I ended up getting gifted a set by America's Test Kitchen. Their website is pretty bad, they actually have some fundamental books - chicken dishes, side dishes, fish dishes, etc with hundreds of recipes in each. Most recipes describe a couple of failed attempts, the reasons they failed, and why the final recipe works. Great for learning. Most are simple recipes that don't take a bunch of ingredients.

My cooking just accidentally went up a couple of notches after cooking a couple dozen recipes out of the books, and paying attention to their failure descriptions. Pretty great way to passively learn!

> Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.

> I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.

Have you tried ChatGPT? Just give it the ingredients you have, and it will synthesize a tasty recipe for you, without having to deal with all that online garbage. My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it! Just be careful not to add too much bleach!

Once you learn to cook properly from cookbooks, online recipes become useful again. You will instinctively know which recipes are good and which ones to avoid; further, you”ll know how to modify a so-so online recipe into something passable.

BTW, get Hazan’s book, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”. Much like Julia Child’s book, but for Italian cuisine.

> 5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel.

FWIW It's a TV show (slash media franchise; see: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/ ) that happens to have a YT channel. I primarily know it from PBS.

Kenji has an excellent youtube channel that I think should be the starting point for people who want to learn to cook. There's nothing like video to see what it's supposed to look like during the process.

Also funny dad jokes.

https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt/videos

I first have to proclaim my love for cookbooks. We have over half a bookcase full of cookbooks. Do we use all the recipes from all of them, of course not but there are some great recipes we have found in some of them. We have more than a couple that are annotated and stained and loved and repaired. I’m also a technical writer and it’s my job to capture institutional knowledge and I know how hard that can be. So yeah, I think cookbooks are important. It is very easy to make a bad cookbook. Sure the recipe might work in your kitchen with your pots and pans, that doesn’t mean it’ll work in Denver which is at a high altitude, or Phoenix with lots of heat and basically no humidity. One thing I like about America’s Test Kitchen is that they have beta testers all over the place that test in all kinds of conditions. All the recipes I’ve tried of their’s have worked on the first try. But almost all recipes need adjustment when I move to a new apartment. One of the big things I have learned to check is what setting on the stove is for butter/bacon where it doesn’t smoke (4 on my current stove) or 6 for a high temp oil like corn oil. I love watching Tasting History with Max Miller on YouTube, because he has to figure out what measurements even mean to find something that works. The Old Cookbook Show segments on Glen and Friends YouTube is also great, though they tend to use for modern cookbooks aka late 18th to early 20th Century, but even they often have to convert one kind of quart into another kind of quart or to liters. I am reading Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat and she’s the first to actually say how much to salt pasta water (3.5%). Now she has a professional cooking background and I am not, but she understands how to do good technical writing so the first half go the book is all about technique to make it taste good. My problem with a lot of cookbooks is that they pretty much only give you recipes. Assuming that you already know technique, but that isn’t true right now in the world. Mom and Dad are both working so they have to grab frozen or fast food. Schools dropped Home Economics classes where you could practice technique at least a little. Schools are slowly bringing back Life Skills or Family and Consumer Sciences classes as a replacement. But a generation lost the skills and only some are trying to learn them. I have old recipes I can’t recreate. My mom used to make me fried bread and hotdogs as a treat. I can’t recreate it because I can’t find the Lithuanian style rye bread she could get near NYC where I currently live. While we did try to bake rye bread from scratch we didn’t even get close. So yeah.

Generally America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, Cook's Country, and descendant ventures like Serious Eats and Milk Street are mostly good and pitched at a beginner-to-intermediate level. I wish I'd had them when I was learning. I like them all but the "this one thing changed the way I boil water forever" hook they seem to have to have for every recipe gets a little old, and frequently the "trick" isn't worth the time and effort. Also, I've found I have a little Gell-Mann amnesia with their recipes - if I know the cuisine or dish well, their recipes are usually just OK to good, but if I don't, they're fantastic!

