Ask HN: What are your go-to sources for culinary info? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your go-to sources for culinary info?

So, I'm trying to get better at cooking, but I really don't know what sources have a good signal-to-noise ratio, and I thought I'd ask here if anyone has recommendations.

So far, I've tried googling, searching YT, searching Reddit, and using ChatGPT. They all have varying but largely middling signal-to-noise ratios, with ChatGPT doing the best, but I'm wary of it hallucinating.

Are there any authors, websites, books or other sources that have helped you get better at cooking, and that you'd be happy to recommend?

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As far as fundamentals, I recommend Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat [0]. To be clear, I've only read the salt and fat sections so far. Nosrat talks about different kinds of salt and the appropriate time to apply them (or not, if the ingredients are salty). Likewise, she describes the differences between, say lard and butter, or butter in different states (cold, room temperature, clarified). She also strongly argues for tasting the food throughout the process and building an intuition for how to improvise, thereby.

[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat/Sa...

For recipes, the BBC is a good resource. https://www.bbc.co.uk/food

For cooking then for me it's cook repeatedly. Like most things, the more you do it the better you get as you learn what works, what does not, what you like, how your oven/hob/pans work (because they all vary).

I must have a dozen or more 'cookery' books but they can't tell me how hot is hot, how my pans conduct heat, how different my oven is to theirs.

Keep cooking and maybe start by perfecting a food you love.

Yes, agree 100% with the "practice over and over" approach (I'm reminded of the "50 pounds of pots" story, shared by Derek Sivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097663 ). I already do that, I'm just looking for sources to supplement it.

Anything from the folks at Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen.

I love their recipe articles because they discuss what worked, what didn't, and why in the process of developing the recipe.

I rarely cook from recipes, but I have gotten an amazing number of good ideas and techniques from Cook's over the years.

The best cooking YouTube channel I've found are Food Wishes and J. Kenji López-Alt. Both of these channels focus on making a specific dish in each video, but they explain the why of the ingredients, cooking techniques, prep skills. Especially from a food science perspective, their knowledge was so deep and they clearly have a lot of experience in restaurants.

This helped me understand what role each ingredient and cooking step actually does. Similarly, they have great advice on efficiency so that cooking doesn't take as long or as much work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@foodwishes

[2] https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt

Chef John's voice superbugs, but i do like his baguettes: https://youtu.be/Q2rLPq8oYCc

https://www.budgetbytes.com is a good option for a collection of cost effective but generally good recipes, though the author goes light on seasonings to keep costs down. I also have a large collection of William Sonoma cookbooks that was just on sale on Humble Bundle. I really like their "x of the day" series: https://www.williams-sonoma.com/search/results.html?words=of...

When I learned to cook on the line, the grads from culinary school had me read "On Cooking", the textbooks they learned from in school. Teaches fundamentals and basic skills.

Working with professional chefs in a higher end restaurant is by far the best way to learn. One unique, homely skill that I picked up from Sun-Tues experience, is how to craft tasty recipes from the ingredients and leftovers at hand, which is more about having a recipe repertoire. A good cooking game is to take one main, and one flavoror, ingredient and craft a recipe from those.

Are you a beginner? Advanced?

I'm a beginner/intermediate. I started with Japanese curry from a box: https://youtu.be/2T_Sh2jKf3M

Then moved on to no-knead bread: https://youtu.be/13Ah9ES2yTU also baguettes: https://youtu.be/Q2rLPq8oYCc

When I want to learn something, I'll watch many videos, then pick one, eg on carving a turkey: https://youtu.be/iAe7-GpV98E

This series has lots of theory: https://youtu.be/Z9L-tJxPTGY

I had this rigatoni at a restaurant, so I wanted to make a version at home (much cheaper) https://youtu.be/fpes-A0BO_Q different recipe: https://lideylikes.com/pasta-alla-buttera/

Someone made this at a chili cookoff. I asked them for the recipe, and it was Martha's: https://www.marthastewart.com/315258/30-minute-chili

I really liked the cookies at Specialty's; I found this: https://wearychef.com/recipe/black-and-white-cookies/

I love these eggs. My gf and I had eggs at a restaurant the other day, we both agreed mine are better: https://youtu.be/AsDj0JJxMXo

Me neighbor made these red velvet cupcakes: https://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=705248

Lately, I'm working on my Turkish coffee game using my gf's cezve.

My (agressively tree-shaked) notes and links on amateur cooking. Cooking is an underrated skill.

https://github.com/slowernews/notebook/blob/master/on-cookin...

Thanks! Yes, I agree 100% on it being underrated.

YouTube really helps with this. There are plenty of cooking channels, and you can find just about any recipe you need.

I'll shamelessly self-promote-- I just launched an AI-powered recipe assistant that my wife and I have been using to cook with for a couple months. It outperforms ChatGPT in our subjective testing.

It's called Sage Cooking (https://www.sage.cooking)

> I just launched an AI-powered

Ugh.

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