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As if I needed more fuel on the fire of my burning hatred for recipe collections. Everyone who is interested in cooking should do themselves a favour and buy a
by henrikschroder 3y ago
As if I needed more fuel on the fire of my burning hatred for recipe collections.
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.
- dmarchand90 3y agoCould you recommend such a "proper" cookbook
- xupybd 3y agohttps://www.mightyape.co.nz/product/edmonds-cookery-book-fully-revised/25457229?gclid=Cj0KCQjwyLGjBhDKARIsAFRNgW-0KFNoR7o6LR72Do4XQNZ59bGZWQ4ufnvtAQwe7kyF9yHOR_fZM3waAmnZEALw_wcB https://www.mightyape.co.nz/product/edmonds-cookery-book-ful...
- misja111 3y agoI really enjoyed Cooking for Geeks: https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Geeks-Science-Great-Hacks/dp/0596805888 https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Geeks-Science-Great-Hacks/dp/...
- BlackLotus89 3y agoThis was one of the worst cookbooks I ever bought and some things were borderline wrong. 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.
- misja111 3y agoI didn't care about the pictures, I was more interested in the explanation about the science behind cooking. > .. 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.
- avvt4avaw 3y ago- Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat - Ruhlman's 20 by Michael Ruhlman - How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
- kieckerjan 3y agoRatio by Michael Ruhlman as well.
- klondike_klive 3y agoSuch a useful book. Algorithms for cooking! I still use this every time I make pancakes, fritters, any type of dough.
- Millsen1 3y ago[dead]
- ashergill 3y agoDelia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course is an absolute classic and I can also recommend Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 3y ago12 minutes for rice. Don't lift the lid. Only lesson I ever needed.
- matwood 3y agoI remember when I reached a point where I could just look at the rice through a glass lid and know it was done together with the timer in my head. Silly, but a big moment for me. Growing up, my parents always butchered the rice so I had this weird fear it was really hard. It’s not, as you said, timer and how much water.
- bearmode 3y agoThe Joy of Cooking.
- bregma 3y agoSecomd edition. Before they took out the illustrated section on how to skin a squirrel. Essential knowledge, after all.
- alexhornby 3y agomy sister tests all her recipes, takes her ages! https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Cook-How-Jane-Hornby/dp/071485901X https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Cook-How-Jane-Hornby/dp/071485...
- stormdennis 3y agoI just bought it. It better be good or I will find you.
- yurishimo 3y agoYou've potentially narrowed down the country!
- Woansdei 3y agomy wife does as well https://www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Mary-Anne-Boermans/s?rh=n%3A266239%2Cp_27%3AMary-Anne+Boermans https://www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Mary-Anne-Boermans/s?rh=n%3A2...
- btgeekboy 3y agoIt's not quite what OP suggested, Joshua Weissman's Unapologetic Cookbook does something similar. The first section is literally, "A Little Cooking Foundation" and the first subsection is "Staples From Scratch." It's not comprehensive, but it is cohesive - by the end, you're using recipes from the beginning. 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.
- yurishimo 3y agoYea, Weissman is certainly a talented blend of home and pro cook but jeez do I not have time to make literally everything from scratch. 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.
- ivan_gammel 3y agoHelloFresh does a good job explaining how to cook their recipes. After a year of their subscription you will know the basics.
- rocketbop 3y agoHaving worked for a rival, I can confirm that all recipes for these mealbox companies do actually get made and tested in the test kitchens.
- eertami 3y agoYou can also just go online and read the recipes for free, which is quite nice. I moved to a country without HelloFresh but sometimes take a browse through their recipes and buy ingredients in person, when wanting to try something new (but unsure what exactly.)
- jxf 3y agoOne way to get some general recommendations is to check out the James Beard awards [0] for "general cooking" cookbooks. You'll get what the industry and expert chefs think are the best for beginning cooks to get started (and they're usually right). [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Beard_Foundation_Award https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Beard_Foundation_Award
- alisonatwork 3y agoLook at what your local culinary schools are using. Practical Cookery by Foskett et al is a popular textbook that covers pretty much everything you could want to know about how to cook and how to use every bit of equipment you can find in a kitchen.
