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How did you learn to cook?
How did you learn to cook? Who taught you? What factors were important? Looking back, what do you think could have been better?
Or, if you're learning to cook: how is it going? What are you finding tricky? Is it easy to find teaching resources?
Mom taught me the basics (which vegetables become softer the soonest, how to rid a pepper of seeds, how to "clean" a chicken), everything else just went on from there. I started reading about it and watching some videos about basic concepts, such as how to manage fonds, pan sauces, proper meat temperatures...
My picks for videos were Marco Pierre White, Alton Brown, Adam Ragusea and Kenji Lopez-Alt for the most part, especially because they have a "scientific" approach to it, explaining why things are done rather than just telling you to do it. That way, you understand what you're doing and how you can adapt a recipe to your tastes.
I read "Salt Fat Acid Heat" and plenty of other books that focus on the "whys" of cooking, but "Salt Fat Acid Heat" has to be the one I reference the most.
However, the most important thing that I was taught, by my mom, early on, is patience. A lot of dishes just don't end up well if you rush it, use higher temperatures than supposed to, and so on. Some mistakes in cooking can be fixed just by "cooking it off" or waiting, especially with sauces, soups and in some particular cases, meats. In the beginning, I burnt some pancetta ends and ended up undercooking chicken breasts by not using lower temperatures.
The second thing that I learnt that I apply to most cooking, is that alcohol solves a lot of issues. Balsamic vinegar (even the cheap imitation ones) brightens up sauces that cooked for too long, wines/cognacs/vinegar deglaze pan fonds and help you manage the thin line between a lovely golden crust and burnt fond, white wines bring a degree of refreshment to "summery" dishes that is simply unbelievable, and above all, if you are patient, you're able to rid cheap vinegars and wines of their acidness/sourness by cooking them. This is why I avoid applying alcohol over the item that is being cooked. Instead, I follow the perimeter of the pan so it can seep underneath and cook off.
To your point about adding alcohol around the perimeter of the pan, if you're doing a stir fry, that's the proper way to add liquids in general. Soy sauce in particular develops some lovely flavors when added around the outside of the pan so some of the water instantly flashes into steam.
no doubt about it ;)
So I'm an early Gen X'er, and was one of the "latchkey kids". My mother had a horrible work schedule, my dad liked food but rarely cooked (mostly meat). Home-cooked food was usually throw-it-on-the-table sheet pan or one-pot dinners, made with exhaustion and anger. Occasionally, there'd be holiday and party trick dishes - fancier rolls, cakes, roasts, or sides that my mother kept to herself in the kitchen. We got carryout or ate in restaurants pretty often, so I had some sense that there was a world of cooking outside what I could taste at home.
We had some fruit trees and berries, so I learned to make jellies, jam, applesauce, and pie filling. As far as feeding myself when the folks weren't home, I could make sandwiches, boil oatmeal, cook boxed pasta and canned soups, scramble eggs or make omelettes, and cut up vegetables to put a salad together. We still had a couple of Home Ec classes in school, so I could bake cookies and box-mix cakes. But not much else until I moved out.
I lived in a vegetarian group house in college, so I cooked basic legumes, grains, pasta, and vegetables with my housemates. We were always broke and frugality was our ethos, so I learned how to salvage bruised or half-rotten produce, plan around bulk co-op purchases, cook for a dozen people at a time, make basic vegetable stocks, and preserve food. We put a lot of effort into seasonings to make cheap eats tasty, so that's when my knowledge of spices took off. We were mainly inspired by Indian and Japanese Buddhist cuisines, due to the variety of vegetarian dishes and college-town ingredients available.
That's when I got curious and started to dig into cookbooks more. Studying chemistry, it seemed like the distance between a lab prep and a recipe wasn't insurmountable, so I experimented with more ambitious dishes. I had to realize that cooking ingredients aren't lab reagents - size, ripeness, moisture/fat/gluten, etc. content are all variable, and you won't get the same results with the "same" materials every time.
When I got a decently paying job, I moved to an apartment with a few carnivore friends. That started me on meat cooking. Roasting a chicken, making pot roast, or stir-frying pork started me down the rabbit hole of classical and global cooking techniques. I also learned about dealing with a crappy apartment electric stove, after the commercial gas range in the group house.
Since then, it was continuous exploration and practice. I started and stopped a few different careers. My first round of IT burnout happened to coincide with the publication of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. With that inspiration, and spouse's encouragement/Dot Com bubble money, I quit my job and went to culinary school.
I was totally unprepared for the degree of technical mastery and speed required for commercial cooking, as well as the pathologies of professional kitchen culture. I broke down in tears more than once. Nonetheless, everything I learned there has served me well in every career since. The level of organization, discipline, precision, preparedness, and practice required for smoothly operating kitchens is extraordinary. You are 100% responsible for, and expected to be in control of, the outcome of your efforts.
