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I teach cooking classes recreationally. It pays well, but it's not steady income, so I'm not trying to give up my day job any time soon. That said, I do enjoy them immensely. Unfortunately, I have this sinking suspicion that when I leave, the person never tries any of the stuff we went over ever again, unless it was so simple that they were shocked at its simplicity. I don't mean simple for me. I've been in my mother's kitchen, handling knives and the rest since I was old enough to reach the counter. I've been cooking food itself on the stove since I was around 10. I've made meals for my family since middle school. What I find simple is different from what someone who's never set foot in a kitchen will find simple. There are, however, certain recipes that I have found to be successful with newbies. If, when I first got into the kitchen, my mum told me that the basis of cooking was to make stock, and from there you make other things, I would have told her to go hang, and gone outside to play with my friends. Even if you're not standing there for hours over the simmering pot, it is a large investment of time that not a lot of people have or care to use up. If I've never cooked before, and I want to have a go, I'm going to make something that will give me immediate results, so I can see if I'm any good at this in the first place. Instead, what she did show me was that there are entire recipes that involve a few ingredients, and minimal prep time. My brother, on the other hand, preferred to let me experiment, and see where the things took me. Both of them liked to make things that were relatively low fuss, and the hell with presentation. Case in point: a typical recipe for puri calls for you to roll out your dough into tiny little individual discs, and then fry each disc separately, giving you beautiful little rounds. My mum's solution was to use the dining room table as her rolling surface, roll out a huge amorphous blob, and use a pizza cutter to cut out random shapes. The puris tastes just as delicious, and were quick to make. What I'm getting at is that I feel like I sometimes need to step back and really ask myself "Is that person going to get an appreciable difference in the final product by doing it the "right" way, or are there a few shortcuts s/he can take so that s/he is motivated to try the recipe again?" Here's where y'all come in. I'm going to start using this thread as a beginner's guide to cooking, hopefully written with a true beginner in mind. For example, I'm not going to cover things that involve multiple pans, long cooking times, or things that a newbie would be intimidated to try. It wouldn't require special equipment, or intense prep work. I'm happy to write some recipes of my own, but I'll likely rely on the excellent wealth of Youtube clips out there that cover the information already. I'd also like a /basic/ set of tools for any newbie to buy, with which s/he can make good food. Essential Tools A good frying pan. Use it to sautee vegetables, make sauces, and for a bit of deep frying. I find that I prefer a frying pan for deep frying, because the wider surface lets me get more stuff frying at the same time. If you want something nonstick instead, try a wok with a handle. It'll work just as well. A good pot. I swear, this is not a plug for Macy's, but their Tools of the Trade is very affordable, and I've yet to find an American city without a Macy's store in it. For those outside the USA, please let me know if you have something comparable, and I'll add it in. A knife. Forschner makes excellent knives, that will last you a good long time. A large cutting board. I can't count how many kitchen accidents I've seen because the person was using a tiny cutting board, and trying to keep everything on it. It's not worth it. Get a large cutting board in either wood or heavy plastic (not the flimsy floppy things). Nice to Have Tools Silicon Tipped Cooking Tongs. More than stirring spoons, I find myself reaching for either saibashi (long cooking chopsticks that you can find in any Asian market) or my silicon tipped cooking tongs. They're great for doing pretty damned near everything. Whisks Vegetable Peeler I bought this one in 2007, and have loved it since then. Basic Videos Chopping Onions How to Cook Pasta Rice Cooking Without Rice Cooker And now I'm drawing a blank. See, this is where I'm running into trouble. The people who call me for classes generally have something specific in mind, and I can work from there. However, it's been so long since I've had to work on beginner recipes that I literally can't remember the first things that I cooked successfully. What were your earliest success stories in the kitchen? If it really was stock, then disabuse me of my stock racism, and tell me. If it was eggs, go ahead and post the recipe (or even better, a video). I know that in home ec, when the teacher wanted to start us with easy stuff, one of the first things she covered were scrambled eggs. For me, I think it was pasta, but I can't quite recall if I used the butter + garlic route, or if I used some kind of sauce that my brother and I made up. It's been a really long time since those early days. I'm hoping that this becomes a resource to point newbies towards, when they have questions like "I've only dipped my toe into the water, but would like to have someone hold my hand while I wade deeper", but cooking related of course. Please also tell me what cookery books you used to inspire you to get yourself into the kitchen. I think someone mentioned Bitman's book at some point, but I personally find his stuff to be really bland. Again, I don't tend to turn to books anymore, because I can find pretty much whatever I want on google, but for a beginner, a book is sometimes the best bet, because it will take them through the steps that many of us take for granted. Rachel Ray maybe? Either way, I can't do this alone, because I don't know very much outside of my own sphere of influence. I'd really love your help to turn this into a helpful resource for beginners, and to share stories about our own early cooking attempts.
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| # ? Jan 19, 2013 14:48 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 09:52 |
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Here's how to cook a steak! This is easiest to do with a NY Strip or ribeye - filet mignons and other thick cuts of beef need a different cooking time. Materials - 1. Steak 2. Cast Iron Pan (preferably well seasoned with bacon) 3. Black Pepper (I like a black peppercorn grinder but the preground poo poo works as well) 4. Salt (Again, I prefer a sea salt grinder, but a big box of Morton's works as well) 5. Olive Oil 6. Tongs 7. Cooking Range and oven 8. Oven mitt Directions - 1. Turn on your oven, set to broil. Let it pre-heat for a while. 2. Get your steaks out. Put a dollop of oil on them, rub into the meat with the back of a spoon. Apply black pepper to taste. I like a lot, some people don't. Flip steak and repeat for the other side. 3. Put your cast iron pan onto the range, pre-heat on high heat. The hotter you can heat it the better. Surface of the sun is what you're going for here. 4. Once your pan is heated nicely, go ahead and lightly salt both sides of the steaks. Don't do this until right before you're going to cook them, like within five minutes. If you want to salt them before that, you need to do it about an hour or more ahead of time. 5. Put steaks in pan. Let them sear for 30 seconds on the first side. DO NOT TOUCH THEM until the 30 seconds is up. Flip the steaks, and sear for 30 more seconds. 6. Put the whole drat pan into your oven. Cook for a minute and fifteen seconds, or a little less if you prefer it rare, more if you prefer it better e. I like a nice medium rare. 7. When the time's up, remove pan from oven, flip steaks, put back in oven, cook for around 15 seconds less than you cooked it on the first side, so in my case it will be a minute. 8. Remove pan from oven, let sit for around 5 minutes or so. The steak is still cooking for this time, so don't rush it. 9. Serve with a glass of red wine and your side of choice, perhaps some steamed asparagus or mashed potatoes. Grand total of about 10 minutes actual cooking time, maybe 30 if you include pre-heating the oven. Makes a glorious steak for very little actual effort. Once they master this, they can start messing with marinades and sauces and what-not, but this is where I started and I've come a long way since with this as a foundation.
