Ask Lemmy

adam ragusea's videos have taught me so much about cooking. he's very much an advocate for cooking by feel, he teaches a lot of the food science behind his recipes, and his recipes are very easy to follow.

My dad forced me to cook as a kid, that was stressful. Then when I moved out, I was way too broke to eat out, so I learned more by trial and error/looking things up. Then later, I worked in a kitchen for like 5 years.

By making mistakes! I have always been experimental with food and it eventually paid off. I can cook very well now, and love to. Lucky you to have a cook!

My mom made food for us, and kept easy to make stuff too, we were well fed, but she was not a good cook, just spaghetti and chili and eggs, wirh an occasional crab/shrimp boil, it was fine but she didn't enjoy cooking.

My dad did most of the cooking, it is serviceable food some great some just okay, but he'd have a thing where he introduced me and my sister to cooking by starting with asking us to taste food during cooking and going "do you think it needs any salt? Any pepper?" type questions

This progressed on to "can you make the mash whilst I make the sausages? Can you slice that vegetable whilst I...?" - easy tasks that are out of the way of the main bulk of the meal

Then on to eventually "wanna try making the Sunday Breakfast today?"

A steady progression of increasing responsibility, in a way that disguises that's what's happening

A really great way to teach, tbh

People suggest cook book as a start, however be careful that complicated receipts are tedious and might remove the joy of cooking.

Most actually good receipts are also simple - keep that in mind.

My two cents will be to find simple stuff and start from it. You will discover that most cooking consists of

1. "Fry onions / other vegetables" Add meat.
2. On the side boil some granes or potate, mix in. 2.5. Or smash everything together into the oven and wait.

It is possible to have a nice home cooked meal without the major struggle if you learn simple receipts. And then you can start buying food based on your knowledge of cooking - keep the stash of universal cooking supplies is as important as the cooking itself.

I just started trying recipes on the internet. Did Hello ~~rotten~~ Fresh for a bit but quit that because of quality reasons. Now I have a collection of “signature” dishes, a few I’m refining, and a good sense of what to do with ingredients and how seasonings interact to make something without a recipe to guide me.

Alton Brown.

I learned to cook the same way I learned to have sex. Trial and error, usually by myself, sometimes with a partner, and I read some publications about it that had plenty of pictures.

YouTube

• Food Wishes, Chef John M

• Chef Jean-pierre, god bless the man. He taught me everything I need to know about Onyo

Trial and error. Lot's of meals that I just... forced down. Learned what I did wrong and changed it. But well, I don't really cook specific recipes, mostly I just boil things and know when to add stuff and what spices might go good with it, if any.

I'm happy other people had their parents to teach them but my parents mostly made stuff from boxes like hamburger helper and kraft dinner. Then they had all that free time to themselves to watch tv and get drunk.

I did cooking at school, all the way to GCSE, very nearly went to culinary school instead of doing A Levels and Uni. I decided against it as chefs are more likely to work evenings and weekends than your average IT nerd. I do not regret it, IT can be toxic but nowhere near as toxic as a lot of commercial kitchens.

As I got older I realised that I enjoy cooking, and I am a good cook, but I am not a chef and being a chef is a completely different level due to the volume of food and dishes you have to make. Cooking for yourself you make for a handful of people most of the time, usually a single meals worth of dishes, and you will still eat it even if its bad most of the time. A chef might do over a 100 covers from a menu of dishes and they have to be at least good, while working as a team to do so.

At least for GCSE there was a lot of repetition over dishes to get good at them and their basic techniques, and an encouragement to experiment with them. I must have spent six weeks making victoria sandwich cakes for example.

Post school, cooking books and youtube to expand the range of cuisine that I can cook.

Opened cookie book. Followed directions. Suddenly had delicious cookies. Realized that I could do this with other things.

Following a lot of different recipes for the same dish, also Alton Brown

Something my mom said, I am slightly paraphrasing: Cooking is simple, you just put things on heat source, don't let it burn i.e. add ingredients in the 'right' order, control the heat, stir and stir; balance the salt and pepper. Voila.

