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Comment by el_benhameen | Hacker News Reader

It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available. Going to the grocery store is then less about "shit, they're out of $ingredient" and more about "wow, the salmon looks really fresh this week". The actual act of cooking is the same--instead of focusing on following and mucking up someone else's recipe, I get to feel creative as I build something based on what sounds interesting. It's kind of like a mini side project.

Alton Brown is probably not an ideal source for recipes for you since he really goes all-out with ingredients and prep, but he's a fun way to learn about the science of cooking. His methods are hacker-ish, and that he doesn't follow same-old-same-old recipes helped me to stop worrying about doing things the "right" way.

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Alton Brown is our guiding light for CookAcademy. (Our chef ironically also happened to be on Cutthroat Kitchen!)

Mark Bittman writes about the stages of learning how to cook and you are pretty advanced relative to others. Many of us haven't gotten to the point where we can realistically come up with ideas based on tastes because we don't know how they interact. Generalizing these ideas requires understanding how and why things work, which is exactly why Alton Brown is so useful to so many people. He breaks down the reasoning behind something so that you can generalize it the next time, or in a different dish, or apply a principle to something new altogether.

Exactly! You put that much more eloquently than I could've. I'm glad to hear that you're creating a product that makes that learning philosophy accessible.

That approach sounds like something coming out of experience. I hope to reach that level one day; right now my mind just blocks when it starts thinking about composing ingredients, and I revert back to the two or three recipes I know. I wish I started cooking as a kid, I was less anxious to experiment then.

You can start by putting together a list of ingredients you like. Many of these will be common ingredients for multiple recipes and go together in different ways. Nearly every time I go grocery shopping I get these things because my SO and I like them.

EG: chicken, beef, tomato, onion, peppers, mushroom, cheese, rice, quinoa, pasta, potato, carrot, broccoli, spinach, asparagus, corn, sauce, etc.

Make sure you have a good stock of different spices, salt, and pepper.

Start with something simple like just chicken pasta and each meal add in something from above suited towards your taste. As you run out of ingredients you'll realize you can still make good dishes. If you run out of pasta you can skip it completely or sub it out with quiona.

I often play the "lets see what I can make with what is still in the fridge" game :D

That's the way I started when I first moved out of home - very simply. I still remember wondering how I should cook a steak; how would I know when it was cooked? How do I know what to heat the pan to? Etc....

To go a bit philosophical, you have to lose the fear of engaging with your food and the cooking process. Don't be scared to play with your food while it's cooking. Smell it often, listen to the noises it makes, don't be worried about moving it around the pan and even take notice of how it moves - is it sticking to the pan? Does it seem a little dry? Does it smell good? Start doing this with the simplest of things - some oil in a pan and a steak or sausages, for example.

Don't worry about following recipes to the exact letter all the time, unless you're doing something like baking where the chemistry is more important to get accurate. If your time isn't exact or the temperature is a little off or you use more than a tablespoon of oil, see what happens. See what happens if you add salt, or if you don't. Observe it while it's happening. Don't be scared to taste something off the pan. If it doesn't taste good, ask yourself why? Then ask yourself how you might fix it.

Once you're not afraid to do that, cooking becomes a lot more fun and intuitive. Then you can follow recipes while engaging with them and the food.

I feel like this is something that many people who hate cooking or who are scared of cooking miss. Cooking shouldn't be a "follow the instructions to the letter otherwise one wrong step and boom!" process. Instead it's a highly interactive, very sensory thing.

Thanks for the tip. Yeah, the game of "lets see what I can make with what is still in the fridge" sounds totally fun! :D.

Yeah, you were right in the above comment that that ability does come from having some experience. But the "let's see what's in the fridge" game is a great way to get that experience! You'll undoubtedly mess a few things up, but that's just the process of learning.

It's weird... the more I think about it, the more I ask myself - "it's just like programming, another cool skill to master - why I'm so afraid of experimenting?"...