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| # ? Jan 19, 2013 16:29 |
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The best kitchen tool I have is a silicon single-piece spatula with no ridges. Here's a list of what I use. Some of the situational ones (measuring cups) are essential for certain things. Essential 8" Chef knife Paring knife Bread knife Cutting board 2 Qt Saucepan 8 Qt stock pot 10-12" skillet Silicon spatula Flat spatula Slotted spoon Baking sheet Mixing bowl Pepper mill Tongs Oven mitts Stove/oven, obviously Useful Cast-iron skillet Cast-iron dutch oven (enameled or not) 1-qt saucepan 8" skillet 10-12" saute pan Grater/microplane Wire balloon whisk Colander Strainer/chinois Corkscrew Peeler Can opener Bottle opener Citrus squeezer Ladle Scale Thermometer Hand mixer Stick Blender Blender Food processor Grill Smoker Situational Fruit pitter/corer Stand mixer Spice grinder Morter and Pestle Pastry cutter Pastry/basting brush Measuring cups Flour sifter Rolling pin Ice cream scoop Mandoline Potato Ricer Meat Tenderizer Fish spatula I've wanted to create an intro-to-cooking class like this for a while (though I've ultimately been too lazy). I think the hardest step in teaching people how to cook is getting them to make the transition from using recipes to cooking freestyle. My plan was to teach simple recipes that illustrated concepts and technique (e.g. green beans with a bacon vinaigrette) and then having them brainstorm to think of their own dishes (what other fats/acids could you use in a vinaigrette, what else could you use a vinaigrette with, etc). Ideally, I wanted to create a whole multi-day/week set of menus that would progress something like:
Anyway, here are a few simple things you can start off with: Aforementioned green beans with bacon vinaigrette. Apio (sweet and sour celery). It's a pretty easy introduction to braising, it will teach your students how to balance sweetness and acidity, and it is a great way to use up the leftover sliced celery you'll probably have after teaching them how to properly use a knife. Eggs. Here's the Gordon Ramsey scrambled egg video that people always link in these threads (yes, I know every French chef ever cooks scrambled eggs this way): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU_B3QNu_Ks. Tomato/feta/watermelon/cucumber salad. Good demo of balancing flavors and textures, plus whoever's making it will learn an important lesson about either cutting vegetables too big (can't taste everything) or too small (degenerates into a watery sludge). Roasted chicken. Dead simple, teaches you to truss/carve/cook poultry, and provides stock material (if making stock is your kind of thing). Here's Thomas Keller making it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWLt6G85zC4. Mac & cheese. Good intro to mother sauces (bechamel/mornay), seasoning, and proper pasta cookery. Here's a good guide to cooking dried pasta. Pasta in general is a good thing to start with, since it makes a good canvas for a lot of ingredients and figuring out which pasta shapes work with which sauces or accompaniments (any why) is pretty useful. Pureed vegetable soup. Provides a good canvas for testing out and balancing different flavors. You can start out with something like this and then have a follow-up where the beginner cook chooses the vegetable and seasoning. Here's Gordon Ramsey (again) with a 2-ingredient pureed broccoli soup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtYfJONfI90.
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| # ? Jan 19, 2013 18:41 |
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Dramatika: I've found that most newer cooks tend to be nervous about salting their food, and get terrified when they see TV chefs throw on the salt. How would you correct for this nervousness? Thanks for sharing the steak recipe. I wouldn't know how to tell anyone how to steak. Donkey: Looks good, bro. Definitely like the concept of free-styling the cooking, which is why I tend to avoid measuring spoons when I teach someone to cook. I try to force them to use their hands, their fingers, and the size of the pot as measuring milestones, so that the cooking itself goes by quickly. I've found that if I can build someone's confidence in eyeballing it, their cooking tends to go way faster than when they bust out the measuring cups and spoons and the like. For the list that you made, are there any that you'd consider as absolutely necessary/essential for a beginner, and others that you'd consider as "nice to have but not strictly necessary"? That's kind of what I'm aiming for: a truly essential list of tools and techniques for someone who's terrified of stepping into the kitchen. For example, I have one silicon spatula at home, which I use for everything. It means that I don't need a regular spatula. Or were you referring to a metal thingy used for flipping pancakes? I own an oven mitt, but I find myself reaching for kitchen towels, and just leave the oven mitts hanging up. I own a slotted spoon, but find myself not really using it all that much, in favour of the wooden spoons, which go on my nonstick cookware as well as the regular cookware. Absolutely feel you on the mixing bowl. Totally echo the bread knife. I don't ever use my paring knife though. Also, for a newbie, I'm not sure that a cast iron skillet is that great an idea, because they're nervous enough to cook, much less have to babysit a piece of cookware. I'd move the can opener and the grater into the essential category. I reach for my zester almost every day, to the point where I have it hanging up outside, and not in a drawer. Great ideas so far though! Another side effect of this is that I'm getting people asking me how to outfit their kitchens. A friend just finished grad school, and will be cooking a lot more frequently than she did in the past. Y'all are giving me great ideas to help people get started. dino. fucked around with this message at Jan 21, 2013 around 20:40 |
| # ? Jan 21, 2013 20:34 |
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The most important newbie advice I can give is to read the entire recipe before starting. Ideally, you should read 2-3 recipes for a given dish in case one is just plain off (especially important with internet recipes). Then, arrange all the ingredients for the dish on your counter before starting in order to insure that A)you actually have all the ingredients and B) you won't end up having to do a mad scramble while cooking for one that isn't where you thought it was.
