Hello, bees! I like playing around in the kitchen, but I feel like I really have no idea what I’m doing with the fundamentals. I’m enjoying the learn-from-experience process, but am looking for something to supplement. I recently started reading / listening to Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (by Samin Nosrat). I’m liking it so far, but I am feeling like there are some assumptions made on readers’ understanding. Perhaps there are other helpful materials with different perspectives on covering the basics. Do you have any recommended books, shows, or other material on the absolute basics of cooking?
Salt, fat, and acid is no doubt a great book, but I always find good videos more informstive than cook books, especially for beginners, since videos help you to know how a dish looks like at each step.
Some of my favorite includes food wishes (everything), pasta grammar (italian), vincenzo’s plate (italian), and Wang Gang (Chinese)
BBC Good Food is quite good. The website is basically a big book of recipes, but tailored to all levels of experience.
When they ask you to do something, there’ll usually be a hyperlink to an article covering that particular thing.
Often there will also be demonstration videos as well, which can be handy.
I think it depends mostly on what you’re struggling with. For me, as a kid growing up in the 1970s, they never taught us cups, ounces, teaspoons, tablespoons… “Oh, these kids will all be on the metric system by the time they grow up…”
Um, yeah, about that. I still use apps to convert things.
What are you finding confusing?
Check out Ethan Chlebowski on youtube. He really dives into the whys of cooking techniques and runs alot of experiments. Learned a ton watching him
I second Ethan’s channel! He has a few videos on how he preps his meals, or how he organizes food around his days so he doesn’t need to reach to takeout when he doesn’t have time to cook and stuff like that.
A bit of a different recommendation, but a service where they send you ingredients with instructions for the dishes you select, aka Hellofresh in some countries. It will help you to wrap your head around portions, spices order of preparation and etc, most importantly just plainly building experience instead of listening / reading to other people talking about it.
If you’re open to paying for something, America’s Test Kitchen is a great resource for all the basics. Their website also gives you access to Cook’s Country (which is like regional American food) and Cook’s Illustrated (which does deep dives into how they come up with and test recipes to get the final result, which in turn gives lots of technique tips). They have an absolute wealth of technique tips, recipes, videos, cookbooks, etc etc. They will advertise to you a ton so I recommend unsubscribing from their marketing emails, but the depth and breadth of their cooking resources are massive.
You can also find their content on YouTube with kitchen equipment tips and technique lessons. If you’re a library user, you may also be able to check out digital copies of Cooks Illustrated/Cook’s Country through Libby. The library, digital or otherwise, is also a great resource for cookbooks and such. One last book you might look for is Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, which is massive and does go over a ton of basics.
I really like Serious Eats since they actually provide a bit of a theoretical story about what you’re trying to do, in a way that can be generalised to similar ingredients. Before I became generally too sick to prepare complex meals for myself, they really inspired me to play in the kitchen more.