If I could upvote this a thousand times, I would. The problem, however, is that making a mistake in programming is not so painful. Making a mistake in cooking costs money and is often pretty embarrassing. I can easily see why you'd be more afraid of experimenting here.

Agree strongly RE embarrassing part - for now I just gave up on experimenting while cooking for friends; I tried it once, and they laugh at me ever since. Costs is also a factor, but I notice I'm afraid of experimenting even with small dishes and cheap ingredients the fridge is stocked full of.

I'm starting to realize now that it's just a stupid fear I need to overcome. I'm glad this thread forced me to think more about my attitude towards cooking.

Feel free to write to me privately anytime. I'd love for you to try some of the lessons on CookAcademy and let me know if it helps, too. One thing we're trying to reduce that fear of embarrassment is have a sort of automated helper when you're done. You answer questions about what went wrong and we provide feedback for how to improve it the next time. We also track your progress so you can get a good gauge of where you stand. Are either of those things helpful to you?

As a bachelor I do it like every day, two times per day ;)

(Yes, sometimes is a really hard game.)

I learnt by starting to cook Indian food when I moved here. A lot of Indian food has the same set of spices and similar procedures. Soon I realized that I can experiment with the ingredients and vary the spices to change flavor and it did not have an adverse impact on the final outcome. That caused me to loose the trepidation of experimenting in the kitchen and I do it with all cuisines now. And it has worked out well, cause I generally can manage to put a meal together with whatever is left in the fridge.

Years ago I bought a vegan cookbook, which had week-long recipe plans in it. I'm not vegan, but without the "meat + sauce" or "meat + veg" options the recipes had to be so much more inventive. It gave me some good ideas, a taste for chickpeas, and a willingness to add beans to anything that looks boring.

A flatmate has a book called simply "Saucen" (German for "Sauces") which provides a good basis for many meals.

>> It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available.

I've been trying to learn how to cook ever since I moved roughly 3 months ago. My early attempts at replicating others' recipes had paid off decently so I attempted the hack-stuff-together approach on a couple of occasions. It did _not_ go well. :-/

I ended up with a ton of wasted ingredients not to mention the significant amount to time spent in prepping and later, cleaning up.

That said, I agree that (with a bit of experience) this approach to cooking is a lot more fun. As a comment elsewhere on the page says, cooking for yourself could sometimes be a pain (especially after you get home from work) and thinking of it as a side project really helps.

Is it normal in your country/culture/social group not to have much experience cooking? I had a lot of second-hand experience by the time I was 18 from simply watching my parents or other adults, and sometimes being asked to help.

I have some pretty basic recipes I cook if I'm a bit tired from work, I can make them without really thinking (e.g. diced chicken + green beans & cream + pesto.) Fortunately, the nearest shop is about 2 minutes detour from my route home, so I can wander in and buy the things I'm missing.

3 months isn't a long time.

I think one way to build up intuition is to cook a recipe with a very short list of ingredients multiple times, with small variations (like the size of cutting things up or cooking time or whatever).

One thing Good Eats consistently does is talk about whether an ingredient has a functional purpose in a recipe, and what that purpose is. Other cooking resources do that too, but usually not as well.

This right here is exactly right. If the reasoning is mentioned at all, it's usually incidental and not intentional. When we talk about salt in the seasoning step of our pan-sautéed chicken lesson, we wrote: "Salt "brings out the flavor" in chicken by reducing our perception of bitterness in foods. This, in turn, leads to an increased perception of sweet, sour, and umami (savory) flavors."

This is obviously a rather trivial example, but hopefully you see how generalizing this (and similar nuggets of information) can help.

You can see the link to my site elsewhere, but I'd be happy to help more thoroughly if you're interested. The ability to do this is not a reflection of your ability to think creatively but rather that you need to understand why you're using certain things and what effect they will have on your dish.

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