Help Me Learn To Cook!

Cafe Society
41

First of all the best place to buy equipment is at a restaurant supply company in your town or city. They will have an incredible range of pots, pans, etc to pick from and will offer great prices. You won’t find All-Clad there but the OP isn’t in the market for that anyway. As stated in other posts start out slow and just gradually build up your kitchen as you go (both with respect to equipment and ingredients). I would partially agree that the essentials are a good knife and a good stainless steel pan (you cannot deglaze using non-stick cookware).

Regarding cookbooks (and I have over 300 of them) the best book to accomplish the objectives of what is stated in the OP, hands down and without argument, is Jacques Pepin’s Complete Techniques. It’s available in paperback for $19.95. You can take any recipe from any source (online, magazine, cookbook) and for example, figure out what is meant by julienne. The wealth of information in this book is incredible.

42

I realized, after walking into the kitchen, that the most essential piece of equipment you need to buy is a good quality pepper mill that has multiple settings for coarse-medium-fine ground pepper and then fill it with good quality tellicherry black peppercorns. Your taste buds will be eternally greatful.

43

My recommendation is to avoid recipes that requires anything more complicated than a pot, a frying pan or an oven. You need to start by learning the fundamentals, like how not to burn meat. Also, learning the properties of various foods and how they can be combined is more important than slavishly following recipes. Master the art of substituting what you have for what the recipe calls for. Finally, there’s nothing wrong with eating Crummy Delight i.e. the recipe that just did not work out the way you wanted it to, and looks horrible, but is still completely edible and tastes good.

44

If you like fresh bread, you can’t go wrong with a bread machine. There are a couple of easy recipes that are pretty darn good. Then you’ll get addicted to fresh bread and use the bread machine to do you mixing and rising, and then bake in the oven. If you’re not into fresh bread, then this one is strictly optional.

45

A cookbook that I’ve fallen in love with for simple family meals is How to Cook Without a Book. Okay, so it sounds stupid, but what it does is have a chapter on a technique, say, “Saute”. And it will say, “Okay. You can saute these kinds of fish, or chicken, or (whatever, I forget.) Here is how you saute.” And then it will give you a basic recipe: “To saute fish - melt your butter. Watch it. It will foam. Then it will stop foaming. At this point put your fish in.” It’s super-easy and you can’t screw it up. But the best part is, it’ll be “Pan sauces”. And it will give you “Basic pan sauce recipe”, which will be, like, twice as much acid as fat or whatever (that’s not exactly what it is, but it tells you the basic proportions of how you do this, and directions.) There is even a little stupid rhyme about it. Then it has, like, twenty pan sauces, and they say “Use this one for pork, fish, or burgers”, and they all follow the basic recipe with different ingredients or additions.

Now, a lot of cookbooks follow a similar premise, but the difference is: this one’s fast, practical week-night cooking, and the results are great. I cook a good bit, although I don’t consider myself a good cook really, but the sauteed tilapia with lemon caper sauce I made out of this one my family would have ordered happily at a restaurant. Ditto the tomato basil cream pasta sauce. All that, and it teaches you to feel comfortable with improvisation! It’s really an excellent cookbook, I think especially for the new cook.

46

I’d recommend eGullet forums. Don’t be put off by the fact that there are a lot of professionals there, there are also many people new to cooking, or aspects of cooking.

If you’ve got a question about why something didn’t work, or how to make a technique work, or a specific dish, you’ll get excellent answers from a whole range of people.

As a group they’re very serious about food, but generous and encouraging to people who are interested in learning.

What they call the eGullet Culinary Institute has some terrific (free) online courses in how to do stuff, from making sourdough bread to all about eggs, there’s an entire thread, with pictures, how how to poach an egg.

My own suggestion would be to find a class of food you enjoy, for example, pasta and get a handle on making a simple version of it. Maybe something like a nice, made-from-scratch, tomato sauce. When you’ve got a bit of confidence in that, start ringing the changes on your own … add some wine, a bit more garlic, some different vegetables, a bit of cream. Keep tasting, start to work out what you like.

Once you’ve got something basic down you can use that in a whole lot of other ways. A good tomato-based sauce can be the basis for a casserole, reduced can be a topping for pizza, made thinner can be soup.

I think the important thing to remember is that food should taste good, not just be something to stop you being hungry.

47

I cannot recommend How to Cook Everything highly enough. It is really the ultimate cookbook, for beginners and experienced cooks alike.