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| # ? Jan 21, 2013 21:21 |
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Unless you live right by a place that sells tomatoes and they're in season, most of the time canned tomatoes are going to be far higher quality than anything you can buy "fresh". A lot of times tomatoes are picked unripe, and are artificially ripened using ethylene gas because if you ship tons of ripe tomatoes on a truck, chances are good that most of them are going to be mushy poo poo thanks to all the other tomatoes on top of them. Canned tomatoes are usually picked at the height of their ripeness and processed that way. They're good, don't think that fresh is better because most of the time they're not.
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| # ? Jan 21, 2013 22:50 |
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re: tomatoes If your recipe actually needs fresh tomatoes and they're out of season, I find that grape tomatoes or cherry tomatoes are way better than normal sized tomatoes when not in season. Maybe they're greenhouse grown and then they can fit them into a plastic carton to ship? I don't know, but I've had little "cherub" tomatoes actually be really sweet and pretty delicious even in winter. So if you're making salsa or guacamole, salads, or whatever, go for the little ones. Otherwise, canned.
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| # ? Jan 21, 2013 23:40 |
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Re salt: ive had good luck with using unsalted butter as a medium for teaching about salt, the difference between salted and unsalted butter on plain bread is fairly shocking. Same deal with white rice. Something so simple changing so drastically is effective.
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 00:49 |
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Great OP! RE: Onions When I was starting out cooking for myself, I really had trouble finely chopping onions and getting the pieces small and even. I watched the video in the OP, and it's similar to the method I used to use. I've found the method in this video to be much easier and have had better results: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/...-an-onion-video
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 04:04 |
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My mom didn't teach me much about cooking but she did give me a copy of Clueless in the Kitchen when I left for college. The recipes are mostly simple and cover a pretty wide range. There are also tips about shopping for ingredients, meal planning, balanced diets and that sort of stuff. Some of the recipes I remember turning out well early on were: Curry-glazed chicken (chicken breasts coated in honey, mustard and curry powder baked in the oven), fried rice, tuna tomato pasta (can of tomatoes, tuna, oregano and basil, garlic, red pepper flakes, olive oil and optional capers), mac and cheese not from a box, the basic bechamel sauce for pasta, quiche, banana bread, strawberry rhubarb pie (with store bought crust first and crust from scratch later), quesadillas and nachos. Jamie Oliver has been trying to get newbies to cook for a while now and I like a lot of his stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWHtN6wDvw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HG_raAiRVs
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 05:14 |
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Teach them the recipe most people have complimented you on so you gain their confidence. After people try my lobster bisque they usually trust me serving them anything. Anybody can(should) be able to cook a steak. So them something that requires a lot of attention but isn't really that complicated or ingredient intensive. Mad_Lion posted:re: tomatoes I am one of the guys responsible for the tomatoes in your store. Roma seems to be good year round as are caprese. Greenhouse I wouldn't touch out of season. No type of tomatoes ever touch each other but the greenhouse ones always looks pretty unappealing, and that's before you see them.
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 06:29 |
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I'm tied up at the moment, but I'll touch up my baking-for-beginners rundown on how to make from scratch muffins and post it later. Seems like the easy first step into the world of baking, and fairly forgiving. Not that I'm biased, given that I make 20k + of the drat things a year.
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 15:47 |
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Although dino's a vegan and probably doesn't value it as much as meat eaters, I think the important of an accurate thermometer should be stressed. I still consider myself somewhat of a beginner cook, and it wasn't until the past couple years that I realized how important it was to temp any meat I was cooking. I recently posted a reply to a question in the general questions thread about how recipes that call for "X minutes at Y degrees" should only be used as a guideline since there are so many variables that could affect the finished product, and that's something I wish I had known when I was a true newbie to cooking. Asked the now ex-girlfriend for a Thermapen for Christmas and she got me a lovely Food Network "instant read" thermometer. Oh well, I'll own one someday.
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 16:04 |
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The Midniter posted:Asked the now ex-girlfriend for a Thermapen for Christmas and she got me a lovely Food Network "instant read" thermometer. Oh well, I'll own one someday. Is that why you dumped her? Good call. 
