For me, it was wanting to do biscuits and gravy with more sausage than the cheap-ass diner we ate at on fishing trips considered sufficient.
The other big stimulus was having someone to cook for, who didn’t cook but liked to eat :)
I’m far from a chef :) Just have a need to cook for myself and I prefer when the food doesn’t taste like crap, so I picked up a few things here and there and then have built upon it over the years. Catching an episode of a cooking show here or there doesn’t hurt. But I mean really as long as you understand basic techniques (which is easy with the internet) then recipes are really just following instructions. Anyone can do it :)
In my case, a very good friend’s family introduced me to Indian food while I was visiting her in Lexington, KY, but when I got back to eastern TN, there was nothing of the sort nearby. While I’d cooked some things here and there before (I used to watch Good Eats for the hell of it most nights before bed during high school), I suddenly needed to be able to grasp an entire cuisine by the throat and demand it do my biding ;-)
That’s a little more dramatic than it actually turned out, but in essence, Indian is a pretty complex cuisine to start with. Kinda like how I decided to learn guitar by practicing Blind Guardian. Talk about jumping in at the deep end. My initial experiments were crude and not very accurate, but it inspired a passion.
Later, during senior year at college, I moved into an apartment and abandoned my meal plan. Suddenly, cooking went from a novelty I’d take up to knock out a dish for my gf and I when I was home for the summer and became something I had to do 2-3 times a day, every day. In a tiny, shitty kitchen, with almost no money or tools at all. Another trial by fire.
By the time I graduated and moved out with my gf into our first apartment, I’d accepted that cooking required experimentation, failures, and risks. . . and brought a lot of rewards, good food not being the least among them. That was. . . about 7.5 years ago. Been a journey ever since. I’ve still got a lot to learn. . . as it is, I still can’t knock out the solos up there in “Mirror Mirror,” but I’m feeling almost competent with the rhythm guitar bits!
Tonight!
British cuisine returns with a pub classic: Fish n Chips with Mushy Peas, Soda Bread and Coleslaw.
Fish is frozen cod dipped in a basic beer batter (Newcastle Brown Ale this time around) and fried. The chips are russets chopped, simmered, frozen, pre-fried, re-frozen, and final-fried, Heston Blumenthal-style. The fish are from yesterday, so a little darker than before thanks to a trip through the toaster oven.
Mushy peas are pretty basic frozen peas with salt, pepper, butter, mint, and lemon. Soda bread is really for the generic UK-style “full breakfast” tomorrow and Friday for lunch, but it’s just a basic wheat-buttermilk quickbread. And the slaw was just some angelhair-style cabbage tossed with mayo, Greek yogurt, apple cider vinegar, salt, pepper, sugar, and celery seeds. Turned out pretty okay, though!
How are you deep frying that? Do you have a deep dryer or use a pan? Man that looks good, especially the coleslaw.
Yeah, just a cheapo $20 GE ~1 gal deep fryer from like 7 years ago, but it gets the job done! Frankly that thing’s seen more use than I suspect its engineers ever counted on. . .
I don’t mean to derail things, but with deep frying. How do you handle reusing oil? Do you re-use it at all? Like filter it back into the bottle, or leave the oil in the fryer?
If I’m just making the same thing a few days in a row, and it’s not super messy, yeah, I’ll just leave the oil in the fryer. Like, say, if I’m doing that Mediterranean-inspired Chicken Zaki meal with fries (just basic frozen crinkle fries usually for that), I’ll just keep fryin’ 'em each night, leaving it unplugged to cool down in-between.
Between major meals, or after making something “messy” (e.g., fried chicken that tends to put off lots of bits of flour or batter while it fries), I’ll run it through a strainer and back into the bottle. Sometimes through an old, disused plastic filter from a broken coffee machine, if there was lots of particulate matter.
Finally, I try to move the oil through “stages,” opening it up with something fairly “sensitive” to off flavors, like doughnuts (haven’t done those in ages tho) or hush puppies, then moving onto medium-neutral stuff like fries or chicken, and then wrapping up with something very flavorful, like fish or falafel. By that point, the oil’s been used 7-10 times or so and is reaching its last legs, so “ruining” it with really strong flavors doesn’t matter–it’s ready to toss after that last use.
Uhh, when I lived with a couple of other bachelors in a house we had a deep fryer. Like a double basket thing. And we did all sorts of fries/cheese sticks/etc in that thing. And the oil was never removed from it until we changed it. Which was like, every 3 months. Maybe. Though it did have a lid that went on it once it had cooled down. None of us ever got sick or died and everything always tasted fine. I’m not sure if this is valuable information or not. :P
In my wildest dreams I’m a chef. A real chef is not only someone who can cook well, but also a maestro who guides his or her kitchen like Frank Zappa guides his band. Cooking well is certainly part of it. But I’d say 50% of chef is controlling the rest of the crew.
As far as your real question, if you will forgive me for the assumption, how did I learn the rules of cooking well? I started by watching my grandmother in the kitchen. At a very young age I would always wake to the smell of onions and garlic sauteing in the downstairs kitchen. Grandma’s father was a real chef. And she passed on his knowledge to me. Later I loved to watch Julia Child and the Galloping Gourmet on TV in black and white. Later there was Jacques Pepin and Mario Batali. Ultimately the rules that all of these real chefs talked about stuck in my head. No oil in the pasta while it’s boiling. Cook to temperature, not time. Less dried herbs than fresh. Don’t move food on the hot pan until it releases by itself.
There are a hundred things that I had pounded into my head by watching cooking shows. And I’m still learning today.
My big rule? Try it. If you make a mistake, try again. And again until you get a result that you like.
To quote Jacques Pepin, “Happy cooking!”
Trial and error, and knowing when they show you an egg baked in an avocado, avoid that site. It’s a bullshit recipe.
