Hello, bees! I like playing around in the kitchen, but I feel like I really have no idea what I’m doing with the fundamentals. I’m enjoying the learn-from-experience process, but am looking for something to supplement. I recently started reading / listening to Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (by Samin Nosrat). I’m liking it so far, but I am feeling like there are some assumptions made on readers’ understanding. Perhaps there are other helpful materials with different perspectives on covering the basics. Do you have any recommended books, shows, or other material on the absolute basics of cooking?
Salt, fat, and acid is no doubt a great book, but I always find good videos more informstive than cook books, especially for beginners, since videos help you to know how a dish looks like at each step.
Some of my favorite includes food wishes (everything), pasta grammar (italian), vincenzo’s plate (italian), and Wang Gang (Chinese)
BBC Good Food is quite good. The website is basically a big book of recipes, but tailored to all levels of experience.
When they ask you to do something, there’ll usually be a hyperlink to an article covering that particular thing.
Often there will also be demonstration videos as well, which can be handy.
I think it depends mostly on what you’re struggling with. For me, as a kid growing up in the 1970s, they never taught us cups, ounces, teaspoons, tablespoons… “Oh, these kids will all be on the metric system by the time they grow up…”
Um, yeah, about that. I still use apps to convert things.
What are you finding confusing?
I really like Serious Eats since they actually provide a bit of a theoretical story about what you’re trying to do, in a way that can be generalised to similar ingredients. Before I became generally too sick to prepare complex meals for myself, they really inspired me to play in the kitchen more.
A bit of a different recommendation, but a service where they send you ingredients with instructions for the dishes you select, aka Hellofresh in some countries. It will help you to wrap your head around portions, spices order of preparation and etc, most importantly just plainly building experience instead of listening / reading to other people talking about it.
