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Comment by henrikschroder

3 years ago

As if I needed more fuel on the fire of my burning hatred for recipe collections.

Everyone who is interested in cooking should do themselves a favour and buy a proper cookbook. Something that starts with the basics, and works itself up to full meals. It should have cheat-sheets for basic ways to cook all your staples, here's all the ways you can cook a potato, with times and temperature. Here's all the ways you can slice an onion, with examples of what it's good for. Here's how to cut a cow into pieces, here's what the pieces are called, here's how long each piece takes to cook and what it pairs well with.

Unfortunately, most people think they can cook something from a recipe collection without being proficient at the basics. "I'll just follow the recipe!", and then they wonder why it didn't work. A timer can never replace the knowledge of how something is supposed to look, feel, and smell when it's done or not.

And yet recipe collection regularly outsell cookbooks by a wide margin.

I guess they look good on a coffee table at least.

117 comments

henrikschroder

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GuB-42  3 years ago

> 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?

  • dbspin  3 years ago

    I think you're leaving out the extent to which cooking is an analogue process. Your particular ovens temperature envelope, the rate at which your pan or wok heats (due to its thickness and composition), the specifics of the varieties of plant or cuts of meat you're cooking, the quality or specifics of the spices or oils you're using. I'm no chef, but it seems like these can all make quite substantial changes in cooking times, sauce thickness, flavour profiles etc etc, and all necessitate observation and analogue adjustment of cooking processes.

    • TeMPOraL  3 years ago

      > I think you're leaving out the extent to which cooking is an analogue process.

      The main difference between cooking and process chemistry is that the latter actually cares about quality of the end result.

      There is some unavoidable variation because of the inconsistency in ingredients and lack of access to tools that would mitigate it. However, the typical kitchen tools are also just bad by design, with any kind of precision or consistency long ago "value engineered" out of them. And now we also learn that cooking recipes are mostly pulled out of their writers' arses, to the point you might as well ask GPT-4, and save money on a cookbook / avoid exposure to ads and made up life stories on-line.

      Hell, GPT-4 can at least also give you a Gantt chart to go with your recipe[0].

      In the end, the only way to deal with this is by hand-holding the process, performing minute adjustments as guided by experience. This makes cooking much more of an art than it could - or should - be.

      --

      [0] - Some assembly required. Taste and safety not guaranteed, as I can't cook to save my life. https://cloud.typingmind.com/share/a349a38e-0e24-470e-a1c8-3...

      2 replies →

    • dislikedtom2  3 years ago

      Timer is accurate only if you have first done experiments with your unique settings. However temperature gauges are very useful. I usually trust my eyes and nose more than a timer.

  • ilyt  3 years ago

    > 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.

    Both. Have both. Ingredients are not 100 uniform and always cook in same way. Have "how it should be done" and "how it should look during/at the end of the process". You can't have exact same temperature on the pan as recipe, I guess unless you're constantly using IR thermometer to check

    • brookst  3 years ago

      And humidity, altitude/weather, variations in stoves/ovens, shape and thermals of the pan, etc. There are too many variables for the same process to produce the same results.

  • nemo44x  3 years ago

    I cook a lot and although you’re right in some regards (scales, thermometers are very useful) you’re discounting the variance in many things making following a recipe precisely not always possible.

    For example smoking a brisket. There is no perfect temperature that tells you it’s done. We know the thereabouts but one brisket might be done at 203 while another is at 200 and another at 205. You need to feel it.

    Each animal is different and each smoker is different and the weather really matters. A humid day will influence cooking differently than a dry day.

    Unless you can get uniform ingredients you’ll never be able to follow a recipe to the letter and get great outcomes every time. You should use tools but in the end you need your senses and you should taste everything you can before serving.

  • throwaway2990  3 years ago

    > 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.

    If you’re baking then you usually must follow the recipes as it will yield the best results. Experience will tell you more or less water will result in what. More or less baking soda will alter the result in what way. Etc

    But if you’re cooking dinners, you don’t really need to follow recipes. Soup? You can often just throw whatever you want in the pot and it doesn’t matter. If it said 1 onion and you added 4, just tastes more oniony”

  • henrikschroder  3 years ago

    > 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.