No cookbook will teach you these things - it's purely experiential learning. Working in a pro kitchen is part ballet and part jazz. You develop a proprioceptive sixth sense - where someone is moving hot pans behind you, what a smooth rhythm of prep, fire, plating feels like, how much time expires before you need to check doneness. You learn to use all your senses - what doneness looks like, smells like, sounds like, feels like, tastes like. It's an all-encompassing, sometimes overwhelming experience, seasoned with verbal and (fortunately rarely) physical violence.
At that time, I also learned the performance arts of plating, table service, and beverage pairing. Again, restaurant world is a realm apart from home cooking. It's a business, so every choice has to be justified in the bottom line - food, time, rent, and other costs make or break the restaurant. As an example, our butchery instructor patiently explained to us how to portion and prepare a $5 whole chicken as $100 worth of dishes.
Restaurant cuisine is also a competitive art form, so every aspect of performing service has to be considered: decor, napery, plates, cutlery, glassware, uniforms, frequency and language of waiting on the table, menu verbiage, timing of foods, pairings...
I ultimately spent 7 years working in a patisserie café. We did catered pastries, wedding and event cakes, and special orders in addition to the bakery case. I loved the predictable routines, kitchen cameraderie, the play with new preparations on slower days and the rat-a-tat rhythm of the busy periods. But at the end, it's incredibly demanding physical work for meagre pay. You're lifting 80 - 100 lbs. dozens of times a day, constantly standing, alternately freezing or broiling, with hands often cramped for hours doing intricate decorations. A career in food service is best started and wrapped up while you're very young, and I wasn't that.
I still break out those skills for fun now and then, but my home cooking now is mainly for the pleasure of eating good daily meals. Spouse and I trade off meal prep, making batches of recipes we think will be healthy and pleasing enough to eat for a few days, or freeze and pull out when we're tired. We've both got big enough repertoires that we rarely eat the same things twice. We've got space now for a garden, so there's also the delight of using what I've grown, fresh to the table or put up for winter.
I'm wondering, did you get back to tech? What's your current career?
Yes, I've been back in various tech roles for the past 15 years. Currently, I think of myself as semi-retired, mostly 9 - 5 with a little onsite travel. I'm doing application-specific work in a healthcare niche that uses a variety of skills. Still having fun.
I learned to cook through a lot of trial and error. These days, it’s going pretty good, and I cook well, but it didn’t start out that way.
Growing up, we weren’t allowed to cook. I tried a couple of times because I was hungry for something specific like pancakes, and my parents weren’t early risers. I got in trouble for cooking while my parents were asleep, and I understand why that could have gone so bad, but as a result I knew how to cook nothing when I moved out in the late ‘90’s.
I picked up a couple of cookbooks from the library, and tried to cook things I liked. Cakes and food were a little on the ugly side, but they tasted good. I kept trying to cook meals, and got much better at it. I was burning less food, things were more consistent and I started enjoying it too. There were still oopsies like the first Thanksgiving Turkey I cooked that I didn’t thaw long enough, and some burned hamburgers, but I could make dinner and feed everyone.
Fast forward a couple of years, I’m switching channels and I come across a show called Good Eats. The show made me laugh but it also tackled the science of why we were doing these things to the food, and it fascinated me. I learned so much from that show. It ignited a passion for cooking in me. No more boxed meals, cool whip, or inferior ingredients. I learned how to handle ingredients properly and make them into the meal.
Now, I garden and grow a lot of what makes it into our meals. Learning about good food inspired me to take it to the next level and garden, seek out local meat, and cook great things. So while cookbooks from the library started me on my journey, I think Good Eats took me down the path I ended up on. Eternally grateful for that show, and I still cook Alton Brown’s turkey every year at Thanksgiving.
I can relate to a lot of this. A lot of my learning was also trial by fire(alarm) - no actual fires just figuring out how not to burn food :)
When I was in high school I became vegetarian for a while. Folks bought me the foods I asked for but told me: they would make whatever they were going to make. If I didn't want to eat it, no problem, but it was my responsibility to make what I did want. Maybe it sounds a bit harsh, but it set me on a pretty independent path early on and I got a lot of my cooking mistakes out of the way pretty fast. I had a little experience in cooking and baking with grandparents and other family members, and combined that with cookbooks and the early internet.
Many of my best social memories from university involved staying in and cooking with friends, which really helped me expand my knowledge and repertoire. At one point around that time, I would buy a 'new' (to me) veggie each time I went grocery shopping just to force myself to figure out how to cook with it.
I also garden a lot now. I don't have the time or climate to grow most of my veggies (and every year I feel like I discover a new way to fail something!), but I am pretty pleased that at least I'm able to can enough tomatoes to last us through most of the year :) As a next step, I've dipped into foraging and mushroom identification, which is its own adventure.
