4 ms·

I will tell you from experience that one cannot learn "cooking" in a single hour, any more than one can learn "music" in an hour.

riffraff 7y ago
I agree 100%, but I would say: it is possible to learn _something useful_ about cooking in 1 hour (e.g. how to chop vegetables, or how to cook a steak). I am doubtful it is possible to have the same experience with music, although maybe one can learn things like "what is a canon".
- loblollyboy 7y ago
  How to open a bottle of wine
- gonzo41 7y ago
  Watch bon appetit on youtube for an hour. It's fun and you may find yourself thinking about cooking more for fun rather than a chore afterwards.
  - chongli 7y ago
    Whether cooking is fun or a chore is, I think, directly related to how much stress the rest of your life is causing you. If you’re extremely busy holding down multiple jobs just to pay the bills and feed your kids, then it’s hard not to see cooking as a chore. A person in such a situation is going to get very impatient trying to watch most cooking videos which tend to waste a lot of time talking about things unrelated to the recipe at hand.
    - shantly 7y ago
      Home food prep takes a lot of time, quite a bit of skill, and a ton of knowledge, for the whole process, not just the cooking itself, especially if you want the supposed health benefits and savings it grants. 1) Shopping. What's a good price on X? Meal planning's a factor and takes time, and you've gotta already have some notion of what's cheap right now for that, or else much better cooking skills to be able to make something with whatever you happen to pick up, in which case you also need to be a good judge of how much of each thing to pick up to cover meals for a given period of time. All this also takes time. 2) The actual cooking. Obviously. Takes time, takes skill, takes schedule stability if you don't want to end up with a bunch of "well shit, I guess we're ordering delivery pizza again" days. 3) Cleaning. Even if you're great about clean-as-you-go while also trying to watch kids or whatever, is your spouse? Uh huh. And cleaning as you go is another skill in the cooking department, gotta know when you're done with things, when you have minute to wash a pot without ruining anything, how to prep your ingredients and space and in what order for maximum effect (being other-than-awesome at this adds quite a bit of time to your cooking process). How to clean various things requires a little knowledge and experience, too. (Of course it can be super cheap and incredibly easy and low-time-commitment if you can convince your family to be OK with rice-cooker rice, beans, and steamed whatever-frozen-veggie-was-on-sale for every dinner. Good luck.)
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Of course, that's true of a lot of things. Many things are fun when you're doing them because you want to and have the time but are chores when you have to do them even though there are other demands on your time or you're just not in the mood. I'm definitely like that with cooking. It's a hobby of mine but there are nights when I just need something to eat and get on with other things.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  > I agree 100%, but I would say: it is possible to learn _something useful_ about cooking in 1 hour (e.g. how to chop vegetables, or how to cook a steak). Yes, I recently took a knife skills class with a some friends. Technically ran a couple hours and $60, but well worth the expense. You could presumably figure out the same stuff by watching online videos, but the social experience and getting immediate feedback on physical skills was nice.
- yesenadam 7y ago
  :-) I'm a jazz musician, and I think a bad piano teacher. I basically teach everything in one hour - how to read music, basic chords (triads, and with all kinds of 5ths and 7ths), cycle of 5ths, basic harmony - then tell people now they have to find great musicians they love and learn from them. (So much easier with the internet than when I was a kid) Sometimes I give them a list of people to check out. Of course, you have to practice that stuff for years until it's like breathing, but the basic theory can be presented in under an hour. You learn from years of listening to the music, transcribing solos and playing them, and playing with other people.
robert_tweed 7y ago
This is true, but you could probably make quite a lot of progress with "Cooking in Ten Minutes" by Édouard de Pomiane. Some reviews of this book point to the recipes being dull compared to some newer books, which while true, misses the point entirely. This is a book that introduces the fundamental concepts of cooking with simple recipes that can be made in 10 minutes. It may be the single best cookery book ever written. It won't teach you a bunch of recipes so much as it will teach you how to think about cooking. It's also very short, so you could probably read the whole thing in an hour (and if you pause near the start to boil some water, you might even cook something too).
schwartzworld 7y ago
I learned music one hour at a time. took a few thousand hours but I got there.
ozim 7y ago
Meh of course you are not going to be Gordon Ramsey in an hour. To read how to cook rice, get to know when meat is ready (if you buy meat from supermarket you probably can under cook it and still be fine) and how to boil/prepare some vegetables. Then that hour where you read instructions for 10-20 mins, did an experiment that took next 30 mins... Voilà you can now cook the same thing for next couple weeks in only 30 mins without reading recipe again. Now when you know how to cook one thing you can try out some other stuff which will be small investment because you have some base from cooking that one meal for some time. I am by no means a chef (so not going to impress anyone with my cooking skills because it still is just basic stuff) but I am not afraid of cooking, I can now quite confidently experiment and I started with baking chicken breasts and boiling rice.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I would argue that cooking is particularly amenable to being broken down into discrete activities that one can at least take a first pass at in an hour or so. And, for all the stuff in my kitchen, the number of things you need to get started is actually pretty minimal. (In fact, as with many things, you're probably better off keeping it simple at first.)
loco5niner 7y ago
True. However, you can learn a specific skill under the umbrella of cooking in that time. One time I bought a 50 pound bag of onions and practiced cutting/dicing/etc for an hour plus. These days, I cut up an onion (or multiple onions) very nearly on a daily basis in my cooking at home.

