I never learned how to cook, and I want to know how. What should I do?

August 6, 2016 6:37 PM

I eat rather plain food, and I eat the same things over and over again. I've started watching Chef's Table on Netflix, and it's made me super curious.

I'm not looking to be an amazing chef, but I would like to know the basics of making food... what pairs well with what, simple techniques, and "always good" recipes. Something like a home cooking 101. I'd love to go to something that's once or twice a week in the evenings. Do you know of anything that would give me a nice crash course to be a good home chef? (I live in Orlando, FL if that makes any difference.)

posted by uncannyslacks to Food & Drink (31 answers total)

My local community college has a whole bunch of "cook this one recipe/one meal plan in this style" classes, relatively inexpensively. That's where I'd start looking. Fancy cooking-equipment places like Sur La Table also may offer classes - the ones around here are often free, but there aren't as many of them and they're mostly one-night-only things.
posted by restless_nomad at 6:39 PM on August 6, 2016

Dunno about Orlando, but you might try:

--- Watching Good Eats on Neflix
--- picking up Mark Bitman's How to Cook Everything or The Joy of Cooking
--- checking out Cooking for Engineers
--- or Serious Eats, especially the Food Lab columns

America's Test Kitchen and/or Cook's Illustrated also have very thorough, step by step recipes but they're not completely newbie oriented.

Learning to cook is really a trial and error sort of thing, but it's not hard. It's a bit like learning to drive --- it can seem intimidating before you know, but really it's just abour stringing a very simple series of actions together. Press pedal, turn wheel. Chop onion, flip steak. If I were you I'd just get stuck in --- think of a dish you know you like and have never made before. Then find a recipe for it. Simple comfort foods are probably your best to start with. And pick something you like so that way you have a sense of what it should look and taste like at the end. Picking up a good beginner's cookbook such as the two I mentioned is better than looking up recipes on the internet, at first --- a lot of recipes on the web are pretty lousy, and you have to know what you're doing a bit to be able to tell the good ones from the bad ones.

Good fundamental skills to pick up from the start: How to hold a knife and the basic ways to cut vegetables. Good knife skills are like the wax on, wax off bit in the karate kid --- everything starts from there, and they make everything else so much simpler.

Also learn how to season properly. But other than that, just start exploring, man.
posted by maggiepolitt at 6:56 PM on August 6, 2016 [16 favorites]

Good Eats and Serious Eats.
posted by Huck500 at 6:59 PM on August 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I like Good Eats too.
The early series of the Naked Chef (Jamie Oliver) are also really good for simple tasty recipes with some skills and explanation. He also gives the occasional cheat too - like I think he made homemade meatballs for the spaghetti, and fancied up some tinned tomatoes for sauce. Very realistic. Jamie at Home was especially good for general technique and upon googling looks like it's online.


I also really like River Cottage, but it's more an exploration of food and not so instructional. Good background though.

Investing in a year's subscription to Cooking Illustrated, published by Americas Test Kitchen. Lots ot explaining why things work the way they do. Their chicken pot pie is extremely good and very easy!
posted by jrobin276 at 7:08 PM on August 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Nthing Good Eats, particularly the earlier seasons! (I guess Netflix has some episodes? I'm a bit shocked to see that the Food Network is no longer even airing it in reruns; link goes to season 1 DVDs on Amazon but I'll bet it's the sort of thing you could probably get hold of through inter-library loan too.) I learned a whole lot about cooking from Alton Brown. Like most cooking shows it covers procedural recipe prep, but does so from a basic chemistry standpoint, explaining why ingredients behave and interact the way they do. In a lot of cases he covers variations of a recipe and explores how changing the amount of an ingredient (or omitting/using an entirely different one) affects the result; so you learn how/why something works instead of just following instructions, and you can use that knowledge to extrapolate and experiment.

Later seasons were still interesting and entertaining, but a lot of the recipes got really ingredient/labor intensive.
posted by usonian at 7:11 PM on August 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I learned by watching videos on FoodWishes. The chef there takes it VERY slowly and has great recipes.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:16 PM on August 6, 2016 [4 favorites]

I definitely recommend watching America's Test Kitchen. Try a few episodes, and if you're intrigued, then maybe consider trying some of their recipes yourself. I do not consider myself an especially skilled cook, but everything of their's that I've tried to make has at least been straightforward (even though occasionally some of it might be time-consuming or strenuous), and almost everything has been a success.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 7:26 PM on August 6, 2016

Get sharp knives, just a chef's knife or a santoku style knife (whichever feels better in your hand) and a pairing knife.

nth-ing Serious Eats. Good eats helped me a ton, but that's a slow going intake of information, and aside from a few "collections" of random episodes released on netflix from time to time, there's not a good way to get to all of them. Good eats has a tendency to over-explain processes and show you DIY plans that are over-complicated to illustrate how things are made, not necessarily how you can make it. Sometimes his DIY stuff pays off, but other times I've taken it as illustrative. America's Test kitchen is a good resource for sure, and their recipes have a tendency to be foolproof, if followed correctly, but if you deviate at all, you're going to get a pile of sad for dinner.

