Very good if you have that gift. My mom relied on smell more than the timer itself especially on her coconut and chocolate pies. Us kids started trying to learn some of her favorites, when she was up in years because we just didn’t want to lose these recipes forever. She said ovens varied on temperature, so the timer was a guide, but the final test on some foods had to pass a certain smell test.
Dad had many stories of how my mom couldn’t cook when they were first married. She didn’t have her own mom around from age 1 on. I asked her how did she learn. She walked out and came back with this wore out book that must have been about 4” thick, and duct tape holding the cover on. It read, “Meta Given’s Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking”. Hers was one volume that consisted of 1,698 pages. Later versions broke it down into two. Still see these on e-bay, and they often command a good price for them.
Beyond having interest in cooking well, doing my research and getting in lots of good practice, the best thing that helped me was to have two HONEST critics in my wife and my younger brother (in his case, “merciless” would be appropriate as well).
The benefit of that is that they didn’t blow smoke up my ass to make me feel better, and ideally, they could help mefigure out if you lack salt, or if the dishes needed a touch of vinegar to make it taste brighter, or if the herbs were off, etc…
If you can find an honest critic like that, you can eventually build up your own palate to tell whether a dish is under or over salted, etc…
Also… don’t salt a sauce until AFTER you’ve boiled it down. I learned that one the hard way.
I think the OP is expecting too much from himself. Most home-cooked meals, even by very excellent cooks, are not exceptionally good. They aren’t bad and they work for a family dinner, but they will never be written up in a culinary magazine. It’s a lot like photography-- most “good” hobbyists are going to be able to adequately capture a nice sunset or a cute baby, but publication-quality shots are still going to be one-in-a-hundred. Good home cooks feed their family and can pull of a dinner party with some planning, but even the best have plenty of flops and plenty of “family-only” dishes.
Why? One reason is that unlike restaurants, home cooks are hesitant to load their dishes with gallons of butter. Lots of butter is basically why good restaurant food tastes good. Home chefs also don’t have consistant access to the quality of produce and meat that restaurants have. And all home chefs eventually end up with a personal style- preferred seasonings, go-to techniquest, etc. which will eventually morph into shortcuts, which eventually leads to clumsy cooking. I’m the stereotypical “good” but clumsy cook- most of my dishes are delicious, but I overspice, over garlic and rely on a few tried-and-true techniques to carry 90% of what I cook. The food is delicious and my family enjoys it, but it’s never going to cut it professionally.
And even restaurants-- which do this professionally-- generally have as many mediocre dishes as amazing ones. It’s just how food works. Most recipes, for that matter, aren’t very good. Recipe writers aren’t immune to writing the occasional dud, and other times a particular recipe just isn’t going to fit your style or taste.
So for the OP, I would stop focusing on cooking well, and start focusing on preparing healthy, affordable meals (or whatever is important to you) that aren’t actively disgusting or inedible. Once you can reliably avoid starting fires or curdling the sauces and can successfully feed yourself something passable on a regular basis, then start learning more about ingredients (learning to work with spices is important) and techniques. Once yuo get a bit of a routine going with that, THEN it is time to start looking at interesting recipes and learning to improvise. But the first step is just to be able to prep a few meals that aren’t actively terrible.
Also recommending Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. It’s brilliance is that it provides slightly simplified and clear recipes for most of the basic dishes, as well as instructions for simple variations (i.e. add lemon and oragano to your chicken for a Mediterranean taste, or cumin and oregano for a Mexican take.) In this way, it teaches you both basic techniques and how to think like a chef, which will eventually enable you to cook without recipes.
Hey know who I love? the Pioneer Woman and her recipes. They are spelled out (with pictures) and pretty well described and I’ve yet to make anything of hers that was a flop. Check her out and look up a few recipes you want to try:
That links to her blog which she updates with recipes all the time but you can search for about anything. Let us know how you do on your quest! I have faith in you!
I don’t know if this is similar to your problem or not, but the couple of people I know who are just awful cooks tend to “adjust” recipes without being really aware of it. I’ve actually been told, “I thought this recipe would be much better with blueberries but I didn’t have any, so I dug around in my cabinet until I found a bottle of blueberry syrup and added half a cup and now it doesn’t taste right.” Often they sub in one spice for another because they ran out or they want things to be “fancy” so they get creative with ingredients and it just comes out terrible. If this applies to you be watchful to make sure you aren’t getting creative with your recipes until you have given them a whirl all on their own first.
I bet we can turn this around for you. There are a lot of good cooks here and we are more than happy to help. Just like learning anything else a good mentor is the key.
How about you pick a fairly simple thing you want to make, or even a good idea of what you like ingredient wise. If the directive is to give you exact measurements I’m willing to take what I would add in the palm of my hand and measure it out to the nearest tablespoon. When I was learning some of my mom’s recipes when I first started out I had her do the same for me so I had a base line.
A couple of things you do need to know is the difference between a boil and a simmer. Also, if you have something on the cook top don’t leave the kitchen. Give it constant attention. And don’t try to do 5 items your first try. Use some microwave steamed veggies as a side your first try so you aren’t distracted from the main course. Get everything out before you start from the ingredients to the pots and pans and measuring utensils to the serving dishes. Even better, chop and measure what you need before you start cooking. You can impress your friends by telling them you are just setting up your “mise en place.”
Seriously… pick something out… give us a day or two… get everything ready and I bet you will be surprised at the result.
I believe it’s easier if you learned at home as a child but not impossible to learn later. I also believe that, like music, some of us have to work harder than others at it.
Cooking, unlike baking, is an art, not a science, and nothing needs to be exact. Don’t sweat it and don’t panic if you don’t know what seasoning is missing.
