How to cook for yourself, really, really good food. I no longer crave restaurant food, and all of the really important things I learned about cooking take just the time to read it, hear about it and then try it. All without any special hardware.
A few examples:
1. Cooking jasmine rice: rinse it first, 1 c. water to 1 c. rice ratio. Bring to boil, turn down heat to lowest setting. Leave lid /the entire time/. Fluff the rice (look this up) when done. (about 12-15 min of cooking)
2. Baking a cake: (any square pan yellow cake) Read how baking powder actually works, then you realize you need to mix and bake quickly. Letting it sit before baking will make a flatter cake. Also, stick a butter knife in the middle to test when it's done, if it comes out with batter stuck on it, it needs a few more minutes.
3. Eggs: When frying, scrambling, put the eggs in warm water before cracking to make them room temperature first. They cook better this way.
4. Chocolate syrup: 1 c. water, 1 c. cocoa power, 1 c. sugar, 1/2 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp salt. Blend it in a blender. (sealed container works best, as it's messy) Better than store bought, super cheap, use organic if you like...
etc...
Why is this valuable? Because I am no longer tempted to waste money at restaurants any more, or buy unique expensive organic products (because I can make them now). I feel incredibly free and liberated that I get food at home that tastes better than what is at a restaurant now. (for about 90% of the stuff I like)
Also, I can teach my kids, and they start life with these skills. Great question, way too many things to write down...
My partner really picked up cooking in the last couple of years. We hardly ever go out anymore. Every time we get a craving she says "Yeah, we could go to a crowded restaurant... or I could make it better". Without fail, she does.
I think the secret is, one of the most important aspects of good food is time to table. When you make it at home, you can eat as soon as it's done or rested. Along with the anticipation factor of having worked on it yourself and having the smells fill your home for a while beforehand.
Plus, if you're an introvert who's already burnt out for the day, you don't have to wear pants. Huge points for not having to wear pants.
I do most of the cooking at home for my partner. She could cook perfectly well, but I think she's out of practice these days and I don't mind doing it.
It makes ordering or going out more of a treat, too.
Also, your comment made me realize I probably stay in pants too often.
You mentioned cooking jasmine rice using a 1:1 ratio of water to rice, but rice generally can't be cooked using a linear ratio like this. As you increase the amount of rice being cooked, and change the size/shape of the cooking vessel, more of the water will be lost as steam. It's easiest to use a rice cooker, which will allow you more flexibility with regards to how much water/rice you used, but if you don't have a rice cooker (or anything that can work as a rice cooker) then I'd recommend the method where you cook the rice in a covered dish in the oven.
I wanted to demonstrate that it can be simple, but you are right there are a lot of variables, but I think they are small. The size/type of pot you use may affect water amounts.
But I found it very useful to learn to cook with whatever you have available to you. And then learn to adjust. All of these things take tiny amounts of time and yield great results. (mainly through practice of course)
OP didn't say anything about ratios or scaling, just offered 1c rice as that's generally enough for 2-3 servings at a time. And it just happens that 1c water is generally the right amount for this and is easy to remember.
Good advice on the water. Similar to how people learn ovens, it helps to learn pans. The best method I've tried so far is a ~2:1 ratio (adjust to desired texture) in a 14" wide, lidded, enameled skillet. I'll try the oven again soon to compare, but that particular pan on a stovetop is hard to beat. Learn your pans.
That is a good point. I have often found the temperatures in recipes to not work great with my combination of pots and pans and need to tweak.
But you only get to the tweak stage after you start trying to cook at all. (a lot of people don't cook much or try to make meals they think are out of their reach)
The rice cooker is easiest, but there's another scheme: use an abundance of water and cook the rice like spaghetti. I learned the technique from a Lynne Rossetto Kasper cookbook, and it's never failed me.
I had never heard of cooking rice like pasta before. (going to try it next time I cook rice, thanks!) I think this is a good example of a small piece of knowledge that can possibly have a larger effect.
Given ordinary cookware, and picking a pot that's not completely out of proportion to the rice, the 1:1 works just fine. You don't lose steam (well, not much) because the lid stays on. Takes 20 minutes, pretty much without fail.
