Cooking

What do you like to eat? Favorite cuisine? I'd suggest some focus to start. There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread about books and videos but I'd avoid picking random recipes to try. They won't overlap ingredients (or tools) and that drives costs up quickly. Instead, pick a focus (or two) of some kind. That could be a specific thing like ramen or pizza or a bit broader like breakfast or Mexican food.

Next I'd say you should learn how to do one thing at a time, learn to make tortillas but use taco seasoning and basic fillings. Next week buy the tortillas but make refried beens from scratch. The next week make salsa but buy the beans and the tortillas. Continue this until you can make every component and then pick a day and make everything from scratch. Doing this you will learn what you like making, what parts are worth your time and what you would rather just buy.

The method I propose here also scales well if you want to do some amount of weekly food prep to save time on weeknights - make a big batch of a component or two and mix and match your homemade items with store bought ones throughout the week.

Some pitfalls to avoid. Touched on this above but don't go to the store with a shopping list that is just the recipe - this gets expensive fast and is likely to result in lots of waste. Avoid specialty ingredients till you have practiced with cheap ones too. Also avoid special tools to start - you need a knife and a pan to get started. Not saying not to invest in good tools, just don't go buy a stand mixer or a mandolin until you've made enough things to know why a particular tool would be a good investment for you.

Last thing I'll say is that you'll burn things, add cinnamon instead of cumin, salt instead of sugar, your dough won't rise or you might drop all your hard work on the floor but it's part of learning - keep at it and try to just enjoy your time in the kitchen!

Cookbooks are a great option if you have a bit of time and like reading. I started out this way, simply reading books and watching YouTube for fun. I've found many books at my local bookstore and thrift shops for very cheap (like $1 - $10). I would keep an eye out for these specifically, especially older editions that are cheaper:

The Professional Chef, Culinary Institute of America
Professional Baking, Wayne Gisslen
What's a Chef to Do?, Anthony Bourdain
Gear, Alton Brown
On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee
Basics with Babish, Andrew Rea
The Flavor Matrix, James Briscone
The Flavor Equation, Nik Sharma

All of these go over essential principles and skills that every cook needs; if you read and understood even just one or two of these cover to cover, you could easily master cooking essentials in just a couple days/weeks accompanied with some practice

100% of my cooking skills came from long form cooking videos on YouTube but the key to getting better is practice. Practice the dish you fucked up and keep trying until you get it right. To start, cook an egg every day, cook an egg a different way, every day. Then master the art of cooking a perfect egg any way, every day. Shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes out of your schedule with clean up.

If it were me telling me this; set baking aside for now. Focus on breakfast and dinner mains. Baking is a science that takes years to get right. Try to stay away from shorts/reels/tiks they are often click bait with no recipe or worse, fake (wasting ingredients).

Good instructors:

Basics with Babish

Ethan Chlebowski (week night spare rib)

Alton Brown

J Kenji Lopez-Alt

Food Wishes

Nick DiGiovanni

Old’s Cool Kevmo

Niche/Comedy:

Epicurious amateur vs pro series

You Suck At Cooking

Nats What I Reckon

Tasting History w/Max Miller

…and many many more. I create a bookmark location called “to cook” and file yummy looking things in there. Pick a recipe and watch the video a few times. Go grocery shopping, watch the video again, and when it’s time to cook, make sure EVERY ingredient is prepared. Veggies diced and in a bowl, spices measured and in tiny bowls, liquids weighed and in a bowl. Everything in its place or Mise en place (pronounced meez ahn plas). Watch the video again and go go good luck.

Pro-tip, unless you’re boiling water, there’s almost NO reason to set your burners to high heat at this point in your journey. Go slow at first, don’t worry about “developing a perfect crust” just yet. You’ll get there with practice.

After a few months/years, you’ll feel confident enough to improvise and start to understand short form cooking channels and how all the ingredients work together (scientifically).

Equipment you will need:

A Chef’s knife, Cutting board, 8” -12” non-stick pan with lid, Large pot with lid and steamer basket, Stainless steel sheet tray (half sheet), Stainless steel rack (to fit tray), Glass casserole tray, Wooden cooking utensils (I love chopsticks), Instant read thermometer (always cook to temp, NOT time), Lots of tiny & medium bowls, Kitchen scale.

^^go cheap at first and if you use them till they break, upgrade. Except the thermometer, spend a few bucks there. I recommend anything by ThermoPro.

