+1 to all the sibling replies. I’ll add the inspiration element from my experience:

Samin Nosrat is a fantastic teacher. She shares cooking through the lens of “why”. It’s the opposite of say, rote learning which, as a beginner, i’d always assumed “follow this recipe” was and so suffered indifference toward the world of cooking. I’ve never been good at following directions.

She’s the teacher that guides you to what you could not see because of false assumptions.

Cooking is now an endless exploration. There are foundational answers to “why” and though I’d call it an anti-recipe book, the second half is all recipes heh, but they are like seed ideas. You can practice one seed and explore yourself how to build upon it.

I made an herb salsa: citrus juice, herbs (i use cilantro), onion, salt, and oil. This is the ACID. You can then incorporate the other 3 however you wish. It makes me feel like a chef! I put it in eggs. and chicken. i’m still exploring. It takes time and care, but not “to get the right answer”, rather to develop your point of view. I look forward to it now. each meal is an opportunity to practice and explore. its my own creativity and art. i love it.

I haven’t read through it, but the essence I believe is an emphasis on fitting components and techniques together rather than slavishly following recipes.

Similarly good (and maybe a good companion) is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s YouTube channel. He basically wears a GoPro and cooks full meals with a very minimum number of cuts. You can see him make mistakes and adapt recipes to what he has on hand in real time. Watching a pro do that really made a lot of things click for me. His book (The Food Lab) and his articles on Serious Eats are also good, but his videos have really been extraordinary.

Fully agreed. I wanted to add that sometimes he also goes into a scientific detour about why something is done the way it is, and I learned a lot theoigh that.

I've read part of it, and really enjoyed it, and I would say: It breaks cooking down into four simple, basic principles (the salt, acid, fat, and heat of the title), then deep dives into each one and explains exactly how those things contribute to the taste of different dishes. This allows you to learn to cook without just following a recipe and knowing that if you apply those principles correctly to whatever food you have in your kitchen, you can make something reasonably tasty.

Of course, learning to cook also involves many other techniques and combining flavors in more complex ways, but if you're starting out and can't boil an egg, it's a great introduction to the basics of what makes food taste good.

It’s a pretty deep read I’d say. It’s improved a lot of my instincts in the kitchen (what’s a dish or pot missing) . Recipes are also nice but can be a cost trap until you generate a sense of what sorts of things you want to have stocked. For that I’d say stick to one grouping of recipes (like say, Italian) to get a basic idea of what “most” recipes use in that grouping. That will save you money as you won’t have to be going out for different new spices, canned goods and oils every time you cook.

Sounds a lot like how I've learned cooking during my student time. It's fun experimenting with techniques until you understand how to extract a decent flavor out of each ingredient. I think this is why master chefs never stop learning, it's a really deep rabbit hole until you've perfected just one dish, repeatably.

> I want to learn to cook

Invest in good cookware.

Three high quality pots and two high quality pans will improve your cooking experience, learning, and results exponentially.

And at least one proper knife.