I find it odd that your parents never let you cook. Not allowing a young kid to cook unsupervised is totally understandable, but letting your kid enter adulthood not knowing how to cook seems pretty extreme.
As for me, my mom taught me how to cook. Supervised only until I was tall enough to reach everything in the kitchen without being at high risk of knocking into things or knocking something down (so maybe 11 years old). Once I reached an appropriate height, my mom let me go wild and make whatever I wanted. I would tell her what I wanted to make and she would by me the ingredients and explain the recipe and I'd go at it while she sat in the other room and relaxed. Once we got internet I would find new recipes to make. Sometimes I would just make up some dish with whatever ingredients were on hand. Sometimes the result was tasty, sometimes... not. But it was fun and good practice for learning to become a better cook.
Unfortunately I hardly cook any more, mostly because I'm lazy, but I thank my mom for giving me the skills to whip something up any time I want to. That being said I'm not a great cook or anything but I'm good enough for me or any close friends/family who might want a bite to eat.
I learned a bit from my mother. We had a Rayburn - ours had a single hotplate but otherwise looked like this. It provided most of the heating for our home[1] and my "job" was to chop wood. We didn't do much with it, mostly slow-cooked stews and casseroles. But we couldn't afford much meat, we'd be eating rabbits[2] that my Uncle shot.
We also had an electric cooker with coiled elements and that's what most of the cooking was done with. My mother did a lot of baking so I learned a lot of pastry and pie making from her.
At school I did "Home Economics" and that taught a bit of nutrition, a bit of recipe planning, and had a heavy practical element of preparing and cooking a bunch of stuff.
I kept that up when I left home - people gave me recipe books, I cooked for flatmates and friends and they gave feedback, and I built up a set of recipes and techniques.
I very slowly built up my equipment, and continued learning.
I'm at the point where I'm comfortable with my level. (I'm a reasonably good home cook, I'm not going to poison anyone, and I can put together something from the stuff I have in the fridge or cupboards). I have the equipment I need (looking to get an immersion blender, and some pans).
And now I'm passing on some of these skills to my child. Fair to say they're much more interested in eating the food than cooking it, so I'm not pushing the preparation. I've started asking about taste, texture, contrasts, and giving them things to compare. eg Here's a slice of tomato with no salt, and here's a slice with salt, taste the difference.
[1] I was chopping wood for our home (the rayburn and a fireplace in the sitting room (and that fireplace had a back-burner which heated water)); and our elderly neighbours, and a nearby relative. So I spent a lot of my time with an axe splitting and stacking logs. Long term weather forecasts were pretty bad, and you didn't really know how bad winter was going to be, so you'd want to build up a good stock pile of wood. By stacking I mean "throwing into a pile" - this allows wind to move through the pile and helps dry the logs out a bit more. The wood was under cover so I wasn't worried too much about rain.
[2] We had a pet rabbit, and so the family told me and my younger sister that the things we were eating were "spring chicken". The gig was up when we noticed the surplus of leg and absence of wings. Also, don't lie to children, and don't lie to people about the food they're eating. It's a terrible thing to do.
Completely OT: Ok, that sounds like either I completely misjudged either your age or the daily life in rural England? I had assumed for no particular reason you were 30-40 ish, and your bio puts you into England. So what gives? Grown up somewhere else, older, or am I just wrong about daily life in England in the ~90s?
Thinking about it a bit more, I conjecture that it's England I'm wrong about. I know English plumbing, heating, etc., is special, with lots of oddities still existing in current urban buildings that I would firmly assume would've been ripped out in the last century. So if you add to that 30 years or so of time passed, and throw in a bit more for rural England, I can actually imagine a wood oven as the only heat source. I'm in Germany, and my completely unfounded assumption is that I'd have to go about as far back as people born in '65 to find even rural people who remember that kind of heating. Which is not to say people don't still use wood ovens here, but that seems to be more of a frugalism/recreational thing, than a necessity.
Man, I probably look like some young whippersnapper for whom a floppy disk is just "the save symbol" right?
Hi! I'm 53. (Went to primary school in the 1970s and secondary school in the 1980s, left home in early 1990s). We lived in a small rural community. Dad had recently stopped working (as a social worker) and had started a business, and mother was working as a care assistant for someone where the pay was mostly "you get to live in this cottage". So, money was pretty tight. But, also, you're completely right about heating in English homes. A surprising number of homes are still stuck with night storage heating, or have radiators that don't have a good thermostat. And they're poorly insulated. It's a bit weird.
The cottage had night storage heating, which is terrible. For most of the year we burned wood because that was either free or cheap (apart from the labour of having to chop it), and we kept the coal / coke for the very cold winter where the extra heat was handy.