For all types of cuisine, you need a pantry. Access to a culinary tradition's pantry items will get you 85% of the way to good cooking, especially as you're learning.For a traditional american style culinary tradition, I would suggest picking up the book The Art of Simple Food by alice waters. I would grab a copy of it at the library. I have some issues with Waters in terms of politics and the like, and while the recipes in the book are better than average, but they're poorly written. However, the saving grace of that book is the section on building a pantry. With that setup and the tactics used to build that pantry, you can slowly build other ones. The coolest part about this, is that you'll see the parallels and crossovers between cuisines, and be able to eventually riff a little.

But I would start with what you like. What are some of your favorite dishes? Pick a couple dishes, find as many resources you can on those. Learning how to make a pizza that you like will give you a ton of skills. If you take it to the furthest degree, you'll learn a ton about dough, sauce, simple cheesemaking, knife skills, etc. If you pick a couple of fundamentally different dishes that you enjoy, you'll have a pretty solid toolkit in approaching other recipes.
posted by furnace.heart at 7:52 PM on August 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yes, I learned to cook by watching PBS. (My mom taught me other things, but she's not a good cook....) America's Test Kitchen is great. I have one of their cookbooks, too, and it has a lot of information in it (comparing kinds of cookware, different ingredients, chopping tips and tricks. ..)

I recently treated myself to Blue Apron, too, and have learned some new techniques and gotten new ideas for pairings that kind of helped break me out of a frozen pizza and takeout rut I had gotten into.
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 7:56 PM on August 6, 2016

Thinking of this from a different angle, lots of people learn to cook from their parents or surrogate parent figures - I began the process of learning to cook from an old boyfriend's mom and was able to build more advanced skills from there. Lots of accomplished cooks like teach others how to cook in their traditions, so if there is a friend's mama or grandma (or dad or grandpa!) whose cooking you like, you could get some hands on experience that way.
posted by tatiana wishbone at 8:06 PM on August 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

I was coming to suggest Blue Apron too.

Something I did was find a friend who was successfully feeding herself and her family and just invited myself to dinner to help her cook. That is surprisingly successful.
posted by guster4lovers at 8:25 PM on August 6, 2016

Good Eats along with Brown's book I'm Just Here for the Food will give you a good handle on the processes of cooking, as others have mentioned. I wanted to suggest a supplementary approach: go to your local library and look at their cookbook section. Find some cookbooks that appeal to you -- whether it's for a specific type of cuisine, or just a basic cookbook. Then just browse through it. If you find a recipe you like, give it a try. Even if you don't, I think reading cookbooks can give you a sense of the whole process. And if you pick up cookbooks for a particular cuisine -- Thai, say, or Italian, or whatever -- you can get an idea of what flavors go into making that cuisine unique. To my mind, that's a huge part of cooking well: knowing what flavors work together to make tasty food.

I learned the very basics of cooking as a kid (some from my parents, but also from cookbooks and tv shows), but browsing through cookbooks is what really helped me understand how to cook without needing to refer to a recipe every step of the way.
posted by Janta at 8:38 PM on August 6, 2016

Part of cooking is trying and getting a feel for it. I prefer Winter food over summer food in Chicago.

So even when following directions on a meal, pay attention to color, texture, look , sounds and smells. You will eventually associate what some things look like, or smell like and so instead of having to rely on timers and other assistive devices in cooking.

I would start with dishes from cuisine you eat often. For example with generic American food I cook:

Hamburger
Smothered pork chops
Texas style chili
Baked chicken w root veggies
Basic pasta dishes (spaghetti, scampi, pasta salad)


I base what I try on ingredients I like, I was born and raised in Louisiana, so I tend to use lots of onion, garlic, bell pepper and celery, with cayenne pepper. (I cook traditional cajun food as well but that's more complicated) So I look for recipes that have those things as components. Maybe not all of them, but some of them because I'm much more likely to enjoy it.