The updated version is: heat the pan, add little oil or butter, lightly fry chopped onions, add stuff to it, stir to prevent burning, sprinkle salt and pepper, Voila. When you're ready to start being fancy, experiment with spice mix, later you don't have to rely on spice mixes.

I watched a lot of PBS and YouTube videos to better under what I should look for when cooking. After that it's really just get in there and try it. Flavor is subjective so that videos kind of stop being helpful at some point. ATK and Babish do a pretty good job of explaining what is happening and what to look for to know that something is done cooking.

I took adult classes for about 3 years. I could have passed the exams to become a professional cook and pastry chef, but didn't bother as I didn't actually want to enter the industry. I just wanted to learn.

I recommend school books for people who actually want to learn. They're usually a good ressource. Typically better than generic recipe books.

I didnt yet. When I left home i was too poor together any real ingredients, and lived off whatever the supermarket was selling for "about to throw it away" prices. Usually cakes and bread, remade sandwiches and whatever. Now that I'm in a real family again the other members are all super picky and only eat about 5 meals, so theres no room for trial/error to learn, and most staple ingredients are blacklisted anyway.

my moms is like that only does expensive takeouts and barely cooks herself, she used to before she got lazy and just goes out shopping all day. i can sorta cook, but not entirely self-sufficient, we do use rice cooker.

Have kids to feed. Have random things to cook. No time. Get creative. Fail. Try again next time. Succeed. Repeat. Fail. Succeed. Fail. Succeed. Start to plan ahead. Continue to fail or succeed. Try to teach kids so they fail less than me. Hope kids teach their kids. Break cycle of family not knowing how to cook. Family line succeed. Humanity saved.

I learned cooking from observing my father, but he never really taught me to cook. He loved cooking and I always remember himself saying, "the hardest part about cooking is figuring out what you want to cook." Cooking is easy when you're not afraid of making mistakes.

By cooking.

My mom allowed me to watch, so I understood the basics. But she also was a terrible cook, so I didn't really git gud until I started watching Good Eats. The inclusion of the science was a huge help, since I am one of those people that benefits a lot from knowing why I am doing something and not just knowing that I need to do X. So I can follow recipes, but also can concoct my own things knowing what will work as a substitute and why, or what flavors go well together and such.

My mom made a point to teach me and my sister when we were kids. We even had to plan dinners and cook it. I then made a point to take home ec in middle school. But my mom has a collection of cookbooks she is very proud of. She reads cookbooks like people read fiction books.

Home cooking was a staple for my family. My grandparents raised my mom and her brothers on the farm. For a little while I even lived on that farm. But even though we mostly lived in town for most of my life, the fact that most meals were home cooked didn't change.

Breaking Bad.

Wait, I mean Baking Bread.

I started by "making" frozen dinners, instant noodles and meal kits.

The most complex stuff I'd make is stir frying with some stir fry sauce.

Starting somewhere around 3rd year in college I decided I wanted to get better at cooking so I would look up a recipe for something I liked to eat once a month and try to make it.

Once I graduated I realized I actually like cooking so I took the idea further and decided to make a new dish every week. I would research a dish, find a recipe that I thought looked good and then buy the ingredients the next time I'm at the grocery store. I practiced mise en place (ie. I would measure, wash and cut every ingredient before turning on the heat) and it really helped make every dish accessible.

I did this for 10 years. Turns out if you consistently cook at least once a week for 10 years you make mistakes, learn and get better.

I'm not as good as a chef and my knife skills suck but I like to think I can cook food as good as most restaurants. I also got to explore a large range of dishes and discovered a lot of foods I love and how to make it.

I learned in chapters.

1. Teen/young adult years I just got the basics down, how to cut meat and veggies depending on their application and making meals I grew up with and knew well. 
2. Twenties, mostly cooking in restaurants learning new recipes and commiting the "correct way" to memory while learning foods from other cultures 
3. Thirties, breaking out of my comfort zone and just making food that sounds like it'd work together instead of making what middle-of-the-road restaurants taught me. Lots of YouTube videos absorbing general concepts.

