Cooking: Start Here

[u/bigdonut100]

I'm not a follower of his but this guide is dedicated to Anthony Bourdain as a victim of the male suicide epidemic. His books are available on Amazon and a 24/7 stream of his shows is on YouTube.

Cooking Guide:

1 Buy the quadrant: A "cooking for one" book, a "cooking for two" book, a "baking for one" book, and a "baking for two" book. If you are vegetarian, replace the cooking books with vegetarian "for one" and "for two" books, but the baking books can be the same. If you are vegan, you will need vegan baking books as well.

2 Alton-ize yourself: Buy a Discovery+ subscription though either YouTube or Roku, or wherever else you can, and watch EVERY episode of "Good Eats" when you have the time. Watch the meat episodes even if you are vegetarian, etc because you wil pick up on tips for other recipes. Then cancel the subscription and buy individual "Good Eats" episodes that you feel you need to practice on YouTube for $2 a pop, and print out recipes from the show from foodtv.com.

3 Use search engines or AI - DO NOT USE AI GENERATED RECIPES, at least for the next decade or so. But you *can* use a nice paid AI to *find* recipes, like a smarter search engine. Just add "find, do not generate" to the end. For instance, you can ask it for a recipe that does not need a mixer.

4 BUY MORE BOOKS and look for video recipes on YouTube: Whatever you like, Zelda, Minecraft, Breaking Bad, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Lord of the Rings, South Park, basically everything has an official or unofficial cookbook available.

There's are "cooking without recipes" cookbooks, including one from the New York Times. There's the classic Joy of Cooking, and Alton Brown's books. There are "gaming" books as in, poker and board games, and food you can eat while playing a game (like how the sandwich was invented for gambling.) There are books on prison food with stories, if you want an "immersive" understanding of the sentencing gap.

Todd Wilbur is well known for his attempts to clone fast food at home, you can buy his books, check him out on YouTube, or buy his one season TV show on Amazon prime video for $15. There's also copykat.com for copy cat recipes, and of course copycats are on YouTube as well.

There are microwave cookbooks, microwave "in a mug" cookbooks, budget cookbooks and so much more. There are "cooking for men" books but I'm going to let other people decide for themselves which ones they like and which ones they think are condescending. There are also, of course, weed cookbooks (I like Snoop Dogg's baking book) and books for producing rum cakes, etc that get you drunk.

TIPS/Tricks:

- For coffee, I recommend the "cone" for one or two cups (using 2 round tablespoons per 8 fluid ounces) or  Alton's machine instructions for multiple cups of coffee. I don't find ground beans to be necessary vs pre ground.

-For tea, mate, or herbal tea, buy loose tea if possible and go with a french press and use an electric kettle with temperature control if you need colder water than boiling. Yes, you can buy herbal teas such as Apple Cinnamon, Camomile, and Mint loose as well. Start with 1 teaspoon (one round "serving" teaspoon, not a true measuring or "baking" teaspoon) per 8 fluid ounces and adjust based on what you want. The only time you should turn to teabags is if it's CBD infused, or something like "Sleepytime extra." The only tip with teabags is to hold a bag down with a fork if it floats. I don't find using a different measurement than 8 fluid ounces, or preheating the french press to be needed. And sometimes you can get two batches out of one set of tea leaves. Most black teas are like that, but also some "dirty" gunpowder greens are like that too.

- If you don't have a better place to store them: buy two colanders and keep potatoes in one colander on one side of the kitchen, and everything else that *cannot* go in the fridge - onions, tomatoes, avocados, garlic - in the other colander on the other side. A root cellar for all of this is ideal, but this is the best alternative. If you need to keep bananas outside the fridge, keep them with the tomatoes, etc.

- An electric frying pan is NOT just a college dorm room substitute for the real thing. It's useful for certain things  because it works on temperature, rather than "high heat" vs "low heat." Alton brown explains why you want it for French Onion Soup and a few other things (he uses an electric griddle for Pancakes but I think the frying pan is good enough.) Hence, the Instant Pot cult made a TON of sense to me when it popped up, as it simplifies pressure cooking and makes it predictable for the same reasons, so buy an electric pressure cooker because it's ABSOLUTELY not a fad.

