Would be useful for any home cook (I have it in my kitchen)
https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-...
https://www.amazon.com/Cordon-Bleu-Complete-Cooking-Techniqu...
The Key To Good Cooking on the other hand is a much better book for home cooks and focuses entirely on practical ingredients and techniques and is organised in a way that makes it much easier to find exactly the advice you need as you need it.
It certainly does.
Someone bought Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course as a wedding present for me and my wife. We were already reasonably proficient in the kitchen, but this book goes from the basics of boiling an egg, cooking perfectly fluffy rice onto more complex recipes. We've bought it for newlyweds since.
I agree with your basic point though. And there are tons of cookbooks today that do spend pages on relevant techniques--though certainly some are celebrity chef memoirs interspersed with recipes and high-quality photoss.
Table of Contents: Acknowledgments. Introduction. Meal planning (45pa). Food shopping (12pa). Cooking (530pa): measurements, beverages, breads, cake, candy, cereals, cheese, cookies, desserts, eggs, fish, meat, meat sundries, pastry and pies, poultry, preserving and canning, salads, sandwiches, sauces, soup, vegetables. Deep fat frying, leftovers, misc.
'Never used' as I get a lot of pleasure tasting and trying myself, picking up tips via browsing bookstores in the past and YouTube or talking to chefs now.
Time to watch Cunningham's Law in action.
He's also got a YouTube channel that's pretty fun to watch.
That said, be careful what you wish for. My partner and I joke that he's pretty over the top sometimes. For example, the first part of that book includes recipes for butter and Ranch dressing. I'm sure they'll taste amazing, but if you're trying to make dinner after work, it'll be late by the time you get to eat, vs. just using stuff off the supermarket shelf. Really depends on what you're trying to get out of a cookbook.
But making those recipes every once in a while can teach you a lot of techniques that you can carry over into other off-the-cuff recipes. One of my favorite things to do is add extra spices to mayo/ranch as a sauce or dressing. Sure, I can buy Siracha mayo at the store, but mixing it myself takes only a few seconds and I have more control. Little things like that can go a long way to making weeknight cooking more interesting and less monotonous.
- Ruhlman's 20 by Michael Ruhlman
- How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
I should have taken notes of what irked me so much about it, but there were multiple things about it that weren't for geeks. Any interview in it filled liked pure filler and because the book is black and white illustrating pictures loose nearly all meaning.
Most "illustrations" are more than unnecessary anyway and seem to be only there as a space filler. Don't get me wrong with 400 pages it is not a pamphlet or something and there ARE useful information in there, but most of the information wasn't useful, scattered through the book, interrupted by interviews with 0 value and littered with recipes I would never cook.
I personally rate "The Food Lab" from Kenji Lopez-Alt much higher than this and more helpful.
> .. littered with recipes I would never cook.
Me neither but that's exactly what I liked about it. I would have normally never tried them out, but because of this book I decided to try a few and was amazed how good they were.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Beard_Foundation_Award
Saving people a click https://weber.mizecx.com/knowledge/s3/retrieve?path=knowledg...
PDF page 65 onwards
pdftk 54372.pdf cat 65-end output weber-grilling-meat.pdfIn both Firefox and Chrome (probably Safari too) there is a page number at the top of the page when you open the PDF. Here you can manually type in a number. Open up the PDF and enter "64" and it'll take you directly to the page you enter.
Just open this link: https://weber.mizecx.com/knowledge/s3/retrieve?path=knowledg...
which is the original link, with "#page=65" appended. At least on Firefox, it will lead you straight to the page in question.
This sounds like made up recipe without ever trying too cook it, as some other commenter mentioned.
She made a cookbook of her recipes we all enjoyed for years and years and she included some of the original cutouts and index cards from probably the 50-60s or so. There’s also a lot of steps that you’d expect from a grandmother “cook until done” and “add some spices” to some of them.
I ended up experimenting with the recipe over the next six months, eventually getting the texture of the filling right. But those initial recipes were so far off, I doubt any of the authors had actually made it.
Nonserious recommendation: Just drop >600USD on
https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-cuisine/
… and end up spherising your breakfast or something, idk.
I tend to disagree on that one, unless you are particularly experienced, or naturally gifted, measuring tools (timers, scales, thermometers,...) will give you the best results. At least for me, that's the case.
And if you can't follow a recipe to the letter, without knowledge of how things are supposed to feel, it is not a proper recipe. The entire point is to give you consistent results, if I had the intuition, I wouldn't need a recipe.
And even if you are an experienced cook, precise instructions and measurements will give you a better baseline from where you can improvise. Yes, I have an idea on how cook a potato, but unless the recipe tells me how to do it, how do I know how potatoes are supposed to be for that recipe in particular?
So yeah, no matter how good at cooking you are, if you "just follow" a recipe properly and it doesn't work, then the recipe is wrong or incomplete. It is like in programming, 99% of the time, where there is a problem, it comes from the software, not the computer running it. And successful developers don't ask users to fix their bugs, even on open source projects where users have the ability to do it, why should it be different for recipe writers?
Both. Have both. Ingredients are not 100 uniform and always cook in same way. Have "how it should be done" and "how it should look during/at the end of the process". You can't have exact same temperature on the pan as recipe, I guess unless you're constantly using IR thermometer to check
The main difference between cooking and process chemistry is that the latter actually cares about quality of the end result.
There is some unavoidable variation because of the inconsistency in ingredients and lack of access to tools that would mitigate it. However, the typical kitchen tools are also just bad by design, with any kind of precision or consistency long ago "value engineered" out of them. And now we also learn that cooking recipes are mostly pulled out of their writers' arses, to the point you might as well ask GPT-4, and save money on a cookbook / avoid exposure to ads and made up life stories on-line.