Yes, you can get more complex. Maybe it even produces better rice. But the secret to homecooked meals is - for most people - simplicity :)
As I understand, cooking rice usually has a constant amount of water lost to steam. You need to have a rough idea of how much water your rice actually needs to absorb and how much is lost to steam. In my experience with my setup, rice usually requires an equal volume of water and 1 lost 1 cup of water to steam. So 1 cup of water requires 2 cups of water, 2 cups of rice requires 3 cups of water, etc.
So y = x + 1 where y is the cups of water and x is the cups of rice. 1 is the number of cups lost as steam.
Each time you open the lid you lose steam, so you may have to take that into account. I use a rice cooker and don't open the lid so I don't worry about that though.
Water lost to steam heavily depends on style of cooking, or more precisely, in a covered pot, is mostly a linear function of the excess heat beyond that required to bring contents to boiling temperature (steam re-condensation on the lid/sides provides a slight buffer) + a bit lost to empty space in the pot (when opening etc).
Some stoves are hard to regulate so the food is just barely boiling, so it can be hard not to notably lose water.
From experience, the boiling of water in itself is mostly meaningless when cooking, unless you want food extra shredded. You can happily cook at 90℃ or 80℃ if you want, but it will take longer.
Note if cooking risky food: beware of required time at a given temperature to kill pathogens, not forgetting heat transfer takes time especially in solid chunks.
In general, a rice cooker is indispensable and costs about $30. Plus you can walk away from it as it cooks, and you can put things on top of the rice to steam in there as well. (It will impart flavor though, so maybe don’t put greens in there unless you want broccoli-water flavored rice.)
you guys are doing it all wrong. take it from us Asian folks. it's called the finger test. the amount of water above the rice should come up to the first line on your finger as you're touching the rice. yes you have to stick your finger in the pot.
having grown up where our main staple was rice, my parents never made burnt or soggy rice. oh and having a rice cooker prob helped as well.
I agree, and it's pretty easy to get started. My pallet is pretty easily amused, so take this with a grain of salt, but there all kinds of fun optimization problems and achievements to unlock with cooking.
For example, given the random contents of a refrigerator, make some sort of meal out of what is available. For example, I recently had a cabbage and an onion and some chicken left over. With a little ginger paste and some soy sauce I was able to make a pretty decent stirfry.
Another example is tortilla chips. I bought some tortillas from 7-eleven and tried frying them up in oil to make tortilla chips. This is fun because there are a lot of parameters to play with to try to get the perfect chip (oil type, quantity, time).
Making more involved recipies are fun too, but there is a good amount of pleasure to be found in the mundane. I also eat a lot of Jack in the Box, so I've got no high horse in this fight.
Second the tortilla chips. I used to fry them in a pan but I figured out how to get decent results in a microwave.
My go-to is to spread butter on them then nuke them.
Two weeks ago I went to Costa Rica and did a horseback/boat/hiking tour and there was a shack high in the mountains where we stopped and the guide made lunch. I was delighted to find that one of the three foods provided was fried tortillas. I insisted on helping. Frying tortilla chips in soybean oil in a wok on a wood fire in the cloud forest with no electricity or running water is a little different than nuking in the kitchen, but once you have the knack for it, it's pretty easy to pull off.
You never know when your weird cooking skills are going to come in handy!
Marksweep says:"My pallet is pretty easily amused"
I'm fairly certain it is your palate, rather than your pallet, that is amused! (although the visual image conjured by your verbal construction is very amusing.)
Yep, I think this is a natural tendency to someone who has /tried/ to cook over a period of time. And doesn't mind eating leftovers repurposed. I find myself doing almost exactly what you described, only my chips came out terrible and I have not since tried again. (I have made my own "dorito" flavoring though of plain chips, and you can make some neat combinations)
I second this as a worthy skill to have, but there aren't many dishes you can become really good at making just in an hour. At least anecdotally, just the process of learning to make a great french omelette is pretty brutal.
He covers the American omelette which is my go-to. Usually with spinach, red bell pepper, red onion and sometimes mushroom filling. Often with some old cheddar and they are monstrously simple to make mediocre and not too difficult to make very well.
"Really good" is subjective. It's the very notion something is possible and that you can do it that I see as valuable. Practice makes perfect, nothing can be perfect the first time you learn it.