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 18:57 |
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dino. posted:I've found that most newer cooks tend to be nervous about salting their food, and get terrified when they see TV chefs throw on the salt. How would you correct for this nervousness? Thanks for sharing the steak recipe. I wouldn't know how to tell anyone how to steak. The best way to illustrate how incredibly important salt is is to give someone two small cuts of meat (if they eat meat), one prepared with proper salt (and pepper) seasoning and one just thrown in a pan to cook. The taste is completely night and day. Salt, unless you put a small mountain of it in/on something, just makes things taste more like themselves, and if it's health they're worried about, you can point them over to Alton Brown's  about how it's not actually Satan or something. The rule of thumb I use is that unless you have enough salt on something that it's supersaturated and hanging around in great big piles, you're probably fine when it comes to taste. Everybody's got their own limits, though, so they can experiment.Experimenting, really, leads me to a bit of a story I can tell to illustrate my own evolution from complete newbie to...well, still relatively new but at least trying. When I was a little kid I had two foods: Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and tacos made with pre-packaged seasoning. That was basically it. As I grew older, I discovered that there was a whole lot more out there than just stuff you could get in boxes, and started having more of my parents' home-cooked stuff like steak, pork tenderloin, casseroles, home-made breads, chilis, rice dishes...the list goes on. I adventured with a lot of foods afterwards, read up on cooking books, watched good cooking shows, lurked in here, and expanded my tastes quite a lot. I still don't eat my greens as often as I should, but I at least give most vegetable dishes a shot rather than immediately turning them down. The very first big dinner I cooked on my own that wasn't from a box was some big beef roast with new potatoes that I can't remember the exact recipe for. It was good, but kinda complicated and I only made it once for my at-the-time girlfriend. It didn't really "click" for me. Same for the duck I tried cooking on my own recently - it was good, but I knew I could do it better now that I had experience. You don't want to just give up if a meal doesn't quite work. That's a sign that you're almost to something amazing, you just need to tweak some things to get it right. Here's some advice I have from my experiences cooking on my own in a student apartment: - Despite what I said, there is no absolutely shame in working out of a box for some, or even most, meals. You can stretch like, four or five meals out of some Rice-a-Roni and a pound of ground beef. Hell, it's even a good springboard to finding tastes you like and using them in scratch-built meals. - An addendum: I hear people smack-talk rice, but rice in general is bland and bad only if you just boil the poo poo out of it for a while or something. Season the water, use stock instead of water, spice it up, fry it in some butter before cooking, look up one of the zillions of ways to prepare it, make it interesting! Not only that, it doesn't take much uncooked rice to turn into enough food to feed you and whatever vulturous housemates raid your fridge for days on end. It's a staple food for over three billion people for a reason. - As Humboldt squid said, read the entire recipe over and over again before you start. Make sure you have every ingredient before you even set up to start cooking. Boiling up a batch of noodles only to discover you don't have enough milk for the sauce sucks. The concept of mis-en-place means having all your ingredients prepared and in one place before you start cooking. It saves time when you're cooking, it makes high-stress recipes that can go from good to ruined in less than a minute much easier when you begin dabbling with those, and it stops cooking from being as hectic and sprawling as it can be if you're constantly fetching and preparing ingredients. - Clean as you go. When you have a moment to spare, or after you're done with something that's been touching food, clean whatever you can. Cleaning a little bit at a time saves you the  feeling of looking at two pans, a pot, several bowls, a cutting board, silverware, etc that all need to be cleaned at once.- Simple does not mean bad, and complex does not mean good. You can spend six hours slaving over some ridiculously elaborate meal only for it to fall through for one of any number of reasons. As for simple, I'll post two recipes after this that are both incredibly simple and incredibly delicious. Resource-wise, Alton Brown helped me a lot in my initial stages of learning how to cook. While he can get pretty gimmicky, he explains why you cook things the way they do, how food cooks, and shows you the building blocks that allow you to start improvising instead of following recipes slavishly. His show, Good Eats, is all on YouTube, and he has a bunch of books that are pretty good. One caveat, though: he sometimes likes to overcomplicate things, a lot, for silly reasons. If he starts talking about how you should build your own home smoker out of terracotta pottery or something, or that you should rig up some elaborate way to steam potstickers, you can safely ignore him and just pay attention to the stuff he says about food science. If you like him, and want a denser, more in-depth  explanation of tons of foods, you can also pick up Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking." It's basically the grand-daddy of modern cooking techniques, and has enough anecdotes and simple explanations to make it more than just a food chemistry textbook.
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 20:14 |
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Double post because goddamn I'm talking too much: here's a pair of recipes I love that I think would be great to help teach new people how to cook with. They're fall-off-a-log simple. The first: Alton Brown's sliders. All you need: A pound of ground beef 1/2 teaspoon each of salt, pepper, garlic powder, and onion flakes An electric skillet That's it. That's all you need. Well, you need buns and whatever else you want on the burgers too, but these are good enough that you don't need much but the burger and bun. First, thaw the hamburger fully while you set the skillet to warm up to 350 degrees. Put it on a BIG stretch of parchment paper, enough to fold over and cover it on top as well. It's best to err on the side of caution here. Once covered on both sides with parchment paper, roll the meat flat with a rolling pin on the paper. You're going to want it very, very thin - not enough that the meat starts breaking, though. Pull back the paper and sprinkle all the seasonings across the top of the meat, evenly distributed. Once that's done, fold the meat onto itself with the paper so all the seasonings are now in the center of the meat. Pat it down to squish the meat back together, but don't roll it out any thinner. Cut out patties based on how big your buns are, keeping in mind that the patties will shrink once cooked, and cook on the griddle for about two or three minutes a side. There will be hissing and grease, that's a good sign. Once done, put aside on a plate to rest until all of the patties are done, and then put on buns and As for recipe two, I got it from a local barbecue sauce maker. This is so simple that it's basically a guideline rather than a recipe. Barbecue-glazed Pork Loin You need: One pork loin, any weight Some olive oil Salt, pepper, whatever seasonings you want Your favorite barbecue sauce, but an apple-cinnamon barbecue sauce is incredible for this is you can swing it Two tablespoons of brandy, though bourbon works well too Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. You read that right, 500. Trim any excess fat off the pork loin and coat it with olive oil. Yes, using your hands, this is probably gonna feel gross, but it's not as bad as shoving your hand all up in a turkey your first few times. Season it with any seasonings you think would taste good, but just salt and pepper is fine too. Rub the seasonings into the oil and meat, put it on a roasting rack in a roasting pan, and slide it into the oven for ten minutes when it's hot enough. Cooking it the whole time at 500 degrees would turn the delicious pork into formerly delicious charcoal, but giving it ten minutes in the blast furnace will help set up a delicious crust. Once ten minutes are up, take it out of the oven, and set the oven to 250 degrees. Mix enough barbecue sauce with the brandy to coat the pork, and paint the sauce on with a basting brush. You can reach under to the bottom and paint the bits on the rack too if you want, but most of it is going to be on and stay on the top. Put the pork back in the oven, and let it cook for about an hour per pound of meat until it's done. You can check the internal temperature with a thermometer if you got one, you want it to be between ~140-145 degrees. Let it rest for ten to fifteen minutes once out of the oven, so the juices don't fly out when you cut it. Serve with the barbecue sauce on the side for dipping or mopping. You only have to spend about ten or fifteen minutes preparing this, and the rest is all waiting. It's incredibly simple, and so good it impressed my Texan uncle. Daeren fucked around with this message at Jan 22, 2013 around 20:17 |
| # ? Jan 22, 2013 20:15 |
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dino. posted:
I was looking for a cook book like you describe for my wife, who isn't that into cooking and can find a recipe intimidating. The one I settled on is this: The Family Meal by Ferran Adria. It has simple methodical recipes, good tasting food (as served to and from the elBulli staff) but most importantly (for her) are the photo's. There's pictures of the mis en place and the steps involved in making the dishes, not just the food stylists dream of what they should end up looking like. She doesn't feel like she's having to translate what she reads into what she sees. When the Bolognese recipe tells her to brown the meat, she's not pulling it when it's grey but letting it go to the crusted dark golden brown. The equipment called for is that commonly found in a kitchen (except perhaps the soda and whipped cream siphons) and the ingredients are not outlandish. It's enabled her to cook good food and when she's using it I don't feel the need to surreptitiously season things when her back's turned. The only complaint I would have with it is it uses cups instead of weights.
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 21:07 |
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I've taught a couple of cooking classes (just casual stuff) and I try to go with simple recipes with a lot of "bang for your buck" in terms of it looking fancy. The three recipes I would teach: Chicken Soup Whole Roast Chicken Shortbread "bars" Chicken soup is basically just a disguise for teaching how to break down a chicken, make stock and do a little knife work, like dicing an onion. While the stock is simmering you can discuss different uses for the chicken parts and teach the knife work. I use Thomas Keller's roast chicken recipe, modified a bit. I stress how you can shove just about any combination of herb and citrus into the cavity and get good results, drying the bird and salting liberally is key, and how to tell doneness using a thermometer instead of a timer. I teach shortbread because it's easier than making brownies from a box. I show my students how to make bars by covering the top of the shortbread with jam, adding reserved shortbread crumbles and cooking for a little while longer.
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 21:24 |
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This got me enthousiastic about cooking as a complete newbie. It's a free pdf cookbook with maximum five ingredients and ten minutes per recipe, which helps keep the learning process fun.
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 21:32 |
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First thing that got me excited in the kitchen was pancakes (crepes) - easy as hell, and a yummy pay out... also flambé ing...
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| # ? Jan 22, 2013 22:06 |
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Reading this series of blog posts on Salt, Acid, Fat, Crunch really gave me a solid handle on understanding the fundamentals of any dish. There will always be that time a new cook makes something and it's not very good. I was at a friend's house the other day and she was making an apple/pear tart/pie thing, and had me taste the mixture. "It's not so great, how would you fix it?" I immediately thought of that series of posts, and realized that she mostly needed some tang in her mixture. There were no lemons, but a cautious application of white wine vinegar totally did the trick. Similarly her stew was a bit too sweet and flat. It could have used a bit of acidity, but most sources of acid are also somewhat sweet, so I didn't want to go that way. It was already at a decent level of salt, but I added a bit more, and then a *lot* of cayenne (and some fresh black pepper). I think spicy could be added to the list of tricks for "fixing" a dish. These sort of instincts come naturally from a lot of experience, but they can also be taught and absorbed early. One good teaching method I've heard involves, alas, stock, but it isn't about making it. Take 4 cups of good, rich, but unseasoned stock in 4 different containers. Veggie works, but I used chicken when I did it. For the first cup, add salt gradually (in like tsp increments or so), tasting each time until it's too salty. Record the amount you used total in the second-to-last taste (the one right before it got too salty). To the second cup, add vinegar (something mild, like rice vinegar) slowly until it's too sour. Record the amount used total in the second-to-last taste (just before it got too sour). To the third cup add the amount of salt recorded from the first cup, and the amount of vinegar recorded from the second cup. Then taste it next to the 4th, unseasoned cup of stock. It's an excellent illustration of the value of sour and salt, and how they can be used to make flavors pop. Kenning fucked around with this message at Jan 23, 2013 around 03:57 |
| # ? Jan 23, 2013 03:54 |
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I actually have done this before with a pile of beans. I'll have someone taste beans that haven't been salted at all. Then, I'll sprinkle a bit of salt on, and ask them to taste it now. "It's still missing something." So I'll sprinkle more on. "Huh." Then I'll have /them/ sprinkle more on. "Holy crap, that's so amazing." I think the revelation that a bit of salt will really make something /pop/ just baffles folk. I had to teach that to Puppy one day. "Baby, if anything seems to be lacking a little something, just salt the thing, and it'll be great." It was like I'd turned on a light bulb for him. He'd been quietly eating things that he didn't enjoy, and never asked for salt, because his family never did. Once I gave him "permission" to fix his food with a touch of salt, he's been enjoying things far more.
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| # ? Jan 23, 2013 05:09 |
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dino. posted:I actually have done this before with a pile of beans. I'll have someone taste beans that haven't been salted at all. Then, I'll sprinkle a bit of salt on, and ask them to taste it now. "It's still missing something." So I'll sprinkle more on. "Huh." Then I'll have /them/ sprinkle more on. "Holy crap, that's so amazing."
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| # ? Jan 23, 2013 11:30 |
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Cuddlebottom posted:One thing that helped me learn was to try this taste-add-taste with basically everything. It showed me what the various things in my spice cabinet do, so when I was following a recipe, I didn't need to actually measure out 1/2 tsp of basil. It was also helpful once I realized that I could taste almost everything before I finished, even things I normally wouldn't eat alone like a drop of vinaigrette. So we're more or less agreed on cooking pasta. I'm curious to know if y'all think it would be sensible to put together a tutorial on cooking beans from scratch? Not the flavoured one with half a ham in it, but rather just getting a pot of beans done, so that you can do other stuff with it (be it bean salad, soup, curry, daal, hummus, whatever). Or is it too intimidating, and better to just encourage tinned beans?
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| # ? Jan 23, 2013 14:58 |
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I would like to see the basics of cooking dry beans, if for nothing else than the thrifty factor. Another thing I thought of to get people excited about cooking: booze. Most everyone gets excited about something with alcohol in it whether it's Irish carbomb cupcakes, pork stew with cider or beer bread.
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| # ? Jan 23, 2013 15:58 |
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Yes, making dinner and booze obligate partners is a pretty good way to entice new/nervous cooks into giving it a shot. Plus once they've done a few turns of "one for the pot, one for the cook" they'll stop getting all wrapped up in their own heads. I could see a "how to cook a nice steak with a cream/cognac sauce" how-to going over well. Sounds and tastes all fancy-pants, is dead-simple in reality.
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| # ? Jan 23, 2013 17:11 |
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You could do pork chops au poivre too, keeping in the vein of the post above me. Not a difficult recipe at all and people won't feel bad about screwing up a pork chop the way they would if it were a more expensive steak. Easy and cheap enough to be a weeknight dinner, but fancy and tasty enough to make you feel like a really good cook. It was one of the dishes my husband first branched out into proper cooking with, and it turned out great even the first time. And something I just thought of: if you're going to teach appetizer type things, teach some simple dips. If you go base + other stuff you can show how versatile something like greek yogurt or simple hummus is and how easy you can make things up by adding something else. No worries about over or under cooking things, and you could teach how to make a simple flatbread from scratch as well.
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| # ? Jan 23, 2013 22:11 |
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Go ahead and post those recipes, folks. It's a completely abstract thing for me, as I've never et the stuff before. Same goes for anyone else who'd like to suggest something meaty/dairy: I don't know crap all about it, and assume that anyone wandering in here because they're new to cooking will likely need that hand holding too. 
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| # ? Jan 23, 2013 22:20 |
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This is an awesome thread. This forum has needed a resource like this for newish people! Personally, the first stuff I learned to cook was breakfast when I was a kid. I just kind of never branched out from eggs, basic chicken and basic grilled stuff until like two years ago or so. One of the first big things I did was cook kebabs and falaffel for family and friends. While I was doing this, I made a big old stock too (hah) since I like cooking stuff I can reheat on the go. I like biting off more than I can chew and learning from my screw ups. Humboldt squid posted:The most important newbie advice I can give is to read the entire recipe before starting. Ideally, you should read 2-3 recipes for a given dish in case one is just plain off (especially important with internet recipes). Then, arrange all the ingredients for the dish on your counter before starting in order to insure that A)you actually have all the ingredients and B) you won't end up having to do a mad scramble while cooking for one that isn't where you thought it was. This is really important when you're first learning. I was the idiot who used that awful pad thai recipe from the wiki that called for 13 tablespoons of brown sugar  I learned my lesson after that.Cuddlebottom posted:One thing that helped me learn was to try this taste-add-taste with basically everything. It showed me what the various things in my spice cabinet do, so when I was following a recipe, I didn't need to actually measure out 1/2 tsp of basil. It was also helpful once I realized that I could taste almost everything before I finished, even things I normally wouldn't eat alone like a drop of vinaigrette. This is pretty much how I got to the same point of not really measuring stuff and winging recipes. I think the best stuff to really understand what ingredient does what are by starting with soups, stews and sauces. For stews and soups especially, there's so many variations on the same recipe. The fact that they cook for so long allows you to really go wild with taste-add-taste with each ingredient to really understand what each one does. Also, unlike some other dishses, soups and stews tend to be really forgiving if you gently caress up (too much salt, add more liquid, etc). Something like chili has a billion different recipes and it's quite hard to gently caress up. It's also nice because it's a dish that most people will really enjoy, and you can easily cook for several people and feel like a real badass. It also allows for a lot of experimentation because of how forgiving it is, and how many different ways there are to do it. On another forum, a few people and myself made a food thread and I've gotten a couple new people into cooking by just explaining the above. I also think that, early on, it's important to show how simple some recipes can be. My girlfriend knew next to nothing about cooking when we first started dating and was amazed how easy it is to do stuff like make a simple rub for flank steak, or make an awesome marinade for chicken fajitas. Things like spaghetti carbonara, which people typically assume with fancy, are really cool too because they're not hard at all and delicious.
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| # ? Jan 23, 2013 22:35 |
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dino. posted:This. Tasting things even if you don't necessarily like them. It's hard to do, especially when you so violently hate that thing, but so necessary to make sure things go out correctly. I hate sweet potatoes, but I know that the awful texture and sickening sweetness is just part of its "charm", so I know what to look for. My grandmother taught me how to cook beans when I was too short to even see what she was doing on the stove and she told me that I should "neber neber neber juse cahns of beans porque is no good!" She's changed her tune now and says that they're OK but never just out of the can, they still need a lot of work. I've found that learning how to use dried beans is helping me to learn how to be a better cook because you're learning how to coax a lot of flavor into a pretty bland ingredient and you can tell the difference between well seasoned beans and un/under seasoned beans really easily. Abulita's (Cuban) black beans: 1 pound of dried black beans 1/2 green pepper 1/2 onion 1/2 head of garlic 2 bay leaves 1 cup extra virgin olive oil salt and pepper to taste 1. Soak the black beans over night in heavily salted water. 2. Drain and rinse the beans then put them into a pot with 1 quart of water. Add in the 1/2 green pepper, 1/2 onion, 1/2 head of garlic and the bay leaves (no chopping necessarily just chuck them in whole). Bring to a simmer over medium high heat and then reduce to low and simmer for 45 minutes until beans are soft. Fish out the veg and the bay leaf and (if you want you can pulse the onion and pepper a few times in a food processor and add back into the beans but the flavor of the peppers and onion and garlic has been cooked into the beans so this isn't necessary so you can also just) toss them. 3. Pour in olive oil and stir beans with a large spoon, using the back of the spoon to mash some of the beans against the side of the pot. Cook for another 15 minutes, season with salt and pepper to taste and serve over rice. (Please don't tell my grandmother but I use a splash of red wine vinegar at the finish to give them a kind of zing.)
