Best Books to Learn Cooking

What are they? What do you recommend?

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amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1485794072&sr=8-3&keywords=cia cooking
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can't learn from a book

just do

cooking isn't the kind of thing you learn from a book

go find an inexpensive recipe and try to cook it. if you fuck it up, figure out where you went wrong and try it again

repeat this exercise across different recipes with different steps

Read recipe
cook recipe

repeat until you have the experience to comfortably improvise.

But how will I know what to put together, how to properly prepare and season, without spending a lot of money and fucking it up a lot?

Mastering The Art of French Cooking by Julia Child
/thread

practice?

cook and taste as you go

if it needs more seasoning add more

I mean if you want to make something specific recipes are good

this + la technique

Good Eats DVDs.

Tell me why exactly what you just said can't be published in a book?

Each chapter would consist of first explaining certain actions which will be used, next a recipe as you'd see in a book, then some questions that analyze your dish, advice about what people commonly mess up on this dish, etc.

Thanks for the idea time to make some money :^)

Literally the Americas test kitchen cooking school cookbook

recipes = internet
techniques = books, videos, magazines.

cooks illustrated is a good magazine to learn about cooking techniques. You should almost never have to buy a recipe book though- there are more recipes on the internet than anyone could ever cook. Only try the well revieved recipes with lots of good ratings and you will save yourself time and money.

epicurious.com hasn't let me down for good recipes. Just stick to anything with a 3.5 star rating or higher.

If you must buy a book, why not one that culinary students use as a textbook ?

amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-America/dp/0470421355/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1485794072&sr=8-3&keywords=cia cooking

> Good Eats DVDs
> Alton Brown
> need $3000 dollars worth of equipment to make banana pudding
> need a degree in chemistry/theoretical physics to understand how to make banana pudding.

Just kidding, I like Alton Brown, but sometimes I wonder if his show turned some newbies off of cooking because of how complex he makes things sound and the cost of the special equipment for every recipe.

There's no point in buying books when you can find all you need online.

Want to make something and you're not sure about the details? Just Google a recipe and you'll almost certainly get a bunch of options. Choose one that sounds good and/or has good reviews and just make it. If something goes wrong, learn from it. Don't make big complicated dishes for the first time when it really matters (like when you want to impress a date or something), but prepare them for yourself first to see if you've got the right idea.

Even if it's the very basics you need to know, you can find it online. Seriously, you can Google how to hardboil an egg and get the exact time you need to boil it for any given size of the egg, so even complete morons can make it work.

Once you get some practice (and you actually pay attention to what you're doing instead of just blindly copying recipes) you'll automatically start picking up the ideas behind the dishes. You'll start getting a lot more confident about your own skills once you learn not just what to do but also why to do it, and you'll be able to adapt that knowledge into your everyday cooking.

Not OP, but my problem is that there are too fucking many recipes on the internet.
Where to start?

Just give me a curated list of easy recipes I can do to learn this shit. Once the basics are covered, I will browse the massive list of recipes.

Depends entirely on what you want to make. There's no one-stop guide to becoming a good cook. You just make shit you like and regularly try something new. Specific techniques come with specific types of dishes and preparations, and the best way to learn them is through the experience of making those dishes.

As for what to look for in a recipe, if you're starting out it's often a massive help to look for a video instead of just a written recipe, so you can see what they're doing and how they do it. Pictures can help too, but all too often picture guides fail to show anything that the text doesn't already tell you.

>Where to start?

By looking for who does the dish well. Want to make chinese food? Then learn from Chinese chefs like Martin Yan, Chen Kenichi, etc. Want to make classic French food? Look at Julia Child or Jacques Pepin. Get the idea?

Ask yourself who does that particular dish well and then get advice from them. When I wanted to learn to make better mexican food I talked to a Mexican lady I knew from work.

The book you want is essential Pepin'. It's his modern "la technique" but in DVD form.

joy of cooking

This book also contains recipes from Ultimate Cookery