(Just for interest, here's a Google Map link to show the cottage - it's just about visible. That's two cottages, semi-detached.)
Ok, wow, that is very rural.
Yeah, I've had the pleasure of staying in an urban semi-detached english house not too long ago, and the stuff you guys build... Kitchen drain goes through the wall, and on the outside there's a visible PVC pipe that takes it around the corner, where there's a storm drain, and the pipe ends just above that. Wild. Cue standing outside in the winter with a hair dryer to unfreeze your kitchen sink drain. Or there'll just be rooms that have no radiator at all. Well, at least I haven't seen a squat toilet over there yet.
I've always cooked, but I didn't really get good / into it until my 30s. Keller's Masterclass was all about 'tools of refinement' and that got me on that whole track. Add that to getting into plating etc on top of normal improvements with technique and stuff and its been on the up and up ever since.
Keller's Masterclass isn't a must-see. You can cover a lot of ground with chopsticks and everything in squeeze bottles.
A mix between Boy Scouts and my mom having me cook. When I got to college I was fine cooking for myself, and I got really into varied things I could do with it despite having a shitty kitchen. I've learned more from the internet in the years since, since there are a lot of non-US recipes that I wouldn't usually be exposed to naturally, there.
I think my big shift was beginning to cook on cast iron, which made me think more about the functional effects of oil and heat in cooking. That, and cooking for other people - it makes you realize how subjective your own taste is, and what you're bad at tasting. A lot of rules I didn't see the point in aren't pointless - they just don't make an impact that I can discern. Other people, though...
From age 10 my parents had me make dinner once a week. I could make whatever I wanted (within a non-ginormous budget), but had to make it from scratch (barring like making pasta, but having to make sauces etc. myself.).
We ate a lot of weird dinners the first years, but gradually, you learn to make dishes you like, and that others don't hate.
I wish I'd started baking deserts earlier to get more failures out of the way when I had time. Now when I bake, I want success since it's not something I do very often. That means I'm much less creative than I could have been.
In my experience, baking is a much less creative endeavor than cooking - as someone who's got the inverse track record of you, more experience baking than cooking. With cooking, you can vary recipes up a lot before you walk into failure territory - most things are forgiving technique-wise, and only very unfortunate flavor combinations will get you into hot water. Baking technique is, by necessity, much more restrictive. Change quantities up a bit and you might end up with a batter that doesn't hold its shape, that kinda thing. You need a lot of experience to form a predictive model of what your nontrivial changes will do to the chemistry involved, and some experience to figure out what even is a trivial change. Even messing with the quantities of flavor compounds can have unintended consequences. Meanwhile in cooking, the chemistry will probably work out, save for a few pitfalls like too much acid in a creamy sauce, so you get to focus on the part where creative expression is fun: The flavors.
Former chemist and pastry cook weighing in here. Baking doesn't have to be less creative than cooking. What you can do with baked materials is more like architecture or sculpture than a cooked dish which is finished of itself.
Yes, there's a more limited range of functional ingredients for baking, and baking is more technically exacting. However, once you've mastered some techniques, there's a lot more room for play. Rise, density, crumb, tang, assembly - there's so much you can do with structure, texture, flavor, color, and mouthfeel to create a planned multisensory experience. That's not even counting the "cooked" components - icings, fillings, chocolaterie, fondant, pureés, etc.
Advanced baking isn't to everyone's taste. It's a never-ending journey of craftsmanship. Yet for me it's worth it because so many people take joy in the results.
Some breads/recipes are temperamental, but baking can be flexible too.
I have a muffins recipe I made that is almost impossible to mess up.
You can also substitute pretty much every ingredient and it'll turn out fine.
You can also reduce the sugar and make it savory.
You can also lower the temp and increase the time and bake it as a loaf.
Baking is an art as well as a science. The tolerances are tighter but if you're careful and know what you're doing you can still express yourself. I've messed up a lot of baking experiments but I've succeeded a lot too.
Oh certainly. There is room for messing about, some recipes are more forgiving than others. My thesis isn't that baking is uncreative; it's that it's less creative than cooking, for the aforementioned reasons. You generally need more experience to conquer less creative freedom than you would with cooking.
For anyone looking to dip into experimenting with baking, or using up random ingredients, I think I'd agree that muffins/loaves may be the most forgiving.
I tend to follow(..ish) recipes for most baking, but often make very liberal substitutions to muffins/loaves (to the point of making recipes unrecognizable), and they pretty much always turn out tasty with some type of nice texture.
Like many people in this thread I learned out of necessity. I did cook the occasional snack when I lived with my parents but not much beyond that. I moved out for university in 2020 (during the pandemic) so I had a lot of time at my apartment to learn new cooking things!