The biggest things I've learned is that food needs twice as much fat/oil as I think it does and three times as much salt. When I have bits of veggies I'm not gonna cook, I freeze them in a bag until I have enough to make a stock—it's free flavor. Also, spice and season everything; I used to season my main ingredients and then just plop unseasoned ingredients on top thinking it's fine (for example, an egg scramble needs salt and pepper added to both the eggs and the sautéed veggies) 

I had a mom who was able to pass the basics of cooking down as well as home ec. classes. We've done a major disservice to the younger folks by not offering such classes honestly. Learning how to read recipes, basics of cooking, knowing when food is good to eat, etc. is a highly useful skill even now.

Back in 2009 our youngest was born and I had lost my job due to the economic downturn. My wife was the cook at the time, but was also the sole bread winner as well.

I had some basic skills in the kitchen, but really could not say I could cook. My wife was a great cook. However, it did not make any sense for her to work a 12 hour day and come home to cook. When I had been home with the baby and our older son all day.

So I had her teach me what she knew. Mainly it involved in how to read recipes. Learning the difference between a TSP and Tbsp and those types of things. While I would not say I have a talent for cooking, I did have a penchant for it. That lead me to cooking almost every day and discovering that a lot of getting good at cooking is practicing cooking techniques.

Fast forward to today and I've been a hobbyist cook for 17 years. I can confidently open any cookbook to any page and at least competently make that recipe, if not put restaurant quality meal on the table.

Am I as good as professional cook or chef? Oh hell no. I'm a home cook... A great home cook, but still a home cook. I'd probably be lost in a professional kitchen.

I learned most of it during my youth, from my mother and my grandmother. Nothing beats the specific instructions like "stir it faster", "this is enough oil", "when it looks like that, then it is ready" etc.

And then lots of trying out ofc when I was older.

My father was, shortly, a short order cook. So we learned some from him. Mother was also an adequate home cook despite her thinking she wasn't. So we learned cooking from them.

I learned baking from teaching myself by "following recipes exactly and precisely" which usually worked. Having to follow the rules really helped for baking.

I still don't know why mothers friends didn't understand what preheating the oven meant!!!! Don't throw shit in there while it's preheating at least not cookies!!!

There is a book called "cooking for geeks" which instead of just giving you recipes explains why stuff is cooked a certain way. What actually happens, chemically, when you cook something. After reading that, I could just improvise dishes and they would usually come out pretty well.

It started from sloth and gluttony, actually. I remember wanting a cookie, but not having the motivation to go out into the world to buy cookies. So I looked around the kitchen, looked up a couple of recipes, and tried to make some simple sugar cookies with what I had on hand. I didn't have the right kind of flour, and ended up using whole wheat flour, so I had these odd looking brown-ish sugar cookies.

They were so good. I couldn't believe I'd made them. So I started picking up the spices and other ingredients that cookie recipes commonly asked for, and I started making cookies every weekend. Then I started collecting cookbooks. Eventually I changed the way I bought groceries, I don't buy finished food anymore for the most part, I buy ingredients. I have an impressive spice collection built up at this point, some of which was grown by my wife. I have all the cool stuff like cooking sherry and at least three different kinds of vinegar.

And now, a decade after making those first ugly cookies, I can create an amazing meal at the drop of a hat using only the stuff in my house. And then I can make cookies that melt in your mouth and are so tasty they would make a medieval peasant cry.

Tl;dr: Man is too lazy to drive to town, changes his life and eating habits over a decade instead.

My parents are both culinary explorers and taught me several dishes. Mum learned from her mother and from recipe books. Dad is masc (guitarist, surfs, lifts weights), also had a cooking mum, and intuitive cooking just adds to his rizz. I’m a blend of them, although I pick up more from YouTube nowadays. I hope Nebula eventually gets more cooking content.

If you’re feeling cornered by masculinity, look to celebrity role models like Bourdain and Ramsay. There’s good (free) content from them that can be inspiring.

My wife and her mother taught me. I love to cook now, but my mother doesn't like to cook and was too tired as a single mother to cook a lot, so when I lived alone I was totally incapable to cook.