Keep on experimenting, and don't be ashamed to cook the same thing a few different ways (keep track of changes! ) to learn how ingredients interact, and how you like it personally.
posted by AlexiaSky at 8:48 PM on August 6, 2016

Oh and learn what to buy and what you'd rather cook. I know I love making my own chicken broth, but don't bother in most situations because I'm busy.

My smothered pork chops use cream of mushroom soup, there is no way I'm making that from scratch for a simple dish. Other things, like potatoes in a can are just off limits and I would not use them if it was the end of the world.

Every cook makes these choices, and it is okay to because unless you want to professionally cook you won't have the time for some things. For skill purposes you need learn the skills, but you can be an awesome cook and rely on shortcuts!
posted by AlexiaSky at 8:59 PM on August 6, 2016

As a very basic step before anything else, get a few good knives and learn some basic knife technique. A chef's knife, a paring knife, and maybe a boning knife. These three, along with a honing steel to keep them sharp will make your life so much easier when it comes to cooking.

Being able to break down vegetables and meat quickly lets you make food so much more easily.
posted by Ferreous at 9:09 PM on August 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

To me, the solution is to look for recipes for items you might like and try them. Say meatloaf for example. Google for meatloaf recipe and there will be more than you can imagine. Pick one and follow the directions. If they use words you don't know, say, "dice" just look it up (chop). Instead of learning proper chopping technique, just do it any way that works for you this time. Cook the meatloaf. Eat. Hmm. Too salty. I will use a little less salt next time. Trial and error. As you get more comfortable with just spending time in the kitchen, start to watch videos or attend classes on how to do things like dice, blanch, etc.

If you can cut up an onion, a bell pepper, carrots and celery and can put them in a pan, cook over med heat for a few minutes and add a protein such as chicken or ground beef, and you can have a good home cooked meal.
posted by AugustWest at 9:16 PM on August 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm not really a fan of those food boxes, but I got a sample week of Blue Apron and that might actually be a good fit. They send all the food items in a box with instructions, and in my experience attempt to get you to try some new cooking techniques. I certainly learned a few things I hadn't anticipated. Might be a good first step to try it and see what you think.
posted by Toddles at 9:28 PM on August 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

There are a lot of foodies here telling you complicated things to do to learn how to be a serious chef. I didn't read your question that way. If you want a book to show you simple basics on how to learn to cook food as an adult who hasn't ever cooked, there are books for that. I liked The Four Hour Chef. Not everyone likes author Tim Ferriss's brash, self-promotional style, and in particular he seems to rub the "typical" tech-savvy, left-leaning mefite the wrong way (much like Malcolm Gladwell, whose name is also dirt here). But I like him, and I think he wrote a book that comes closest to giving you what you asked for. It might be worth checking out from a library. Whatever you do, making almost any sort of home-cooked food is going to be cheaper and more healthy than almost any sort of take-out food. You have made the right choice, and I wish you good luck, and good eating!
posted by seasparrow at 9:29 PM on August 6, 2016 [4 favorites]

Youtube is your friend. Think of a food you like to eat, say spagetti and meatballs, omelette, tuna salad sandwich etc. Then search for it on youtube using the term easy or simple.

Also I must recommend some books I've used. Clueless in the kitchen, a great book for a beginner of any age. How to cook without a book is also good for beginners. You shouldn't need to look up recipes in order to cook your meals. Get the technique down and then adjust the spices and sauces to change the taste.
posted by Coffeetyme at 9:59 PM on August 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Nigel Slater's 'Kitchen Diaries' series is actually pretty good for this: he's something of a celeb chef, but the diaries are him thinking out loud about what he fancies on a particular day, what he thinks is in season or looking good in a shop, and what he has the energy and time to cook. Some days he has something lazy, or the nicest sandwich he can wangle; some days it's a chicken on a bed of onion and garlic with a lemon jammed up its rear; some days it's a multi-course feast.

I see it as a three-stage process: you learn techniques that make things less hassle and you learn recipes that get you a decent meal and then you twig that there are continuities and easy swaps to get you between certain regional cuisines and then you're off.

You have to learn your own palate.
posted by holgate at 10:04 PM on August 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Unfortunately, cooking for one is an additional difficulty that is pretty hard to get around when you're just beginning. Most recipes are for at least two people and more likely four, and although an experienced home cook can be quite adept at adjusting recipes this way, it is harder than it might seem when you're really at a 101 level, and can get really frustrating.

So my main suggestion is to ask someone who you know can cook something delicious and ask them if you can come over and help them make it some time. Observe and ask questions and do the washing up. There will be at least one other person to eat the food, and if they're amenable to it you can cook other things with them and keep learning. (Offer to pay for the ingredients, of course!)

Those food box subscription services might work well for you, too, although you won't have a person there to ask questions and go on friendly tangents with. It might fit your lifestyle well, though, and you can do both, of course.

Around here, our local co-op grocery store chain, PCC, offers lots of one-off seasonal cooking classes at many of their locations. You might have a similar thing near you, check local and organic focused groceries and markets. I think Whole Foods also does some classes like that? Anyway that might be fun for you - pick a class based on what they're making in it, an ingredient you know you like like your favorite local seafood or a seasonal fruit or whatever, and learn to make one thing with it. You'll learn some techniques and probably more importantly gain some familiarity with being in a nice kitchen.

Everybody thinks different things pair well together, and everybody thinks different techniques are "basic" vs "not often needed". This all depends on what you want to cook. But since you really don't know what you want to cook, take some time to figure that out a bit. Think about your favorite restaurant foods and things cooked by friends and family. Are they often roasted? Steamed? Stews and soups and curries or maybe fried things or baked? Do you love red meat, or are you more of a seafood person? East Asian cooking techniques can be very different from European ones but they are no harder, just a bit more obscure sometimes. Do you love sandwiches? Making a really *good* sandwich is all about figuring out what flavor pairings and texture combinations you think are great, and it is definitely cooking. So basically, start paying attention to what you like to eat and then you can really get started on learning how to cook in a way that will benefit you.
posted by Mizu at 10:06 PM on August 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Get a copy of Mark Bittman's cookbook: How to Cook Everything: The Basics.

It's smaller than his bible How to Cook Everything which makes it less intimidating for a new cook, and it has lots of instructional pictures instead of just pretty pictures of food. It's also organized, loosely, from easiest to hardest, so you can start at the beginning and work your way through it. And Bittman takes the time to explain all sorts of things that other cookbooks assume you already know, which I find really helpful.
posted by colfax at 3:25 AM on August 7, 2016 [6 favorites]

Another vote for blue apron. My boyfriend, who never cooked, went from living off of frozen dinners to cooking dinner more or less from scratch every night. A major benefit of Blue Apron compared to YouTube videos or cookbooks, for him, was that because they send you the ingredients in the portions you need, you don't have to find an interesting recipe and then go out and buy an entire bottle of all the spices you need, and a whole pound of scallions. It really reduces our food waste.

For one person, you can get at least two meals out of each recipe, so while it's a bit expensive, I think it works out pretty well if you would normally be shopping at a place like Whole Foods, and you actually use all the food you purchase. And, then you know how to cook one main dish and two sides, and you can mix and match and use those techniques on different ingredients.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:15 AM on August 7, 2016

If you want an early boost to your confidence, try this super-easy chicken and mushroom dish. It is a good example of how a little bit of technique can turn simple ingredients into something truly delicious. He does a good job of explaining why he's doing what he's doing.

More generally, but related, if you don't already have one, get a quick-read meat thermometer. The best meat is neither under- nor over-cooked, and a thermometer removes the guesswork.

Another good and easy-to-try example of technique is this Jamie Oliver video of three different ways to make scrambled eggs. (My own favorite is the third example, which he calls American style.)
posted by Short Attention Sp at 5:52 AM on August 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

On cookbooks and recipies....

I think of cookbooks in three categories.

I. Encyclopedias of original or "best" versions of well known dishes. Think Joy of Cooking.
II. Compendiums of easier or quicker "get dinner on the table" recipes. We have an old Pillsbury cookbook that is like this, and I think there is at least one Betty Crocker cookbook that qualifies.
III. Cookbooks devoted to a single cuisine.

As a beginner, you should have at least on type II reference so if you are ever in a hurry to make hot fudge sauce for your ice cream, you're covered.

Also, any recipe connected to a brand name is likely to be on the easy side with fewer ingredients than the "traditional" version. Several recipes of this sort are in our usual rotation, for example, this one. Most major brands have web sites with recipes which make a good reference.
posted by SemiSalt at 6:23 AM on August 7, 2016

Another vote for one-off cooking classes. Where I live, there are quite a few chefs who offer them from time to time. A restaurant near me has had them recently for sushi and for making vegetable dishes, for a reasonable price that includes the resulting meal. Look for something like that. Some of them are in the actual restaurants and some are partnered with a food or housewares stores. They usually do cook a specific meal but the good ones make an effort to include things like knife skills, composing flavors, things like that.
posted by BibiRose at 8:18 AM on August 7, 2016

I went from basically zero cooking ability to cooking pretty well in the course of about a year. I really recommend just watching any one of the many Youtube channels focused on cooking; for me being able to watch people cook food was a huge gamechanger compared to reading recipes, because I hate measuring things and timing things, and recipes can often be very ambiguous or assume prior cooking knowledge. I just like getting a general sense for how much of something to put and how well cooked it should be, and that's what the videos do well. I think text recipes and cookbooks are basically only for people who already know how to cook.