I particularly became interested in baking, all of this being self taught / from the internet.
I learned by myself. I started with instant noodles, boiling water was a stable and convenient medium for healthy cooking. From that I could e.g. make pasta, steam foods.
My cooking's on the simple side, mostly due to laziness. Usually boiling or in my air fryer, sometimes stir frying/searing/etc in my pan. I mostly figured things out by experimenting, observing and adjusting. I generally don't follow recipes strictly, mainly as a guide for cooking times and certain ingredient ratios (flour, milk, eggs, butter) A little overdone or a little too much of something is usually fine, and trying out different ingredients is always interesting. I'll usually be off the first time I make something in a long while.
More important are general principles like how you can control how much heat something gets (e.g. temperature of the pan, when it goes in the pan, how much water is also in the pan, how finely it's cut). It's also more interesting having somewhat varied cooking results, rather than getting it 'perfect' each time. (Maybe that's fine for me because my dishes are usually simple and harder to really screw up.)
Dinner yesterday was instant noodles. Lunch today was scrambled eggs with flatbread, dinner was yaki udon. Onions, tomatoes and bok choy went into all the meals, and eggs in both of today's. Cooking is also about figuring out what you can do with what you have on hand, this is the most fun part for me.
Do you find yourself enjoying cooking, or does it feel like a chore to you? I also choose to cook very simple dishes (usually dishes that only require one pot, etc) also due to laziness. I find myself dreading the cooking, and if it was cheaper I would honestly rather eat out everyday. The cleaning up afterwards alone sends shivers down my spine, if I'm being honest.
Depends on how I'm feeling on a given day. Some days I'm tired, upset, depressed etc. If I still decide to cook I'll usually make simple comfort food. e.g. korean style instant noodles, canned soup, toss something in the airfryer and just eat that with bread/crackers, etc. Sometimes I just want to take a slow relaxing day, that's a good time to make something more involved like a pie, or try a cooking experiment.
I also usually stick to just one pot and eat from that, or a pan + plate. The cooking part is fun, the prep and cleanup is pain (and procrastination lol).
If you're cooking for just yourself, you should absolutely do what's comfortable (and hopefully fun!) for you. That might mean no cooking at all (eating out). There's a whole bunch of ways to reduce the number of steps needed to make good food. You can use ready to eat canned, vacuum sealed etc ingredients. There might be e.g. frozen mixed vegetables, platters in your supermarket so you don't need to prep each ingredient separately. And IMO making a sandwich or putting fruit, syrup etc in ice cream is cooking too. Once you're making food that you enjoy in a way that you're comfortable with, it gets easier to try more involved cooking.
I learned mostly by watching my dad. He’d explain what he was doing and why each step was important, and why this spice complemented that dish so well or why this herb could be replaced with that one in a pinch. He also watched a lot of cooking shows, as I did (and still do) once I was old enough to graduate past only watching cartoons. Once I started cooking myself there was a lot (and I mean A LOT) of backseat cooking from him - it was bloody infuriating at the time but it helped me be a better cook; it also taught me not to backseat cook for other people unless they actually want my help!
There were some summer holidays where I had to study for a reparation exam (basically, failed maths last year and had to take an exam or repeat the class) and since my mum had forbidden me to use the computer, which is normally how I waste most of my time, I picked up cooking and playing the guitar. I did it by following recipes of dishes that seemed nice and the rest came with time.
Still love both.
Partially learnt how to cook out of necessity. When I moved out for my 3rd year of uni in 2021, I had to rely on my own cooking to survive as I didn’t have access to the dorm food hall nor my mom’s cooking like in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Also didn’t want to eat restaurant food all the time as that gets boring and expensive real quick. Just started haphazardly following recipes I’d found on YouTube and following package instructions for pasta/rice. I never cooked the most balanced meals but it got the job done. I wish I’d experimented a bit more with my cooking and tried to cook more balanced things. My diet was very protein and carb heavy as I usually ate chicken, bread, pasta, and rice. The only veggies I’d eat were those salad mixes every now and then, bell peppers, carrots, and the veggies in the fried rice I’d get weekly from the local Thai place.
I am still learning how to cook nowadays too. Finding it rather difficult as I currently live with my family. Very hard finding space in our fridge which is filled with my moms leftovers and ingredients, leaving not much room for stuff I want to put in there. The kitchen is also organized just how my mom likes it, which is very different from how I want it organized. As a result, it becomes pretty cumbersome to cook in the kitchen. I hope to move out at the beginning of next year so hopefully I learn to cook some simple, balanced, healthy meals that I like by then.
Watching my mum when I was a kid, then making food myself and learning from mistakes.
Learning how long individual ingredients take to cook is key, especially meat (to avoid food poisoning!). Once you know that you can plan the meal preparation knowing what has to be done when.