Once you have some basics, YouTube is just a fantastic resource in general for things like knife skills, or breaking down subprimal cuts of beef, or if you want to see a bunch of different takes on making a bouquet garni (which in a cookbook will frequently be succinctly "tie it up in a leek leaf") or tying a roast.

I think Lebovitz "wrote" the Dean & DeLuca cookbook, didn't he? I love that book.

[edit] Nope, David Rosengarten

Anyway, as long as we're making suggestions, my two favorite dessert books are

The Cake Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum. Had it for at least 30 years and was one of the first cookbooks I ever bought.

Classic Home Desserts, Richard Sax. Borrowed from a friend and after she warned me not to get anything on it (was one of her favorites), I got my own copy. Still in frequent use 25 years later.

Tangent on representing recipes - Always loved the "Cooking for Engineers" guy's recipe notation (scroll down to just above the comments), they're so clever and concise:

https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/168/Pecan-Coffee-...

I like having my recipes in digital format, but the lack of notes, annotations, and editing history is a big weakness in most of them. I would love one that offered a git-like interface for recipes: it could track the "diff" of a recipe as you tweak it, and you could "commit" each variation along with notes about the outcome.

Can you share your chocolate cookie recipe?

Serious Eats can still be good, but I basically don't trust anything that wasn't written by Kenji or Daniel Gritzer.

Yes, it's a problem when the recipe was adjust just enough to be different from the source, but the person who adjusted and publish it never actually tested the recipe, resulting in readers making garbage, then correcting it in the comments.

I think that's what the person who originally replied was getting at. The people who do that aren't interested in adding to the craft, just generating content.

My grandmother's index cards are nearly all for baked goods, and they're all useless. It'll call for "a small pile of soda" or "eggs" (no number, just "eggs"). The cookie recipe I loved growing up turns out to list no quantities at all EXCEPT ... "2 eggs OR add more flour" which ... makes no sense whatsoever. Maybe she was trolling us?

I hate baking because precision isn’t sufficient to make the quality of food my mom makes, who has tens of thousands of hours of experience. She bakes by look, feel, smell, and even though I wrote down very specific instructions, I can hardly get my product to match up.

Yes and a lot of things like stews, sauces, soups, etc you can lump together as "peasant food" that had variations in how you prepared it based on what you had left over.

The idea of combing through dozens of recipes, formulating a precise grocery list, and shopping with the intent to cook that one exact dish is very much a Type-A modern day phenomenon.

How many tomatoes go into the sauce? However many bruised ugly tomatoes grandma had leftover. How much meat to make it a meat sauce? Whatever leftover cuts from the roast. Etc.

Improvisational cooking was much more the norm. It is also how you avoid food waste.

Even recent recipes have issues as shrinkflation and corporate food chemistry have both changed pre-made boxed ingredients for specific recipes. A box of cake mix today usually yields a softer crumb than a box of cake mix from 20 years ago. It's also smaller.

This is exactly why anything important should be written down: you can't trust random specific people to value that knowledge. Whatever it is that you value, you can't trust that your kids will value it too, and in fact, they usually don't.

Crucially, do all of your chopping and prep before you heat the wok, then begin cooking

Amen. A single $15 restaurant serving of Thai curry, for example, is enough to pay for a whole pot with 5-6 servings at home using the exact same curry paste and coconut milk that the restaurants use. For the price of a $10 McDonalds meal, you can buy a pound of USDA Prime top sirloin steak at Costco, or a pound of t-bone or ribeye if you’ve got low cost ethnic markets in your area. Costco chicken breasts are consistently $3 per pound and sous vide makes it foolproof. Shrimp is $5 per pound on sale (make sure to check weekly ads!). If you want to splurge, get a big tenderloin, salmon, or some jumbo shrimp for $10 per pound. Entire meals can be had for less than the delivery fee and tip on a single entree. You can even make entire meals just from the vegetable and meat scraps!

