Learning to cook requires trying and failing

Learning to cook requires trying and failing
                        

With age, wisdom is said to follow. You live a life, gather experiences, and you know things. Rising to this lofty, smart place, we look back at all that time we feel was wasted in the struggle.

“If I knew then what I know now, I could really get something done.”

It’s that way in the kitchen. The best way to learn to cook, as with just about everything else, is to try and fail. There is a learning curve, a curve that gets flattened by mentors who show you what to do. If you’re lucky, your parents and grandparents can help a lot. Time spent with an experienced cook helps. Even couch time with good instructional videos can make a big difference.

You’re still going to burn things, make dry biscuits, misread measurements, pull accidental bricks from the oven, cut yourself and come close to making someone sick. Keep at it — we all do those things.

Perhaps one of the most difficult things to learn is which combinations work and which don’t. Cuisines and cultures have flavor profiles that you really can’t tamper with too much. Olive oil and Asian dishes don’t generally mix. Mediterranean and olive oil do. You can’t swap prosciutto for honey-baked ham or cilantro for Italian parsley.

I picked up two quite excellent cookbooks last week. One I would highly recommend to anyone at the front end of the kitchen learning curve, the other as a close look at Indian food. The first would make a great wedding or graduation gift or a thoughtful book to give to the person in your life who loves to cook but stinks at it.

“Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” by Samin Nosrat offers the best overhead view I’ve found of the basic elements without which no one can be a good cook. The book not only explains each of these key elements of every cuisine, but also which kinds of salt, fat, acid and heat belong where.

You can easily pinpoint which kind of fat to use to create something from Scandinavia, for example, and then match up the appropriate form of acid and heat source to arrive at something respectable.

Eventually it’s second nature, but Nosrat, who is the child of Iranian immigrants, vaults you there much faster in an easy-to-digest way. I find many “serious” texts on cooking are impossibly boring, but this one keeps it fun, and your eyes won’t glaze over.

Nosrat also hosts the companion series by the same name, available on Netflix, which is four easy-to-watch episodes taking you around the world and back to her home kitchen. Watch the olive harvest, cheese production and get a great primer on focaccia in Italy.

Learn about bitter orange as an acid in Mexican cooking and learn to make crispy Persian rice from the author’s mother. I really can’t recommend the book or the series highly enough.

I think it can help skip you over the hump to understand how flavor profiles come together, how to properly salt the dishes you make, why time is always an unlisted ingredient, why things taste as they do and how you control that process. The recipes also are practical with roast chicken, tacos and a hefty vegan salad among the many.

All of it is presented in a way that projects my favorite thing about food: It brings people together and expresses love unlike anything else.

The other is “Dishoom: From Bombay With Love” by a trio of Indian cooks and explorers. While “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” helps you understand cooking itself and global cuisine, “Dishoom” gives us a focused look at the food of Bombay, India.

Choosing several 100-plus-year-old restaurants, you get a deep dig into the culture and history of each and why they’re still a focus of food in that enormous city. The recipes are unlikely to be anything you’ve seen on any menu or encountered before, with many vegetarian dishes included.

Both are available from any good bookstore or online, and each is in the $20-$35 range.


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