Culinary Theory?
Is there a "theory of cooking"? I'm interested in learning to cook (but could not spend much time learning it unfortunately), but I don't like the general ad-hoc and very subjective nature of recipes. Also, information is very disorganised, it's dispersed in many resources, most hardly accessible. I always thought that there should be a general set of theories when preparing food, like what sort of ingredient does what, how things react when mixed together at different times, and what processes like heating, freezing or kneading do to food. Indeed generally it's possible to find detailed and nearly objective information, sometimes even physical and/or chemical explanations to certain stuff, but then it's always ad-hoc, i.e. related to the particular food item or recipe I'm looking for. I've been searching for a resource that aims to be a comprehensive and scientific (as much as possible) intro to cooking that gives the sort of culinary theory I want, but I've been unable to find such a thing so far. Does anybody here know of such a resource?
That's a whole degree program.
But this is my bible: The America's Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook, and it covers just about all of that in some way, shape, or form. It covers a lot of technique and theory, and they go really in-depth and explain why things are done.
I went and took some pics from Chapter 1 – Cooking Basics, a Recipe Tutorial which includes a troubleshooting section, and a couple technique pages to try and get the vibe of it across. Here's the album link.
Be advised the pictures are pretty huge [3036x4048] and came to 67MB before uploading to imgur, so, data warning for mobile users.
I would second this suggestion. I have that cookbook and use it regularly with apprentices.
Three other books that I recommend are the flavor bible, On Cooking and The Proffessional Chef, the latter two are required reading at the CIA and most culinary schools. I have all three and read them regularly even now.
A word of advice for you @cadadr, even the recipes that are specific are subjective. I will teach you your first fundamental of cooking right now;
Cooking is both a science and an artform, the key to mastering it is learning to find a balance between the two.
Yes, there are general theories for all of cooking, scientific laws that everything adheres to, and those textbooks I listed (as well as the one @CALICO listed) will teach you most of that. But everything you cook will change with your own style and tastes, even after you learn those fundamentals everything will still be very subjective.
I find that with any form of art, understanding at a fundamental level the way your artistic medium works will make you a better artist in general. For instance, it's far easier to paint effectively if you first understand how to anticipate the result of blending two different colors. This is especially true of trying to lighten a darker paint with a white paint, as that can frequently result in a gray pigment tainting your desired color. Understanding that you're effectively mixing black and white pigments when attempting to lighten the color, resulting in gray, helps you avoid repeated headaches.
From that perspective, I completely understand the desire to understand cooking fundamentals rather than dealing with trial-and-error through recipes. Especially when you decide you might want to try diverging significantly from the recipe or experiment with something new entirely, it helps to do so without blindly throwing things together that you think "might" work based solely on intuition and previous recipes and to instead approach it with those fundamentals in mind.
It's that very reason that I don't really get more into cooking myself. Ingredients cost money (something I don't have a lot of); cooking itself requires time and energy (also neither of which I have a lot of); and the post-cooking cleanup takes a good deal of time and energy as well. Making a significant mistake means all of your time, money, and energy end up being wasted, and since you're cooking, odds are you intend to eat whatever it is that you were just cooking, so by the end of it you may just find yourself exhausted, hungry, and frustrated. Because of that, and because I lack a knowledge of cooking fundamentals (apart from some simple "these flavors go together"), I end up being very risk-averse with my cooking. I just play it safe and follow known recipes for the most part, rarely ever diverging from them.
Anyway, I digress. What I'm trying to get at is that whether in science or in art, fundamentals are important :)
(cc: @cfabbro, @CALICO, @EscReality, @Emerald_Knight and @patence_limited)
Thanks a lot for all your suggestions and help! I don't have much to say other than a thank you (because the books and the advice are really great), so I wanted to do so in one place in order not to add too much noise to the thread. Special thanks to @CALICO for the pictures, I really appreciate that! Also, @Emerald_Knight expresses me better than I could, especially here:
Just like knowing music theory doesn't make you a musician, knowing "culinary theory" certainly wouldn't make you a decent cook, but it'd really help when "designing" and "debugging" a recipe.
While I don't know of any overarching theory that covers every aspect of cooking, mise en place seems to somewhat fit the bill. But IMO food science is probably what you're looking for since it studies the underlying principles of why we do the things we do in cooking and what is happening during those processes. And by understanding those underlying principles of cookery you can extrapolate them out to every single recipe you read or create yourself.
E.g. Understanding gluton helps understand why we kneed or avoid overmixing certain doughs. Understanding the Milliard reaction helps us understand why we sear meat, bake bread at certain temperatures, etc.
If you want to start down the path of food science, America's Test Kitchen is a good place to start, as is Serious Eats with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (a personal favorite of mine). Good Eats with Alton Brown, an old food network show, is also a really awesome show to watch that covers a lot of these topics but can sometimes be hard to find. :(
e: fixed messed up links
The theoretical "bible" of food science for the general reader (in English, anyway) is Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking.
I say this as a biochem major and former pastry cook - McGee covers the underlying components and behaviors of foodstuffs very well, and his work is foundational to the efforts of Ferran Adria, Christopher Kimball (Cook's Illustrated, and ultimately, America's Test Kitchen), J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, et. al.
Want to know about the Maillard reaction, and why browning creates such an amazing range of flavors? What an emulsion is, and why it's a fundamental method for making everything from Sauce Bearnaise to cake frosting? On Food and Cooking is still one of the most detailed, accessible reference books to provide the chemistry that underpins culinary technique.
McGee is my go-to cooking book. Barely a recipe in sight, a shitload of theory, answers to every question you might have and tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of detail.
Nothing else comes close, although Michael Ruhlman's Ratio and Niki Segnit's Flavour Thesaurus are worth picking up too.
Blumenthal got his start with a copy of McGee and if it's good enough for Heston...
I recommend Salt Fat Acid Heat. It's an easy fun read, and it's not a recipe book, it's an explanation of how to develop intuition and technique around a few core concepts of cooking.