A lot of that is about developing intuition and like in most fields, there's not an easy way to develop intuition without a lot of experience. What helped me a

A lot of that is about developing intuition and like in most fields, there's not an easy way to develop intuition without a lot of experience. What helped me a lot was starting to work through "On Cooking", which is geared towards culinary students, and at least has a more useful progression of skills (e.g. starts with equipment, knife skills, etc.) and techniques, and then starts building up from there. e.g. you learn to make sauces before starting on full dishes, etc. But doing something like that is a pretty large commitment (and all of the recipes have to be scaled down to non-restaurant sizes). At one point in my early 30s I considered writing a cook book based on trying to teach my housemate to cook, starting with the assumptions that the person in question hadn't ever cooked and didn't own any reasonable cooking stuff, and trying to establish a baseline of recipes that could all be cooked from the same 20-ish ingredients that one could reasonably always have around. There are definitely recipe-based and intuition-based approaches to cooking, and while I think teaching intuition is difficult, learning a particular vocabulary of skills in a certain order can help.