Not that I am a great cook per say, but I do the same thing I do today that I started doing years ago. I find a reasonable recipe and make it by the book, then I tweak with it to correct anything I don’t like. Still haven’t mastered rolling a good meatloaf though, or the cakes actually… not a good roller.
Armando inspires me to break out some of my heavier dishes though before the weather warms up some.
Excellent question, I am no chef, I’m a home cook. Chef’s get paid. Home cooks do it for the enjoyment and to put food on the family table. What did it for me was actually turning 35 and the understanding that I couldn’t cook more than about 5-6 dishes. I knew no techniques, no crazy recipes, nothing. I barely had passable knife skills. I didn’t know what braising meant. I didn’t understand what mirepoix was and why certain veggies made a dish. I had two pans, two pots, and a slow cooker. .
So the path went something like: watching some interesting cooking shows, making attempts at things, purchased kitchen gear, more cooking attempts, reading some cookbooks, more gear, more attempts at recipes, reading some cooking periodicals, even more gear, reading some blogs, giving away gear so I had room for more gear, more refined cooking attempts, etc.
There is nothing you can do wrong except make some food. And the way that got me going was simply asking myself, “what would it take to make this tasty dish I just had at this restaurant?” If you asked me now, I wish I had a kitchen four times the size of the one I have now, just so I could do more.
Similar to Armando, I have a deep fryer. It gets used moderately. I bought one that filters the oil into a holding container when done, then you just pour it back in when you want to cook again. You get a feel for the flavor of the oil and know both by the color (dark) and smell of it when warming up when it is time to change it out. Oil can eventually go rancid, but I would put that into the category of someone who left their fryer loaded with oil for many months, or many, many uses. It’ll taste like ass long before then. To describe that taste so you’ll know, it’s similar to a slightly burned/bitter flavor, and a similar aroma. Your food will also be more greasy than the first few times you used the oil for frying. If you notice foaming or more commonly smoking at the same temps you’ve used before with the same oil, it’s time to change it.
Also similar to Armando I go in stages with oil, when I can: veggies, then meats, then heavily breaded items, then fish (which is rare for me.) Fishy oil will forever be fishy oil. That’s where you stop, or just use it for fish from then on.
You don’t need a deep fryer though, and I’m very partial to frying on the stovetop. I’ve used a high sided saute pan, but my favorite would be one of my cast iron skillets, or my cast iron dutch oven. I actually prefer fried chicken done this way versus a deep fryer. You can easily fry most things stovetop if you really wanted to get into it.
I’ve used various oils, but for deep frying I prefer peanut oil. For stovetop frying, I’ll use many more things, but vegetable oil seems the easist.
EDIT: I noticed I missed a question there. I let the oil completely cool down to cold temps, then filter it through a strainer. I’m just really trying to get the particles out, you don’t catch them all usually. Then I either store it in the fryer (for my deep fryer,) or into a metal coffee can that I have (for stovetop,) and put a lid on whichever of those it is. Break it back out next time you want to fry. Always remember to check your oil on the day you’re going to fry so that you know if you need to buy more oil, BEFORE cooking time. :)
This was much how my experience was. I moved out on my own, with no experience. I saw, as it were, three options.
Learn to cook
Eat out, or buy premade frozen, every meal
starve
I was making poor money, so #2 was out of budget, and I didn’t like the idea of #3, so I learned to cook. Fortunately I was single, on my own, and with a high level of risk tolerance. So I experimented like a fiend. I also have a propensity for novelty, and a bargain hunters eye, so the local Ultra was a massive aid. While not as varied as a small ethnic grocer, they still would carry a wide range of more unusual items. And I have a policy of trying anything once, so if something I’d never heard of was on sale, I’d grab one and figure out what to do with it.
And since I was the only one who would have to suffer from any failings, I was liberated to do so. And the reality is that there were very few out and out failures. So I gained a wide repertoire of recipes.
Also All Recipes. That site is a godsend.
I pretty much just found good cookbooks and am working out of them. Started with slow cooking (and Slow Cooker Revolution), because it’s super straightforward, have since mostly moved on to stovetop skillet and dutch oven stuff. See earlier in the thread for my book list.
The Good Eats series, though now somewhat dated, was what pushed me from trying new things to really wanting to know so much more. The appeal of cooking combined with my proclivity with anything technical and scientific. I see less of Alton these days unless he’s an emcee or judge on a show, but Kenji Lopez-Alt has taken the place of that for me.
YouTube is also an invaluable resource, even more so than any cookbook I own.
He’s bringing back (a spiritual successor to) Good Eats as an internet thing.
Holy shit, I had no idea, that’s great news!
Huge agree with @Skipper re: the technical know how aspect of Good Eats, Lopez-Alt’s Serious Eats, and, I’ll add, Harold McGee’s On Cooking was hugely influential for me over the years. I want to know the how and why if what I’m doing; how do fats and emulsifiers and proteins and heat etc etc etc all work and interact.
And yes, YouTube is HUGE. Actually SEEING a recipe come together answers so, so many questions.
I still don’t own that, but I really want it. I have a long list of cooking related books I want to own. I need more space for books first. :(
Yep, fairly common story I think. When I moved out on my own I had the same options, but did have the money for #2 so did that for a few years. Till I got sick of it, and realized I just needed to learn to cook.
I took a scientific/engineering approach to it and figured that methodical experiments would yield increasingly better results over time. Which was true. The early stuff was fairly bad, but that’s okay. One thing that kept me from giving up was my promise to myself that if I really screwed up a dinner I would have no regrets about tossing it in the trash and ordering a pizza. Hell, every once in awhile when experimenting with a new recipe that will still happen to me, but mostly I’m competent to cook many different types of food.