Moved to a new place for work, and had a furnished kitchen available. So I thought why not give this a try. Turned out cooking some basic stuffs for keeping myself fed is not very much difficult. It is more healthy and cheaper as well. Now I order foods weekly one day may be at max.
By doing and watching videos, like most things.
I found things I wanted to cook/bake, make it by the recipe once, and then experiment.
It's very derivative, you learn from others and improve yourself along the way.
I mostly learned to cook by necessity. My folks split up when I was younger, and I would live with one or the other, mostly my mom but for a few months when possible, with my dad. They both worked full time, tried to date, and frankly had substance problems... so if I didn't want to eat stuff from the microwave or instant ramen, then I had to learn to cook.
Before this forced independent streak, I'd always help my mom in the kitchen. She taught be the basics of chopping veggies, handling meats, sautee, and baking. Her seasoning skills weren't top notch, but I didn't figure that out for a long time. It was enough to make decent spaghetti and meatballs, other pasta dishes, stir fry, and to follow recipes in magazines or later online.
I turned out to really enjoy cooking, so when I turned 14 I got my first job as a prep/line cook at a place that did diner food in the day and fine dining in an attached structure in the evenings. Only ever got to prep for the fancy place, but I turned out omelets, benidicts, sandwiches, burgers, and various fried foods for the diner crowd every day for a little while.
Not long later I got a job as an electrician's apprentice and quit the restaurant, but I learned a lot in that short time. Since then I was always the cook in whatever place I lived and it's become a hobby/point of pride.
I would say the bulk of it came from taking some electives in high school for cooking and baking, but otherwise being self taught. Watching food and cooking TV growing up probably didn't hurt either! Emeril and Rachael Ray were solidly entertainment, but Alton Brown was definitely foundational for learning more technique wise. I definitely got support from my mom in buying ingredients or small help with things, but really only as I expressed an interest in it or asked rather than being shown.
There was a rule I my house growing up (GenX) that if you made dinner, you didn’t have to wash dishes. I was all over that and started cooking for the family often. I started by reading recipes out of my Mom’s excessive collection of cookbooks and just trying to do what it said. The Joy of Cooking will always have a special place in my heart because it has tons of general “About______” sections that basically teach you how to cook. Most of my ability for sure came through trial and error. Now, with the internet, I feel like anyone can make anything and it’s amazing!
I am an amazingly picky eater (some food allergies, some . . . I'm just weird), so when I headed out into the wide wonderful world of "adulthood" in 1994 I brought with me a 1976 Joy of Cooking cookbook and the actually ability to make 3 "real" foods (pizza, mac and cheese, and chicken parm), from there it was trial and error (my mom is a "good" cook, but she specialized in New England "Anglo cuisine" of which I'm not a huge fan of most of it).
Some of the key takeaways was in my BEQ there was a actual Filipino chef who was in the navy to get citizenship that introduced me to "spice" (and a scathing review of the things I could cook, learned a lot for him, have completely forgot his name in the ensuing 30 or so years). The next was street tacos in San Diego/Los Angles. which for a white boy who grew up in a New England farming town in the 80's was a slap in the face, pallete wise at least. The final was getting dragged kicking and screaming into indian and south east asian cuisine by my friends and roommates in LA.
When I finally moved back east, it was right as youtube was becoming a thing, and between Food Wishes and pirated Good Eats episodes I really learned a bunch of the fundamental techniques that I still use to this day to prepare much more . . . intricate dishes (I can do a really good beef wellington . . . I can't eat mushrooms so I do change up the ducelle but people really like it and it gets requested every Christmas . . . regardless if I'm actually going to be there or now). I have actually gone through the process of getting decent enough at making puff pastery dough . . . that I now buy it.
I now have a pretty huge repertoire of, mostly fusion type, dishes I can cook at a pretty high level. I do specialize in various pizza things, and baking in general (precision and repeatablity are things I value a lot).
I learned to read recipe books as a young kid because I was highly motivated to learn to bake and my mother helped me learn things like how to use measuring cups, preheating the oven, whipping to soft peaks etc.
As a teen, I was a latchkey kid, but my cooking was very basic, featuring spaghetti bolognese and instant ramen soup and scrambled eggs and toast. As an adult, I have slowly learned to cook what I like, but I'm older GenX and Youtube was not part of my learning process until fairly recently. I will never forget some early mistakes, like trying mashed potatoes and not being explicitly told to drain the water from the boiled potatoes before using the electric mixer. I ended up with potato soup lol.
I've moved out of my parents house 2 months ago, and the hardest part of living alone for me is learning how to cook. One of the things I have trouble is to know the amount of ingredients I need to use to cook a certain dish for me. It's all very new, but I guess that there is a lot of resources material on the internet to learn how to cook. My biggest problem would it be to get used to cook a lot more than I did when I lived with my parents.