    No, this is 100% false, and this is exactly why recipe collections are popular, because people think they can just follow a recipe to get a delicious meal. There is an immense difference in quality and properties of ingredients, difference in cookware, difference in appliances, etc. What's "medium heat" ? What's a "medium-sized potato" ?

    You need to know basic cooking to work around these differences, you need to know what something feels like and looks like when it's done, otherwise you will forever fail.

escapedmoose  3 years ago

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.”

  • beedeebeedee  3 years ago

    I also use the Joy of Cooking and love it (as well as Mastering the Art of French Cooking).

    > 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.”

    What I do is look at about half a dozen recipes online when I am trying something new. I compare them and make my own recipe based on that. Through practice I can usually glance at them and see pretty quickly what they are doing differently and similarly.

    Most dishes come out really well because I can get a feel for the dish before it's made and I have the freedom to make changes based on what the different recipes say (and my intuition). I'd encourage everybody to take this approach and not follow just one recipe.

    • samstave  3 years ago

      This is my favorite internet Chef (well famous chef on the internet now - hes accomplished, funny and cooks like my granda did -- He says "just make sure you measure EXACTLY" (as he puts in random amounts of shit and doesnt really measure a thing).

      https://www.youtube.com/@ChefJeanPierre

  • jbaber  3 years ago

    Knowing to just have a copy of [The Joy of Cooking] and [Better Homes and Gardens] takes you very far. The recipes are full fledged you're-a-homemaker-with-time-to-do-this level, so sometimes you can simplify them down -- e.g., there are some pancake adjacent recipes that have you put the yolk of an egg in first, followed later by the frothed white -- I skip that.

    The only time I need to stray from those is for various kinds of ethnic cooking, in which case, a cookbook devoted to them serves a lot better than a website with a bunch of machine generated boilerplate at the beginning.

    [The Joy of Cooking]: https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Cooking-Fully-Revised-Updated/dp/... [Better Homes and Gardens]: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Homes-Gardens-Cook-Book/dp/069...

    • escapedmoose  3 years ago

      Oh for sure ethnic recipes are the downfall of The Joy of Cooking. Admittedly I have 0 skill in the kitchen, but those have turned out hilariously underwhelming. I’ve started to quadruple the spices

  • danaris  3 years ago

    The Joy of Cooking and the Betty Crocker cookbook were the cookbooks my parents taught me to cook from.

    I've since added the America's Test Kitchen cookbook to my collection. (Others, too, of course.) It's very explicitly a cookbook developed by chefs testing out recipes and fine-tuning them to get them just right.

    Unfortunately, I rarely have the time & energy to cook from scratch these days, and the majority of the recipes I actually make come from Blue Apron—but they're also a pretty good source, and make some damn good dinners in a very practical amount of time.

fps_doug  3 years ago

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.

  • MereInterest  3 years ago

    Even when comparing across several recipes, I can still run into issues. For example, about five years ago I wanted to make banket, a Dutch almond pastry. I found several recipes online, compared them, and started testing them out. Every single one of them had a runny filling. Worse, most of the recipes were just copies of each other, sometimes with unit conversions, but the same wrong recipe.

    I ended up experimenting with the recipe over the next six months, eventually getting the texture of the filling right. But those initial recipes were so far off, I doubt any of the authors had actually made it.

    • capableweb  3 years ago

      There is so many variables that could ruin it that it's hard to know exactly what went wrong. As an example, I've had relatives come visit me from a very humid place when I lived in a very dry place, and trying to cook the same way they do it at home but everything turning out differently, just because of the humidity of the air and the hardness of the water used.

  • rightbyte  3 years ago

    One would guess the "story mode" recipes are the made up ones? Sounds like a inaccurate rule of thumb.

    • fps_doug  3 years ago

      Well sure, in essence that's just a "works for me" thing. Also, no idea how much this is a regional/cultural thing, I exclusively use a German site for this. It doesn't seem to suffer fake ratings like Aamzon etc., probably as there isn't too much to gain from that. Story mode might sound a little extreme though, it's mostly that I like useful hints about common pitfalls, rookie mistakes, ingredients that can have vastly varying properties, these kind of things that an experienced chef might just know, but not a rando like me. :)

lldb  3 years ago

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.

