Cooking is worth it

Cooking is terrifying

"Anyone can cook."
Gusteau

This page is for anyone who wants to find joy in cooking with a bit of easy science. I used to be terrified and exhausted by cooking because it has numerous logistical problems to solve; to decide what to eat I need to at least kinda know:

  1. What flavours and tastes and textures will go together in this meal?
  2. Am I getting enough nutrition?
  3. When and how do I start the different steps in the recipe?
  4. How should I shop for all the ingredients, and how do I stop a simple meal from racking in at $50 from Coles and Woolies?
  5. What are the essential parts of the recipe that I can't fuck around with? Which parts can I change up if I'm feeling creative?
  6. Where can I find reliable recipes as starting points, given that Google's search algorithm has filled the internet with homogenous crap recipes? You know, the kind with 6 paragraphs, 4 pictures, and 3 ads before the recipe?
  7. How do I ensure I can cook a recipe reliably, and that I didn't accidentally "cook" something (as in, fuck it up)?

Cooking a meal has at least seven problems to solve per recipe. That's a lot of effort. But until we have our socialist utopia where My Muscle Chef has taken over the world (just kidding, that would be gross), we're all going to have to partially become our own prep chef, nutritionist, supermarket price analyst, executive chef and scientist.

But it's worth practicing, in my opinion, even if it's just once a month. Pros include:

  1. Personality. Once you know how a recipe works, you can customise it, optimise it and become known for Jack's Fries or being The Nachos Person.
  2. Science! It's science you can see, smell and taste; I wish chemistry had been taught at school through cooking.
  3. Community. Having a reason to pull neighbours, friends and loved ones into your house to try delicious (or questionable) experiments you've had. Plus, I've noticed my friends are much more likely to offer a couch once I've cooked them a brunch.
  4. Cheap. As the cost of living crisis escalates, the dollar price of human labour (and the amount of time it takes your human labour to earn that price) is getting less worth paying for. Regardless of how much you cook now, investing in cooking skills can pay dividends for life by growing your ability to improvise based on the ingredients in your fridge. Finding a niche in a cuisine allows you to break up with the big supermarkets and go support your local Japanese pantry, Indian grocer or farmer's market. I use Farmer's Pick to get knobbly vegetables that taste much better than The Big Two.
  5. Mindful enjoyment. Learning to cook is also about learning to taste, which requires a degree of mindfulness. This will pay spiritual dividends in your life by giving you more memories. Also, smell (which is a huge part of flavour) has access to parts of your brain that literally no other sense can touch, and is why Ego has The Ratatouille Moment.

Where do you start?

I got into cooking by learning from Kenji at Serious Eats, who abandoned the boredom of slow-paced biology research for a life of experimental cooking. He has a great series of fundamental blog posts, and in his recipes, the classic six paragraphs are actually worth their weight in gold; what is usually AI-generated SEO nonsense is actually used to explain the crucial parts of a dish. Some great fundamental points he makes are:

  1. Buy one cast iron pan and one carbon steel wok, learn to care for them, and they'll last your (potentially nonexistent grandchildren's) entire life. I use a Lodge 10.5 inch skillet and a Craft Wok flat-bottomed hand-hammered carbon steel wok for almost all my stovetop cooking. In addition to lasting forever, seasoned cookware also traps flavour over time; my wok omelettes now taste like the ones from roadside carts in south-east Asia. The heat from my cast-iron pan is the hottest thing in the kitchen, even hotter than me.
  2. Buy a cheap or expensive knife, but keep it sharp with honing and sharpening. I use a $20AUD Kiwi stainless steel 8-inch Thai chef's knife (no. 21) and sharpen it with a $50AUD diamond steel honing rod. You can find them in asian grocers or in Bezos land. I sharpen once every 2-3 sessions, or right before I'm about to do fine-slicing. My friends remark it's the sharpest knife they've ever used, and it was very cheap. The diamond on the honing rod means you don't need a whetstone; the diamond sharpens the blade, and the steel hones it.
  3. Get a salad spinner and use it to instantly dry washed veggies, strained noodles, and use "centrifugal force" unironically in a sentence. You don't really need this, but I think it's fun.
  4. Use mass instead of volume for measurements (in grams of course, no imperial shit here!). Measuring dry goods like flour by volume results in up to 50% error by mass. What the fuck is "a quarter cup of mint", or a "tablespoon of crushed cashews"? When people say "baking is a science" and then list their recipes in volume measurements, it's the ultimate cringe. If you want your recipes to be reproducible, get a Walter-White scale that does 0.1g accuracy, and rewrite your favourite recipes from the internet with mass measurements. If it's too salty, you can guarantee that if you use less grams of salt next time, it will be less salty...unless you use more fat, which reduces perceived saltiness. There are some subtleties, but you'll hardly encounter them; mass measurements are a torch, volume measurements are a blindfold.
  5. Learn how to taste properly (mindfully). I read this about separating flavour (how your brain perceives a food) into taste (what your tongue perceives) and aroma (what your nose perceives). It was really amazing to see the difference between what my tongue vs nose perceived for different foods!
  1. Hold your nose, take a bite, and chew and chew, getting to know the flavor as your tongue experiences it
  2. Let your nose go, and see the difference it makes when your nose gets in on the action
  1. Learn about the Maillard reaction. This is the same as learning how to cook a mean steak or fry tofu that's actually tasty. Basically, our noses evolved to smell protein (which repair and build our bodies) and sugar (which our brain guzzles like a small child). Our stomachs evolved to eat cooked food, whose nutrients are easier to digest than raw meat and plants. The Maillard reaction produces an orgy of broken down proteins and sugars, which combine to smell like nutritious crack for our brains. This is the reason that fries, steaks, soy sauce, laoganma and probably all your favourite savoury food tastes so good.
  2. Learn how to make a basic salad dressing. If you're new to learning to flavour your meals, just cook some plain veggies in your fridge, boil some pasta or rice noodles, and learn to make a good dressing. Long story short, salads are oils and water with other flavoursome stuff inside. Oil and water hate each other, so to connect them, you need an emulsifier; a molecule that connects water and oil molecules. Salad dressings are, in my opinion, the simplest playground to start experimenting and iterating on flavour combinations. You'll get an intuition that will naturally extend to seasoning veggies while you cook them, or making sauces. If you can't be bothered with dressing, just start with sauces like kewpie mayo and BBQ sauce.

If you learn these basics, you should know how to

Recipes to start with

If you'd like some of my favourite recipes to try, here you go. They're all vegan, because supermarket meat is cheap trash that probably gives us mysterious cancers, and cleaning up animal fat sucks. Good quality meat and handling all the cleanup is an experience actually worth paying a restaurant for.

Anyways, some recipes I've adapted and rewritten in blessed mass-measurements so you can enjoy them, are: