Cooking is not so hard

Saturday, December 16, 2006

I've been cooking now for about a year and a half. I've gotten to the point I can reliably follow any recipe with good results. This is a very happy thing: when I cook, I impress my friends and even when I'm alone I have hellishly good leftovers. It's not that hard to get to this point, and I think anyone can do it. It just takes a little work.

First step, I took a few classes. I started out with a basic skills class at a local cooking school. It was a four session class, and about $60 a class. A hands on class, it went through a lot of the basics: it taught and showed you what various techniques were supposed to look like. It covered things like

• Basic knife skills: how to chop, slice, carve.
• Boning a chicken. I took the class to learn to do this.
• What sautéing, frying, roasting, broiling, poaching all looked like, and what you need to know to get it right
• Stocks! This is the cheapest way to get flavor.
• Handling vegetables and starches.

I also took a knife skills class to learn more about using a knife. This was a big help, since now I find it a lot easier to chop herbs, veggies, and everything else than I used to... now I only use a food processor if I really have a lot of things to chop. And I don't even consider buying those "timesaving" things you see on TV or in some cooking stores, because it's so fast to chop things with the knife.

After that, all you really need to know to cook is to have some good recipes and follow them closely. All you have to do is follow the steps.

Unfortunately, some recipes suck. Some cookbooks are not well tested, do not sufficiently explain techniques, or recommend things that simply don't taste good. (If the cookbook actually recommends cooking wine, throw it away.) If you want ones that are reliable, try the following sources:

• Cook's Illustrated. They have a magazine, website and a PBS show called America's Test Kitchen. They exhaustively test recipes so that they'll work every time and involve no more work than absolutely necessary for the flavor, and the articles describe what tradeoffs they made in the recipe. May not be to everyone's taste, but with the descriptions they give, each recipe is much easier to fit to your taste than otherwise.
I have the bound copies of the whole magazine, and they're the first thing I look for when making something new.
• Cookwise. The recipes are a bit shakier, but the book describes the science behind food so you make sure to get the right results every time.
• Cooking class recipes: They aren't as finely honed as the above choices, but you are shown how to use them so they tend to turn out very well.

Over the next few entries, I'll review a few cookbooks and say whether they're good or bad.

After you can follow recipes carefully, there's nothing you can't do. All you need is a bit of practice.

Copyright © 2006 by Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>