Comment by vkou
17 hours ago
I own multiple physical cookbooks.
I often find their contents to be both incredibly broad, and incredibly shallow, and often lead to dishes that don't quite suit my tastes.
I have generally had more success with the internet than I have with them.
I have the same problem with cookbooks
I usually just find recipes that are close to something I like and then modify them until I like them
I feel like cooking recipes should always be full of little notes from past attempts, to tweak them to your personal taste
Once again, Grandma had it right. The Fanny Farmer or Betty Crocker cookbook with dozens of little papers slipped in it and/or marginal notes everywhere is the way.
I do that, but I've found more success with using internet recipes as a starting point. The general-purpose cookbooks are, at best, another data point, or an explanation for something glossed over by other recipes. Ar worst, they kind of suck.
And we aren't talking about something esoteric. How To Cook Everything. (4.5 rating on Amazon, 4.0 on Goodreads), one of the most popular cookbooks in the world...
Has its first recipe for chicken cutlets produce undercooked chicken (15 minutes at 325F has not resulted in 165F internally).
Worse yet, its chile recipe for some weird reason involves boiling and simmering a whole onion with the beans before throwing it out (WTF). It then has you drain the beans only to add that drained water right back (WTF?), unless you optionally replace it with tap water (WTF was the point of boiling the onion then?), so that you could bring them to boil again. The recipe barely has any spice besides actual chile peppers.
This... Is not good or helpful, but is incredibly opinionated with a bunch of bullshit steps. Like, yes, I could tweak that into something that's not insane, but why would I choose that as a starting point..?
I get it. Compiling a thousand-page cookbook is really hard. But this... Ain't great.