riffraff 7y ago

I agree 100%, but I would say: it is possible to learn _something useful_ about cooking in 1 hour (e.g. how to chop vegetables, or how to cook a steak). I am doubtful it is possible to have the same experience with music, although maybe one can learn things like "what is a canon".

loblollyboy 7y ago
How to open a bottle of wine
gonzo41 7y ago
Watch bon appetit on youtube for an hour. It's fun and you may find yourself thinking about cooking more for fun rather than a chore afterwards.
- chongli 7y ago
  Whether cooking is fun or a chore is, I think, directly related to how much stress the rest of your life is causing you. If you’re extremely busy holding down multiple jobs just to pay the bills and feed your kids, then it’s hard not to see cooking as a chore. A person in such a situation is going to get very impatient trying to watch most cooking videos which tend to waste a lot of time talking about things unrelated to the recipe at hand.
  - shantly 7y ago
    Home food prep takes a lot of time, quite a bit of skill, and a ton of knowledge, for the whole process, not just the cooking itself, especially if you want the supposed health benefits and savings it grants. 1) Shopping. What's a good price on X? Meal planning's a factor and takes time, and you've gotta already have some notion of what's cheap right now for that, or else much better cooking skills to be able to make something with whatever you happen to pick up, in which case you also need to be a good judge of how much of each thing to pick up to cover meals for a given period of time. All this also takes time. 2) The actual cooking. Obviously. Takes time, takes skill, takes schedule stability if you don't want to end up with a bunch of "well shit, I guess we're ordering delivery pizza again" days. 3) Cleaning. Even if you're great about clean-as-you-go while also trying to watch kids or whatever, is your spouse? Uh huh. And cleaning as you go is another skill in the cooking department, gotta know when you're done with things, when you have minute to wash a pot without ruining anything, how to prep your ingredients and space and in what order for maximum effect (being other-than-awesome at this adds quite a bit of time to your cooking process). How to clean various things requires a little knowledge and experience, too. (Of course it can be super cheap and incredibly easy and low-time-commitment if you can convince your family to be OK with rice-cooker rice, beans, and steamed whatever-frozen-veggie-was-on-sale for every dinner. Good luck.)
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Of course, that's true of a lot of things. Many things are fun when you're doing them because you want to and have the time but are chores when you have to do them even though there are other demands on your time or you're just not in the mood. I'm definitely like that with cooking. It's a hobby of mine but there are nights when I just need something to eat and get on with other things.
Marsymars 7y ago
> I agree 100%, but I would say: it is possible to learn _something useful_ about cooking in 1 hour (e.g. how to chop vegetables, or how to cook a steak). Yes, I recently took a knife skills class with a some friends. Technically ran a couple hours and $60, but well worth the expense. You could presumably figure out the same stuff by watching online videos, but the social experience and getting immediate feedback on physical skills was nice.
yesenadam 7y ago
:-) I'm a jazz musician, and I think a bad piano teacher. I basically teach everything in one hour - how to read music, basic chords (triads, and with all kinds of 5ths and 7ths), cycle of 5ths, basic harmony - then tell people now they have to find great musicians they love and learn from them. (So much easier with the internet than when I was a kid) Sometimes I give them a list of people to check out. Of course, you have to practice that stuff for years until it's like breathing, but the basic theory can be presented in under an hour. You learn from years of listening to the music, transcribing solos and playing them, and playing with other people.

robert_tweed 7y ago

This is true, but you could probably make quite a lot of progress with "Cooking in Ten Minutes" by Édouard de Pomiane. Some reviews of this book point to the recipes being dull compared to some newer books, which while true, misses the point entirely. This is a book that introduces the fundamental concepts of cooking with simple recipes that can be made in 10 minutes. It may be the single best cookery book ever written. It won't teach you a bunch of recipes so much as it will teach you how to think about cooking. It's also very short, so you could probably read the whole thing in an hour (and if you pause near the start to boil some water, you might even cook something too).

schwartzworld 7y ago

I learned music one hour at a time. took a few thousand hours but I got there.

ozim 7y ago

Meh of course you are not going to be Gordon Ramsey in an hour. To read how to cook rice, get to know when meat is ready (if you buy meat from supermarket you probably can under cook it and still be fine) and how to boil/prepare some vegetables. Then that hour where you read instructions for 10-20 mins, did an experiment that took next 30 mins... Voilà you can now cook the same thing for next couple weeks in only 30 mins without reading recipe again. Now when you know how to cook one thing you can try out some other stuff which will be small investment because you have some base from cooking that one meal for some time. I am by no means a chef (so not going to impress anyone with my cooking skills because it still is just basic stuff) but I am not afraid of cooking, I can now quite confidently experiment and I started with baking chicken breasts and boiling rice.

ghaff 7y ago
I would argue that cooking is particularly amenable to being broken down into discrete activities that one can at least take a first pass at in an hour or so. And, for all the stuff in my kitchen, the number of things you need to get started is actually pretty minimal. (In fact, as with many things, you're probably better off keeping it simple at first.)

loco5niner 7y ago

True. However, you can learn a specific skill under the umbrella of cooking in that time. One time I bought a 50 pound bag of onions and practiced cutting/dicing/etc for an hour plus. These days, I cut up an onion (or multiple onions) very nearly on a daily basis in my cooking at home.