/ck/ - Food & Cooking

I was 16 and I realized I had no idea how to do anything in the kitchen besides boiling eggs and making chef boyardee palatable, so I asked my mom to start teaching me.

Watch cooking shows on PBS/Food Network and attempt to duplicate them in real life.

Practice makes perfect. If you just sit there and watch without ever trying it for yourself, you'll never learn.

I threw stuff together until it tasted good.
Later I began looking into traditional cuisines, however still trying to replicate whatever food my own way.

Been helping the family with preparing dinner since I was 3. Cooking with supervision since I was 6. Cooking alone since I was 8. Cooking complex things since I was 12.

>>4562004
Practice.
Started cooking at 15/16, and just tried stuff out.

Really it's just cutting stuff up smaller, and making it less cold.
But knowing how much spice, salt, herbs and how long to cook until done is really something that needs experience.
Unless you make everything to a recipe, which is gay.

Lots of different ways. Mum, cooking shows, cookbooks, recipes from food packaging, friends and housemates, /ck/ and other relevant internet sites, experimentation, we did "food technology" at school as well.

I think it's important to be adventurous as a cook in order to get better too. If you only ever cook the same meal every time out of habit, that's all you'll ever be able to cook, so I try to expand my horizons fairly regularly by buying ingredients I've never cooked with before.

Learning from my mom and grandmother. Basic, then later on more advanced cookbooks. Cooking shows on PBS when I was younger, stuff on food network, travel channel, etc. these days. Lots of trial and error.

>parents were divorced
>dad was poor as shit
>cooked on the propane grill outside even during the winter because we had no gas or electricity
>learned how to grill, prepare certain food, boil water, etc.

>mom worked a lot
>always came home bitching about having to cook dinner when she just wanted to sleep
>yelled at me until I'd fix something I watched her make before
>would bite my head off it was something she didn't feel like eating
>learned how to cook recipes under pressure

>bought my first Japanese cookbook at 15
>made really shitty recipes from it from ingredients I could get ahold of at Wal-Mart
>didn't realize how to cook them properly until I was 18
Close enough, and then anything new I learned how to prepare after 18 came from the internet or shows.

I was hungry, and no one would make me anything, so I decided to scramble eggs and make pancakes. I was also 8, and had to use a chair to get to the proper height on the counter. It may have been a kitchen stool, i dont remember specifically. Anyway, after that point I pretty much did whatever I wanted to do, once they realized I wasent trying to burn down the house or anything. It was my job to cook dinner for all the kids when I was 10. Now, 17 years later, i work in a restaurant.

Got a job in a restaurant at 16
Dozen or so restaurants later im a pretty bad ass chef.

I learned all my soulfood from old southern ladies though

in a dark dark house
in a dark dark room
in a dark dark cabinet
in a dark dark box
i found a recipe book

I live in southern Louisiana and I come from one of those families that get together and cook ungodly amounts of food EVERY weekend. Just kind of happened.

I always watched a lot of food tv, and when my mom died I just started making my own meals.

Lessons from my mother.
Reading and practice.
Lessons from my wife (chef).
More reading and practice.
Some TV cooking shows.

From here.
When I went to uni, I realised I didn't want to live off instant ramen, so I paid /ck/ a visit. Mainly just copying recipe's at first then I started experimenting.

Being poor was really helpful, I couldn't afford to eat out so I cooked every meal myself. That's how I learned to make things delicious without spending a lot of money.

Recipe books and a lot of trial and error.

So much wasted food.

Started off like most my age by making instant ramen and eggs when I was about six or seven. I would add things like vinegar, lime and hot sauce to make flavors more intense. I flipped turkey burgers for my older cousin who thought I would burn the house down at 8.

Didn't start properly cooking until recently because I was inspired by watching Gordon Ramsay and Thomas Keller. They made it look easy and honestly, cooking is. Baking on the other hand... America's Test Kitchen held my hand through a wider range of stuff.

Best way to learn to cook is to buy an iron skillet and start refining recipes.

watching "The urban peasant" and "Biba's italian cousine" on TV while being a kid, they certainly broadened my horizons when it came to food.