- j_french 3y agoI thought all cookbooks were just recipe collections until I picked up Darina Allen's 'Ballymaloe Cookery Course', a 'proper' cookbook that you could use for life by Ireland's Delia Smith (I guess? not too familiar with Delia)
- sumo89 3y agoI've inherited an 80's Good Housekeeping cookbook. Some recipes are very dated but it goes in to detail on all the techniques needed for each dish including a lot of things people did more of back then like breaking down a whole bird from scratch.
- than3 3y agoNo such book actually exists. There's a french book that covers basic/common procedures and a reader's digest book but those are about it; and they definitely are not beginner oriented.
- BerislavLopac 3y agoOh I see what you did there. Ward Cunningham would be very proud. ;)
- cnity 3y agoThe Food Lab covers that kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_Lab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_Lab
- jamestimmins 3y agoSecond this. The Food Lab is great and by getting into the science of cooking, it made it approachable in a way that may resonate with the HN crowd.
- iamacyborg 3y agoIt’s a fantastic book and the author also has a great YouTube channel.
- vinnyvichy 3y agoFood and (lab) chemistry: 2 subjects that are better served by video than by text (alone).
- bearmode 3y agoThe Joy of Cooking is a pretty good one.
- ubercore 3y agoSure it does. https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0764557343/ref=pd_sim_b_5 https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-... Would be useful for any home cook (I have it in my kitchen)
- lldb 3y agoNot exactly a cookbook, but the manual for our weber gas grill has proved shockingly useful in cooking most meats to near perfection. Has tables for thickness, cuts, etc.
- SSLy 3y ago> manual Saving people a click https://weber.mizecx.com/knowledge/s3/retrieve?path=knowledge/WEBER_LG/54372/54372.pdf https://weber.mizecx.com/knowledge/s3/retrieve?path=knowledg... PDF page 65 onwards
- TomK32 3y agoLet me save you from scrolling through 64 pages: pdftk 54372.pdf cat 65-end output weber-grilling-meat.pdf
- capableweb 3y agoLet me save you a few characters in the future friend: In 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 "65" and it'll take you directly to the page you enter.
- shakna 3y agoWell, they do both use PDF.js [0]. [0] https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/ https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/
- capableweb 3y agoMight be, although the UI is certainly different, at least for me on Windows. The page numbers are in the top-left on Firefox but top-center on Chrome.
- ghusbands 3y agoChrome uses PDFium [1], not PDF.js. [1] https://github.com/chromium/pdfium https://github.com/chromium/pdfium
- fps_doug 3y agoI use recipe websites. When I want to try something new, I read a handful of recipes there, usually those with high user ratings. But what I really pay attention to is the writing style. If it's just a dry "do this then that then that", it might very well be some stuff someone made up on the spot. But if people go into detail, like "yes this seems like an awful lot of butter, but trust me, this is how the real thing is done at the restaurant where you don't see it", and little details that make me believe the person is actually writing from experience and dropping hints of what to watch out for, it's usually a really solid result for me.
- rightbyte 3y agoOne would guess the "story mode" recipes are the made up ones? Sounds like a inaccurate rule of thumb.
- fps_doug 3y agoWell sure, in essence that's just a "works for me" thing. Also, no idea how much this is a regional/cultural thing, I exclusively use a German site for this. It doesn't seem to suffer fake ratings like Aamzon etc., probably as there isn't too much to gain from that. Story mode might sound a little extreme though, it's mostly that I like useful hints about common pitfalls, rookie mistakes, ingredients that can have vastly varying properties, these kind of things that an experienced chef might just know, but not a rando like me. :)
- MereInterest 3y agoEven when comparing across several recipes, I can still run into issues. For example, about five years ago I wanted to make banket, a Dutch almond pastry. I found several recipes online, compared them, and started testing them out. Every single one of them had a runny filling. Worse, most of the recipes were just copies of each other, sometimes with unit conversions, but the same wrong recipe. 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.
