The Glade 4.0

So... for the past two years or so I've started to get into cooking. I enjoy it! It is right up my alley as something that, with a little bit of knowhow, can be tinkered with based on gut feeling (har!) instead of carefully planning out via strict rules. Not that I have anything against formulas and such, but simply that I feel it's more personal and more of a success to just create something based on what you think works and have it come out well. Perfecting that recipe after your 20th iteration is great. I have learned I should really start documenting my iterations, but I digress...

In any case, I am in part looking to improve in general and in part looking to expand my culinary horizons.

Which brings me to a big problem I have with the vast majority of cooking information: it's all recipes! This is great if I want to just copy someone else's work while not being bothered by all the pesky details, but that takes all the soul out of the act of cooking! So far I have been coming up with variations of my own of certain dishes by finding a million recipes online and distilling what I like from them to come up with some sort of master recipe. This is fun and all, but again, I'm looking for more... :p

To that end, are any of you aware of any good sources of information along these lines? Cookbooks seem to be 99% recipes. There are more recipes than you can shake a stick at on the Web. The Web follows up with really basic information that is nice to know but isn't too practical unless I intend to head off to chef school in the form of pages like Wikipedia telling me all about the history of various types of roux.

To be honest, I'm not even sure what form the information I'd like would really take. Perhaps a discussion on common thickeners and the various results they get, how best to use them (such as what point in the cooking process), etc... or perhaps going back to the roux idea, a page describing the basics of making one with common variations and perhaps some example simple recipes to try and see the differences for yourself. Maybe an overview of everything one may need to know about things to do with your raw chicken before you start to cook it. And so on and so forth. I'm all over the map here, and that's the idea!

I'm tempted to poke around trying to find something like entry level chef school textbooks, but I don't know if chef schools even work that way. :p Besides, they're usually costly, and the Internet has friggin' everything, doesn't it?!

If it matters at all, I'm 99% a stovetop guy. I am up for baking things like diced potatoes when I want to play with some spices but baking is, so far at least, not part of the picture. There's still room for a lot of learning on the stove! Soups and perhaps stews would be highly up on my list of things to expand into, for example. :p But a source with any general sort of cooking skills information would be welcome!

Recipes are starting points! You never have to follow them exactly, for the most part (baking maybe being the exception). Personally, I will look up recipes for the same thing and compare them, then decide how I want to proceed. Sometimes recipes will have ingredients I don't like or hubby can't have so I substitute things he can have or I like! It's a lot of fun experimenting with cooking! Throw yourself in and get your hands dirty! That's how you learn!!

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"Said I never had much use for one, never said I didn't know how to use one!"~ Matthew Quigley

"nothing like a little meow in bed at night" ~ Bruskey

"I gotta float my stick same as you" Hondo Lane

"Fill your hand you son of a *****!"

The #1 skill for cooking is patience.

And aside from that, there's no substitute for experience. Jump in, follow the directions, and realize that cooking is science for hungry people It really is just chemistry. Tasty, tasty chemistry.

After working with food, you learn how spices interact with each other, how adding one ingredient will thicken something, another will thin it, etc.

Once you've learned the basics, you can modify recipes to fit your tastes.

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Holy shitsnacks!

And remember... cook at other people's homes until you get good at it... that way if there is a kitchen fire: your stuff is not in danger.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Get one of the culinary school texts. Given that they keep coming out with new editions you should be able to find an older one pretty cheap... it's not like roux works different this year.

I talked with some friends and did a little research on my own concurrently with posting this, and... I'm thinking that is likely the best way to go about it Taamar. Thanks for the examples. One friend already had one in pdf format, obtained not so legally I will admit, and it... is a bit more clinical and professional chef-ish than I'd prefer but it isn't as bad as some dry generic Wikipedia and Wikipediaesque sites I found in my initial round of interested browsing around. And again, it's not like that extra knowledge hurts any.

I doubt exactly what I'm looking for even exists, in part because I'd expect the preferred ratio of practical doing vs 'book learning' would vary widely from person to person. Some people probably don't even want a mix at all, either preferring to do it all on their own by taking and/or modifying recipes as is or by totally ignoring any written word and going on with what experience they already have.