To summarize for those who can't/don't want to watch both videos: Just because world renowned chef Jacques Pepin makes an omelet look easy, doesn't mean it is.
My experience was that it made me look at omelette cooking in a totally new light. My omelettes aren't perfect, but I actually like them now. And my wife (who loves them) approves of the new technique. (I use cast iron and don't get the exact results, but they are greatly improved)
This video with Gordon Ramsay is just as good. These two videos together will teach you basically everything you need to make scrambled eggs and omelettes.
Pepin himself starts out his video by saying that the omelet is the dish that he would judge a chef by, implying that it demonstrates all of the skills of the chef. I'm not sure how this is supposed to demonstrate that you can learn to cook in an hour.
I wouldn't say "learn to cook in an hour", but I would say it gives you the confidence that you /can/ cook, and even learn to make just one thing good enough for just you. (an actual achievable goal)
This is so important. I don't know if you can "learn to cook" in an hour, but you can probably drive to the store, buy some vegetables, come home, and make a great salad with an awesome homemade vinaigrette dressing in less than an hour. I try to eat fairly healthy, but having a salad that's easy to make that I actually crave (oh no, I've turned into an old person) most days at lunch is amazing. It's fast, and I have great energy all afternoon.
Here's my default dressing: salt & pepper to taste. Bit of lemon juice. Bit of dijon mustard. Balsamic vinegar and EV olive oil. Adjust relative quantities to taste and based on what you have in your salad. Gets rave reviews and could not be simpler. ;-)
If I only had an hour, i'd focus on a simple intros of really fundamental techniques kinda like the OP indicated, and not necessarily cooking everything in that time.
Knife skills. Keep them sharp. Mise en place. The importance of salt and pepper. Searing techniques for cooking meat and how not to do it. Roasting vegetables 101. The basics of finishing pastas and reducing sauces. The fact that you can make your own dressing in no time.
You can probably cover all of that quickly and in enough time to ask the right questions moving forward and begin your jorney - IF you had a curriculum. If it's self study it takes longer to figure out what you don't know :) For me it all started with "why does my Grilled Cheese suck? This should be easy" and it's been all downhill.
The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt was a big window into this for me because of the approach around time and temperature, and the book takes you through all of this stuff by section.
Cooking for over 15 years at home and still only learned this recently despite already knowing about it. I had to grind out a chip from one of our knives, and I realised when I was done it was much sharper than I usually get them. I hadn't been doing it quite right all this time.
> Mise en place
Asian wok-based cooking is great for learning this. You don't have time to mess around. It's something I've been trying lately (my frying pan stir-fry was always pathetic so I never made it at home, but now that I have a wok I can do a decent one).
Love The Food Lab. (And I think my grilled cheese is pretty decent, at least according to my kids, which is saying something.) ;-) Agree with everything you are saying here, but I'll add that salads often have a bad reputation (I avoided them for years), but I can't think of an easier, healthier, more enjoyable thing to eat, assuming you can get good ingredients.
I regularly make my own dressing as well! I have a few basic recipes—most are pretty much the same as yours. One I like in the summer especially is a really simple one:
+ 2 parts olive oil
+ 1 part honey (try and make it good wildflower or clover honey)
+ 1 part squeezed lemon juice (add some zest as well if you're feeling energetic—I hate cleaning graters)
I do something similar. Mine is olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and a tsp of really strong mustard. I put mine in a small Tupperware in the fridge, that way I can shake it up easily to mix, and I just add to it as I get low.
I actually started with a bit of honey and removed it after some experimentation. Figure any time I can avoid adding sugar and like the taste as much or more, I should take advantage. ;-) I'm with you the cleaning graters-- too lazy for that... Depending on what's in the salad, I'll adjust the proportions, or even throw in some turmeric, paprika, or sautéed garlic.
Having a dishwasher makes using a grater so much less dreadful - perhaps more than any other single kitchen implement. When I had a dishwasher at home we even got a Microplane zester. It's amazing how much flavor and aroma exists in lemon (and other citrus) zest that's not in the juice.