Hell, GPT-4 can at least also give you a Gantt chart to go with your recipe[0].
In the end, the only way to deal with this is by hand-holding the process, performing minute adjustments as guided by experience. This makes cooking much more of an art than it could - or should - be.
--
[0] - Some assembly required. Taste and safety not guaranteed, as I can't cook to save my life. https://cloud.typingmind.com/share/a349a38e-0e24-470e-a1c8-3...
Its ripoff engineered. I just threw in the trash an obscenely expensive pan with Vegan, cancer free, teflon free and gluten free coating thats coming off.
Do home cooks not care about how the food tastes? This seems like a strange take. People started cooking by roasting or boiling things over an open flame or searing them on a hot rock. Most of the techniques learned and passed down are about how to ensure good results under contexts where the inputs are naturally inconsistent and hard to control.
I don't know why we'd have an assumption that people have or want to work with precise scientific instruments all the time.
For example smoking a brisket. There is no perfect temperature that tells you it’s done. We know the thereabouts but one brisket might be done at 203 while another is at 200 and another at 205. You need to feel it.
Each animal is different and each smoker is different and the weather really matters. A humid day will influence cooking differently than a dry day.
Unless you can get uniform ingredients you’ll never be able to follow a recipe to the letter and get great outcomes every time. You should use tools but in the end you need your senses and you should taste everything you can before serving.
If you’re baking then you usually must follow the recipes as it will yield the best results. Experience will tell you more or less water will result in what. More or less baking soda will alter the result in what way. Etc
But if you’re cooking dinners, you don’t really need to follow recipes. Soup? You can often just throw whatever you want in the pot and it doesn’t matter. If it said 1 onion and you added 4, just tastes more oniony”
No, this is 100% false, and this is exactly why recipe collections are popular, because people think they can just follow a recipe to get a delicious meal. There is an immense difference in quality and properties of ingredients, difference in cookware, difference in appliances, etc. What's "medium heat" ? What's a "medium-sized potato" ?
You need to know basic cooking to work around these differences, you need to know what something feels like and looks like when it's done, otherwise you will forever fail.
> A timer can never replace the knowledge of how something is supposed to look, feel, and smell when it's done or not.
And it's not only that. If you just eat a lot, you'll know what things are supposed to look like when they are done. However, the difficult part is knowing what intermediate stages are supposed to look/smell/feel like! If you get it wrong at T=15 minutes, there might be no way to save the finished product at T=30 minutes, however hard you try.
And that intermediate stage you don't experience just by eating. That takes cooking and understanding.
When I follow a recipe it may or may not turn out well. If the recipe is a bad one or there's a part of it which requires a technique I don't know, the end product won't be good.
When I learn a technique it opens up a variety of options for just creating delicious stuff. A good example was learning how to make a pan sauce. Suddenly a bunch of things lying around the kitchen became ingredients for whatever kind of delicious sauce I was in the mood for, accompanying pretty much any meat or vegetable I wanted to eat. Dozens of possibilities for making great meals all came from one technique.
When you learn the techniques you end up with tons of options for what you're going to cook and the end product turns out better because you understand why it works.
I'd be a lot more hesitant about adopting this approach to baking though!
For someone who didn’t learn to cook growing up, that book is a godsend.
On the other hand, I refuse to make recipes found on the internet. They work extremely rarely if you’re like me and don’t have a sense of “what the authors really mean when they say X.”
> On the other hand, I refuse to make recipes found on the internet. They work extremely rarely if you’re like me and don’t have a sense of “what the authors really mean when they say X.”
What I do is look at about half a dozen recipes online when I am trying something new. I compare them and make my own recipe based on that. Through practice I can usually glance at them and see pretty quickly what they are doing differently and similarly.
Most dishes come out really well because I can get a feel for the dish before it's made and I have the freedom to make changes based on what the different recipes say (and my intuition). I'd encourage everybody to take this approach and not follow just one recipe.
As an example, my first stop for instant pot recipes is Amy + Jacky and they’ve yet to steer me wrong: https://www.pressurecookrecipes.com/instant-pot-cheesecake-n...
The only time I need to stray from those is for various kinds of ethnic cooking, in which case, a cookbook devoted to them serves a lot better than a website with a bunch of machine generated boilerplate at the beginning.
[The Joy of Cooking]: https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Cooking-Fully-Revised-Updated/dp/... [Better Homes and Gardens]: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Homes-Gardens-Cook-Book/dp/069...
I've since added the America's Test Kitchen cookbook to my collection. (Others, too, of course.) It's very explicitly a cookbook developed by chefs testing out recipes and fine-tuning them to get them just right.
Unfortunately, I rarely have the time & energy to cook from scratch these days, and the majority of the recipes I actually make come from Blue Apron—but they're also a pretty good source, and make some damn good dinners in a very practical amount of time.
Everyone who is interested in cooking should do themselves a favour and buy a proper cookbook. Something that starts with the basics, and works itself up to full meals. It should have cheat-sheets for basic ways to cook all your staples, here's all the ways you can cook a potato, with times and temperature. Here's all the ways you can slice an onion, with examples of what it's good for. Here's how to cut a cow into pieces, here's what the pieces are called, here's how long each piece takes to cook and what it pairs well with.
Unfortunately, most people think they can cook something from a recipe collection without being proficient at the basics. "I'll just follow the recipe!", and then they wonder why it didn't work. A timer can never replace the knowledge of how something is supposed to look, feel, and smell when it's done or not.
And yet recipe collection regularly outsell cookbooks by a wide margin.
I guess they look good on a coffee table at least.