Neat things to have:

Air fryer (adds oven space and great for roasting veg when the main oven is busy), Rice maker, Spice rack, Dutch oven, Cast iron pan, Full steel heavy bottom pot and pan set, Immersion blender, Vacuum sealer, Blender/food processor.

I grew up cooking. But what really stepped up my game was getting a cheap "three ingredient cookbook" and learning how very basic things can become amazing when combined. Now this cookbook had like "Italian sausage, pasta. Pasta sauce" as a recipe for spaghetti with meat sauce. Then I started making the things you make things from. Make the sausage from ground pork and seasonings. Make the pasta from semolina and water. Make the sauce from tinned tomatoes and other things.

All the things you cook with are eventually reduced down to some basic ingredients. I ended up making the things I made things from.

Now this does become a problem. 30 minute meals take two hours. When you are hungry you don't have any food, just the things you make food from. But that's a problem for another day.

Today's meal was those Philly cheese steak tacos. If I had had money I could have gone and bought flour tortillas. But I had the stuff to make my own tortillas already on hand. And that is when you start developing textures and flavors you just can't buy. That's when you are cooking instead of wetting your drys and pouring things out of jars and bags. That's when you really start to learn how to cook.

I mentioned it the other day, the first thing I ever made from scratch was a PB&J. Three ingredients. Each of those ingredients has about four ingredients. And except for the bread two of the second generation ingredients are shelf stable. Which means making things in advance that future you can enjoy with almost no work.

I am going to give you two book recommendations that I think should be done in this order: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and The Wok

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is great because it talks and about what is needed for all recipes (it's title). It talks about food science and theory so you can understand techniques and understand what each thing in a recipe does. It does have generic recipes that you can modify as well "lessons" to walk through what you learned.

The Wok is similar but just about using a Wok. I love the wide variety of things you can make with the wok. It also gives you some sidebars about how to shop of ingredients, sauces and how to chop for the recipes. It also talks techniques with then example recipes. Read both and try them out

what do you like to eat? what counts as “cooking” to you?

for example - you could boil pasta, add some sauce, and eat. Youve cooked a meal.

Or are you wanting, for example, to cook the whole of the sauce yourself rather than store bought?

Start with something you really like to eat. You like it so much you can tolerate it if it’s only ok.

Start making that repetitively.

That’s what will become your ‘go to’ recipe.

After a few dozen times you’ll start to get some nuance in how you make it. You’ll understand the heat, timing and seasonings.

From there you start on a second recipe that may need a new technique.

So for instance , roast chicken.

Tasty, cheap and can be served a few different ways over a week.

I used the joy of cooking, though later began to like the American test kitchen books for their detailed explanations of each part of the dish and what goes wrong.

Honestly being forced to cook everything you eat really ups your skills.

Stay away from dishes that need special equipment. Deep Fried food are pretty hard to learn and expensive as a beginner. You can get most cooking equipment from a Salvation Army/goodwill to start.

I like cook books since you can write yourself notes in them as to what you tried and if it was a good idea. If you find a recipe online print it out and keep it.

YouTube!

I like both Ethan and Brian. I'm sure others will have plenty of other suggestions. Or simply search cooking for beginners. There is a ton of stuff to get you started.

https://m.youtube.com/@EthanChlebowski

https://m.youtube.com/@BrianLagerstrom

Junk food is a pretty good place to start, you can control exactly how unhealthily you make it, what cooking equipment do you have?

Find some cooking shows (regular "stand and stir" instructional ones, not reality TV competition type ones) that interest and inspire you to make the recipe shown, then go do it.

Ideally, try to pick ones that go into the "why"/food science/technique, as opposed to just rote instructions. Alton Brown (Good Eats on TV) and Adam Ragusea (YouTube) are good examples of that.

Like anything you get better with time. I would master one dish then move on to the next. Pretty soon you will have a bag of tricks. Turn down the stove top.

Read recipes, watch videos, and try things out.

If it helps, this is a super easy recipe for chili to make: https://www.budgetbytes.com/basic-chili/

All you need is a big pot, a chefs knife, a plastic spatula, a can opener and a cutting board.

It stores great in your fridges freezer, so you can pack most of it into plastic containers and you'll have lots of meals ready to go. Once you've got one good recipe down pat, you can focus on adding another until you have home cooked meals every day of the week.