My no. 1 recommendation to any young person learning to cook is to master three things:
1. A good fried rice
2. A good stir fry
3. A good omelet
These three things alone will mean that you'll have substantial, delicious food at the ready. They're incredibly flexible in terms of ingredients and need minimal skill. A stir fry or fried rice can take any vegetables or meats you have at hand, and an omelet can take everything from ham to mushrooms.
Strongly second the first two, strongly oppose the third. Omelettes are far too difficult for a beginning cook. Fritattas on the other hand are trivial (you just pour the eggs/milk into the pan after you've cooked the filling a bit).
When using a new ingredient, try it in something you're already familiar with, so you can isolate that ingredient, rather than introducing it in a completely new recipe where you can't easily tell what impact that ingredient has vs others in the recipe.
Think about how to setup your kitchen - is it better to have all your spice containers in a group with one another, where they all look similar, or to put them alongside the items you use them with (tumeric with your basmati rice, nutmeg with your pestle & mortar, etc) so that it's easier to find everything you need for a recipe.
That cookbook looks interesting. I have run into scientific cookbooks before and understanding why and how things work (like caramelizing onions) makes cooking with them easier to get the results you want.
I've cooked all kinds of rice with different utensils under many different circumstances. The one trick I've learned is, yes follow the regular rules (rinse, boil, cook on low), except at the 10 minute mark lift the lid and take a quick peek. If it's too dry add a little water. If it's too wet cook with the lid off until it drys out then put the lid back on. (Of course, a good rice cooker does all that for you.)
I have tried to "fix" rice in the past and I have never succeeded. I am surprised this works for you. I have found that if I measure correctly and turn down heat appropriately my rice comes out the with very little variations.
Sure that's fine until you cook a different rice and then you have to recalibrate. Japanese rice for example requires less water than thai fragrant rice. I just fill up the pot with water from the tap and measure the water amount with my fingers. Sacrilege I know :)
Happy to see this rose to the top. I mean, knowing about compound interest and how to coil cables is cool and all, but the art of preparing food for oneself and others is by far the most important skill listed in here. As someone once said, “if you don’t know how to cook you’re loosing at life”.
It’s also a relatively easy way to impress a potential romantic partner. Learn how to make a few basic dishes (and perhaps a decent breakfast if you’re optimistic).
I’m years beyond being young and single, but being able to cook and being able to dress yourself (and for the occasion) will set you apart from the crowd.
Seriously. I moved out of home with 0 cooking skills and after a few years of having to feed myself I feel like I'm becoming just average. It's amazing how many variables there are to control when doing even the most basic task like sautéing onions:
Sautéing in oil allows you to really crank the heat, using butter you have to be more careful. Cutting in larger chunks is great for some dishes and bad for others. The whole timing thing is probably the hardest to nail, going easy on the heat allows you to get in some other prepwork while the onions are doing their thing, but you also don't want to spend hours cooking so you want to crank it to the point where your prep and the onions will be done at the same time.
How far do you take the onions? How far do you take them if you want to throw in more veggies into the same pan? When do you add spices if you want them to get a bit toasty aswell?
And sautéing large amounts of onion (1kg+) is a whole different calculus.
Cooking is this endless fractal of problems to solve and optimize. Kinda like programming innit.
As someone who cooks a fair bit, I tend to agree that someone could go from how to boil an egg and incrementally add things like organizational skills, knife sharpening, simple sautes, etc. in useful one hour chunks. You can't learn to cook in any meaningful way in an hour, but it's definitely a skill that you can usefully develop on a skill-by-skill/recipe-by-recipe basis pretty effectively.
I'm not sure how many cooking classes are aimed at rank beginners but there are tons of videos these days. It might even be useful to subscribe to something like Cooks Illustrated for a more structured approach rather than wading into YouTube.
I actually don't have too much experience in cooking, but with every meal I make I get better. Cooking is not programming. Some of the best meals I actually made were made without precise measurements, just by gut, sometimes in a hurry. Sure, I might have measured things by the gram the first time I made them, but on next attempt the closest 20g or 30g is more than enough. Oven 45 minutes? Sure, but it looks brown already and it has only been 35, just pull it out.
Cooking is a skill one can develop their entire life, like most skills. But in my opinion it's perfectly achievable to go from zero to one or even a few basic meals in an hour. Even more so if you have a slow cooker and follow a recipe.
