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I got into cooking via Youtube. Youtube cooks became a thing about fifteen years ago. People like Jamie Oliver started promoting first themselves and then other

I got into cooking via Youtube. Youtube cooks became a thing about fifteen years ago. People like Jamie Oliver started promoting first themselves and then others on Youtube and I sort of started watching that stuff to relax. The genius of this was that Jamie Oliver was of course famous but the people he promoted weren't. They were just ordinary people that pointed a camera at themselves while they were cooking stuff. Quite a few of them are still on Youtube and have successful channels now. And of course others have come along. There are many thousands of people regularly uploading stuff. These days if I want to learn how to make something, Youtube is the first place to look. It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that I could do some cooking myself. If you are a programmer (like me), my realization was that if I can follow instructions and implement some complex algorithm, cooking is a lot easier. And even the failures can be tasty. Julia Childs was basically doing the same thing as these Youtube chefs but about half a century earlier. You can find quite a bit of her shows on Youtube. But it's got a similar vibe to it: shot at home, very passionate about what she did, very relatable, etc. And it necessarily follows a similar format. She was funny, and no-nonsense. Very unglamorous too. And obviously very skilled. She was a middle aged woman by the time she got on TV. It was all about the food and her character. I can't say she was a huge influence for me because I never knew she existed until some Youtube chefs kept referring to her and I checked out some of her stuff. Anyway, I loved the bit of information about her WW II career as a high level intelligence officer. Only makes her more awesome.

globular-toast 2y ago
Big difference being Child went to France to train as a cook and spent a long time there (she learnt French). There were techniques and recipes that simply weren't available to the English speaking world at the time. It's different nowadays, especially with English being so much more dominant. It's easy for us to find someone French doing a video in English. As of about 10 years ago there was still a bit more to learn if you learnt French, but the amount of stuff left is shrinking. For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes (this book incidentally sets out the ingredients better than any other cooking book or website I've ever seen). Where YouTube shines is the techniques. Books do an admirable job of describing kneading, but nothing beats seeing someone do it. That's how we really learn this stuff, and must of us don't have a parent to learn from these days. So watch YouTube videos, but pay extra special attention to what they are doing, more so than what they are saying (you could have just read that part).
- maccard 2y ago
  > For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes Hard, hard disagree here. Learn some recipes, enjoy eating some food that you've cooked for yourself. Cook some recipes you like for 6 months and _then_ start learning the techniques and fundamentals.
  - globular-toast 2y ago
    I didn't say don't read or follow recipes like some kind of culinary monk. Using recipes is as important to a cook as reading programs is to a programmer. But the focus, if you want to learn to cook, should be on ingredients, tools and techniques. For a start, you will not enjoy making any recipe without a good knife. What's more, your execution will be terrible if you don't know what "finely diced onion" is supposed to be or how to make it, or how much "salt to taste" is. You won't enjoy it and will forever think restaurant/takeaway food is better than your own creations. Recipes are always written at a particular level of abstraction. Most won't tell you how to dice an onion, but many will tell you explicitly how to make a roux, without saying the word roux. Learning the basics means you can skim and assimilate recipes at a much higher level. Plenty of people can follow recipes but few can learn a recipe from first principles as there are far too many details. To learn a recipe you need to first learn the basics, then you find a recipe is rather easy to learn. Then once you can do that you have the power to tweak them or substitute ingredients etc. as necessary and/or desired.
  - tpm 2y ago
    I will try to give an example: you find a recipe you like at first glance and try to cook it. It's from East Asia and contains tofu, so you buy tofu, and if you live in Central Europe like me there is good chance the tofu will be completely different to what should the tofu in that recipe be like. Same for the rice (and other ingredients). The result will not be ideal, to say the least, because while the recipe might have been good and you may followed it correctly, the fundamentals weren't there.
jstanley 2y ago
> It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that I could do some cooking myself. What were you eating before you had this realisation?
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  I was cooking but not very well. Or healthily.
- stronglikedan 2y ago
  Most folks eat microwaved food. Not cooking, just heating precooked meals.
  - stephencanon 2y ago
    I'm really curious about who "most folks" you refer to are; no one in my extended family does this normally, and I don't know of any friends or neighbors who do it either (we all microwave a snack here and there, sometimes a meal, but it's not how we habitually feed ourselves and our families).
    - mattl 2y ago
      Most single professionals I’m guessing
  - bdavbdav 2y ago
    I suspect this probably applies more to certain nations. Microwave meals are a lot less prevalent in Europe as a staple.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  When I was around 20, I lived exclusively on takeout. And not because I couldn't cook, I am and was a solid cook, it's that cooking for one is not that economical (specifically time-wise) and I could just eat places that would allow me to eat a days worth of food in one sitting, think lots of Indian buffets, which made feeding myself on takeout pretty cost effective. Before that, I lived on takeout because I worked in a restaurant and it was free to take home the food that was going in the trash at the end of the night.
datpiff 2y ago
> Jamie Oliver started promoting first themselves and then others on Youtube He had multiple TV cooking shows before Youtube even launched
- midgetjones 2y ago
  > The genius of this was that Jamie Oliver was of course famous
stevenwoo 2y ago
The first couple of years of her TV career are fictionalized in the HBO series Julia, though a lot of it is based on her extensive written correspondence to others. Her editor and her friends were interesting in their own right, as well.