The great classics are good. Every home should eventually have a Joy of Cooking. But HTCE provides basic, simple (but not simplified) and straightforward recipes for…nearly everything. Joy of Cooking is great if you need to know how to cook chicken divan for a dinner party of 13. But HTCE is where you can go to get a baseline, minimal ingredient recipes for common and some uncommon dishes in clear terms. Other ‘beginner’ cookbooks can be good, but too often they skip important but slightly complicated recipes, encourage weird substitutions (instead of sour cream, just use yogurt!) and don’t really teach you how to cook on your own.

The true power of How to Cook Everything is that it teaches you how to take these simple foundations and expand on them. This is the true art of cooking- going beyond the recipe and creating your own tastes. You will learn how to spice things on the fly, what kinds of substitutions you can make, how to turn your favorite Asian green-beans into Hungarian green beans, what kinds of stuff you can successfully add to lasagna, and what you can do with that leftover chicken. Nearly every recipe comes with variations and suggestions for making your own variations. Soon you will be able to waltz up to a pile of raw ingredients and know what to do even without a recipe. You’ll know how to read a recipe and know what you can change and what you better stick to. You’ll know what tastes and textures go with each other. You’ll know, in short, how to cook. It’s one helluva book.

48

As for equipment…

Go to a restaurant supply store. Pick up two non-stick pans, two sauce pots, one big stock pot, a casserole dish, a big chef knife and an optional serrated knife (shouldn’t cost more than twenty bucks each- pick the ones with the big ugly plastic handles.) a pack of wooden spoons, a couple big cheap cutting boards (plastic is fine), a ladle and one really big cheese grater. Don’t get a little cheese grater. This and the knife is probably the most important part.

Anything else is gravy. This whole endeavor shouldn’t cost more than $150 or so. If you want a food processor get one. I love mine to death. Don’t worry about a bread machine if you have a food processor- you can knead bread in the food processor and bake it in your oven just as easy and with better results.

A pressure cooker is a godsend if you like beans or soup. They are expensive and scary, but they take beans from a four-hour deal to a fifteen minute one. Most of the world is really in to pressure cookers- with a good reason.

Spice are important. Buy them at a Mexican Market (also a good place to pick up produce) and they will cost you about 1/4th of the supermarket price. I make it a habit to pick up one new spice each time I got to the store so that I’m not spending a hundred bucks on spices all at once.

Some spices are good in Asian food, some in Indian food, some in Mexican food, some in Italian food and some in European food. Learn a few basic spice mixes and you can 'ethnisize" anything. My personal spice mix is coriander, cumin and cayanne pepper, which I add to just about everything (my cooking leads towards Mexican and East Indian). You will develop your own favorites.

There are two pieces of information that really changed the way I cooked. One is the Vietnamese philosophy of cooking- that you should hit each of the five tastes (sour, salty, sweet, bitter and savory) in some way in each meal. Sometimes all it takes to perk up a dish that isn’t working is one of those missing elements- a dash of lemon, a pinch of sugar, a little vinegar. The other is that you can use complex ingredients to make up for that- wine, worchestire sauce, fish sauce, etc. are all complicated tastes that can add complexity to a dish. You can go simple or complex, but make sure each dish follows one of these philosophies.

49

Which reminds me that since you’re the cook you have the right to throw anybody out of your kitchen if they’re bothering or distracting you. :smiley:

I have a copy of How to Cook Everything too and I’ll add my recommendation for it. The first chapter is on equipment, and it covers the basics of just about everything. I have about 10 cookbooks and I’ve used recipes from all of them. Sometimes I even compare recipes from different books and use variations and ingredients I like and leave out the ones that don’t appeal to me.

50

To reiterate what I said in my first posting and what virtually everyone else has ignored is that *Joy of Cooking * and How To Cook Everything may well be great cookbooks (I am not a huge fan of JOC) but, for example, does either one actually show you how to grip and handle a knife, how to cut vegetables (or anything else) into a dice (HTCE does offer some rudimentary instruction), or how to skim or strain sauces?

Old Chinese Proberb says that you can’t hit a baseball if you don’t know how to hold the bat!