I taught all my kids how to cook. You are right, you can't learn _everything_ about cooking. But you can learn one meal you really like.
I pick a new one I want to perfect every few months, look up recipes and try them out over and over until I get it the way I want. (you have to eat anyways) And after doing this for years, I am always told I should open a restaurant. (but that is silly hard work, and everyone can cook)
Sure you can. If you said 10 minutes I'd agree. But if you can learn a bit about programming in an hour, you can learn enough cooking in an hour to make a yummy meal.
The simplest example is a pork steak. Throw it on the skillet and wait awhile. Turn it over and wait awhile. You now have a pork steak. It's delicious.
That's not cooking, that's following instructions. It's like saying that you can learn programming by opening Visual Studio, clicking "new console project", typing in printf("hello world\n"); in between the braces and hitting play is "programming". It kind of is, but you've learnt nothing.
With the pork steak how long is "wait awhile"? 10 seconds? 60 seconds? 10 minutes? All of those yield completely different results, and only once you've had plenty of experience cooking pork steaks, you will be able to judge what "wait awhile" is. Also you missed adding some salt and pepper to the steak - without those it just tastes like....unseasoned meat. Which is ok if that's what you want, but I doubt many people do. But you need to somehow know that salt and pepper are things that you would normally add to a pork steak, but not cinammon or sugar.
I think the only way to "learn" cooking is repetition, repetition and repetition. Not going to do a lot of that in an hour unfortunately.
That's not cooking, that's following instructions. It's like saying that you can learn programming by opening Visual Studio, clicking "new console project", typing in printf("hello world\n"); in between the braces and hitting play is "programming". It kind of is, but you've learnt nothing.
Whoa, that took me back. That's literally how I learned programming when I was 13 or so. (I'm completely serious; I begged my mom for a copy of Visual Studio off of ebay. It was called Visual C++ 6.0 back then, or something. Nehe legacy tutorials were the shit! https://nehe.gamedev.net/)
I think everyone learns differently. The first thing you'll learn is that as long as you're standing next to the skillet, it's very hard to cook a pork steak too long. It'll always end up delicious.
I love cooking and try to only buy foods that I can't make as you say (whether for convenience or lack of skill).
It always surprises me when programmers can't cook. You're just following an algorithm! Sure, the technique takes a little time, but most people can manage. I also think baking suits a logical mind more since it's often more precise with measurements and conditions.
One trick I do is rewrite recipes then print them out. Most start out as wordy fluff. You'll get halfway through a cake recipe and it lists half a dozen things to add to a bowl. I will just rewrite this like: Bowl 1: flour, sugar, baking powder, combine. Bowl 2: oil, egg, whisk. And so on.
Rewriting like this is great for learning and retention and it makes it easier at a glance to not miss anything.
If you haven't read it, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a great read. I have cooked for years and it was a short, easy read with lots of applicable tidbits. I recently tried out the Salt methods on a check steak and it is significantly better and similar to a strip cut in tenderness and flavor.
Clarifying butter and slower cooking my omelettes has been fantastic, along with salt early in the mixing bowl and letting it sit for a minute.
The secret to cooking corn: put the corn in a pot of cold water and set the burner to bring it to a boil. When the water boils the corn is done, and never overcooked. May require some fiddling, but this has always worked for us. Scrambled eggs are similar: creamiest eggs are cooked slowly. Essentially put eggs and cold butter in a cold pan and stir while slowly heating up until they are done.
For rice, the rice:water ratio I follow is 1:1.25. I add a teaspoon of olive oil, salt and pepper to taste.
For eggs, I'm going to try running the egg under warm water. One thing I've observed improvement in quality of eggs when mixing it is the material of the bowl (copper provides best results) and how much air you introduce when mixing the eggs.
Try making a meringue, it's fascinating how versatile eggs can be when put through different conditions.
I have tried lots of ratios rice/water, and I think the brand/type of rice, stove and pot properties all greatly affect the results. Not to mention the subject "goal" for the results we all like. (maybe you like your rice wetter/stickier than I do?)
Do you add the oil, salt and pepper before cooking?
That is true, I haven't had the same success with the ratio when using different types of rice and pots. I achieve the desired texture that the people I cook for prefer :)
Yes, I add the oil, salt and pepper before cooking.
