93 - Cookbooks for Noobs 👨🍳👩🍳
Hey there, !
This one's for the n00b cooks like me, or if you're someone who likes cookbooks (?). If not, jump afterwards - there are some fun links to read :D
Anyway, for people who are starting their cooking journey - Welcome! - you've come to the right place. I have a bunch of recommendations about starter cookbooks that are written JUST FOR YOU (i.e. me, being a nerdy engineering type wanting to know things about cooking before actually just doing it).
1.
The Problem
I wanted to outline up front what the problem I had with cooking was for the longest time, as it might not be the case for you, in which case you can stop reading. It's a problem that I still have with baking - which was that, I didn't know how my inputs would affect the outputs. What happens if I add this lemon in here? Or this bay leaf? Or Shaoxing wine? I don't understand why we put all these things together (soy sauce, sugar, corn flour) and then just use that sauce on like...everything. Why? How does it work?
Every time we would cook meat, for example, people would say 'pork chops are 6 mins one side, 2 mins the other side' but...okay, what if it's bigger? Smaller? What should I be looking out for?
When I make chicken, how do I know if it's done in the oven? Can you just see it? I've had enough undercooked AND overcooked chicken to know that it ain't that easy to know.
Vegies sucked - I would just like...boil them. Or steam them. Which, yeah, it's healthy, but sometimes you get that like...plasticky texture - why?! How can you fix it? When my soup is too...not working - how do I fix that? What should I do!?
So...you see that I'm quite a 'I want to know why' type of guy, rather than a 'just do it and see what happens' guy. Like I've said before, it's something I'm working on.
tl;dr - I needed a way to understand how my actions would affect the food, and make it so that I would enjoy the process of cooking.
2.
The Solution
So I did all the research, selected a few books, bought them, read them, and are the ones that I can personally recommend people who had the same problem as me (because I went through them cover to cover, and can validate that it solved my problem :D).
There are a few good recommendations that I haven't looked into yet - e.g. On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee (I actually just got this after writing this post - it's like a freaking TEXTBOOK so I do not recommend it...yet. Will let you know after I've finished reading :D), New Complete Techniques by Jacques Pepin and The Flavour Bible by Karen Page...I'm sure I'll get around to them one day!
The Holy Trinity
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Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat
Most cookbooks are lists of recipes, with a list of ingredients on one side, a list of bullet points with relatively arbitrary timing and action points, and then a fancy picture on the side to show you what you should aim for (but will often fail at). Often you won't have the right dish, or pot, or you're missing one or two items. What do you do?!
Luckily, Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is set out like a teaching cookbook. Half the book details out the titular components of great food - what salt can do, what fat can do, what acid can do, and what heat can do. It's a framework for how to break down a recipe, understand why it's delicious, how it can be balanced, and improvise as required.
Don't have lemon? What other acids do you have that you can use? When should you be introducing salt to your meat? Why? What vegies can benefit from being blanched in salted water? How does it work? How does fat help a dish? What kinds of fat are there? What type of heat are you using for this food, and why?
It's a wonderfully simple way to think about cooking- which you can then adapt to recipes that you read online, or see on videos. The key thing is that you can just throw whatever you have together, and understand how to balance it in a way that is delicious!
The other half of the book has a bunch of recipes that are described as 'exercises' in using each component - it's not comprehensive, but it doesn't have to be. With the tools that you have at your disposal from the first half of the book, you can understand why you're doing things, and what will help you make great food.
It's my gold standard for cookbooks. The watercolour pictures are used specifically so that you don't anchor your mind on what the dish should look like (though, see below for where I think it can actually be kinda helpful...). I know there's a Netflix special as well, but the book goes in to way deeper detail about how and why you should use things. If you're only getting one thing - get this!!
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Ruhlman's Twenty by Michael Ruhlman
Ruhlman's Twenty is like Salt Fat Acid Heat, but it's for twenty different elements of cooking. Those are: Think, Salt, Water, Onion, Acid, Egg, Butter, Dough, Batter, Sugar, Sauce, Vinaigrette, Soup, Saute, Roast, Braise, Poach, Grill, Fry, Chill. There's a lot of overlap in terms of the frameworks from the above, which is why it's a number 2 for me.
I will say - the Onion chapter gave me a great understanding on onions as an ingredient (almost...too much), and the Sugar chapter gave me a ton of new ways to think about sugar in my meals.
But the biggest thing I remember from this was the Think chapter. It's only like...3 pages, and the tl;dr is mise en place, but it was very impactful for me. It's about thinking about everything you're about to do, before you do it - thinking through how you're going to prep your ingredients, what you need to do at what time, how you need to do it, and the timing for when it'll hit the table. When you're in the midst of starting to cook stuff, timings can shift so quickly - you just won't have time to think about these things any more, and you'll become less efficient at what you're trying to do.
He also wrote a great book called Ratio which contends that there are a bunch of recipes which you just need to remember ratios for, rather than remembering the actual recipe itself. I haven't got this one yet but it's on the (increasingly long) list!
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The Food Lab by J. Kenji López-Alt
I love anyone that puts an experimental mind to things, and J Kenji Lopez-Alt is extremely comprehensive in his food science, but broken down in a Mythbusters type way. He goes through a variety of different cooking techniques and methods, but shows you exactly what he was thinking to try and understand the technique, the experiment he did to test it, and then the results. It has charts, graphs, tables - but not overwhelmingly so - an absolute DREAM of a book! Some examples of these include:
- How long should you cook an egg for? (depends what you want, but he has a scientific method and diagram for replication)
- Does it matter if you flip your steak more than once? (no, but give it a minute each side as you cook and use a thermometer to check done-ness)
- Should you salt your eggs before you scramble them? (yes, but 10mins of salting is enough)
- Dry / wet brines for chicken - how? (with 6% salt by weight, but dry-brining is nearly as good in terms of juice retained)
One thing I appreciated most about his cookbook was knife skills that he shows in really simple, easy steps that are photographed clearly in the book. It helps you understand what you should be cutting, or how, and it's a really useful resource for someone who just...never really got it.
He also has an entire, comprehensive chapter on the key tools you need in your kitchen which I was so close to skipping because by gods it was long. But now I have a thermometer, a sharp knife and two cast iron pans, so really, who's laughing now (me. and him. probably).
He also does a lot of YouTube videos showing how easy it is to do certain recipes, based on his home kitchen (which were pretty fun to watch over lockdown!). They're deliberately natural so you can see exactly what he does at every step, rather than have something fully prepared to show off.
The book is chockers full of recipes - so if you like that, this is the one for you.
I will say though, that you have to really sit down and read this book - it's not just a framework that you can use to improvise your dishes and balance them as required. It's a labour of love, a book of scientific experiments that he's tried to make as replicable as possible.
Honorable mention: Just a French Guy Cooking by Alex Ainouz
- Shout out to Laura F for getting this for me - I hadn't heard of this guy before but he's just like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt - he puts a curious mindset towards cooking and tries things out, showing you the results of his work in video form. He released a cookbook, which has a bunch of his hard-won techniques and experiments, and the recipes that have come from it.
- However, if you jump on to his YouTube channel, you'll find he's doing some really cool stuff all the time. He learnt and practiced how to rapidly chop an onion, he learnt how to make a PERFECT omelette, and just recently he's looking into wok techniques, and learning from the masters! Really cool stuff :D
3.
Other great resources
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Bon Appetit - yes, it sucks and you shouldn't really support them / can you really separate the art from the artist - but these were incredibly helpful in showing me how easy and simple cooking can be - the natural, easy part of it that shouldn't be stressful, shouldn't be hard, and shouldn't be overwhelming. The techniques were simple, repeatable, and presented in a really engaging way. It's a shame what happened (and I haven't really been back to watch any new vids) but I'm still thankful for the recipes I did watch!
They also have a great spinoff website called Basically which is like...cooking for beginners as well. They have a lot of really cool innovations like putting gifs as method steps, making sure they have a lot of pictures and visuals for the tools and ingredients you need, and making sure that the recipes don't use too many ingredients. Great resources for noobs :D
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Your parents - once you've mastered a little more of the basics, you'll be able to understand why some tried and true recipes from your parents have been passed down the ages, and why they're so delicious. The previous way I was being taught by dad was just 'observe and try to learn from that' but I didn't really retain any of it because I didn't actually understand what was happening.
How much soy sauce? Oh...you just know. How much salt? Just...y'know...enough. >_____>
But once you have a grasp of the basics, it makes a lot more sense about what you want to happen, and how you can change things to make that occur. The balance doesn't seem right because it's too rich? Find something acidic. It's not flavourful enough? Try add some salt - see what happens.
The sauces that they make, or the techniques that they use are born from testing and learning, but coupled with an understanding of why they're great - you're unstoppable.
At least, that's what I tell myself ;)
4.
Books I have not bought but look great because of the vibe
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Nothing Fancy by Alison Roman - I love the vibe of this book because the theme of the book is hosting dinner parties that are low-key, low-stress and low-fuss. Get the guests to help you prep things. Make things ahead of time. Drink some wine, fuck some stuff up and order pizza - just spend time with other people; that's what it's all about. Saturday Night Pasta by Elizabeth Hewson also has this vibe - it's supposed to be relaxing, not a stressful endeavour
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Cook This Book by Molly Baz - a Bon Appetit chef who left the organisation; she was great at chunking down recipes to their simplest parts, and showing you how they could be done super easily. I have watched her video on making mushroom carbonara so many times - she makes it seem low-stress and easy, which I love. The book also has QR codes which show you quick techniques, which apparently is a cool new feature, but I haven't tried it so shrug.
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Soy Sauce, Sugar, Mirin by Harvard Wang - a lot of the recipes above aren't really Asian-based food. It was a bit of an undertaking to break down Asian recipes that my parents were making into the component parts I was learning above, but we got there. I saw this book on subtle asian cooking on FB - it's a Melbourne based photographer who wrote a lockdown book on Asian cooking, using a similar framework style to Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. I'm gonna get it some time to see what it's all about! Another Asian-inspired one I want to read is To Asia, With Love by Hetty McKinnon, an Asian-Australian who usually makes salad dishes but has ventured back into Asian cooking. Love love love it!
Chat soon :)
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✔️ Real Life Recommendations
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Off Menu - (recommended by Eelaine!) - a podcast by comedians James Acaster and Ed Gamble who ask a guest to detail out their perfect starter, main, side dish, drink and dessert...it doesn't necessarily have to match, but it's a really good way to start a conversation. It's a hilarious podcast and idea - I love that literally anyone can talk about food, the things they like and dislike, and have a lot of memory that's associated with food as well. An episode with Kumail Nanjiani brings up a bunch of childhood memories about grandma's biryani, and a great story about finding him sitting in the pot!
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I'm Okay With Anything - technically not a real life recommendation, but great find - Ronny Chieng set up this website when you're surrounded by people who say they're 'okay with anything'. It's Melbourne based I believe - a few years out of date, but still has some good recommends. Take a look!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Fields of Watermelons Found on Mars, Police Say - say what now?? A fascinating article ;) probably a bug, but imagine if it was REAL
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Revealed: seafood fraud happening on a vast global scale - nearly 40% of 9,000 products from restaurants, markets and fishmongers were mislabelled! A lot of them are harmless (a Japanese scallop being named a King scallop), but some are more sinister (prawn balls in Japan having traces of pork, or no traces of prawn at all).
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The Endless Work of Winning Yourself a New Life - welcome to the world of 'sweepers', continuously hustling to try and win one of those massive sweepstakes. It just takes time, and effort - a bit of a side hustle like you might do on FB Marketplace ;)
Nevertheless, the sweepers persist. Perhaps they can squeeze something for themselves out of those corporate marketing budgets. Perhaps they’ll be the lucky ones. Their sacrifices—time, attention, data—are costly, and yet they make them still, hoping that a little bit of capitalism’s excess will fall into their laps.