Reddit reviews Professional Cooking

I am in the same position you are in. Love cooking, no formal training, but love the science, theory and art behind it all. I have a few books that I find to be indispensable.

• How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything: Vegetarian by Mark Bittman are two of my favorite recipe books. Loads of pretty simple recipes, lots of suggestions for modifications, and easy to modify yourself. Covers a bit of technique and flavor tips, but mostly recipes.
  
  
• CookWise by Shirley Corriher (the food science guru for Good Eats!) - great book that goes much more into the theory and science behind food and cooking. Lots of detailed info broken up nicely and then provides recipes to highlight the information discussed. Definitely a science book with experiments (recipes) added in to try yourself.
  
  
• Professional Baking and Professional Cooking by Wayne Gissen - Both of these books are written like textbooks for a cooking class. Filled with tons of conversion charts, techniques, processes, and detailed food science info. Has recipes, but definitely packed with tons of useful info.
  
  
• The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters - this is not much on theory and more recipes, but after using many of the recipes in this book and reading between the lines a great deal, this taught me a lot about how great food doesn't require tons of ingredients. Many foods and flavors highlight themselves when used and prepared very simply and this really shifted my perspective from overworking and overpreparing dishes to keeping things simple and letting the food speak for itself.
  
  And mentioned in other threads, Cooking for Geeks is a great book too, On Food and Cooking is WONDERFUL and What Einstein Told His Chef is a great read as well. Modernist Cuisine is REALLY cool but makes me cry when I see the price.

maybe I can save you some money and maybe I can't, but I'll try anyway.

Anything you learn in school is something you'll learn by working in a restaurant. The only difference is that you'll get a knife roll, probably this book, and 15K - 30K in debt if you do school. Instead, you can make money, read that book, buy your own knife roll, and not try to pay off a student loan for the next 15 years while you make 12 bucks an hour.

If you really want to go, OCI is the cheapest and has good chefs.

If you like self-studying, here's a college-level textbook: Wayne Gisslen - Professional Cooking

I would definitely recommend getting Professional Cooking or The Professional Chef, then. Either of them will give you the solid foundation you're looking for.

Most anything coming from the Culinary Institute of America is trustworthy, as is Alton Brown and Julia Child. America's Test Kitchen (and Cook's Illustrated/Cook's Country Magazines) is fantastic... they do a lot of recipe and product testing, which saves you the effort, energy & resources. They give you a recipe, but also go into a bit about WHY it worked.

Professional Cooking, 7th Edition by Wayne Gisslen. Good information on every aspect of cooking, equipment, kitchen safety, about 1300 recipes, emphasis on building flavors and understanding why things work in the kitchen.

My bookshelf for cooking includes:

• The Flavor Bible
  
• Professional Cooking
  
  I am well beyond your average home cook but I hate dealing with the cleaning up, I'm not cooking for anyone but myself and dealing with getting groceries is just a pain & a combination of laziness on my part.