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| # ? Jan 23, 2013 22:46 |
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Daeren posted:
Just wanted to say you should do this the other way around. Roast at 200-250 until you're ~125F, take it out, let it rest while you crank it to 500F, then throw it back in for 10-15min. What you're doing here is reaching an equal temp all around, rather than blasting the outside to start, and then maintaining that temp on the outside. So you don't end up with a loin thats juicy in the center, but dry on the outside. Also, brine your pork. Always brine your pork. Deglazing is a newbie thing that's really important, and most won't know it. Always have white and red wine on hand, and possibly some brandy. Chef De Cuisinart fucked around with this message at Jan 24, 2013 around 00:37 |
| # ? Jan 24, 2013 00:35 |
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I think one of the biggest eye-openers in the process of learning to cook was the usage of water to control the process. At the end of the day, a great deal of the liquids we use when we cook (vinegar, wine, juice, stock) are made up mostly of water. Flavored/sweetened water, sure, but it's still mostly water. I'm sure there are plenty of people who read a recipe, see that it calls for stock and think 'ugh', but with many of those recipes, you can simply replace the stock with water and still end up with a great meal. Use it to thin out your tomato sauce that's a little too thick. Make your pesto sauce creamier by adding some of the water you cooked your pasta in back into the sauced pasta. If you want to reheat something on the stove (like a stew, for example), add some water. By the time you've evaporated the added water, your food is hot and hasn't lost much of its juiciness. This works in the microwave as well, especially if you cover the dish with plastic wrap and poke some holes for steam. Got a pan of drippings from whatever you were smoking that day? Use hot water to deglaze/dislodge it from your foil pan, transfer to a saucepan and reduce with some vinegar and a squirt of BBQ sauce. Want to re-energize yesterday's loaf of bread? Sprinkle some water on the crust and bake it in an oven for 5-10m. Sometimes people get caught up in the specifics of a recipe (it says use wine to deglaze!) and don't learn as much about applying what they're doing to other dishes, or other ingredients. As you cook, it helps to think about the underlying processes of what you're doing.
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| # ? Jan 24, 2013 01:49 |
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mascaria posted:Abulita's (Cuban) black beans: Just out of curiosity, why is extra virgin olive oil used here? Would a traditional recipe use lard, or some other fat? Also, is it just me, or does 1 cup for 1 lb. of beans seem like an awful lot of oil?
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| # ? Jan 24, 2013 15:53 |
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The Midniter posted:Just out of curiosity, why is extra virgin olive oil used here? Would a traditional recipe use lard, or some other fat? Also, is it just me, or does 1 cup for 1 lb. of beans seem like an awful lot of oil? My grandmother's always used olive oil. Maybe back in Cuba she used lard but she's only ever used olive oil that I've seen. As for what it does, it helps to thicken the liquid and it mixes with the mashed up beans to loosen the paste and gives it a more unctuous mouth-feel as opposed to the more pasty feeling of say refried beans. You can cut back on that if you'd like and add it to your preference instead. That's what she's always used (in fact she uses 8.5oz of olive oil because she uses one of the small 8.5oz bottles of oil instead of just measuring out a cup) and that's what I use when I make them and I've never thought they were too oily.
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| # ? Jan 24, 2013 21:01 |
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Cuddlebottom posted:One thing that helped me learn was to try this taste-add-taste with basically everything. It showed me what the various things in my spice cabinet do, so when I was following a recipe, I didn't need to actually measure out 1/2 tsp of basil. It was also helpful once I realized that I could taste almost everything before I finished, even things I normally wouldn't eat alone like a drop of vinaigrette. Can you (or someone else, of course!) elaborate on this? I love to look at what's on hand and try to conjure up some combination to make a dish to suit my mood. Problem is, I keep ending up with the same things because I go down the same lines of thinking. I have all these spices and sauces and only a rudimentary feeling for how they go together. The other day I roasted some garlic (peeled trimmed cloves in a dish, just submerged in oil, covered with foil, in the oven for an hour) and really wanted to try some new extras but had to fall back on throwing in serrano and rosemary. It's good, but not different, and sometimes I feel stuck.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2013 18:21 |
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Enkor posted:Can you (or someone else, of course!) elaborate on this? I love to look at what's on hand and try to conjure up some combination to make a dish to suit my mood. Problem is, I keep ending up with the same things because I go down the same lines of thinking. I have all these spices and sauces and only a rudimentary feeling for how they go together. Ok first I'd suggest tasting all your spices by themselves. Might sound like a bad idea, but it'll let you know what can go well with what it is you're cooking. I found that is the best way to get a feel of what goes together and will enhance the flavors without over powering them all. Second don't think back on what you know tastes good. You want to experiment and break out of having the same thing. So just feel the spices and remember how they taste. Then mix the taste in your mind and then in your pot. Well that is how I do it anyway.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2013 19:46 |
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Enkor posted:Can you (or someone else, of course!) elaborate on this? I love to look at what's on hand and try to conjure up some combination to make a dish to suit my mood. Problem is, I keep ending up with the same things because I go down the same lines of thinking. I have all these spices and sauces and only a rudimentary feeling for how they go together. Cook a lot of food from a lot of different cultures. Being prolific in your food conquests and experiences makes you more able to improvise in prolific ways. Get a Flavor Bible. In it is a nice codex of ingredients and various classic and not so classic pairings. Read khymos' TGRWT posts.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2013 20:04 |
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I am by no means a chef but I have somewhat recently started getting really into cooking and I think the best advice that I could give to someone who wants to get better at cooking is to think about what you eat. Until you develop some intuition and understanding about the taste of various spices/herbs/meats/etc. it's going to be difficult to make good food. Recipes are very useful for learning how to cook, but I guarantee most of the ones you find online are poo poo and you probably won't be able to tell just by reading them until you develop some skills and intuition. You can follow recipes for years and never improve if you don't try to learn. When you are at a restaurant, try to isolate tastes you like and always think about what might make it better. Similar to how you can visualize an image without seeing it, you can imagine a taste without eating it. Knowing how something will taste if you add or remove an ingredient is essential to cooking but takes time to learn. Now search for the word "salt" on this page and count the occurrences. Yes, it is that important.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2013 22:44 |
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God I fucking love Diablo 3 gold, it even paid for this shitty title
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I think some people are also afraid of failing and then oh god what will we eat?!? Maybe assure your students that the worst that can happen is having to order out for pizza. It's not ideal, but you'll probably learn something for next time. Or give them emergency "how to fix this disaster" cards. Meat is too dry! Here are some sauces to make, or you can do these other things. My mashed potatoes are too salty! Add more potatoes and/or quickly cook some other vegetable to mush and mix it in, like cauliflower or carrots. Alternately, undersalt any gravy you're making for the potatoes. I don't know if these are the best ideas, since I just made them up, but a list of common problems and a few ideas for how to fix them can do wonders for confidence. It shows them that they aren't the first person ever to make that mistake, and that there are relatively easy solutions that can be applied pretty widely. It's important to mention that real ingredients are obviously best, but it's ok to start out using some pre-packaged stuff just to get an idea of what ingredients do what. Yes, garlic in a jar sucks, but it's an easy intro for someone who isn't familiar with the flavor or how to cook it or what size minced garlic should be. Yes, bottled lemon juice can taste weird, but you can shake out a few drops, taste, and adjust as you like to see how acidity changes the flavor without having to make a big mess and clean up extra dishes that come from juicing or having to store cut lemons or extra juice or throw it away. Stock from a box isn't ideal, but someone who is afraid of cooking isn't going to start out making stock from scratch, and it can show them how the stock makes tastier rice or better soups or whatever. None of these things are bad, they just aren't as good as fresh. Give them an easy in, then bait and switch with the real deal when they've developed the cooking skills and it's not a big deal any longer. I'm obviously not talking about cream of chemical sludge soups, processed cheez food products or powdered cheese, and boxed meals like Hamburger Helper, since those are the things that real cooking are helping to replace in the first place. Then, once newbie cooks are more comfortable with cooking in general, introduce them to the flavor difference and amazingness that is fresh ingredients. If you don't already know what it's good for, the extra hassle of chopping up garlic, juicing a lemon, or making stock from scratch just don't seem worth it. You may scoff, and I know it's not a huge hassle, but it's still an obstacle for new cooks. Maybe introduce it as, "This is a good intro ingredient, so you can taste the flavor and get used to using it, but once you are done with this bottle/jar/box, you are going to want to start using the real stuff because it is so much better and worth it. And you'll have the knife skills/juicing paraphernalia/bird carcasses to make it fresh by that time, too!" It is far better to be cooking with a couple convenience ingredients than cooking everything from processed chemical food boxes. It's not quite as tasty as fresh, but it's still a drat sight better than Kraft Dinner, and they'll get there eventually. Another way to suggest for them to learn after the class is to find a friend they know who cooks and ask to watch them in the kitchen and ask a lot of questions. Do this for as many friends as will let them. Some people hate having other people in the kitchen, and some people love it. They will also see as many different styles as they have people to watch. I tend to cook fairly simple things with few ingredients, and my best friend cooks everything with tons of butter and fancy cheeses and four hundred ingredients. We both make tasty things, and both ways of doing it are totally valid, but will yield substantially different results for the same dish. It might be interesting to suggest this to them, since it might not occur to some people to ask to learn from watching their friends. Give them a list of good questions to ask such as: What seasonings are you using and why? What liquids are you using and why? Why are you adding this now and not adding that until later? They may end up getting a lot of, "I don't know, I just do" or "the recipe says so" answers, but they may also end up getting some really good stories and tips from friends who know their stuff. As for recipes, from-scratch mac and cheese is pretty easy and far better than boxed stuff. I've always just winged a white sauce and added whatever cheese looked good at the market that week, so I don't have a recipe to link. I remember being astounded the first time I learned you could make pudding from scratch. I'd only ever had it out of boxes growing up, and fresh, warm chocolate pudding in less than 15 minutes of standing at the stove is amazing. This is my husbands first request for special occasions or sometimes Tuesdays. It does need a double boiler or equivalent, but it is incredibly simple and delicious: http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2008...colate-pudding/ Roasted veggies with olive oil, salt, and pepper is idiotically easy and very tasty. Chop veggies. Coat in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Stick in oven somewhere around 350 - 400 depending on how long you want it to take for them to cook. Stir every 20 minutes. Take out when they are to your tenderness liking. 350 takes about an hour, 400 takes about 40 minutes, and both time/temp combinations are super tasty. Just depends on whether I want them more caramelly or more RIGHT NOW. We like our veggies very tender instead of crisp-tender, so adjust your times accordingly. A basic polenta if they need more ideas for starchy side dishes. Make it with water and with stock, let them taste the difference. You boil water/stock, add cornmeal (about a 1:3 ratio of cornmeal:water), stir until creamy, season (salt and butter or whatever you like), done.
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| # ? Jan 27, 2013 06:05 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 09:52 |
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I think this broccoli recipe has a few really good points to make. Broccoli was kind of the champion of gross food for me when I was a kid, and putting veggies in the oven was kind of revolutionary. It also deals with flavor balancing, since messing around with the quantities of garlic, lemon juice, and cheese has a crazy effect on the taste-mix of the dish. the linearity is kind of the opposite of taste-add-taste, but it can be framed as a sciencey introduction to analysing what went wrong in a dish. if you mess it up its no biggie, since broccoli is pretty cheap, and, since its more or less a side-dish, wouldn't be the end of the world. a cheap main ingredient plus lots of variables means tons of opportunities for experimentation- cooking it 3-4 times to get the flavor balance juuust right is an easy transition into freehand cooking.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 14:19 |
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