YouTube

• Food Wishes, Chef John M

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

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 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.

Breaking Bad.

Wait, I mean Baking Bread.

Started off as a kid wanting to eat simple things like eggs without having to be dependent on someone else making them.

My parents got me started on basic stuff like scrambling eggs, boiling pasta, and following basic recipes, but everything past that was basically self taught. Both my parents can cook just fine, but as time went on they did it less and less often, so by the time I was in highschool I made most of my own meals, not usually anything too fancy but I never relied on the microwave at least.

I’ve been using YouTube as a resource more and more the last few years. Helps a lot to figure out the stuff that my parents didn’t teach or that I couldn’t easily trial and error. Firstly, it’s nice seeing someone else do it and secondly as blogger-type recipes grow more and more long-winded it’s honestly not much of a time difference

From the directions on the back of boxes along with trial and error.

I got sick and had to go on a restricted diet that was salt free AND potassium free. I had to learn to cook because everything has salt and/or potassium. Found out I love to cook and bake!

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!!!

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.

I like cooking competitions, more so the high end ones than the average cooks ones because I aspire to cook dishes that are amazing. Still working my way up there, but shows like Culinary Class Wars have been great for inspiration.

Also helps that I’m in a financial position where I can afford to grab new kitchen toys, whether it’s wider bowls, nice knives, or gadgets to accomplish specific tasks.

I suggest reading up about specific techniques, because a lot of it has nuance that isn’t obvious. Like for example, for a long time I thought I was frying things when I was actually steaming them because just hearing a sizzle doesn’t mean you’re frying (and I still haven’t fried anything but I do sautee things now).

Other then that, think of something you want to make, then look up a recipe for it and try to make it. Cooking allows for a ton of variation. Hell, even baking allows for it, though the differences you try out can have a larger than expected effect on the final result. But seriously, experiment and be creative, your failures will help as much as your successes. Other than fires, allergies, and freak accidents, the worst result you’ll generally see is needing to throw out some food. But even that is rare from my experience. Most often I either pivot into something else or say “this would have turned out better if X” as I serve it anyways.

Learn how to balance flavours and while it won’t make everything you make amazing, it will bring up your baseline to “not bad”. Also there is a very fine line between “tastes absolutely amazing” and “tastes boring/gross” and knowing how to balance flavours will help you get to that “amazing” state consistently when your food has the potential to be there.

Also knife safety is important. It won’t make you an amazing cook (though knife skills can really help), but following knife safety could have a huge impact on your life, especially if you get some good knives. They say sharp knives are safer than dull knives, but I’d add a caveat: as long as you are using them safely in the first place. A dull knife can make you use enough force that it ends up going through your finger when it gets free from whatever it was stuck on, but a sharp knife will go right through your finger without any force if you’re cutting in a way that aims it at your finger. And as an added bonus, the technique that I use also makes my cutting better because my finger deliberately acts as a guide, which helps with consistency.

Other than that, play around and have fun! And take notes, it sucks so much to make something that is amazing but then realize you don’t remember how you did it the next time. Something as small as forgetting a teaspoon of mustard can have a huge impact on the final result.

By cooking.

I worked in a group home in college, and part of the job was cooking. When I started, my cooking level was pretty much spaghetti and sauce from a jar. Fortunately for me, there was a set menu with recipes to follow.

I’ve learned quite a bit since then, but I’m still very much a “mechanical” cook. I’m good at following recipes, but I won’t typically be able to improvise a meal with whatever is on hand. I’ll take a look at what we have and start searching for likely-looking recipes.

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.

My parents rarely cook, I mostly learned it from just trying some basic stuff first and than slowly trying new stuff. I highly recommend searching some simple stuff wth ingredients you like and expand on it if you want