- heisenzombie 3y agoSerious recommendation: Back in the day (like more than a decade ago) I learned to cook using rouxbe.com and it really set me up for a love of cooking. Can’t vouch for any changes since then, hopefully it’s still good. Nonserious recommendation: Just drop >600USD on https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-cuisine/ https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-cuisine/ … and end up spherising your breakfast or something, idk.
- aszantu 3y agointeresting how long it takes to get to the price tag xD u only find it when u got it in your cart and about to check out
- disillusioned 3y agoWould you expect anything less from a billionaire patent troll?
- aszantu 3y agoI don'T know, if u'Re him u prolly don't let any opportunity slide
- GuB-42 3y ago> A timer can never replace the knowledge of how something is supposed to look, feel, and smell when it's done or not. 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?
- ilyt 3y ago> 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. 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
- brookst 3y agoAnd humidity, altitude/weather, variations in stoves/ovens, shape and thermals of the pan, etc. There are too many variables for the same process to produce the same results.
- dbspin 3y agoI think you're leaving out the extent to which cooking is an analogue process. Your particular ovens temperature envelope, the rate at which your pan or wok heats (due to its thickness and composition), the specifics of the varieties of plant or cuts of meat you're cooking, the quality or specifics of the spices or oils you're using. I'm no chef, but it seems like these can all make quite substantial changes in cooking times, sauce thickness, flavour profiles etc etc, and all necessitate observation and analogue adjustment of cooking processes.
- kqr 3y agoI'm learning cooking as an adult (if I had to grade myself, I'd say "early-stage apprentice") and it's by far one of the most difficult things I've learned. One of the reasons is this: > 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.
- bluGill 3y agoA fun one is salt to taste early on when the dish isn't safe to taste - raw eggs are in the bowl for example. Not to mention the amount of salt to make the batter taste good is not always the same amount you want after baking is done.
- hef19898 3y agoJamie Oliver's books are pretty decent in that regard, the old ones that is.
- damontal 3y agoJoy of Cooking has been my go to for 25 years. It’s part cookbook, part encyclopedia, and just very useful.
- baxtr 3y agoActually… I can recommend ChatGPT. It’s pretty decent for recipes.
- matwood 3y agoAgree completely. Let me add to, that tasting as you go is the quickest way to level up your cooking.
- maurits 3y agoAny cookbook recommendations?
- linsomniac 3y agoI have a very well worn copy of The Joy of Cooking and highly recommend it. I rarely use it these days, but I've also built up a lot of cooking instinct and I'll usually just look up 3-4 recipes and combine the parts I like from each.
- ianai 3y agoAlton Brown was really good for this.
- safety1st 3y agoVery amateur cook here and I never thought about this before, but I can see your point. 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!
- escapedmoose 3y agoThis is why I use The Joy of Cooking and virtually no other recipe source. It’s a giant book because in each section it describes the mechanics behind whatever the section is based on; e.g. the poultry chapter starts with 10 or so pages describing how to select a chicken depending on how it’ll be cooked, how to cut it apart, what different poultry terminology means, etc. It teaches you what it means to “braise” or “broil” or “sauté,” etc. 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.”
- beedeebeedee 3y agoI also use the Joy of Cooking and love it (as well as Mastering the Art of French Cooking). > 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.
- samstave 3y agoThis is my favorite internet Chef (well famous chef on the internet now - hes accomplished, funny and cooks like my granda did -- He says "just make sure you measure EXACTLY" (as he puts in random amounts of shit and doesnt really measure a thing). https://www.youtube.com/@ChefJeanPierre https://www.youtube.com/@ChefJeanPierre
- wlesieutre 3y agoThe internet does have well written and tested recipes, you just have to find the people who are writing them. Mostly word of mouth because search has been dominated by content farm SEO spam. 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-new-york/ https://www.pressurecookrecipes.com/instant-pot-cheesecake-n...