Here are some channels I like:
Cooking with Dog - Japanese homestyle food
AhmetKocht - Turkish and European homestyle food, it has English subtitles
MaangChi - Korean food
Nyonya Cooking - Malaysian food
Pailin's kitchen - Thai food
There are tons and tons of channels like these, just search on Youtube for a recipe of the food you want to cook.

What I also did was focus on one cuisine that I really enjoyed, and couldn't find easily in restaurants (in my case, Central Asian food). If you focus on one cuisine, you find that you use the same ingredients over and over again, and you won't need to go to the store to buy random ingredients you'll never use again (which was something I hated about cooking before). Focusing on one cuisine, you'll also notice the same cooking techniques being used over and over again, and learning each new recipe will get progressively easier.

I personally recommend against Good Eats or the foodie focused stuff like Serious Eats. In my own experience, hearing people get into the complex scientific explanations of food and describe all these chemical reactions just intimidated me. I think they make cooking/food way more complicated than it needs to be. Also, they are often focused on foodies obsessed with getting one thing perfectly right, which is needlessly much work for someone just starting out.
posted by pravit at 9:28 AM on August 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

Also, purely for morale, I recommend Food Network's "Worst Cooks in America" - that's where I learned how to correctly dice an onion, but also it's a fun show and really neat to see people come in with *zero* skills and then pull off restaurant-quality meals by the end.
posted by restless_nomad at 9:45 AM on August 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

I suggest, while you are browsing for recipes, that you look for the type of things that reheat well. Leftovers have a bad image, but some dishes actually taste better on the 2nd or 3rd day, and not having to cook every single night will make it seem less of a chore. Bonus: the good reheaters also tend to be less demanding technically.

Good leftovers: soup, stew, curry, chile, pasta sauce (you can mix it with cooked pasta and store together, which keeps the pasta from gluing itself into a solid block), casseroles, and most stir-fries (which can be a little tricky, so maybe give these a pass for a while).

Bad leftovers: deep-fried things, pan-fried things (like hamburgers), fish (overcooks on reheating), grilled things. These tend to require more finesse from the cook anyway, so don't start here.

Have fun and good luck!
posted by Quietgal at 10:36 AM on August 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Other than cooking classes, you could maybe do a course at some nice place for a holiday?
One of my friends did these for some years in Sardinia (doesn't anymore, I'm sorry). But the basic concept was that you went to a lovely farm for a week, and during that week you learnt about the local cuisine. You'd go shopping, or foraging, or both. And then together with the instructor you would cook twice a day. He went through every step with his students, from cleaning the products to over knife skills and the difference between a simmer and a boil to presentation. It seemed like a very nice way of spending vacation time and people loved it.
It looked a little expensive but for obvious reasons it was all-inclusive, and I think at the end of the day, it evened out.
When this friend and I were learning to cook as young people, we would meet up a group of of 4-6 friends with a project. It could be to make a classic dish, or to make a theme dinner, and we'd always invite our other friends to share the results. So this was a home-made cooking course and two of my friends went on to become chefs. We kept on doing this for ages, in different configurations of friends, it's such a nice way to do things together. If there is nothing near you in terms of courses or evening school, this might be a solution?
posted by mumimor at 12:31 PM on August 7, 2016

If there is a Time Bank in the Orlando area, maybe check there for some one on one cooking lessons. The nice thing about finding someone locally is that they can talk about the best ingredients available in the area. I don't know how much this is emphasized in cooking classes, online, etc., but one of the most valuable skills I've learned in regards to cooking is how to recognize high quality ingredients. If you start with good stuff, your technique is not so important---it will taste good! But if you start with crap, it doesn't matter how perfectly you execute, the dish will fall flat.

Another component that may be ignored (? or may seem uppity, snobbery....though it's not!) is how to eat and enjoy food. It's taken me a lot of practice to slow down and really taste, smell, feel food...which gives crucial feedback I can use to improve my cooking (or to give myself a high five for an amazing job done)! Good cooks always show this, "MMM! Just SMELL this [ingredient]!!" but I'm not sure how directly it's addressed as an important skill for new cooks to cultivate. And that's what it is, a skill, which can be learned and practiced.
posted by hannahelastic at 6:59 AM on August 9, 2016