No Stupid Questions

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It may sound meaningless, but the best way to learn to cook is to cook. Learning by doing, that is the way.

When starting to cook on my own, I always found it very stressful, because I felt you had to do so many things in parallel and then you look away for too long at the wrong time and something burns.

What helped me is reading the whole recipe very carefully and then prepare everything before actually starting to cook. Many recipes tell you something like "while x simmers, cut y / prepare z". That's fine, when you have developed a feeling for how long things take, but as a beginner, it's better to do everything sequentially. It takes longer that way, but it makes it much less stressful and overwhelming.

Lots of people are recommending YouTube for learning recipes. That's great advice, but carefully vet what channels you view. Lot's of creators are interested in views, not education. Those recipes often gloss over important steps or are altogether fake. Avoid big personalities who make gimmicky dishes with exotic ingredients.

I can recommend Chef John, Kenji Lopez-Alt, Ethan Chlebowski, and Helen Rennie.

YouTube

In addition to what others have said already: make peace with the fact that you WILL make mistakes, that the first few tries WILL look weird and that you WILL forget an allegedly important step. This is just part of the learning courve and happened to literally everyone who ever learned to make meals in the history of cooking, so do not compare the first ever flattened sushi roll you made with something a master chef with 30+ years of experience is able to do or the heavily photoshopped pictures on food blogs.

You will learn from those mistakes, and you will gain more experience over time. Small progress is still progress.

Also, it can help to only make PART of a recipe yourself when you're still a bit unsure how all of it works, like for example buying premade pizza dough and only add the sauce and toppings yourself, or buying premade pie dough and only make the filling. One step at a time.

You start by learning how to pour cereal

Didn't bother learning to cook until my mid 20s. You will be a disaster chef before your a master chef but sick with it and always have cereal on standby!

Start out with the basics: if you like pasta, try a basic tomato sauce recipe. If you like eggs, try an omelette with some veg. Figure out what you like and use that to keep you interested and growing your skills.

You will learn as you go on how to prepare/cut up different vegetables. YouTube is a great resource.

The more you do, the more confident you will become. Watching YouTube videos on cooking is no substitute for time in the kitchen cooking though!

You will cremate food, undercook food, over season, under season, ruin pans, smash dishes, have food weld itself into oven trays, laugh, and cry - and you'll be all the better cook for it.

Good luck!

I started with one recipe: split pea soup. I got this recipe from a coworker, followed the instructions exactly and started with a success. This made me want to try other things, and I got turned onto Good Eats with Alton Brown, easily the most entertaining and informative cooking show.

Then I just started collecting and trying recipes. I eventually got enough experience to try modifying recipes and toying around with ideas.

Especially at the start, recipes are your friend. Try a broad array of them, follow them exactly, and get the experience. Also, use tools. Yes, people can punch a steak to see if it’s about done, but that will never beat a thermometer.

If you’re into baking, avoid recipes that don’t use weight as a measure of ingredients. Those recipes get different results every time.

These are the best tips I have for starting out. As you get experience, discard the ones that no longer apply.

We used Hello Fresh. Both my partner and I had basic cooking skills, but were not very good cooks. He was also a very picky eater. Hello Fresh reduced the overwhelming amount of recipes in the world down to a more reasonable number to choose from. As we kept going, we started to see the same techniques, like reduction sauces, happen in new configurations and we started to understand how they work, not just follow the instructions. It also helped my partner overcome a lot of his pickiness by being in control of what recipes we had each week, allowing him to explore new ingredients when he felt comfortable.

I learned from trial and error, asking for help from those who could, and cooking shows. Specifically good eats with Alton brown, he explains the science behind different aspects of cooking and it helps you to understand the *why * of each step instead of just doing what you're told.

Meal kit delivery services are awesome, in my opinion. They send you the ingredients for like 3 meals every week. For me personally, the worst part about trying to cook was always looking at a cookbook and realizing you don't have all the ingredients. So this takes the shopping out of the equation, which just makes it super simple. I've talked to a few people that don't like them, so they're not for everyone.

No matter how you learn, remember that you will mess up a lot and don't let that discourage you. Just try to learn from it and remember it for next time.

of the websites that I used to learn how to cook some fifteen, twenty years ago, serious eats is still pretty reliable. I like their articles - they tell you why food cooks the way it does. I learned to cook on a basic red pasta sauce what's been going around the family for generations so I'd recommend looking at their italian and starting there.

Start simple. Like pasta. You boil water, add pasta, set a timer, stir. Drain the water when the timer goes off, but taste it first to make sure. Boom. You cooked pasta.

Beyond that, I would say that you have to make sure you read the recipe to completion, at least once, before you start cooking. Don’t have the recipe ready, and start cooking without having read the whole thing.

Then break it down. Get all your prep work done before you turn on the heat. Have stations for different processes, and have any utensils & bowls you’re going to need, during cooking, ready to go.

Have all the things you’re adding on the side of your weak arm, while your dominant arm stirs, and have all the things lined up in order, so you don’t have to think beyond “grab closest thing & dump.”

