Comment by isaacfrond

> 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?

This 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.”

I 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.

Not 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.

I'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.

No 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.

I 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.

Very 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!

Could you recommend such a "proper" cookbook

Joy of Cooking has been my go to for 25 years. It’s part cookbook, part encyclopedia, and just very useful.

Serious 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/

… and end up spherising your breakfast or something, idk.

Agree completely. Let me add to, that tasting as you go is the quickest way to level up your cooking.

Actually… I can recommend ChatGPT. It’s pretty decent for recipes.

Jamie Oliver's books are pretty decent in that regard, the old ones that is.

Alton Brown was really good for this.

Any cookbook recommendations?

> He explains that long videos don't do well. But it takes time to cook.

This is not a mystery. People don't "cook along" with videos. People watch cooking videos for either to get inspired or for a vibe, most often for both.

A stew might take hours to be ready, but the core idea of it can be expressed succinctly in a few sentences. Totally made up example: "We brown beef, and then simmer it with potatoes low and slow with the bones in. It is ready when the meat falls off from the bones. Spice with a pinch of cinnamon." Those are long and sweaty hours in a kitchen to make it, but you can read the idea in seconds. Put the details and quantities in the description. Those few who want to cook it will find it there.

If there is some technique or twist, make a video about that specifically? It doesn't all have to be recipes. I have watched a video the other day where a person explained why they put a few drops of water in the pan when they are frying bacon. If they would have done it in the middle of a 20 minute video I might have missed it. Or what is even more likely would have been skeptical of the technique without the added explanation and test pieces where he has done it both ways to show the difference.

And videos you watch for vibes are not about cooking. They are about the personality of the presenter, that parasocial interaction. It doesn't matter how the food tastes. You won't eat it anyway. What matters are the feelings you experience while watching it.

I'm an amateur who enjoys cooking and does it once a day in order to feed my family.

One of my biggest learnings is that no matter what I do it takes quite a while to cook a meal. Huge complex meals can take hours to prepare, but even a simple meal usually takes me half an hour - because that's just the time it takes to grab the ingredients, boil water for pasta/rice/potatoes/..., cook and present it. The time it takes to cook a meal is largely determined by the duration of the longest step. All the rest is done in parallel, with more complex recipes simply requiring more multitasking. So cooking a simpler meal often makes for a less stressful experience and simpler flavours, but often doesn't save much time.

Video editing is a thing. Something that takes 30 minutes to cook can (and should!) be cut down to 10 minutes of video. You cut five onions, you film how you cut one and edit out the rest. If you stir for 10 minutes watching for certain signs to note when it's done - put in a 30 second show&tell for when it's close to done but not yet; and a 30 second show&tell for when it is ready; and edit out the other 9 minutes.

> Audiences want fast.

Audiences don't want long segments of monotonic action with predictable outcome. No need to show how to slice a kilo of onions. It doesn't sound like the chef videos you mentioned suffer from this, but your "want fast" generalization is off the mark.

I have seen a couple of TikTok creators do cooking videos in a very condensed way. They cut everything, but the important parts out of the video. For example no one wants to watch something in the oven for 20 Minutes, just say that it goes in the oven for 20 minutes and show the result after you took it out.

I’ve cooked with him a few times (he gave classes at our family’s cookery shop) and he’s the real deal. Colourful doesn’t begin to describe his actual background, though.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but there's substance to what the sister-in-law is claiming. I've had a few (not many, but frequent enough) mistakes from very highly produced books, from high-profile celebrity chefs - case in point Thomas Keller. As I was measuring out the ingredients I thought no way this could be right, I'm an experienced home cook and baker. Went with the recipe against my instincts anyway and it turned out quite bad. Especially when the recipe is adapted from a pro kitchen, they make gargantuan portions of stuff, and when reduced for the home cook, the portion and ratio don't necessarily get tested. There are also egregious substitution advice blithely thrown in, for example the Bouchon Bakery cookbook tells you to heat river rocks (but not sedimentary rocks! lol wut?) in your oven and throw water on them to create steam. If you follow this advice you're likely to ruin your oven when one of these rocks explodes. The pros use steam-injected ovens, the test kitchen uses steel chains, but this "use river rock" thing was probably thrown in there by a non-baking intern and I can promise you they never tested this.

Except for rare pockets, the state of Internet recipes is utter garbage. Get a good foundational cookbook, cook and learn from your experience, which no shortcut can substitute. The people who do test their recipes as far as I know, are Cooks' Illustrated and America's Test Kitchens (they're the same company I think).