  • Fomite  3 years ago

    This manual saved a friend's passover celebration once when a number of electric ovens went out cooking lamb and I suggested the grill.

  • bell-cot  3 years ago

    Weber is a long-term premium brand. Hence plenty of skin in the game. I've had similar experience with manuals (or web sites) for cooking/kitchen products from similar brands.

    • conductr  3 years ago

      This reminds me of When my great grandmother became unable to cook and decided to pass her recipes along, it turned out that half of her “traditional southern food” classics had been from some old southern living cookbooks or the back of a Betty Crocker box somewhere.

      She made a cookbook of her recipes we all enjoyed for years and years and she included some of the original cutouts and index cards from probably the 50-60s or so. There’s also a lot of steps that you’d expect from a grandmother “cook until done” and “add some spices” to some of them.

kqr  3 years ago

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.

  • bluGill  3 years ago

    A fun one is salt to taste early on when the dish isn't safe to taste - raw eggs are in the bowl for example. Not to mention the amount of salt to make the batter taste good is not always the same amount you want after baking is done.

than3  3 years ago

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.

  • flir  3 years ago

    Delia Smith's How To Cook taught me a lot. Three volumes. I just yanked volume 1 off the shelf and the first three chapters are on eggs: boiling, poaching, frying, scrambling, baking, frittata, tortilla, souffle omelettes, egg whites, egg yolks, meringues, custard, souffles, hollandaise. The next four chapters are flour.

  • sureglymop  3 years ago

    There is such a book here in Switzerland called Tiptopf. It even includes sections like "where in your fridge should you put which foods" and covers all the basics. It's very popular and almost a national treasure at this point. In high school here there is a cooking/housework class which is where pretty much every student gets this book. So due to the education system alone almost every person should have this book.

  • shever73  3 years ago

    > No such book actually exists.

    It certainly does.

    Someone bought Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course as a wedding present for me and my wife. We were already reasonably proficient in the kitchen, but this book goes from the basics of boiling an egg, cooking perfectly fluffy rice onto more complex recipes. We've bought it for newlyweds since.

  • ubercore  3 years ago

    Sure it does. https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-...

    Would be useful for any home cook (I have it in my kitchen)

  • ghaff  3 years ago

    Cook's Illustrated Best Recipes goes into a lot of the background techniques and rationales. They have an online actual cooking course as well, A number of Alton Brown's books. Cooking for Geeks from O'Reilly. There are quite a few books and sites out there that go into techniques for different foods. Of course, there are also specialized examples as for bread baking.

  • citizenkeen  3 years ago

    There are so many books on the technique of cooking, not the recipes.

    Time to watch Cunningham's Law in action.

  • therealcamino  3 years ago

    That's just not true. Every generation has its own version of this. In the 60s-70s, it was The Joy of Cooking. In the 90s it was How To Cook Everything. Based on the replies there are some candidates for today.

    • ghaff  3 years ago

      The Joy of Cooking still takes up the bulk of its pages with recipes. Though pretty much all cookbooks did pre-Web. You got recipes out of big cookbook volumes (as well as newspapers etc.)

      I agree with your basic point though. And there are tons of cookbooks today that do spend pages on relevant techniques--though certainly some are celebrity chef memoirs interspersed with recipes and high-quality photoss.

    • Pxtl  3 years ago

      For me it was the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. For example, the section on cream soups is a detailed explanation of the process of making any cream soup, with a table of details and variations for each vegetable. I assume they didn't test every variation, but the first part obviously showed enough first hand experience to teach understanding not just rote repetition.

  • sclarisse  3 years ago

    The Modern Family Cookbook by Meta Given. Copyright 1942-1953.

    Table of Contents: Acknowledgments. Introduction. Meal planning (45pa). Food shopping (12pa). Cooking (530pa): measurements, beverages, breads, cake, candy, cereals, cheese, cookies, desserts, eggs, fish, meat, meat sundries, pastry and pies, poultry, preserving and canning, salads, sandwiches, sauces, soup, vegetables. Deep fat frying, leftovers, misc.

  • jsmith99  3 years ago

    Harold McGee's books are classics: informed by modern science but intended for home cooks and covering all common ingredients and techniques. They're more like reference books then something readable though.