Wasn't involved with cooking growing up, at college the most I got from my mom (she's a great cook, I just wasn't interesting at the time) was doing ramen with frozen meatballs, or scrambled eggs.
At some point in to living alone in my 20s I decided I should know how to actually cook, so I bought a copy of The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez and used that as a base, combined with recipes and Food Lab articles on Serious Eats.
That was the major introduction for me to all the big pieces of cooking: cooking meat, cooking vegetables, the composition of full meals, what the different parameters are and how they affect dishes, how flavours are built up in a dish, etc. I was following recipes very strictly, constantly referencing them while cooking to make sure I didn't diverge at any point.
Since then I've done a lot of cooking through different recipes, expanded my cookbook library, and have dabbled in a lot of different cuisines.
Over time I've built confidence in my ability and have tried to ween myself off of recipe checking, and trying to follow the recipes by memory instead. The latest thing I want to improve on is doing more with less, figuring out ways of cooking very quick and simple weekday meals with mostly freezer or pantry items. If I pick up a rotisserie chicken from the store one day in the week, I have ready-to-go meats for throwing in flavoured rice from my rice cooker, mix it with some frozen or pre-julienned from the store vegetables, add some sauces (either homemade or store-bought) from my fridge, and now I can get a pretty good and nutritious meal for what effort? A quick trip to the store? Some prep time during the week for making a sauce? Now I can use the bones from the rotisserie chicken for making stock, and keep some frozen cooked chicken meat on hand for another quick meal.
Recipes online tend to be pretty flashy and designed to get attention, but that can also mean they get complicated and require a lot of time and/or effort. I think the ultimate goal, and the next step I want to be very confident in, is being able to create good meals without needing in-depth instructions or even a plan. Being able to create a kitchen and pantry that lets you fall in to a pit of success and be able to whip together something from different parts. I'm not sure I'm fully there yet but its what I'm working on.
I did not learn how to cook, I was already great at cooking from the time I was born. /s
In all serious though see below.
I had learn through a combination of learning from my mom while growing up, home ed courses that was offered through my high school, and taking a cooking course for my original major in college, which was culinary arts, which I changed for a number of different of reasons.
The factors that I find important is your knife skills. The reason is that you do need to know the difference between the different cuts, how not to cut yourself while cutting, etc.
Try simple recipes first, you are not going to be making a beef Wellington right off the bat. Find resources like Sorted Foods and Preppy Kitchen off of YouTube. All Recipes can have some simple recipes from different cultures.
I watched my mum cooking occasionally when I was younger. I asked her questions as I got older if I got stuck when trying to recreate anything she did.
I use cooking websites and watch tutorials on YouTube too.
I also sometimes try to recreate something I really like in a restaurant sometimes.
I think it also helps when you live with someone as you try and make tasty food for them and that can push you to make even tastier food.
I had some very basic cooking skills from cooking and baking with mom as a kid. Stuff like scrambled eggs, spaghetti using dried pasta, jarred sauce and ground beef. I didn't really learn how to COOK cook until I married my husband, who is a chef. I think the most valuable lessons I learned from him were balance (sweet, salt, bitter, sour, savory/umami), proper prep (mise en place, having everything prepped beforehand, easy ways to cut and prep certain items like onions, a big squash or a mango, and also knife skills), and how to make pan sauces. That last one is oddly specific but I love that I know how to make a pan sauce.
Aside from that, I've also been learning Japanese and Korean cooking, which has taught me some new techniques in cooking I wasn't familiar with. I find that a lot of the dishes I'm learning require a lighter hand than say, making a marrow stock. Flavors often come from fermented or marinated items, like japanese sunomono or korean banchan, miso paste, gochujang and doenjang.
Learned a fair bit from parents in late elementary and middle schools. I always had roommates or partners who enjoyed sharing meals and could cook.
Cookbooks that focused on the necessary pantry for the cuisine made a big difference. For example, Every Grain of Rice by Fuchsia Dunlop and Vietnamese Home Cooking by Charles Phan.
The internet was a game changer with blogs, websites and videos on everything under the sun.
By necessity because eating inside is cheaper than eating outside and thanks to the internet. Started with easy recipes involving no more than one pot or pan and possibly a hand mixer, and then I expanded from there. I also found a series of Tumblr posts listing "depression recipes", dishes easy to cook when one isn't feeling great at all, yet nutritious.
I was shown how to fry an egg when I was 7. I've pretty much been left on my own to figure it out since then. I watched a lot of people cooking, but the actual cooking part I had to learn by trying to recreate what I've seen. It's been a long journey, but I'm cooking things without overcooking or over-seasoning more often now.
