when you learned to cook?

[Karamaru]

I am not a master chef by any means but I just pick up easy step pre packaged dishes that are easy to make just add meat and veggies and you are half way there and cook away.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Fair enough. European recipes are generally better about using metric volumes and weights. American recipes don't even use weights most of the time, and as a German, you must know how infuriating the imprecision of 250 ml PACKED flour versus LIGHTLY PACKED flour!? OMG.

Yeah, 200 grams of flour is 200 grams regardless of how well packed down it is. I never understood why anybody would measure solids like flour, butter etc. by volume.

[Aggrophobic]

Never did.
I can mess up even the most basic things in the kitchen.

[Deleted]

pasta are life. I will eat that all my life because I just know how to do that.

[Mavett]

Back during the school days, mother working 12 hour shifts asked me to cook Schnitzels after coming back from school, surprisingly easy.
caught on with various other dishes over time, lately have been into baking making various pies and Pizza's.

[Shadowsgrace]

As a Child. My friends grew up watching Cable, I grew up watching PBS, which was at the time Bob Ross, and every cooking show imaginable. So as soon as my parents realized I could cook, and old enough to be trusted to use the stove, I was allowed to.

[Pony Soldier]

I still don't really know how to cook, I'm 26. The extent of my cooking abilities is making macaroni and cheese. One time I heated up a can of beans too so I felt extra special that day.

I'm just too afraid to be honest. I despise wasting food so I'd feel absolutely terrible if I went and bought all this food to make and I end up fucking it all up so it ends up all in the trash. That's what I'm afraid of mainly.

Also it means cleaning dishes. Too much work. I'm lazy if you couldn't tell.

[Kathandira]

trying to learn to cook food but i am not making good progress, the chicken was very dry and the pasta was not cooked long enough! seems so hard to learn to cook food right, always something wrong! potatoes boiled too much, broccoli being not soft to chew!

how did you learn to cook and when??

I learned by working at a restaurant and observing the chefs. They showed me a few tricks, and educated me and why somethings are cooked the way they are.

Aside from that, I just follow a recipe. Best tip I can give you to following a recipe is to read the entire thing first. Make a plan, if you are cooking from multiple recipes, figure out your timing on everything. Nothing is worse that messing up the timing on things and not having them all ready at the same time, causing an item to get cold before another is ready to be served.

If you want, check out this article. http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2...an-recipe.html


Read the whole story. It gives you some great insight into why this is the best Chicken Parm recipe (I can confirm, this is an amazing recipe).

The author gives you all of his trial and error so you can understand why he chose this way of making the dish. I personally really love this sort of detail in a recipe.

[Toogoodman]

trying to learn to cook food but i am not making good progress, the chicken was very dry and the pasta was not cooked long enough! seems so hard to learn to cook food right, always something wrong! potatoes boiled too much, broccoli being not soft to chew!

how did you learn to cook and when??

Well how old are you?

If youre 14, i cant imagine youre an expert cook yet, it takes some time to feel out how to cook.

One remedy for making chicken not dry as fuck is to marinade it, just cooking it right out of the packaging is going to result in dry ass chicken.

I'm 28, I've been able to cook for probably 8 years now, since it became a necessity. I used to cook shitty food, now i constantly look for new recipes and ways to cook food, its a lot of feeling.

One last thing, a hard lesson a lot of people never learn, is that after you pull food off the cooking element, it continues to cook due to being so hot, so be warned, usually cutting it up stops this process, and releases the heat.

[Beardless Man]

My mom taught me some pointers but I'd not fully grasp it till cooking class in High School. Where I turned cookies into peanut brittle.

[Allatar]

If you want, check out this article. http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2...an-recipe.html


Read the whole story. It gives you some great insight into why this is the best Chicken Parm recipe (I can confirm, this is an amazing recipe).

I absolutely love that website: his Texan Chili recipe is utterly to die for.

[Daedius]

Been cooking regularly since my early teens.

[Sky High]

a lot of it is repeating the recipes until you get them right, usually by trying different approaches. plus there's plenty of videos on YouTube for this sort of thing.

[Moonstream]

I really like allrecipies.com

Every week I try to cook at least one new thing, if i like it/turned out, it get's saved...if not it's out. It's important to read through the recipe several times to get an understanding of what you are going to have to do. Also already having all the ingredients premeasured, and all the estimated pots/pans/etc you would need.

But like everyone else has said, start small. A real simple one that was one of the first things I cooked where it dawned on me that I had actually cooked was this.

Still making it regularly, plus i see they even have a video now on how to do it. Also read the comments on recipes (assuming you use one like I shown), there's a lot of tips in there. Just things many people don't think to share because after awhile somethings just seem to be common knowledge to someone cooking regularly.

[Kathandira]

I really like allrecipies.com

Every week I try to cook at least one new thing, if i like it/turned out, it get's saved...if not it's out. It's important to read through the recipe several times to get an understanding of what you are going to have to do. Also already having all the ingredients premeasured, and all the estimated pots/pans/etc you would need.

But like everyone else has said, start small. A real simple one that was one of the first things I cooked where it dawned on me that I had actually cooked was this.

Still making it regularly, plus i see they even have a video now on how to do it. Also read the comments on recipes (assuming you use one like I shown), there's a lot of tips in there. Just things many people don't think to share because after awhile somethings just seem to be common knowledge to someone cooking regularly.

Allrecipes is my first go to for trying a new recipe. They have yet to fail me.

And I cannot stress the bolded enough. Very important tip.

[Gaaz]

If you are not enrolled in a culinary school or are supervised and taught by someone who is very proficient, it all comes down to trial and error.
1. Try simpler recipes and follow them to the letter. You will get to know how each product behaves, cooking times, ingredient and spice combinations, as well as techniques of how to prepare them for cooking etc...
2. If you are comfortable with simpler things, start experimenting with spices and or additives. Simpler stuff, like adding parsley to pasta, changing cheese type from hard to mozarella etc...
3. Move to more complex things, liquid dishes (soups etc). Repeat step 2 as necessary.
4. By this stage you should be comfortable with different taste combinations, as well as have a baggage of recipes. You can now experiment and make something new or personalized to your taste.
Learning to cook takes a lot of time. It took me 3 years and 150-200 tries to perfect my pizza recipes. Creating a base from scratch, flower, oils combination and proportion, yeast, sugar and eggs quantities, they all make a huge difference. Same goes for toppings - do you boil, roast or steam chicken? Do you use salami? What type? Parsley, onions, olives, cheese combinations and their order in the stuffing... It all changes the taste. But of course, I am not a pro cook. Studying in a proper school can cut this time many times over. But you will still need a lot of experience on a personal level to make something exactly to your (or someone else's) taste.