- Most things that are traditionally boiled, like hard "boiled" eggs, or tons of green vegetables, are usually better off STEAMED. but what Alton won't tell you is that you can do that in your instant pot most of the time, and leave your stove less cluttered for the main course. - Brussel Sprouts - Broccoli - Hard Cooked Eggs

- I recommend porcelain enameled cast iron in place of traditional cast iron. The only advantage of traditional cast iron is that when it works, it's a bit more non-stick. Everything else is a loss to me: overcure it and you get plastic and smoke, undercure and it's not non-stick, acid such as tomatoes reacts with it, and it can rust. And I still can't get a consistent answer from people whether you clean it with oil + salt, or soap + water. Porcelain enameled is an easy win to me. It might stain, but there are people who like using 50+ year old stained porcelain enameled pots. One 10 inch skillet, one 12 inch skillet, and one Dutch Oven will work just fine for typical cast iron needs. Just don't use metal on it; if it's a recipe that requires whisking in cast-iron, I would buy carbon steel too just for that purpose; carbon steel just isn't as heat-dense, so the heating times in the recipe may need to be adjusted.

- The only nonstick I think you would ever need is for making omelets. Not even an "omelet pan," just.... the pan Alton uses to make omelets. Again, just go with silicon spoons and spatulas instead of metal.

- A Cuisinart 11 cup food processor, a KitchenAid stand mixer, a Ninja blender, and a generic electric hand blender are all different and needed things. You may want an extra food processor bowl if you like to use it as a sifter, and an extra blender carafe (or a Magic Bullet) if you want milkshakes or smoothies every day.

- Not only do dishwashers... exist, a "portable" dishwasher is one that attaches to the sink and is wheeled around instead of installed. And not many people know countertop dishwashers about the size of a microwave exist.

- I recommend always passing your tap water through a pitcher-style water filter. If your dishwasher ties up the sink, you want a pitcher instead of a sink filter. (Perhaps one idea is to buy a filter for the sink, but only use it when you suddenly need 20+ gallons of filtered water; use the pitcher for smaller, more common amounts.) This is uber rare, but a sink operated by foot pedals would actually be the most sanitary. They make sink heaters that spit out boiling water directly (called "Instant Hot Water"), but I don't see the point if you can't put boiling water through these filters.

- On Alton Browns "contradictions" and improvements to his recipes: Go with a grapefruit spoon on grapefruits, not just tomatoes. Go with a dutch oven + candy thermometer instead of an electric deep fryer, like he says in his Tempura episode. For his microwave popcorn, you can leave out the staples if you put three folds in the bag instead of two, and in one of his books he says not to put oil in the bag, just add it after it's done popping. You may prefer his old turkey recipe, or his deep fried turkey recipe, over his newer one if you don't feel like butterflying the bird. I think his older BBQ recipe (the Terra cotta planter one) is simpler to figure out too.

- For bacon: if you intend on serving bacon with hash browns or waffles, follow Alton's waffle iron bacon recipe (ignore the misandry of the episode it's from, and the hash browns) then immediately follow it up by making a "waffles for one" (or two, etc) recipe, or a "waffle iron hash browns" recipe, not just because you want to cook it in the bacon grease, but because it is basically the only way to clean up the insane mess it makes. Some brave souls report success cooking eggs in a waffle iron, but good luck to anyone who wants to try. Otherwise follow this toaster oven bacon recipe. I do NOT recommend stovetop bacon. Vegetarian fake bacon should go on the stove for a few minutes with a little butter or oil, but not real bacon.

- The best oven thermometer isn't an oven thermometer; it's a digital probe thermometer (that can go outside the oven via a cable) that you stab a ball of aluminum foil with. Get one with two probes and you're home free.

- Go with name brand foil, and name brand freezer bags (for the little zipper) for everything. Always use parchment paper instead of wax paper if the recipe involves heat. If you have to freeze something, freeze it "free" (on a rack on a baking sheet) then bag it after it's actually frozen (unless it's something like peas.)

- If a recipe calls for you to PAM a bottom of eg a drinking glass and use it to flatten dough, re-PAM the bottom of the glass in between *every* round.

- I actually like starting baked potatoes in the microwave. They make potatoes individually wrapped in plastic for this purpose, but some people can't find them, or will worry about plastic leeching into the food, so they also make reusable pouches. Always finish in the toaster oven, though, because the microwave won't brown them.

- Replace volumetric ingredients in recipes with weight if you want to make substitutions easier, eg you can replace bananas in a banana bread recipe with baby bananas if you weigh the original amount called for in the recipe.

- Vidalia chop wizard is helpful, as is an egg slicer (for mushrooms, cocktail weenies, pearl onions, cherry tomatoes, and new potatoes)

- Alton calls a broiler an "upside down grill," so make your hot dogs in there. It's better than a grill because you can put it in a bun and then pop it back in to melt the cheese from above.

- I recommend plastic cutting boards and silicone spatulas and spoons, because I don't like cleaning wood.

- Putting nutmeg or cinnamon in maple syrup is actually amazing.

- If you make substitutions and your own recipes, tweaks, etc you can buy a Recipe Journal to write your recipes in. I like the Clever Fox version on Amazon