I got my first kids’ cookbook in 3rd or 4th grade so I have been practicing for 35 years and still make an occasional mistake.
It takes lots of practice so maybe try making the same type of thing repeatedly until you get it. Maybe make similar chicken meals for a week. Then note the texture and color when you finish it. How firm is it? How crispy is the skin, both when it turns out right and when it doesn’t? Is it brown or is it just white? Then when it’s just right, make lots of notes on what you did.
It really helps to watch someone first, and pick up a few pointers that aren’t always in books. Before she became a celebrobot, I really liked watching Rachael Ray’s 30 minute meals on the Food Network. She had a direct, no fear approach that was very comfortable for me and really simple and basic without being condescending or dumbing it down. If you can find reruns of her food network shows, not the syndicated talk show, check them out. Her first few 30 minute meals books are a great resource as they are not technical, the recipes use commonly known ingredients are relatively short and uncomplicated, and she used language that real people can understand.
p.s. I took piano lessons for years and never caught on, and then was asked to leave the middle school choir that let everyone in :o. So you’re way ahead of me there if it makes you feel better.
I forgot to mention, don’t get overwhelmed with too many tools and gadgets. You don’t need special widgets for everything and any good cook (IMHO…) will tell you that.
Get a couple of sharp knives- an 8-10" chefs knife, a paring knife, and a bread knife. Have a 12" nonstick and a 12" stainless pan, a few pots for pasta and soups, cutting boards (separate for meat and non meat), maybe a cast iron skillet later on.
I also use, on a daily or weekly basis, a colander, a few sizes of graters, my all-purpose potato masher (great for mixing meatballs or fillings in addition to potatoes), and a big mixing bowl. I cook almost every day and that’s really the extent of it. Get really good at your basic tools and hardware before trying anything more complicated. Hide the rest and don’t let them distract you.
I can cook, not professionally but reasonably well enough that my meals would be palatable by most.
I cannot sing, I would not endeavor to sing in front of a crowd, ever. For whatever reason.
Once upon a time, I did endeavor to make hand forged knives. I had never made a knife, had never forged anything but… I took the time to learn how to do it, built the forges and other equipment necessary and was successful at making my own hand forged knives.
Moral; if it is something you are really interested in, you should be able to focus on the task and get the job done.
I played trombone in band and was never better than second chair. My technique was excellent after six years, but I never had the talent to ‘feel’ the music. The director once had me do an improv solo on a jazz piece. Once. Sight reading? Not happening. I’m fine with that. I knew my limitations. Let me practice for a week and I’ll be nearly flawless. But anyone that could ‘feel’ music would know that it was a mechanical performance.
Give me a pot and a campfire and I’ll make up something surprisingly edible just throwing ingredients in until it smells and ‘feels’ right.
The point being that almost anyone can make it to second chair cook with practice. Be prepared to throw dishes out and accept criticism and suggestions when they’re offered in good faith. Stick with simple recipes in the beginning, avoid ‘season to taste’. Move on to ‘salt and pepper to taste’. Five ingredients or less. And when you do wind up with golf ball meatballs, Google is your friend.
Is there a specific cuisine you love? If so, go out to dinner with someone you know that has a very good palate, and have her critique the food, especially regarding spices, salt levels, and whether something is too greasy. Taste the same dish. I think it’s easier to begin with ethnic food.
Learn your meats. It’s easy to go wrong with ground beef dishes if you don’t know what % lean is most useful for the final product. It’s good to know, for example, that there aren’t legal standards for things like chorizo and Italian sausage, and some of these can be so fatty they can ruin a dish.
My cookbook recommendations: Joy of Cooking, 1975 edition or earlier. The newest edition has a lot of trendy dishes which aren’t any longer, and doesn’t focus on techniques and basics. On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. It gives you the science behind ingredients. Knowing why a mixing bowl has to be totally free of fat when making merengues, for example, will help you know what’s a law, and what rules you can break. How to Repair Food by Marina and John Bear. This is an obscure one which will tell you what went wrong with an ingredient or a food. Then you know how to either fix it to save it, or how to make it better the next time.
As I’ve been cooking so long, now I tend to use the internet to figure out either what to do with a surplus of a garden crop, or how to get a meal from what I have on hand.
Anybody can learn to cook. I’ts about learned technique and having a strong stomach to eat the stuff ups. My advice is as follows.
Start with what you like to eat. Pick a dish you like and get on google and search recipes and read them. Note the common bits and differences. Pick one that looks good and make it.
Making a dish that you are familiar with eating means you can tell what’s wrong with it when you stuff it up.
Work on being able to cook a couple of staple dishes first. Then expand from there. Don’t start trying to cook things you’ve never eaten until you get a fair bit more practice.
It is nominally a book about learning how to cook but is really about the process of learning. The author starts from about the same position as the OP and prescribes a series of simple lessons that teach you how to be a confident cook. Even if you don’t end up achieving that it is a fun read.
It’s possible that you nose is “odor deaf” You can’t catch the slight differences … This will spill over to your taste buds. This will really affect your ability to tell the diff between “browned” and “burned”
This book is another good one for once you get a basic handle on how to cook.
The author explores 20 concepts, ingredients and techniques through the included recipes. Probably the most simple and profound chapter is the first one, titled “Think”, meaning think about what you’re cooking, and how you’ll actually go about it. Kind of like mental mise en place, in a way.
it sounds like you are not well versed in the basic fundamentals of cooking. Some people have an instinct for it, some pick it up over the years starting from a young age, some have to be formally taught. You are in the latter category. All the YouTube videos in the world will not help this, and you can’t learn it from books. I suggest you take some basic culinary classes at your local community college.