A few publications have also made serious investments in teaching the fundamentals (though all of them mix in somewhat fussier recipes with the true basics): the New York Times’s How to Cook the Washington Post’s round-up of recipes and techniques the LA Times’s ongoing recipe series How to Boil Water Bon Appetit’s Basically vertical and Serious Eats’ coronavirus cooking guide. A good rule of thumb is to use recipes from publications with test kitchens and bloggers who have proven the test of time, though you may have to pay for those recipes. The internet is chock full of free recipes and advice, but the cooking internet stuffers from misinformation as much as any other. Oil plus salt plus fire is as basic as cooking gets, and if you have those things and something you can cook, you have a meal. Undersalting will make things taste flat and disappointing, but you can still eat them. Only a few things will utterly wreck a non-baked good: burning it, undercooking it, oversalting it, or, in certain cases, depriving it of moisture. There’s been a run on garlic? Your tomato sauce will lack some pleasure, but it will still be tomato sauce. Every recipe not written during World War II or in spring 2020 assumes a certain American bourgeois abundance. Almost every mysterious recipe term has been clearly defined online now.ĭo your best as a beginner to follow the recipe, but also give yourself permission to deviate if the current situation means you don’t have an ingredient or piece of equipment on hand. If there’s a term you don’t understand, google it. Read the ingredients list too! It tells a story, and all too often hides some of the prep, like chopping onions or grating cheese or even entire sub-recipes (maybe skip anything with sub-recipes). That’s because even if it feels like kind of a cop move to read and follow the recipe, actually doing so removes much of the stress you might associate with cooking - which often happens when the pan is searing hot and you realize you need soy sauce right that second. How to Read (and Pick) a RecipeĮvery guide like this starts out with the same advice: Read the recipe all the way to the end before you start cooking anything. Beans on tortillas or over some toasted stale bread? Dinner once a week for me. Rice and an egg and maybe some kimchi from the back of your fridge? Delicious. Chicken thighs roasted with salt and olive oil, alongside some root vegetables cooked in the same pan? Highlight of the week. That was true before we were sheltering in place and limiting our grocery outings to the bare minimum, and now it’s essential. The most important thing about learning how to cook is to resist perfectionism and redefine what a home-cooked meal is. Think of it as a roadmap to kitchen competence, a few pages from the grammar manual of home cooking from the dialect I speak. With that spirit in mind, I’ve put together a series of recipes, and notes on recipes, that get really, really basic. I sometimes feel embarrassed that I haven’t moved on from roasting chickens and simmering beans, but right now, basic-ness isn’t a crutch - it’s useful. I’ve been cooking at home for a decade now, and to be honest, I’m still pretty basic. All that emphasis on aspiration and perfection made it way too hard to get started. But back when I barely knew how to boil water, recipes telling me which tweak or technique yielded ideal results made turning on the oven feel high stakes. As someone who now knows how to cook, I love reading about a hack for cooking short ribs or a surprising use for my rice cooker. The rewards and demands of social media virality have only supercharged recipes’ emphasis on novelty and visual beauty. Instead, they assume the cook is already competent and looking to level up or add another dish to their repertoire. When I taught myself to cook at home, I immediately discovered most recipes aren’t written for anxious beginners. Then, when we became adults, time and money were scarcer still, and restaurants became the places we gathered with our friends. There are more of us than you might think: Younger Americans grew up in a system awash in convenience foods, while our parents were working longer and harder and had less and less time to cook.
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