Reddit reviews Modern Sauces: More than 150 Recipes for Every Cook, Every Day

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Second, there are ways to take a more cost-effective approach. I always bring up the physics example of the apple falling on Newton's head, which made him realize gravity existed, and then he dedicated his whole life to figuring out the formula for gravity; then you saunter up to science class one day, learn F=ma, and that's that! Likewise, a lot of smart & persistent people have worked hard to create formulas for food, called recipes, which you can try & learn & get good results at simply by following their step-by-step checklist.

Part of getting good at cooking is learning the underlying tools, technique, and knowledge required for flavor combinations, food pairings, spice mixes, cooking methods, etc., but part of it is also just burning through a bunch of recipes & getting exposure to good results & to various processes, without having to master every single one right off the bat & then think up new ways to use them. So in addition to learning how to cook in general, I'd also recommend simply following a bunch of recipes initially, rather than trying to re-invent the wheel, which can help you get better results initially, simply because you have proven instructions to follow! There are a million great resources for doing this; I'll share just a few here:

• Website: Serious Eats: Most recipes are split into a detailed explanation & then a separate page for the recipe itself. Excellent learning resource!
  
• Book: The Food Lab: By Kenji of the Serious Eats website. This is a really excellent book to learn cooking step-by-step, complete with full-color pictures & detailed explanations.
  
• Website: ChefSteps: An excellent resource for detailed recipes from the company that makes the Joule sous-vide machine (note that not all recipes are sous-vide!)
  
• Show: Good Eats with Alton Brown (on TV or available to purchase online); lots of detailed walkthroughs & tribal knowledge shared in each episode.
  
• Book: Modern Sauces: 150 sauces, plus great explanations to build up your knowledge about sauces. One thing I've realized over time is that most restaurants create amazing flavor through their sauces, whether it's something as basic as Big Mac sauce at McDonald's or a super fancy steak sauce at an elegant, high-end restaurant.
  
• Show: "Wok Star" by Eleanor Ho: She teaches a fantastic, recipe-free workflow for creating stir-fry dishes using a wok & a hi-heat portable burner. Note that you can buy the discs (which are just simple recordings of her classes) & printed materials separately from the wok & burner if you already have the tools. She's put together a really great system for teaching wok cooking, so if you're interested in learning the "flowchart" for quick & healthy meals using the stir-fry method, this is the best resource I've ever come across!
  
  Third, it helps to have some good introductions to the different aspects of food. Here's a few links to read to help kick-start your education process:
  
  
• Basic cooking advice & approach
  
• How to cook a chicken breast so it's good every time
  
• A quick discussion about "master" recipes
  
• Introduction to spices
  
• How our bodies works in relation to food & a bit more on food & exercise
  
• A quick introduction to complete foods
  
• My approach to meal prep & a bit more information on the Look Book
  
• Some tips for getting organized in your kitchen (kitchen part specifically is a few posts down)
  
  Anyway, learning how to cook can definitely be discouraging & can absolutely be a money-drain, because you're going to have to make a lot of mistakes, due to the learning process, and make also a lot of just plain mediocre food before you start hitting some home-runs. I'd recommend making sure that you have a recipe storage system for capturing the recipes & workflows you really like.
  
  I'd also recommend adopting the "growth" mindset when it comes to cooking, because it's easy to quit in the face of setbacks & label yourself as a terrible cook or view cooking at home as hard or dumb or whatever. If you look at cooking from a big-picture perspective, you're going to be alive until you die, and you've gotta eat every day, so imo at least, it's totally worth learning how to cook so that you can save money & enhance the enjoyability of each meal that you cook while you can!
  
  I think part of that is just accepting that it's going to take some time & practice (and money) as you grow & develop your skills, your personal recipe database, and the various workflows available for things like making breads or grilling or stir-frying or whatever you want to dive into. Probably the best way to save money, at this point in your cooking education, is to find & follow top-rated recipes. Pinterest has a pretty good algorithm for bubbling up really good recipes, so if you type in "chocolate-chip cookie" into the Pinterest search & try a recipe (exactly as printed, step-by-step) on the first page of results, then you're likely to get much better results than just winging it...while also building up your cooking skills in the process & getting that background knowledge & hands-on time required to get better at cooking!

I like this one: Modern Sauces