Reddit reviews Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking

Bourdain's Les Halles

So, when you heat food up- meat especially- it has a tendency to dry out. This is very true if you're cooking past medium temps.

A reduction is a sauce made by simmering or boiling down a liquid into a strong, thick concentration, yielding an intense taste. Because there are different components in liquids, when you apply heat they can evaporate or clump together.

Reductions (and other sauces) add another layer of flavor to the dish. If a meat or veggie is bland, not well seasoned enough, or too gamey, the sauce will tend to help liven it up.

I'm a huge fan of red wine and shallots, and bourbon-honey-butter reductions. Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook is a wonderful reference to have in the kitchen and living room.

Tons of cooking videos on yourtube! Here's one with sprouts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LhZpTqWCMc

You should also check out mother sauces. Your taste buds will thank you.

His cookbook is written in a similar manner as well.

I am a professional chef and while watching people prepare food is entertaining and sometimes also educating I actually recommend you to buy books and learn the basics first.

You can then use youtube pretty well in order to watch how to do specific things, like i.e. deboning a whole chicken for a gallantine, or how to trim certain pieces of meat.

Start with french cuisine. Once you have understood how things are connected you'll actually understand everything else.

If you want something simple and entertaining for the start I'd choose Anthony Bourdaine's Les Halles Cookbook. It's amusingly written and the recipes are fairly easy and they are all legit.

Then there is Paul Bocus. Living legend with three long-term girlfriends.

And of course you want to have Escoffier at your home. Doesn't get much more classic than that.

If you want to get a sense of what drives a top notch chef, watch In Search of Perfection by Heston Blumethal. Very very good stuff.

And finally, if you want to learn something about culinary history I highly highly recommend Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany and to learn about our lifes as a chef you need to read the (admittedly exaggerated) autobiographicly Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain.

All this provided, you won't learn cooking without actually doing it.

Edit: Depending on your budget, I also heavily recommend Alain Ducasse's Grand Livre de Cuisine.

I have mixed feelings about celebrity cookbooks, but nevertheless I'm a big fan of Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. It's fairly unpretentious French bistro fare, but a lot of the recipes require a decent amount of prep, a lot of trial and error, and sometimes recipes stages that span multiple days. Not all of the recipes are tough, but as an intermediate cook myself I really think that some of these will be a pleasant challenge. Plus it's a very aesthetically pleasing book imo.

I like to cook French and Asian/Indian foods the most. Here's my base list for any type of cooking: kosher salt, fresh cracked pepper, olive oil, canola oil, eggs, flour, potatoes, onions and shallots, cream, butter, bacon, cheese, rice, canned diced tomatoes, garlic bulbs, red and white wine, vinegar (rice wine or balsamic). Root vegetables can be added too, but I prefer to get them specific to the meal.
A few extras I tend to use a lot are ginger root, oyster sauce, and red cabbage. Not exactly stock-worthy to some people though.

But actually, I think this is the wrong approach. I suggest finding a good cook book, perhaps Ad Hoc at Home, and just start reading it. I did this with Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles book and it revolutionized how I think about cooking. I wish I had done it from the start to develop the thought process first, which then leads to better food preparation. When you cook a specific meal you can go to the store and look at each food separately for the meal you're preparing. When I'm at the market looking for specific ingredients and not "grocery shopping" I'm able to think about the food in a different way. Gradually, you can build up foods and spices over time, but in doing so you'll build good habits, good recipes, and a more mature approach to food in general. My approach before was very much like a shotgun blast of spices, whereas now I'm able to more precisely pinpoint the flavor profile I'm going for.

A word on spices: Buying in bulk will save you lots of money. People suggest dating them, so as to know when they're going bad, but this might be out of your scope right now. I know Central Market here in Texas has a pretty nice bulk spice section, and I imagine other whole foods places do as well.

Herbs: Fresh herbs are key. You want something to have at the ready? Fresh herbs you can get from the store. But really you should invest in a $.25 pack of basil seeds, rosemary seeds, and thyme seeds. These plants are hardy and tough to kill (maybe not so much with basil) and will make everything taste more expensive.

Start with this cookbook

Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking https://www.amazon.com/dp/158234180X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_pyWeAbK4J2TDM