globular-toast 2y ago

Big difference being Child went to France to train as a cook and spent a long time there (she learnt French). There were techniques and recipes that simply weren't available to the English speaking world at the time. It's different nowadays, especially with English being so much more dominant. It's easy for us to find someone French doing a video in English. As of about 10 years ago there was still a bit more to learn if you learnt French, but the amount of stuff left is shrinking. For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes (this book incidentally sets out the ingredients better than any other cooking book or website I've ever seen). Where YouTube shines is the techniques. Books do an admirable job of describing kneading, but nothing beats seeing someone do it. That's how we really learn this stuff, and must of us don't have a parent to learn from these days. So watch YouTube videos, but pay extra special attention to what they are doing, more so than what they are saying (you could have just read that part).

maccard 2y ago
> For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes Hard, hard disagree here. Learn some recipes, enjoy eating some food that you've cooked for yourself. Cook some recipes you like for 6 months and _then_ start learning the techniques and fundamentals.
- globular-toast 2y ago
  I didn't say don't read or follow recipes like some kind of culinary monk. Using recipes is as important to a cook as reading programs is to a programmer. But the focus, if you want to learn to cook, should be on ingredients, tools and techniques. For a start, you will not enjoy making any recipe without a good knife. What's more, your execution will be terrible if you don't know what "finely diced onion" is supposed to be or how to make it, or how much "salt to taste" is. You won't enjoy it and will forever think restaurant/takeaway food is better than your own creations. Recipes are always written at a particular level of abstraction. Most won't tell you how to dice an onion, but many will tell you explicitly how to make a roux, without saying the word roux. Learning the basics means you can skim and assimilate recipes at a much higher level. Plenty of people can follow recipes but few can learn a recipe from first principles as there are far too many details. To learn a recipe you need to first learn the basics, then you find a recipe is rather easy to learn. Then once you can do that you have the power to tweak them or substitute ingredients etc. as necessary and/or desired.
- tpm 2y ago
  I will try to give an example: you find a recipe you like at first glance and try to cook it. It's from East Asia and contains tofu, so you buy tofu, and if you live in Central Europe like me there is good chance the tofu will be completely different to what should the tofu in that recipe be like. Same for the rice (and other ingredients). The result will not be ideal, to say the least, because while the recipe might have been good and you may followed it correctly, the fundamentals weren't there.

jstanley 2y ago

> It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that I could do some cooking myself. What were you eating before you had this realisation?

jillesvangurp 2y ago
I was cooking but not very well. Or healthily.
stronglikedan 2y ago
Most folks eat microwaved food. Not cooking, just heating precooked meals.
- stephencanon 2y ago
  I'm really curious about who "most folks" you refer to are; no one in my extended family does this normally, and I don't know of any friends or neighbors who do it either (we all microwave a snack here and there, sometimes a meal, but it's not how we habitually feed ourselves and our families).
  - mattl 2y ago
    Most single professionals I’m guessing
- bdavbdav 2y ago
  I suspect this probably applies more to certain nations. Microwave meals are a lot less prevalent in Europe as a staple.
mywittyname 2y ago
When I was around 20, I lived exclusively on takeout. And not because I couldn't cook, I am and was a solid cook, it's that cooking for one is not that economical (specifically time-wise) and I could just eat places that would allow me to eat a days worth of food in one sitting, think lots of Indian buffets, which made feeding myself on takeout pretty cost effective. Before that, I lived on takeout because I worked in a restaurant and it was free to take home the food that was going in the trash at the end of the night.

datpiff 2y ago

> Jamie Oliver started promoting first themselves and then others on Youtube He had multiple TV cooking shows before Youtube even launched

midgetjones 2y ago
> The genius of this was that Jamie Oliver was of course famous

stevenwoo 2y ago

The first couple of years of her TV career are fictionalized in the HBO series Julia, though a lot of it is based on her extensive written correspondence to others. Her editor and her friends were interesting in their own right, as well.