Ask Lemmy

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.

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

Alton Brown.

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 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.

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.

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.

My parents had a restaurant and needed some help for the differents services. So they put us at work (brother, sister and I).

Younger I didn't understand the luck I had to eat restaurant quality meal every day. I was kind of happy to eat a junkfood in a US burger chain.

Now that I grew old, I cook because it's way cheaper and also because it's a moment where I could decompress from an exhausting week. Also when we are cooking I let my son participante, and I explain to him the differents ingredients that we put in the recipe.

My bet that he will also Cook when the time comes.

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.

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

YouTube

• Food Wishes, Chef John M

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

By cooking.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

Im old enough for pre you tube. No one taught me to cook. I stopped eating meat and dairy pre 18 years old and either had to learn myself or eat crap stuff.

I started with a few cook books and simple stuff. Made the same thing over and over again and refine it, like a stir fry. What I learned then translates to the next thing.

I try to learn a few "new" dishes or techniques every year and its built up over 20+ years.....

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.

Honestly.. YouTube you can learn a bunch of things there if you want to.

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!!!

I started as a kid with simple things. Cooking and frying eggs, pimping an instant soup, etc.

Then they had a real chef in a weekday afternoon TV show. I started emulating his job, learned about using the "claw" to cut vegetables, how to make soups and sauces from scratch, and what spices to use.

When I was a teenager, I was visiting relatives, and a bunch of farmers wives were peeling and cutting onions en masse. They invited me to join, more for the fun of having a young man on the table. This was a time and culture where a male had no place in the kitchen, so imagine their surprise when I got a different knife out of the kitchen, sharpened it, and started cutting up onions way faster than they did...

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) 

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.