    • dagw  3 years ago

      Harold McGee has two main book. On Food and Cooking is his more famous and 'hard core' book and definitely not something I would recommend to beginner cooks. The ratio of scientific background to useful advice is much more geared towards someone who really wants to deeply understand cooking. It also spends a lot of time talking about the history and anthropology of cooking, which while interesting, isn't useful if you just want to learn how to make a tastier omelet.

      The Key To Good Cooking on the other hand is a much better book for home cooks and focuses entirely on practical ingredients and techniques and is organised in a way that makes it much easier to find exactly the advice you need as you need it.

linsomniac  3 years ago

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.

safety1st  3 years ago

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!

dmarchand90  3 years ago

Could you recommend such a "proper" cookbook

  • btgeekboy  3 years ago

    It's not quite what OP suggested, Joshua Weissman's Unapologetic Cookbook does something similar. The first section is literally, "A Little Cooking Foundation" and the first subsection is "Staples From Scratch." It's not comprehensive, but it is cohesive - by the end, you're using recipes from the beginning.

    He's also got a YouTube channel that's pretty fun to watch.

    That said, be careful what you wish for. My partner and I joke that he's pretty over the top sometimes. For example, the first part of that book includes recipes for butter and Ranch dressing. I'm sure they'll taste amazing, but if you're trying to make dinner after work, it'll be late by the time you get to eat, vs. just using stuff off the supermarket shelf. Really depends on what you're trying to get out of a cookbook.

    • yurishimo  3 years ago

      Yea, Weissman is certainly a talented blend of home and pro cook but jeez do I not have time to make literally everything from scratch.

      But making those recipes every once in a while can teach you a lot of techniques that you can carry over into other off-the-cuff recipes. One of my favorite things to do is add extra spices to mayo/ranch as a sauce or dressing. Sure, I can buy Siracha mayo at the store, but mixing it myself takes only a few seconds and I have more control. Little things like that can go a long way to making weeknight cooking more interesting and less monotonous.

  • misja111  3 years ago

    I really enjoyed Cooking for Geeks: https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Geeks-Science-Great-Hacks/dp/...

    • BlackLotus89  3 years ago

      This was one of the worst cookbooks I ever bought and some things were borderline wrong.

      I should have taken notes of what irked me so much about it, but there were multiple things about it that weren't for geeks. Any interview in it filled liked pure filler and because the book is black and white illustrating pictures loose nearly all meaning.

      Most "illustrations" are more than unnecessary anyway and seem to be only there as a space filler. Don't get me wrong with 400 pages it is not a pamphlet or something and there ARE useful information in there, but most of the information wasn't useful, scattered through the book, interrupted by interviews with 0 value and littered with recipes I would never cook.

      I personally rate "The Food Lab" from Kenji Lopez-Alt much higher than this and more helpful.

      1 reply →

  • ivan_gammel  3 years ago

    HelloFresh does a good job explaining how to cook their recipes. After a year of their subscription you will know the basics.

    • rocketbop  3 years ago

      Having worked for a rival, I can confirm that all recipes for these mealbox companies do actually get made and tested in the test kitchens.

    • eertami  3 years ago

      You can also just go online and read the recipes for free, which is quite nice. I moved to a country without HelloFresh but sometimes take a browse through their recipes and buy ingredients in person, when wanting to try something new (but unsure what exactly.)

  • sumo89  3 years ago

    I've inherited an 80's Good Housekeeping cookbook. Some recipes are very dated but it goes in to detail on all the techniques needed for each dish including a lot of things people did more of back then like breaking down a whole bird from scratch.

  • j_french  3 years ago

    I thought all cookbooks were just recipe collections until I picked up Darina Allen's 'Ballymaloe Cookery Course', a 'proper' cookbook that you could use for life by Ireland's Delia Smith (I guess? not too familiar with Delia)

  • alisonatwork  3 years ago

    Look at what your local culinary schools are using. Practical Cookery by Foskett et al is a popular textbook that covers pretty much everything you could want to know about how to cook and how to use every bit of equipment you can find in a kitchen.

damontal  3 years ago

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

heisenzombie  3 years ago

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.

matwood  3 years ago

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