If you’re like me and eat nothing but whole foods prepared at home and shop around at bargain/ethnic markets, the costs are down right ridiculous. Most weekly vegetable and fruit stock ups are under $30/week. When I was unemployed I was eating like a king for less than $300 a month with at least a half pound serving of meat each day. Most of the budget went to meat and avocados.

It takes a lot of experience to balance that with time though. It took me many years to discover techniques like sous vide that are fire and forget, and build up a stable of recipes like the Thai curry where the ingredients can be prepped while cooking to cut down on prep time. It used to be very time consuming but the rewards are worth it.

Oh, I thought about a better analogy: the information about ingredients and temperature is about as useful for a good dish as the information about the volume of paints is useful for making a good painting.

So, here's my background: printing and publishing. I studied to make books, worked in printing houses, newspapers, before I turned into a programmer. But that was after I managed to land a "proper" job. Before then, I worked a lot of crappy jobs, including in the kitchen.

I'm not a chef by any means, all I'd do in my kitchen jobs would be the boring stuff, like chopping something or frying etc. In my work in the bakery I probably made couple dozens of thousands of doughnuts, but it's not the same as baking them at home, of course. So, it doesn't help with recipes that are normally designed for home-cooking.

But, do professional chefs use cookbooks? -- I know the answer to this one. No, they don't. Or, not in the way they are intended. I knew that some would use the books for inspiration for presentation (i.e. how to style a dish), but not for the ingredients or the cooking methods. Sometimes it's just a general idea, but never the instructions or the ingredients list. I.e. someone who trained to be a pastry chef doesn't need a list of ingredients to make, eg. puff-pastry dough. But there are plenty of variations of puff-pastry and similar doughs (eg. filo). So, a book may give a general direction by saying that this or the other particular pastry traditionally uses lemon juice. And the chef would know how to ration it and how to work the dough. The book cannot help with the later aspect, because that, just like any craft requires seeing / working under a master who'd explain how it works.

Most of the work of the chef has nothing to do with knowing ingredients or temperatures: the typical stuff that goes into recipes, the stuff you'd find in a cookbook. It's about knowing how to tell if the condition for cooking something is right. Take, another example: making the staple bread of the Middle East, the pitas. Knowing ingredients or temperatures won't help you make a pita have a pocket. There's no instruction that can explain what thickness of the dough do you need to make it work, because that's contingent on the hydration of the dough, the temperature of the oven / pan you use to bake it etc. But, even that isn't enough: you need to know how to kneed the dough, how to tell when it's sufficiently proofed, and this will depend on a lot of factors in your environment (temperature, humidity, age of the yeast, age of the flour, water acidity etc.) that are just not possible to capture well in a book.

> convection function

That's just not applicable to baking bread / pastry... Not even vegetables really. Maybe will work for something like a stew, or some other potted dishes, where it doesn't really matter how heat is distributed anyways. This isn't a function that I'd use in home-baking (I don't really make stews). And industrial settings are a different story.

> then keep adding until it looks and feels right".

I think something of value that a lot of cooking/baking education misses is showing what it looks like when it's wrong at various stages.

A deflated loaf of bread could have 2-3 reasons why it looks bad but you'd only be able to know what exactly went wrong by knowing at what stage it was wrong(such as insufficient kneading).

Here's the thing, they are making dozens, even hundreds of the same dish, every day. They are going to become intimately familiar with how it's supposed to be. This is on top of having created similar dishes tens of thousands of times already. That's their job. I have a different job, but I still want to make good tasting food home and I only cook a few dishes a day. As a technical writer, I know that having document that both a novice and an expert can access easily is a hard, hard problem. It's doable but there are so many traditions around cookbooks it's hard to get around them.

> "I add more until it looks right." Like ``it's not "3/4c of flour", it's "start with half a cup of flour then keep adding until it looks and feels right".``

This is so annoying. It is like the 'then draw the owl' chain mail joke picture.

If they can't describe what they are doing they lack deep understand of what they are doing. Just give me the ratios.