Get as much of the thinking done before you turn on the heat, and have everything ready to go, lined up, and sorted out. Then you’ll be able to fully focus on the cooking, not getting things ready at the last minute.

you'll need a pot, and/or a skillet, and a source of heat. without that you'll eat a lot of cabbage and apples, but you still need a knife. if you want to lazy up to spices: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. there's an old hippy song on that. and, it's really difficult to fuck up a baked potato.

What is your favorite meal? Start with the most basic part of that and slowly develop skills to make all the things you want to enjoy. Reading a cookbook can seriously help to understand the basic tools and measurements. There are classes for learning to cook basic meals availability depending on where you live. Basics with Babish on Y o u t u b e. Also, your local library.

I highly recommend subscribing to a meal delivery kit for a few weeks, I think they’re fantastic for beginners. Reasons:

• Grocery shopping and ingredient portioning is already done for you, allowing you to focus on the cooking
• Ability to try new ingredients without committing to buying a full quantity of the ingredient. It sucks when you buy a specific sauce for a new recipe you want to try, only to realize you’re never going to want to use it again.
• Enough choices in recipes but not an overwhelming amount; there are so many recipes and resources online that that’s all you need to learn, but it can be overwhelming and hard to know where to start
• Recipes are generally standardized, well-tested, and don’t require special equipment or advanced techniques

I definitely don’t recommend doing this long term because it starts to get repetitive and is ultimately more expensive than doing your own shopping and planning, but it removes quite a few barriers to entry. Home Chef was the one I enjoyed the most personally but Blue Apron is also reliable and liked by many. Once you are comfortable with the basics you can really just search any recipe you’re interested in and just go for it; follow your interests and the skills will come with experience.

There are many youtube channels that aim at beginners. Find recipes there that are easy (no advanced techniques required) and require few ingredients that are easy to prepare.

The advantage of youtube is that you actually see how the food is made, how it should look, how much salt "to taste" means etc.

Stay away from short videos with titles like "most delicious meal with only 5 ingredients, I make this every week". They're mostly made to farm views and don't actually teach the basics. Not to mention they're mostly unhealthy.

Look for stews, soups, casseroles and oven cooked meat. They're the easiest to make in my opinion, you prepare everything and wait until it's done, maybe you stir every 10-15 minutes. Eastern European recipes are generally easy to make, cheap and taste very good. Simple Italian pastas are also great for the same reason.

Pay attention to the heat level, wash your ingredients, follow the instructions to the letter for the first several recipes and don't worry if your first few meals are too salty/spicy or tastes bland. Take it as a learning experience, you'll do better next time.

Try one of these five ingredient recipe cookbooks. It will get you going with the basics.

There’s a cool book called The Ministry of Food or something by yer man Jamie Oliver.

Taught me a thing or two.

Tasty dishes, simple recipes.

Try to deliberately learn something each time you cook.

Feel like curry? YouTube how to make it from raw spices.

Feel like soup? YouTube how to make your own stock.

Didn't like a meal? Ask yourself what you didn't like.

Was it the texture? Cooking time? a particular ingredient?
If it was an ingredient, learn about other ways to prepare that ingredient, or find another version of that recipe and do it slightly different next time.

Once you learn a bunch of recipes you start to acquire techniques and knowledge of how flavours balance and interact. These days if I want to make something I will find 5 versions of that recipe, see what's common, what's unique. I'll use only the bits I want because I have a feel for the general flavours, what I like / don't like, what I can be bothered buying today.

So, learn new recipes on YouTube, start to play around with them. Try to watch videos where they are actual qualified chefs who explain not just how but why they do something. For example, some basic tips and tricks videos from Gordon Ramsey.

Above all, give yourself time. You gain confidence when you know what works after years of trial and error.

Pick the simplest things you enjoy eating and start with those. I usually just cooked the same thing over and over until I got fed up of them. This is okay as long as your diet remains diverse.

And not everything needs to be cooked. Make use of cold salads and such. I love olives. Olive oil is awesome for both salad and cooking. Salads are often seen as the main dish but I much prefer them as a side, like rice.

Follow the recipe as best as you can at first. You'll be fine, the only important thing is food safety, e.g. handling raw chicken.

Oh and btw even pros screw up their cooking here and there. Don't feel too bad if you get it wrong while millions of kids starve out there.

Genuine question with no intention to talk down on someone: how are there adults that don't know how to cook at least the basics? My mother told me a story about how she went on a trip at school and a teacher that apparently had never cooked before wanted to make spaghetti by putting them in the cold water and then boiling them. Ended up with a huge fused chunk of pasta. How can you not know how to at least make pasta as an adult? Parents and then partner that always cook for you?

Make a meal, you will get better at it every time and figure out your own method and feel. New things I use recipes for as reference. At first you will just wanna take your time and don't stress yourself out.

The two basic steps to making food are to combine food and heat them.

Sandwiches and salads are examples of food that are only combined. Toast and poptarts are examples of foods that are only heated.

Typically, you start with something simple: pasta, eggs, etc. These are basically just cooking with little to no prep.

Later, you can start working on foods that need both prep and heating.