I think the secret is, one of the most important aspects of good food is time to table. When you make it at home, you can eat as soon as it's done or rested. Along with the anticipation factor of having worked on it yourself and having the smells fill your home for a while beforehand.

Plus, if you're an introvert who's already burnt out for the day, you don't have to wear pants. Huge points for not having to wear pants.

It makes ordering or going out more of a treat, too.

Also, your comment made me realize I probably stay in pants too often.

But I found it very useful to learn to cook with whatever you have available to you. And then learn to adjust. All of these things take tiny amounts of time and yield great results. (mainly through practice of course)

But you only get to the tweak stage after you start trying to cook at all. (a lot of people don't cook much or try to make meals they think are out of their reach)

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-cook-the-perfect...

Rice cooker instructions also use a liner ratio.

Cooking rice isn't rocket science.

Yes, you can get more complex. Maybe it even produces better rice. But the secret to homecooked meals is - for most people - simplicity :)

So y = x + 1 where y is the cups of water and x is the cups of rice. 1 is the number of cups lost as steam.

Each time you open the lid you lose steam, so you may have to take that into account. I use a rice cooker and don't open the lid so I don't worry about that though.

Some stoves are hard to regulate so the food is just barely boiling, so it can be hard not to notably lose water.

From experience, the boiling of water in itself is mostly meaningless when cooking, unless you want food extra shredded. You can happily cook at 90℃ or 80℃ if you want, but it will take longer.

Note if cooking risky food: beware of required time at a given temperature to kill pathogens, not forgetting heat transfer takes time especially in solid chunks.

having grown up where our main staple was rice, my parents never made burnt or soggy rice. oh and having a rice cooker prob helped as well.

For example, given the random contents of a refrigerator, make some sort of meal out of what is available. For example, I recently had a cabbage and an onion and some chicken left over. With a little ginger paste and some soy sauce I was able to make a pretty decent stirfry.

Another example is tortilla chips. I bought some tortillas from 7-eleven and tried frying them up in oil to make tortilla chips. This is fun because there are a lot of parameters to play with to try to get the perfect chip (oil type, quantity, time).

Making more involved recipies are fun too, but there is a good amount of pleasure to be found in the mundane. I also eat a lot of Jack in the Box, so I've got no high horse in this fight.

My go-to is to spread butter on them then nuke them.

Two weeks ago I went to Costa Rica and did a horseback/boat/hiking tour and there was a shack high in the mountains where we stopped and the guide made lunch. I was delighted to find that one of the three foods provided was fried tortillas. I insisted on helping. Frying tortilla chips in soybean oil in a wok on a wood fire in the cloud forest with no electricity or running water is a little different than nuking in the kitchen, but once you have the knack for it, it's pretty easy to pull off.

You never know when your weird cooking skills are going to come in handy!

I'm fairly certain it is your palate, rather than your pallet, that is amused! (although the visual image conjured by your verbal construction is very amusing.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBGoJUxxRqU

He covers the American omelette which is my go-to. Usually with spinach, red bell pepper, red onion and sometimes mushroom filling. Often with some old cheddar and they are monstrously simple to make mediocre and not too difficult to make very well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s10etP1p2bU

"Really good" is subjective. It's the very notion something is possible and that you can do it that I see as valuable. Practice makes perfect, nothing can be perfect the first time you learn it.

The guy in the video tried to replicate Pepin's omelette and documented his progress. Pepin even responded to the video.

https://youtu.be/PUP7U5vTMM0

Here's my default dressing: salt & pepper to taste. Bit of lemon juice. Bit of dijon mustard. Balsamic vinegar and EV olive oil. Adjust relative quantities to taste and based on what you have in your salad. Gets rave reviews and could not be simpler. ;-)

Knife skills. Keep them sharp. Mise en place. The importance of salt and pepper. Searing techniques for cooking meat and how not to do it. Roasting vegetables 101. The basics of finishing pastas and reducing sauces. The fact that you can make your own dressing in no time.

You can probably cover all of that quickly and in enough time to ask the right questions moving forward and begin your jorney - IF you had a curriculum. If it's self study it takes longer to figure out what you don't know :) For me it all started with "why does my Grilled Cheese suck? This should be easy" and it's been all downhill.

The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt was a big window into this for me because of the approach around time and temperature, and the book takes you through all of this stuff by section.

Cooking for over 15 years at home and still only learned this recently despite already knowing about it. I had to grind out a chip from one of our knives, and I realised when I was done it was much sharper than I usually get them. I hadn't been doing it quite right all this time.

> Mise en place

Asian wok-based cooking is great for learning this. You don't have time to mess around. It's something I've been trying lately (my frying pan stir-fry was always pathetic so I never made it at home, but now that I have a wok I can do a decent one).

+ 2 parts olive oil

+ 1 part honey (try and make it good wildflower or clover honey)

+ 1 part squeezed lemon juice (add some zest as well if you're feeling energetic—I hate cleaning graters)

+ Salt & pepper to taste

1. A good fried rice

2. A good stir fry

3. A good omelet

These three things alone will mean that you'll have substantial, delicious food at the ready. They're incredibly flexible in terms of ingredients and need minimal skill. A stir fry or fried rice can take any vegetables or meats you have at hand, and an omelet can take everything from ham to mushrooms.