My family's home was your classic 1950s ranch house with one of those "efficient" kitchens where you only have to pivot in place to access the fridge, sink, oven, and stove. In practice, it was very cramped and not suitable for more than one person. I hated being in there, so I never learned to cook while I was growing up.
Once I moved out, I had to learn to cook through trial and error. I got a couple of cookbooks (such as "Starting Out"), which helped a lot, but I still messed up a lot at first. Due to being a poor student, I had few cooking supplies (for example, I had to do all of my stovetop cooking in a single saucepan my grandmother had given me) and I had to eat whatever I made or go hungry, so I had no choice but to fumble my way through and eventually learn how to cook. However, it also meant I couldn't afford to be adventurous, and I usually ate the same meals day after day.
Some years later, when I moved overseas to a tiny town, I really started to get more serious about cooking. There were so many flavors I missed from back home, so I started searching out recipes online and learning how to perfect them. Money was less of an issue for me by that point, so I could afford make mistakes and buy more cooking equipment, and thus I became more adventurous in chasing the dishes of my childhood.
There were a lot of screw-ups along the way. For example, almost all of my baking recipes kept coming out wrong until I discovered that tablespoons are sized differently in my old country compared to my new country. And there was a fair bit of trial and error with selecting ingredients, because there were differences in the products available. For example, in my new country, "cornstarch" is called "cornflour", but not everything labelled "cornflour" is actually cornstarch; it could be actual corn flour or even wheat flour. And some products were not available at all and required me to experiment to find a substitute.
I still wouldn't say I'm a great cook or that I love cooking. I do it for all three meals, every single day, because I otherwise don't have many good food options where I live. (The nearest town is a tourist hotspot, which means restaurants and takeout are very expensive and not very tasty. They are trying to lure in one-off customers, not repeat customers, so they reinvest their revenue into ambience rather than into quality ingredients and cooking skill.) As such, cooking is not an area that I can afford to sink a ton of time and energy, but I do try to make something interesting at least once a week.
We had a household with a very picky eater and also a lot of from the box dinners. Around 13 I got tired of the same five things, and started to cook for myself. Wasn’t anything healthy but was something.
In high school I’d have grilling parties or make a bunch of food for my buddies to come over and watch football.
Going out of college to living on my own I’ve moved into doing much healthier dishes, instead of party food. I have carried over smoking and grilling from those times however.
I see in this thread a lot of people talking about learning the science of cooking, that might be the next step I take. I see Salt Acid Fat Heat, any other book recommendations?
I've always been involved in the kitchen as long as I can remember as a child. I was allowed to use sharp knives at 3-4 years old without a second thought. My great-grandma would have me help her with anything she felt I could do in the kitchen while she did other stuff around the oven/stove. Eventually, my family just let me start cooking and doing things in the kitchen on my own. I think I was around 6.
It's always been the place I feel most comfortable at home (and it's no wonder I weigh so much!). Food has always been a part of my life and being in the kitchen is part of it.
Copied/learned from my mom and then eventually got confident enough to try recipes out on my own.
TV taught me how to cook. Ainsley Harriot, Anthony Worral-Thompson (via Can't Cook, Won't Cook on TV after school) and to a lesser extent, the incredible Keith Floyd.
My parents were post-war babies, both remember food rationing as children. It wasn't that they weren't interested in food, it's just they weren't very good at it. They cared about nutrition and they were ahead of their time in caring about sustainability but flavour was not high on their priority list. So when I was a teenager I learned to cook so I could have something other than plain grilled protein with boiled vegetables on the side. Since about age 13-14 I've cooked the majority of meals I've eaten - in student and shared houses I often cooked for everyone (in return for them doing the washing up, which I hate!)
I currently cook less than I used to because the still fairly new kid takes up a lot of my time and physical capability, but when I get the chance we cook together so he's going to grow up learning about sauces and seasoning and tasting while you cook and trying new things at every opportunity.
I grew up the oldest of a large family. Both parents cooked and baked a lot though they were of middling ability. Learned a lot of basic techniques from my mom. We also watched a lot of cooking shows, FoodTV was a staple. I'd say around 12 I started cooking on my own. Learned techniques and prep work that elevate a dish reading Jean-Fracoise Mallet and Julia Child. Prep is the step I think the majority of people overlook. Learning the correct way to prep veggies make a dish substantially better.
At this point I browse recipes for ideas but cook with a rough outline of the steps I need to keep in mind. I find baking much more technical and I follow those recipes exactly even if it's a recipe I've done many times. I'm not really a hobbyist cook or baker. I just enjoy doing it and people are generally excited to see what I bring. Guests rarely ask what I'm making for dinner with the expectation that it will be good whatever it is.
Gordon Ramsay's youtube videos pretty much. My parents would almost always feed us boxed food.
IT doesn't really matter any more though, because I eat soylent all the time.