I have extensive cooking experience both professional and at home, and have written published recipes and also been a tester for published recipes.

I have very low trust in online recipes in general, and always evaluate the source of them first.

But books are not, overall, that much better! Whatever testing was done was often done ad hoc or in professional kitchens, or on a much larger batch that was arithmetically scaled down to home sizes. This often works fine but not always, and usually needs some tweaking. It tends to be especially true of cookbooks affiliated with a well known restaurant or chef, but certainly not limited to that.

Cookbook recipe testing is basically like fact checking in non-fiction. It's up to the author and not invested in or validated by the publisher, unless the publisher is specifically specialized in cookbooks. Usually this means some of the recipes were tested by the same handful of friends & family. The fact that there's a photo means very little, just that someone made that dish once. No cookbook has photos of every recipe.

You seem to be projecting assumption here. The comment you replied to says she's written books they've seen in a book store.

Also, note that the average book sells very few copies. Even traditionally published books. Some books have higher production values that'd justify a lot of extra effort, but tends to be linked to name recognition for people with very established names. It's not at all a given that all that much money has gone into producing these books.

Just to echo this, recipe tester is a profession in and of itself. There are publishers where recipes are not tested, but more established and trusted ones absolutely do.

Restaurant cookbooks are often very good, if they give you the actual recipes they use in the restaurant.

Except... a) they're ideally making big batches, enough for 10 or 20 servings, and b) their stuff is usually very modular, i.e. made out of other recipes. How do I make that great chicken with the yogurt dip? First make the marinade (recipe on page 42). Then make the spice mix for the yogurt (recipe on page 65). Then make blackened peppers (page 210). etc etc

I've almost never seen a recipe book that didn't have at least one recipe where some aspect of the picture didn't blatantly contradict the recipe; i.e. it was just a stock photo.

Even in Delia's course - she has a good reputation for testing & refining etc. over time, not a TV personality with questionable time/skill in kitchen - the photos & making of those dishes to photograph are credited to someone else.

(And sometimes they do clearly vary from the recipe - like clearly not the called-for cheese, or without the described scattering of something over the top or whatever. Which I think's mostly fine or even good, but occasionally I think 'what do you mean by x' and either can't tell from the photo, or have to remind myself that that's only someone else's interpretation anyway.)

I think the thing here might be "of the results".

Here's my grandma's recipe for flapjacks ... accompanied by a picture of flapjacks ... the recipe I made up, the picture was from a stock photo site (best place to get pictures of gravy! /jk) ...

For me that revelation explains a lot.

The Leith’s books don’t have many photos, great recipes though as you’d expect from a genuine cooking school.

That's a pretty modern development. Older cookbooks, including classics that are just as good or better than anything being written now, don't have photos, and rarely have illustrations.

Cannot say for recipe books, but for illustrations for ads and/or for restaurant posters, the "traditional" way was to not use food at all, or use only partially actual food, the rest being artificial.

Very likely this has changed but once there were specialized artists that made mock-ups (often using wax, but not only), besides the ready-made props (usually plastic).

And then there is an endless list of non-food ingredients that are used because they come out great in photography, example:

https://petapixel.com/2018/11/30/tricks-food-photographers-u...

AI generated photos would probably look good enough for the book to be successful.

Yes, most do! If you want a fortress of well-tested recipes I highly recommend Smitten Kitchen. Everything tested to great depths...

https://smittenkitchen.com/

Except a lot of recipe books from the 1950s to 1970s involve tins of mushroom soup, condensed milk, and jelly rather than real ingredients.

I picked up a cookbook from the 70s in a second hand shop. It's got okay content for the most part but some recipes are incredibly unappealing for modern tastes, stuff like savory jello.

To that end there's a Canadian guy on youtube that puts out cooking videos using vintage (typically early 20th century) cookbooks every Sunday.

I'm a decent cook, and occasionally I've been in the middle of a recipe and noticed something is off.

It came with experience, but knowing whether 1 TSP or 1 tbsp of something per portion is the right rough ratio comes in handy significantly more often than you think

> that is exactly the feeling I often have. Proportions and time seems incorrect and you question what you are going wrong. I have a few cookbooks like the ones from Yotam Ottolenghi where the recipe is actually correct. It is so much more fun to use.

I wonder what you would think of Ethiopia: Recipes and Traditions from the Horn of Africa ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1623719631/ )

The recipes are good. But the book rarely specifies an amount of anything, and sometimes when it does it's accompanied by a note saying "I toned this way down for an American audience". [1] Many recipes include the direction "add enough water to prevent scorching" one or more times.

