure the recipe might work in your kitchen with your pots and pans, that doesn’t mean it’ll work in Denver which is at a high altitude, or Phoenix with lots of heat and basically no humidity. One thing I like about America’s Test Kitchen is that they have beta testers all over the place that test in all kinds of conditions. All the recipes I’ve tried of their’s have worked on the first try. But almost all recipes need adjustment when I move to a new apartment. One of the big things I have learned to check is what setting on the stove is for butter/bacon where it doesn’t smoke (4 on my current stove) or 6 for a high temp oil like corn oil. I love watching Tasting History with Max Miller on YouTube, because he has to figure out what measurements even mean to find something that works. The Old Cookbook Show segments on Glen and Friends YouTube is also great, though they tend to use for modern cookbooks aka late 18th to early 20th Century, but even they often have to convert one kind of quart into another kind of quart or to liters. I am reading Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat and she’s the first to actually say how much to salt pasta water (3.5%). Now she has a professional cooking background and I am not, but she understands how to do good technical writing so the first half go the book is all about technique to make it taste good. My problem with a lot of cookbooks is that they pretty much only give you recipes. Assuming that you already know technique, but that isn’t true right now in the world. Mom and Dad are both working so they have to grab frozen or fast food. Schools dropped Home Economics classes where you could practice technique at least a little. Schools are slowly bringing back Life Skills or Family and Consumer Sciences classes as a replacement. But a generation lost the skills and only some are trying to learn them. I have old recipes I can’t recreate. My mom used to make me fried bread and hotdogs as a treat. I can’t recreate it because I can’t find the Lithuanian style rye bread she could get near NYC where I currently live. While we did try to bake rye bread from scratch we didn’t even get close. So yeah.

Generally America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, Cook's Country, and descendant ventures like Serious Eats and Milk Street are mostly good and pitched at a beginner-to-intermediate level. I wish I'd had them when I was learning. I like them all but the "this one thing changed the way I boil water forever" hook they seem to have to have for every recipe gets a little old, and frequently the "trick" isn't worth the time and effort. Also, I've found I have a little Gell-Mann amnesia with their recipes - if I know the cuisine or dish well, their recipes are usually just OK to good, but if I don't, they're fantastic!

Once you have some basics, YouTube is just a fantastic resource in general for things like knife skills, or breaking down subprimal cuts of beef, or if you want to see a bunch of different takes on making a bouquet garni (which in a cookbook will frequently be succinctly "tie it up in a leek leaf") or tying a roast.

I think Lebovitz "wrote" the Dean & DeLuca cookbook, didn't he? I love that book.

[edit] Nope, David Rosengarten

Anyway, as long as we're making suggestions, my two favorite dessert books are

The Cake Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum. Had it for at least 30 years and was one of the first cookbooks I ever bought.

Classic Home Desserts, Richard Sax. Borrowed from a friend and after she warned me not to get anything on it (was one of her favorites), I got my own copy. Still in frequent use 25 years later.

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