51

Just to pile on here: I love Joy of Cooking, but only the older editions. The new ones suck rocks. Cheap knives are sent by the Devil. Bite the bullet and buy good knives from the get-go. Buy cast iron whenever you can. You can leave it to your grandkids if you treat it right, and it’s essential when making the basics of Life, like Chicken-fried Steak and Sausage Gravy. even sven has it right about spaices: buy the little bags in the ethic section of the supermarket. They are a third the price of Shilling’s, and fresher to boot. There is no such thing as “too much fresh pepper.” Pick a favorite meat, and work variations on a theme. If you and the hubby like chicken, then play with that for awhile. Roast beast is fairly easy, and you can vary things with different sauces and sides. Fresh veggies are wonderful…get a steamer basket. Don’t sweat fancy sauces. A little lemon juice and a little butter will do you just fine 99% of the time.

52

The key to good cooking is to use good ingredients. Don’t short change yourself on ingredients. If you can get it fresh then do so. If you can’t then pick something else. I do my shopping first to see what is available and then set the menu. You will make far too many compromises doing the opposite.

The key to good sauces is making broths your friend. Get (if possible low sodium) beef, chicken, vegetable, seafood, and evn mushroom. Get broth with no MSG. Learn how to deglaze, how to make roux, and how to make reductions with broths, butter and other ingredients and you will easily learn sauces.

53

I wouldn’t get carried away buying a lot of expensive stuff right off. A cheapo set of pots and pans, a couple knives, and you can get started. Don’t get bogged down with the distinctions - it won’t matter for a while.

I would say, start with something simple but capable of variation. Learn to make an omelette, and then you will discover that you can put anything into an omelette - cheese, raw or fried onions, leftover meats, fresh or cooked vegetables, shredded newspaper, stray cats - and it will be good.

Learning to cook is not memorizing recipes, it is collecting some basic skills and then fooling about. It’s like sex, except with more tools, and clean-up is more complicated.

But once you have learned to make a white sauce, or saute something and then pour wine or broth into the pan and make a sauce, you are home free. And anything you like is good.

Remember the basics -[ul][li]Never apologize, never explain.[]You can never be too rich, too well-educated, or put in too much garlic. []Never get involved in an argument about knives with a cook - they get vicious, and cooks know how to debone you. []Gadgets are fun, the first time. Then you have to clean them.[]If they didn’t see you drop it, it doesn’t count. It tastes different when someone you love made it. Trust me on this one.[/ul][/li]
Regards,
Shodan

54

Hey, this is Left Hand’s wife checking in. Much good advice in this thread, but I wanted to chime in with my own two cents.

Begin by focusing on a few basic dishes that have multiple variations. Stir-fries and soups are very forgiving and versatile. Most soups also have the advantage of keeping/freezing well, which is very nice if you have a busy schedule and can’t make something homecooked every night. Stir-fries are great, because for the most part you can throw in a little of whatever veggies you already have.

On a stir-fry related note, learn how to cook rice. It’s one of the easiest things to do, and the basis for a number of dishes.

So, so true. One of my basic cooking (and life) tenets is eat real food. Don’t use margarine instead of butter. Don’t use canned green beans instead of fresh. For the love of all that is good and holy, don’t use Cool Whip instead of real whipped cream. Chocolate chip cookies are, for example, fairly easy to make yourself and approximately 5,000 times more tasty than Chips Ahoy. Once you’ve had the real deal, it’s hard to go back.

55

That’s the real danger of learning how to cook–suddenly, all the manufactured or mediocre take-out food doesn’t taste very good any more.