I just take the philosophy that that book mostly expects you to know what you want and how to get there, and whenever you try making a new recipe from it you might be wildly off. But it's not a matter of the recipes being "incorrect" -- they're great! It's that they're underspecified.

I don't think the requirement for familiarity with a recipe can really be gotten rid of. Learning to make rice-a-roni from a box had its hiccups; over time I tended to get better results despite not consciously doing anything different. And if any recipe is going to be tested for reliability and ease of following by people who are barely able to cook, it will be the directions on a box of rice-a-roni.

[1] And he wasn't kidding about that. I had to use five times the amount of berbere indicated in that particular recipe to get it to taste right.

> Surely that can’t be true (...) every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like

You may be looking at glue used as milk, motor oil as sauce or mashed potatoes pretending to be ice cream [1].

(And don't call me Shirley)

[1] https://petapixel.com/2018/11/30/tricks-food-photographers-u...

> Plus every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like.

Food photography very often is staged for visual appeal, not prepared as directed (for a recipe illustration) or as actually prepared (for a restaurant illustration.)

> Even semi professional chefs need to figure out what flavour combinations need to go together, amounts of each item, etc.

No they do not. Haven't you ever tasted something and said "this needs salt?"

Once you know what x+y tastes like and y+z tastes like, you can sometimes imagine what x+z would truly taste like; Any two things you think might taste good together probably do, for just as surely as you can imagine what something looks like, or sounds like, you can imagine what something tastes like.

The amounts generally remain the same orders of magnitude so even if they're not to your taste, the dish will probably "work", and if it doesn't, home cooks have priors:

Everyone has a crap oven, or high/low humidity or altitude or whatever, so there isn't a single recipe that would work for everyone, and I think most home-cooks know this! Hasn't a recipe ever turned out badly for you?

So if there are any issues they might have with a recipe, I could believe they would blame their skill and/or their kit, and/or adjust a few times before they ever blamed the recipe, because surely that can't be true!

> Plus every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like. I

We have hi-resolution AI pictures all the time on this very site that people can't tell from fiction, and food surprises you?

C'mon! You can get pictures of just about anything from stock photography services. At newspaper-dpi nobody is going to notice!

> I just don’t believe she would get anything approximating a good result from this.

Well I guess it depends what exactly you mean by a "a good result..."

It's more like deploying code to production without at the very least running it once. That would be really fucking dumb. Most people don't do that. The above comment is saying that most cookbooks are hot garbage and dont have recipes that have been used once.

Especially not on live ... it never happens man. It's urban legend.

You're implying this does happen. Where does this happen? I've never experienced it.

I do this, sometimes. And it's fine.

Haha I understand you. I have way too many cookbooks that are untried and untested. I like looking at the pretty photos and marvel at those kitchens and kitchenware. And the ingredients, so colorful!

Then I realize I don't know what half those ingredients are, wouldn't know where to source them, and in any case I don't have time to go shopping for nonstandard stuff.

YouTuber home cooks make it “live”, so I generally trust those. Same for Gordon Ramsey, Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal etc.

As far as YouTubers go you have the holy trinity of Adam Ragusea, Ethan Chlenpwoski and Joshua Weissman, although I dislike the latter and would sub (haha) him out for Brian Lagerstrom.

All of those YouTubers hit a good balance between: scientific basis, concise clear steps and taking reasonable shortcuts.

> The best example I've seen so far were David Lebovitz's recipes.

Nice to see a +1 for Lebovitz - not really familiar with him, but have been getting into home-made ice cream and just ordered The Perfect Scoop last night as my first/only ice cream recipe book.

That's about reviews for anything.

People put a number of stars based on their mood, presumptions, willingness to support a buddy's business, but not so often based on the real experience with the product or service.

I feel the same. That‘s a subscription that really pays off. Also one of the few newslettery messages I let in my inbox.

Stock photos. AI generated. There are options...

For what it's worth, I found the best way to make them is to cut them into very thin slices. My rule is bell peppers have to always be "bite sized" because of how tough they are. If you make the pieces to big, you will have to "bite into" the pepper rather than eating it whole and I think that's where they get a bad rap since they can be very tough to bite into.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_photography

It's almost safe to say you can't actually eat the meal that gets photographed.

Gotta say, not really looking forward to GPT generated recipes rendered by Stable Diffusion.

If it’s a fairly common dish, stock photos.