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I agree completely. The article's principle is great, but the specific recipe they describe is a disaster waiting for happen for a newcomer.

I found chicken to be the hardest meat to learn to cook: underdo it and you have salmonella, overdo it and it's cardboard. A well-cooked chicken is a delight, but it's a pretty narrow range. I found beef and fish to be much less scary meats as a novice since undercooking them is less of a risk. You can't undercook salmon, you can just end up with surprise sushi.

Likewise, I love making rouxs, but it took a number of tries before I had an intuition of the cook time/temp before and after adding the fat.

> - how to properly season something (how do you know how much salt and pepper to put on)

It's hard to have precise rules for that because every piece of food is different. Chickens aren't made in a factory (yet), so each bird will be a bit bigger or smaller. You kind of just have to learn it by taste and practice.

> - knife handling and care

I find youtube videos are really great for technique. Just search for "how to chop/prepare <ingredient>". I can cut a bunch of fruits, vegetables, and animals now with confidence.

Taking care of knives is harder. Video doesn't do a good job of showing tactile details like how much force to use on a honing rod.

> - classic flavour combinations

What I do whenever I'm in the mood for something is look up a bunch of recipes for it. If you compare them all, you can kind of get a feel for the ur-recipe that underlies them. Look at a few of those and you'll quickly get a feel for what things go together.

> - what you should always have in your kitchen (stock, garlic, chilli, etc.)

This depends a lot on what cuisines you favor. I think the absolute basics are salt, pepper, oil, butter, flour, and a few aliums (garlic, onion, green onion, etc.). If you have those, you can take damn near any vegetable, throw it in a skillet, and sauté up something tasty.

I'm always surprised by how far "add to pan on medium heat with butter, salt, pepper, and garlic" gets you.

I think Ruhlman's Twenty is a great resource for the kind of thing you're looking for.

"All cooking comes down not to recipes but rather to techniques. In Ruhlman’s Twenty, cook, writer, and food authority Michael Ruhlman distills all of cooking into 20 fundamental techniques, illustrated with 100 recipes, and hundreds of instructive photos"

http://www.amazon.com/Ruhlmans-Twenty-Techniques-Recipes-Man...

> It's frustrating, as someone who is interested in cooking and is trying to learn, that there are a million and one recipes out there, but very few things that teach first principles.

You'll probably love the books by Michael Ruhlman, if that's your desire:

1. The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen

2. Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

3. Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques 100 Recipes A Cook's Manifesto

Before you go and buy a book, you should check out ChefSteps:

http://www.chefsteps.com/

It's linked to Modernist Cuisine, which is also linked to Nathan Myhrvold, who isn't popular here (for good reasons), but it's really a good resource for cooks -- comprehensive and pretty reliable. I haven't really looked into their basic stuff but it's always getting new content so even if they don't have what you are looking for now they might in the near future.

Compare an article or tutorial on 'Make a Twitter clone in <cool language> in an hour!' to this 'recipe'.

No programming tutorial is going to start with turning the computer on, how to use a web browser...it's the same thing that's implied here.

If I were introducing a complete newb to cooking, the last thing I would do is have them do a whole chicken with gravy, etc.

I'd have them cook something very simple. Potatoes, chicken breast, maybe some eggs. There's a lot of things that can go wrong and a lot to learn with each of those.

Try out America's Test Kitchen (http://www.americastestkitchen.com/). I find there way of explaining things very easy to understand.

Completely agree; learning to cook shouldn't be about cooking different recipes, it should be about generalizing the lessons from each one. That said, I think an effective way to learn it is just to try cooking a million different things and keeping notes (mental or physical ones).

My best resource is foodwishes.blogspot.com. His videos focus completely on watching the ingredient, never himself, and I feel like he does a pretty good job of always explaining why we are adding in a spice or choosing a particular cooking method, or when you can feel free to improvise with your own preferred flavors. And there's also a good variety of different dishes, so its not just one type of cooking. I have been following recipes from foodwishes for about a year and I feel I've learned a lot (for an amateur) about how to cook.

Consider picking up a copy of the Joy of Cooking, or another good encyclopedic cookbook. In Joy, at least, the recipes are fairly concise -- but there's a wealth of other info in there: how to tell when specific vegetables are ripe, cuts of meat and their uses, etc. It's one of the only reference books I actually use, in any genre.

Cooks Illustrated has online cooking lessons that have a strong technique focus. I haven't subscribed but I've seen looks good. I think they came out with a book with a similar focus as well.