Leave lid what the entire time? On? Off? Untouched? Steamed-up? Half-on? Cracked? Ajar? Weighed-down?
I'm assuming "on", since I have cooked food before, but then how is there 12-15 min of cooking, 25% variation, if you're emphasizing "the entire time"? If you can't look at it or touch it until after it's done, and you can't tell when it's done by the time because the time varies, then when is done?
I meant my comment as an introduction to the idea. But yes, leave it on. You can peak and test quick, but when I was starting out cooking rice I wasn't careful about the lid and ruined plenty of rice by letting too much steam out.
Yes, time varies, just wanted to layout how simple it can be to learn a useful skill in a short amount of time.
Jasmine rice hack - put whatever amount of rice you want in the pot, level it off, place your index finger so it's barely touching the top of the rice and fill with water up to your first knuckle (the first crease on your finger, palm side).
You could call it a hack, but it's also the standard way that lots of asian families make rice if they don't have a rice cooker and how I've done it ever since moving into an apartment and didn't want a bulky machine in limited counter space.
Even easier syrup: a handful of chocolate chips and cream to cover or milk to %60 height (or a combo— yogurt and sour cream can also be mixed in). Nuke it for thirty seconds, stir up and pour over a cake or ice cream.
I agree and it's the component I miss the most from working from home. Cooking is great for cultivating mindfulness plus the financial savings and health benefits.
Very useful. When I was living solo in Ahmedabad, I used to cook a lot of Khicdi (It is combination of Rice + pulses cooked) which is nutritious, light and very cheap to cook. I must have saved 80% of the money had I been ordering the food from outside.
You can improve on this by adding recipes to your Anki app so that you'll remember them after a while. It is really nice to be able to recall recipes (both the ingredients and weights/ratios) when you are working in the kitchen or grocery shopping.
At some point going to a restaurant is more of a pain in the ass than just cooking a good meal yourself. There are certain times and for certain meals that I don’t feel this way. But most of the time I loathe going to restaurants.
to add on to that... learn how to cut correctly where the blade rests on your curved knuckles. it pays dividends on your cooking making the prep work go very fast.
Eggs in the USA and Canada are washed before being packaged and sold in grocery stores. This washing eliminates a natural protective coating, which allows bacteria to permeate the shell. This means the eggs now require refrigeration.
Usually the lower case and capital 'T' is the main difference.
Confusingly also note that UK/US TBsp = 3x tsp (approx 15ml) while Australia is 4 tsp (20ml). It might be relevant for some recipes. I don't know why we are the weird ones this time.
More specifically, eggs in the US and Canada are legally required to be washed prior to be sold to consumers in retail locations, and thus require refrigeration.
Maybe the right advice is to just store eggs how you found them in the store. If they were refrigerated, then keep them in your refrigerator - if they were not, then keep them out on the counter.
For natural unprocessed eggs you're right. But for most eggs in the US and Canada, the coat has been washed off, as indicated by ihodes in sister thread. So refrigeration is important there.
A few examples:
1. Cooking jasmine rice: rinse it first, 1 c. water to 1 c. rice ratio. Bring to boil, turn down heat to lowest setting. Leave lid /the entire time/. Fluff the rice (look this up) when done. (about 12-15 min of cooking)
2. Baking a cake: (any square pan yellow cake) Read how baking powder actually works, then you realize you need to mix and bake quickly. Letting it sit before baking will make a flatter cake. Also, stick a butter knife in the middle to test when it's done, if it comes out with batter stuck on it, it needs a few more minutes.
3. Eggs: When frying, scrambling, put the eggs in warm water before cracking to make them room temperature first. They cook better this way.
4. Chocolate syrup: 1 c. water, 1 c. cocoa power, 1 c. sugar, 1/2 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp salt. Blend it in a blender. (sealed container works best, as it's messy) Better than store bought, super cheap, use organic if you like...
etc...
Why is this valuable? Because I am no longer tempted to waste money at restaurants any more, or buy unique expensive organic products (because I can make them now). I feel incredibly free and liberated that I get food at home that tastes better than what is at a restaurant now. (for about 90% of the stuff I like)
Also, I can teach my kids, and they start life with these skills. Great question, way too many things to write down...