Most cookbooks tend to be like the meme about drawing an owl [0]. Mostly because the people making the instructions make assumptions about Stuff One Should Just Know and skip those bits in the instructions.
On video you can actually see the consistency of things as they are cooked and maybe even hear what the process sounds like (frying spices in oil has a distinct sound if the oil is at the correct temperature).
You can also see the proper cutting technique, hopefully saving your fingers from pain later on.
> Most cookbooks tend to be like the meme about drawing an owl [0]. Mostly because the people making the instructions make assumptions about Stuff One Should Just Know and skip those bits in the instructions.
You may wish to look at cookbooks produced by America's Test Kitchen. They try to create instructions that are clear and easy to follow.
This is done via a 'beta testing' program which you can join:
> As a recipe tester, you will be emailed in-development recipes. Recipe testers will receive one recipe per month on average. You can choose what to test; you are not required to test any or every recipe (but we hope you’ll want to!). When you test a recipe, please take the survey that accompanies it to tell us what you think. We will ask you questions about ingredient substitutions, recipe clarity, yields, and timing. And you get to rate the recipe.
> Occasionally, we’ll ask you to help us check ingredient availability at your local grocery store. We do this to ensure that the recipes we develop use ingredients that are widely available to all of our readers.
Watch their videos. Read their magazines. Happily pay them a $100/yr for the education. But throw their books (especially their "every recipe from the show for the past X years" books) in the trash. Honestly, their books are horrid. There's a marked qualitative difference between the writing of the recipes in the magazines and the writing of the recipes in the books. Dan Souza is editor-in-chief of the magazines which explains why the magazine is so good. I swear they outsource their book writing recipes and photography to failed college essay writers & photographers they found on Fiverr. An individual recipe in the books is all over the place. You'd think by the 12th edition they would have nailed the formatting or the writing style but it seems to just be a terrible copy & paste job from one year to the next. Their digital editions are even worse with broken formatting, unsearchable indexes, and bloated images.
I just used her fast caramelized onions technique last night actually. I like that she explains why she's doing everything and how it contributes to the flavour of the meal.
Their equipment review posts and videos are a must-watch. Even if you don't end up picking the winner, they will point out the best/worst aspects of their winners and losers that almost certainly apply to the products you're looking at.
ATK is one of the few digital subscriptions I'm thrilled to pay for -- it pays for itself every year just in bad equipment purchases.
(E.g., knowing that their top picks for kitchen timers will last many years despite being twice the price as cheapo ones, or knowing that buying the cheap bamboo wooden spoons is actually preferable.)
A lot what separates good and bad cooking is tacit understanding that can't be explained in words. You need to practice to detect the nuances in flavor. It's really basic and doesn't make good edutaninment content.
I'd say 90% of being a competent chef is just down to knowing how to balance the basic flavor components; and to figure out how these things change during the cooking process.
With practice and experimentation you can learn to infer what is lacking by taste and make anything go from bland to amazing.
Spices and ingredients are much less important. They aren't unimportant, but they aren't what makes something decent into something great. You can make a head cabbage more delicious than most what you'll find in a cookbook if you get this right.
Reading "Salt, fat acid heat" demonstrates this really well. Maybe almost to well, it takes away some of the mystery I guess between cuisines. Everything is the same, just different aromatics/spices added
That book changed how I approach cooking, I always wondered how people just make recipes, and now I can mostly do it
I found the flavor combinations and techniques easier to grasp than timing. That's what always gets me. Juggling two or three dishes with their own timing and requirements such that they all come out around the same time and one is not burning while stirring the other trips me up. After I practice a recipe a few times I get better at anticipating what it'll need when, but I'll never make the mistake again of cooking all new recipes for a dinner party and have each one fail spectacularly.
What works for me is figuring out which dishes (or partly completed dishes) can wait. Either on or off the flame. Most of the time only 1 or 2 dishes require exact timing. The rest can be (partially) prepared beforehand and reheated/finished at the end.
Most cuisine-based cookbooks have a bunch of chapters on ingredients, technique, equipment, and storage that easily get overlooked. Since it's difficult to share those things in a recipe format (but often come up in videos of preparation) I'm not surprised most people are finding them on YouTube.
I find cookbooks completely ignore is "kitchen management"--preparing a meal with entree and sides being cooked concurrently so they come to the table at the same time or reusing leftovers into new meals and meal prep. Thankfully, there's a bit of this on YouTube (mostly meal prep).
Like you mentioned knife skills are a giant ignored thing. I'm a huge proponent of sharpening your knifes (because odds are they've never done it) and taking a knife skills class. It pays dividends almost every time you cook, cuts prep time at least in half, and reduces frustration and friction to cooking.
Other than Salt Fat Acid Heat (mentioned elsewhere in this thread), any recommendations for building that baseline knowledge? Step-by-step videos are great for making that one dish, but are pretty inefficient for reaching a skill baseline.
This is a bit of a loaded recommendation - I own it and it's a fantastic compendium of literally all western cooking knowledge you might want to ever know.
It's also like 20lb and over a thousand pages and usually sells for textbook prices, so only invest in it if you really want to level up and have the time to read/work through it.
If you want to deep dive read the modernist cuisine 5 volume tome though you really most need the first couple. I don’t think I made a single recipe out of it. The recipes are too elaborate, but the knowledge and explanation of why things were done the way they were was really magical
The Food Lab, by J Kenji Lopez-Alt should be on the shelf of any HN reader who likes to cook. dives deep into the 'why' behind each recipe, includes a lot of A/B testing results (e.g. differences roasting russet potatoes vs gold vs red)
On video you can actually see the consistency of things as they are cooked and maybe even hear what the process sounds like (frying spices in oil has a distinct sound if the oil is at the correct temperature).
You can also see the proper cutting technique, hopefully saving your fingers from pain later on.
[0] https://www.danielzarick.com/uploads/2018-05-draw-the-owl.jp...