Already much good advice given, so I’ll just add a couple of points:
[ul]
[li]While I agree with nearly everything Shodan said, I have to take issue with his advice about acquiring a set of “cheapo pots and pans”; I have a couple of cheap pots I use for stuff like boiling water or somesuch, you’re much better off to piece together your own collection of good cookware rather than buy a set, particularly a cheap one. You don’t have to do it all at once; pick something up as you need it. With sets, you’ll find that you generally just use two or three and the rest collect dust. [/li][li]Ditto with knives; a 8"-10" chef’s knife, a 5"-6" fillet/boning/utilty knife, and a paring knife, along with a sereted bread knife with an offset handle will do for most of your needs. [/li][li]Get a couple of cutting boards; wooden, plastic, it really doesn’t matter. (Perhaps surprisingly, wood doesn’t seem to collect bacteria, but the UHMW plastic boards are easier to take care of and don’t split.) [/li][li]Gadgets are designed for gadget freaks, not cooks. The few practically essential gadgets are a pepper mill, a manual cheese grater (the box kind is great, but the flat ones are easy to store, and the rotary type are fast but require more cleaning), a food processor of some kind and/or a submersible handheld blender, and some kind of juice press for fresh citrus–I use these cheap, handheld leveraged ones 'cause they’re easier to clean than the countertop kind. A food mill is a useful thing, as is a Kitchenaid-type mixing machine, but they take up room and are only imperative if you use them a lot (the former for making tomato sauces, the latter for baking). You can get by without them.[/li][li]Someone already mentioned restaurant supply stores, and that’s a great place to pick up very durable cookware at wholesale prices, but don’t eschew a couple of good nonstick pans for cooking things like omlettes or carmelizing onions; they’re too delicate to survive thousands of trips through a commercial dish washer but are much more convenient for home use. For sauteeing, stir-fry, and other high temperature culinary endeavors, go with nonstick stainless or hard-anodized aluminum; Cephalon is a favorite and worth the price. Stay away from “enamelware” for stovetop, but I prefer it for baking. [/li][li]Get several wooden spoons (useful for any number of things and nonscratch) and a collection of whisks, as well as stainless bowls. All of this stuff is cheap.[/li][li]Start with one type of cuisine, or type of meat; fish, chicken, whatever. Learn the basics, then try variations on a theme until you get a recipe or technique you like. There are a few additions, like carmelized onions, that can improve most any dish. You may think mac’n’cheese is something suitable only for grad students, but after you’ve had my Daddy Mac (large elbows, Kerrygold Cheddar melted in a light roux, basil, roasted roma tomatoes, carmelized onions, garlic, breadcrumbs, baked in the oven and browned, then topped with parsley and Parmigiano-Reggiano) you’ll never look at that Day-Glo Orange Krapt boxed s**t again.[/li][li]Which comes around to another point others have been making; follow all the steps and use fresh, good ingredients. Food doesn’t have to be sophisticated or complicated to be good; one of my favorite meals is a spaghetti al fresca: roma tomatoes, garlic, basil, and fresh mozzarrella, all coarsely chopped and let matriculate in extra virgin olive oil for a couple hours, then tossed over spaghetti and topped with a little fresh graded reggiano and ground pepper, served up with a light Pinot Noir or a Sauvignon Blanc. Minutes to prepare, stands waiting well, and the only thing you have to cook is the pasta. [/li][/ul]

Anyway, have fun and enjoy. It sounds like we have a lot of good and experienced cooks here who are more than willing to offer advice, support, and constructive criticism. In the end, though, your personal taste will tell you what you like.

Stranger

56

Which reminds me of another one: Don’t be afraid of salt. Beginning cooks (myself included) tend to under-salt their dishes, partly worrying about vague warnings about hypertension and partly unclear on what the salt actually does and why it’s being added. Salt is a fairly miraculous substance in that (quoting Alton Brown) it makes things taste more like themselves. Apparently something in salt chemically activates your taste receptors and brings other flavors to life. That’s why you add a dash of salt even to ostensibly sweet dishes like cakes and custards. I read someplace that one of the things that sets a great cook above the merely good ones is the experienced and thoughtful management of salt, and after the last few years, I believe it. When you’re just starting out, if you don’t have an exact recipe, then put in as much salt as you think you need, and then add a dash more. You can always back off the next time if it’s too much. At the beginning, it probably won’t be.

Yes, absolutely. This is what I was getting at with my previous post, about “playing.” After you’ve learned the basic rules, the kitchen becomes a playpen.

(And he’s not kidding about the omelette. My breakfast this morning was thrown together based on a bunch of stuff I had around: yellow onions, scallions, fontina, diced tomatoes, capers, crab meat, some Chachere’s… Just work with the ingredients a while and you’ll learn how they behave and how to treat them: sweat the onions first, save the cheese and tomatoes for last, and so on.)

57

Unless you’re baking. Then you can get away with very few changes - things like, adding more chocolate chips, swapping out blueberries for raspberries, that sort of thing. Otherwise, please treat baking like tasty chemistry, and follow the recipe.

58

This can be taken so many ways.

I’m such a perv.

59

Dare I say that perhaps we share a similar perversion (though, of course, it being a thread on cooking, my reasoning was well intended)? :wink: :wink:

60

No one else has mentioned it before so let me the one let the cat out of bag! :wink:

Don’t let anyone else tell you differently, but the real key to learning how to cook and to cooking in general, is how to cover up your mistakes (without throwing everything away). It will happen and you must be prepared!

It’s when the braised beef dish you were making runs out of liquid and now all of a sudden becomes the roasted beef dish. There are countless ways to correct over salting, too much sugar, etc. and many of the books already mentioned will be your friend.

It happens to the famous chefs and to the humble cooks such as ourselves!