Recommendations for cooks

Jeremy Zawodny has been discussing his diet both during his recent weight-loss period and going forward, and mentioned that he’s now become more interested in cooking more. I wrote a comment on that post which ended up being fairly long and I thought worth reposting here. So here it is:

Good cook books can make a huge difference in confidence in cooking at home (and better confidence I think is one of the biggest differentiators between bad cooks and good cooks). Most cook books in the US focus on the recipe — that is the list of ingredients and then a dry set of instructions on how to combine them and cook them.

Here is a list of fantastic books that I have on my cookbook shelf which teach methods & concepts and not just recipes. They include recipes too, but those recipes are used as the shadows to the platonic form of the underlying technique or ingredient combination. The books help you learn how to not need a recipe in order to cook. Amazon URLs included for convenience:

1. Julia and Jacques cooking at homeJulia Child and Jacques Pepin each cook each recipe, and discuss how their solutions differ from each other, and why each one does it the way they do. A cookbook with a perl-like “TIMTOWTDI” approach.
2. I’m just here for the food
   
   Alton Brown breaks cooking down into basic categories of methods (pancakes are just a special case of muffin). He discusses at a high level some of the science going on when cooking happens, in a way which lets you better understand why you’re cooking things the way you are. If you’ve seen the show, the book is similar, but more in depth.
3. On food and cooking: the science and lore of the kitchenHarold McGee takes the scientific explanation of what’s going on when you cook to the next level. Not really a recipe book at all, but rather a bedtime reading book about the science and history of cooking.
4. The Saucier’s ApprenticeRaymond Sokolov explains the 5 mother sauces, and their descendants. There is no dish which is not improved by the right sauce, and understanding how to create a sauce for a given dish is rooted in understanding the lessons of this book. Warning: Butter content of some sauces in this book may throw you a few sigma off your mean caloric intake.

   I also own a number of the standard recipe cookbooks (joy of cooking, gourmet cookbook, etc) but find that I rarely crack them open unless I’m looking up something like the flour-to-liquid ratio for waffle batter. When I’m looking for inspiration for how to cook a piece of meat or a veg that I have in the fridge, I generally start with a web search, then use the methods learned in the 4 books above to combine the information I find online into something new.

   A recommendation for bachelor/busy schedule cooks: get a crockpot. This will not necessarily save you a lot of time cooking, but makes for much more reliable and time-predictable results than some other cooking methods, which can help you schedule cooking into your hectic day. Preparing food properly (including chopping, browning ingredients before putting them in the pot, etc) will be no less complicated nor time consuming than if you stuck the dish in the oven instead of the crockpot, but with a slow cooker, you can do the prep hours ahead of time and program the cooker to have the meal ready at whatever time you want it to be ready. I have 2 cookbooks which include some fancier-end crockpot recipe concepts which I do go to ahead of an internet search when I’m crockpotting, of which I can only remember one title while sitting here:

5. The Gourmet Slow Cooker

One final tip: when cooking meat, do not cook based on time. Get a probe thermometer, and cook until the meat reaches the correct temperature, whether you’re cooking it on the BBQ, in the oven, on the stovetop. You can skip this for slow-cooker cooking since the crockpot will control temp for you, but cooking meat based on temperature rather than time is probably the single biggest difference you can make to improve your cooking results. I use one of those digital probe thermometers with an extension cable which plugs into a display/timer base, and has a “beep when temperature reached” feature which is very handy.