/ck/ - Food & Cooking

[Anonymous No.15043794]

Any advice to learn how to cook? I’m tired of eating out for every meal but I can only make pasta and chicken

[Anonymous No.15043800]

What are you asking
Cook things, eat them, experiment, adjust

[Anonymous No.15043816]

>>15043800
>How do I learn how to cook?
>Cook
Wow, helpful

[Anonymous No.15043823]

>>15043816
Guess how you learn to draw

[Anonymous No.15043830]

>>15043816
he's right though, look for some recipes online, find some vids to teach you some basics, and try it for yourself. You're never going to get the skill to know how to cook anything if you never get comfortable with timing, your stove, and your ingredients.

[Anonymous No.15043847]

>>15043823
By cooking?

[Anonymous No.15043889]

>>15043823
By having someone teach you the basics? Like, I wanted to be an animator when I was a kid, and someone gave me a book teaching me about frameworks and proportions, they didn't just hand me a pencil and paper and say "lol okay good luck, figure this shit out!"

>>15043830
Yeah, reasonable advice would be to point someone toward the basics. Not just assume people already know that shit, which is what this board constantly does.

Here's a helpful video with a lot of basics, OP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CshkecuFfMc

[Anonymous No.15043899]

>>15043889
Apologies, apparently YouTube is down right now, but it's still something to go back to. You can at least see the list of things he explores in the description.

[Anonymous No.15043996]

>>15043794
Start simple.
Pasta and chicken is a good start.

If youtube ever comes back, start watching Jacques Pepin videos. Start with the 3+ hours of Essential Techniques.
Oeufs Cocotte is my standard next recommendation. Get a glass muffin cup (custard cup, or a ceramic ramekin). Butter the inside, little salt, little pepper, maybe a dash of herb (sage, basil, or dill are all nice), crack an egg into it. Cook in a water bath (Jacques will have showed you how). This is FAR easier than frying eggs, and they look much fancier.

Since you invested the $10 in a nice set of glass cups, build on that. Hashbrown cup bakes? Not much more complicated. Put shredded potatoes in a buttered cup, bake for a while, pull out, crack an egg on top, bake a little more.

The idea is to try something pretty easy, improve your confidence, then try something related but a little more complex.

The important things to learn:
When is it done cooking?
How much salt to add?

Almost everything else you can pick up as you move forward.

[Anonymous No.15044133]

Start making sauces. Simple ones like tomato sauce with onion, tomato, and some basil. Practice cutting the onion properly, learn how it cooks down. Then start making curry. Get a recipe for basic vegetable curry and use whole spices. These sorts of foods are pretty forgiving for a new cook and you will learn a lot of basic skills.

[Anonymous No.15044141]

>>15043996
>pasta
he'll do everything wrong and continue the anglo tradition of bastardizing italian cuisine

[Anonymous No.15044189]

Also going to say:
There are plenty of "one ingredient" dishes. They're a really good place to start.

One ingredient is slightly inaccurate: one ingredient, plus seasoning, maybe with some water or oil as a cooking medium. For the most part, that's stuff no more complicated than "boil pasta" or "pan fry a chicken breast".

Boiled eggs (hard or soft). Poached eggs (boiled but not in the shell).
Toasted bread.
Baked potato. Baked onion. (Feel fancy, call them oven roasted if you like.)
Corn on the cob. (In the husk - soak in salt water for 20 minutes; bake in the oven or cook on an outdoor grill, peel the leaves and silk off after cooking.)
Steak. (Strip steak is no more complicated than a chicken breast; slightly different technique.)
Burgers. (Ground beef is your one real ingredient; any "recipe" more complicated than "sprinkle a little salt on" is wrong.)
Pasta. Rice. Oatmeal. All pretty similar; different times/quantities. Advanced in the family: polenta (cornmeal mush/grits).

After that, plenty of "cold cooking" - salads, where you can focus on cutting and combining things with no worry about burning things, just balancing proportions. Salad dressings, like vinaigrettes (stupidly easy from scratch, why pay $5/small bottle?). Sauces like mayonnaise. Advance to a hollandaise when you can melt butter safely, up your brunch oeufs cocotte (or poached eggs).

If you can do all that, you have a variety of ways to not starve, and can then start upping your game and exploring 2 and 3 ingredient dishes, as well as casseroles.

[Anonymous No.15044198]

>>15044141
He'll fuck it up less than Fazoli's or Olive Garden.

[Anonymous No.15045759]

>>15044133
>ywn be a saucier gathering mangos in the thick jungle during the Vietnam war
Why even live?

[Anonymous No.15045760]

>>15044189
>Baked potato. Baked onion. (Feel fancy, call them oven roasted if you like.)
I feel so stupid. I could have been sounding so fancy all these years of cooking with the oven and here I am callin everything “baked” like some simpleton. Smh my head

[Anonymous No.15045833]

>>15045760
If the yelling chef can describe every dish as "the most amazing", "oven roasted" really isn't out of line.

Oh, baking something that is wrapped in a loose envelope of foil or parchment? That's "en papillote".
https://youtu.be/Pxou7Kjh7Dc

It's not tomatoes on toast; it's crustini.

If a fancy name makes you feel better about your food, use it. Same trick they use to sell McChickens, because breaded chicken slurry on a bun just doesn't capture the imagination the same way.

[Anonymous No.15045854]

Start making Bodybuilder food.
It’s literally made for retards like me who don’t know how to cook but need food to grow and better their diets.
After something like the videos I posted I can just make my own stuff.
https://youtu.be/RM2uYFOr3hs
https://youtu.be/oLClNuM3tZg

[Anonymous No.15045925]

>>15043794
Have you tried like, reading a book?

Tbh the problem is that everyone talks about cooking in terms of recipes instead of techniques. Do you have any education in science? Imo if you know a bit of a anatomy, a bit of botany, and a bit of physical science, then you can figure out how to cook anything at all. Taste as you go. The longer you cook something, the softer it gets. These are the only two rules you really need in order to teach yourself how to cook.

[Anonymous No.15045948]

>>15043794
Cooking is fucking easy, literally all you have to do is follow instructions.
Just cook more and more complex recipes as you get more comfortable. If you don't know what to cook think of something you have enjoyed before at a restaurant for example and try to find a recipe for it. Eventually you will start to be confident enough to mix and match recipes and create your own dishes rather than just following directly.

[Anonymous No.15045991]

>>15043794
Watch any meme youtuber that goes through the "basics". Basics with babish is a good start. Maybe some culinary books, but I haven't seen ones that hit that sweet spot of difficulty. Restaraunt chefs usually go too fancy for a home cook.
Basically, you need to learn techniques, like braising, learn about ingredients, like what happens with meat under heat and how shoulder differs from tenderloin, traditional food and spice pairings, and then you can competently cook any produce you get.
Google a bit about your tools - teflon vs stainless vs cast iron pans, how to handle a knife (and sharpen it).

Then experiment. Recipes makers lie about cooking time contantly, their ingredients and tools differ from yours (gas vs electric stoves, for example, brown vs white rice). Taste. After cooking a stew, for example, taste and add some salt or vinegar if it tastes bland. Taste again. Repeat.

[Anonymous No.15046833]

>>15045925
Cue intro music
Doo do do doo do dododo GOOD EATS!

[Anonymous No.15046838]

But seriously, watch good eats. He dumbs it down and it’s so corny it’s comfy.