When using a new ingredient, try it in something you're already familiar with, so you can isolate that ingredient, rather than introducing it in a completely new recipe where you can't easily tell what impact that ingredient has vs others in the recipe.

Think about how to setup your kitchen - is it better to have all your spice containers in a group with one another, where they all look similar, or to put them alongside the items you use them with (tumeric with your basmati rice, nutmeg with your pestle & mortar, etc) so that it's easier to find everything you need for a recipe.

I’m years beyond being young and single, but being able to cook and being able to dress yourself (and for the occasion) will set you apart from the crowd.

Sautéing in oil allows you to really crank the heat, using butter you have to be more careful. Cutting in larger chunks is great for some dishes and bad for others. The whole timing thing is probably the hardest to nail, going easy on the heat allows you to get in some other prepwork while the onions are doing their thing, but you also don't want to spend hours cooking so you want to crank it to the point where your prep and the onions will be done at the same time.

How far do you take the onions? How far do you take them if you want to throw in more veggies into the same pan? When do you add spices if you want them to get a bit toasty aswell? And sautéing large amounts of onion (1kg+) is a whole different calculus.

Cooking is this endless fractal of problems to solve and optimize. Kinda like programming innit.

* Knife skills * Overview of cooking methods * One-pot meals * Quick meals

You can also usually find classes specific to cooking methods.

I highly recommend a knife skills class, as it'll cut your prep times down considerably, which makes cooking a lot more enjoyable.

I'm not sure how many cooking classes are aimed at rank beginners but there are tons of videos these days. It might even be useful to subscribe to something like Cooks Illustrated for a more structured approach rather than wading into YouTube.

It's not really an hour and doesn't meet the criteria.

I pick a new one I want to perfect every few months, look up recipes and try them out over and over until I get it the way I want. (you have to eat anyways) And after doing this for years, I am always told I should open a restaurant. (but that is silly hard work, and everyone can cook)

The simplest example is a pork steak. Throw it on the skillet and wait awhile. Turn it over and wait awhile. You now have a pork steak. It's delicious.

With the pork steak how long is "wait awhile"? 10 seconds? 60 seconds? 10 minutes? All of those yield completely different results, and only once you've had plenty of experience cooking pork steaks, you will be able to judge what "wait awhile" is. Also you missed adding some salt and pepper to the steak - without those it just tastes like....unseasoned meat. Which is ok if that's what you want, but I doubt many people do. But you need to somehow know that salt and pepper are things that you would normally add to a pork steak, but not cinammon or sugar.

I think the only way to "learn" cooking is repetition, repetition and repetition. Not going to do a lot of that in an hour unfortunately.

Whoa, that took me back. That's literally how I learned programming when I was 13 or so. (I'm completely serious; I begged my mom for a copy of Visual Studio off of ebay. It was called Visual C++ 6.0 back then, or something. Nehe legacy tutorials were the shit! https://nehe.gamedev.net/)

I think everyone learns differently. The first thing you'll learn is that as long as you're standing next to the skillet, it's very hard to cook a pork steak too long. It'll always end up delicious.

It always surprises me when programmers can't cook. You're just following an algorithm! Sure, the technique takes a little time, but most people can manage. I also think baking suits a logical mind more since it's often more precise with measurements and conditions.

One trick I do is rewrite recipes then print them out. Most start out as wordy fluff. You'll get halfway through a cake recipe and it lists half a dozen things to add to a bowl. I will just rewrite this like: Bowl 1: flour, sugar, baking powder, combine. Bowl 2: oil, egg, whisk. And so on.

Rewriting like this is great for learning and retention and it makes it easier at a glance to not miss anything.

Clarifying butter and slower cooking my omelettes has been fantastic, along with salt early in the mixing bowl and letting it sit for a minute.

For rice, the rice:water ratio I follow is 1:1.25. I add a teaspoon of olive oil, salt and pepper to taste.

For eggs, I'm going to try running the egg under warm water. One thing I've observed improvement in quality of eggs when mixing it is the material of the bowl (copper provides best results) and how much air you introduce when mixing the eggs.

Try making a meringue, it's fascinating how versatile eggs can be when put through different conditions.

Do you add the oil, salt and pepper before cooking?

Yes, I add the oil, salt and pepper before cooking.

Leave lid what the entire time? On? Off? Untouched? Steamed-up? Half-on? Cracked? Ajar? Weighed-down?

I'm assuming "on", since I have cooked food before, but then how is there 12-15 min of cooking, 25% variation, if you're emphasizing "the entire time"? If you can't look at it or touch it until after it's done, and you can't tell when it's done by the time because the time varies, then when is done?

Yes, time varies, just wanted to layout how simple it can be to learn a useful skill in a short amount of time.

For a comedic take see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45wHe9KdmrQ for How to Cook Perfect Rice by Jo Koy

Who does this?

Eggs to me have always lived next to the flour and sugar in a larder. - The more you know =)

Confusingly also note that UK/US TBsp = 3x tsp (approx 15ml) while Australia is 4 tsp (20ml). It might be relevant for some recipes. I don't know why we are the weird ones this time.