It's probably a rare position to be in to begin with. I'm a bit of an academic who likes to understand things, but cooking is very much a practical thing where the learning is almost subconscious. Without having someone awesome at cooking to show me different ways to do a certain thing, the best I have been doing is sort of reverse engineering based on recipes I've found and tried. This one textbook has some of that information in parts... the soup chapter is actually really helpful here, whereas the beef chapter is kinda not. So I suppose it varies even then. :p

I'm half-thinking this would be a niche to fill in the book or website market... practical cooking for going beyond the recipe box!

Thanks for the suggestions folks. It is appreciated. For the time being I'll probably browse through this textbook and track down some others, perhaps some blogs (minor success here and there from cooking blogs), and continue along with my iron chefish style of cooking exploration I've been doing. Lately I have been trying to see what I can do with ginger + garlic.. and sometimes soy sauce. It's fun to start with just that in mind and see what it ends up as... though I suppose the ultimate goal of this thread it to have the knowhow to have a lot more variety in my dishes. Usually they end up with a new tasty mix of flavors... but still generally ends up simmered beef/chicken with rice that soaks up the deliciousness.

Now it's 1:12 AM, I have a lot of schoolwork to do, and all I feel like doing is thawing out some beef and testing stuff... while my stomach says go for it, I don't know about this!

All of the above, and practice.

Skill is a combination of learning and practice. Book learning doesn't do squat unless you practice it on a regular basis.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

1. Mother
2. Grandmother
3. Aunt
4. Step-mother
5. Mother-in-law
6. Step-grandmother
7. grandmother-in-law
8. Almost any little old lady from your church

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

OH! And read this book:



It's bot a cookbook, it's about a mans relationship with food and how he comes to cook without recipes.

1. Mother (doesn't cook)
2. Grandmother (cooks heavy greasy food)
3. Aunt (thinks takeout is a basic human right)
4. Step-mother (is one of THOSE vegetarians)
5. Mother-in-law (brought Cool Whip into my home for thanksgiving)
6. Step-grandmother (Dead now, but household labor was beneath her)
7. grandmother-in-law (Dead)
8. Almost any little old lady from your church (the little old ladies at MY church are too busy making mead and going to small impoverished villages to install plumbing to cook)

Hahahahaha! But, YOU already are a fantabulous cook, are you not? So no need for the list.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

This is exactly the way I've learned. I'm pretty much entirely self taught. I'll get a craving for *something* and find a recipe. If there's a procedure in the recipe I don't recognize (temper in the egg, cut in the shortening... etc) I'll look up the procedure on line, there's youtube videos for just about *everything*.

I learn by doing. Observing. Tasting. That's another thing. Taste *everything* you're cooking. Soups, sauces... *everything*. Don't be afraid to experiment. Taste spices, use your nose. Every once in a while, branch out and try something really different.

Try an Elk Tenderloin with spinach salad with raspberry chutney and crumbled raspberry parmesan

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Holy shitsnacks!

"Elk" huh? Suuuuure....looks an awful lot like Moose to me.
You cannibal.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Elk are just smaller moose with different antlers. Sorta.

It was still tasty

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Holy shitsnacks!

Tastiness trumps disturbingness? Hmm... that sounds like a dangerous path to go down!

...as has already been evidenced for moose and moose-related creatures.

I'm in a fairly similar situation... I love to cook, but I prefer to understand why something is done rather than blindly following recipes. My two suggestions are:

Good Eats with Alton Brown. Very entertaining show, and he explains a lot of the science behind recipes/cooking techniques. I've also bought some of his books that focus on cooking techniques rather than recipes and they are pretty good.

Cooking by James Peterson This is my favorite cookbook. It focuses a lot on technique and explaining why things are done. Most of the reicpes are pretty basic, emphasizing the fundamentals and giving you a solid base to experiment on top of. I think it's a good compromise between a full blown cooking textbook and your everyday cookbook that just lists a bunch of recipes.

Within certain parameters.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Believe it or not, I learn stuff from Kitchen Nightmares.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Taamar gives some solid recommendation books. That said, if you want to truly geek out in the cooking department, you could always go and get a degree in molecular gastronomy.

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