I didn't.

>>4562408
>peasant

i was born a woman

>implying that most people who post here can actually cook

>>4562408
"the urban peasant". lel. sounds like me.

didnt, I choose taco bell

>>4562729

>most, if not all successful chefs are male

Face it, you need testosterone to be the best at anything mentall and physically demanding.

>>4562729

>making a comment like this

almost every successful chef is male

>>4563422
Quite true. A lot of this has more to do with the lifestyle than any sort of skill between males and females. The progression from cook to chef is long and requires incredible amounts of sacrifice. You start out working late into the night, every single Holiday. That doesn't stop even when you "make it". Most women want a relationship, marriage, kids, a family life. Those things are out of the question for a female chef without a husband who is willing to be Mr. Mom. Even then, it's not a preferable lifestyle for a woman. Many are not hard enough or committed enough to that kind of pressure. That's why the majority of females in the cooking industry are pastry chefs. Earlier hours, less stress, more of a life outside of work.

I got a line cook job and started culinary school. Dropped out of culinary school after a year when I got hired for my current Sous Chef gig.

>>4563422
>implying the two are mutually exclusive
I'm not saying every famous chef is a man with a vagina
But that's what I'm saying

>>4562004
Had to cook my own food a lot growing up
Always had a distaste for packaged crap(except kraft dinner)
Started paying attention to cooking shows and recipe videos online, eventually translated specific instructions into a general amateur understanding of how cooking works
Always had a willingness to experiment and cook my shit freestyle so I learned what works and what don't
And I'm motivated by a pathological need to serve and please others

My parents made me cook begining at around 13 or 14, full dinners for the family. At the time I thought it was bullshit at the begining, now im so fucking gratful they did.

>game torrent comments
>"download is stuck at 60% plz help torrent no work"
>"hi i download torrent cannot read .nfo file say windows cannot find right program how do i read instrunctions???"
>"game does not load only error when i click exe"
>"Great torrent, followed the instructions in the .nfo file and it works perfectly, thanks!"
>"where i find crack??????"
>"i try use serial keygen in torrent my computer say virus do not download trojan torrent!!!!!"

Started washing dishes from when I was 14 until they gave me prep work. Then I learned how to handle the grill. They moved me up from prepping tuna platters to cooking all the shit. Great work for 5 bucks an hour.

Fuckers.

>be unattractive
>crave the company of a woman
>use vertical recipes found online to make basic meals
>drop hints in classes and virtually every conversation that a vajay could overhear about my cooking skills
>eventually a girl asks "o you cook?!
>with a shit eating grin on my face reply " every now and again...i do make mean garlic shrimp though. i should cook for you sometime!":
>" THAT'D BE GREAT ANON!"
>cook meal for her
>dated for 2 months before she bailed.
> mission accomplished.

My mum got sick when I was 15 and I had to learn how to cook then because she wasn't able to, not even able to teach me but she still complained about everything and tried to make me do it her way. She died when I was 17 and then I really learned it because she was an awful cook and trying to imitate her made me one too.

>>4562004
I never did. I just have ingredients I think look good, google them and read a bit, and then find recipes. I follow the recipe as close as I can, and if I can't find a nice substitution, I just scrap it.

cooking is an science, not an art.

>>4563520
this post confused the proverbial shit outta me

>>4563510

Went to school, didnt want to eat shitty food or spend money eating out whenever I was hungry. Plus bitches love cheesecake, and my cheesecake is fanfuckingtastic.

Trial and error. I use recipes online as a guideline and usually make premade stuff. I can;t even remember when I started. I do remember mixing the Aunt Jemima pancake mix when I was 6 or 7

>be 11 years old
>pirate games like nobody's business
>need to crack the games
>not be retarded
>follow simple steps written in the README.txt

following steps should not be difficult for any non retarded human being

I am a fat food loving fuck but i am too poor to eat in restaurants every day

>>4563611
>read comments section of torrent
>HOW TO WORK CRACK?!?

Jesus fuck people, if you can't do something as simple as apply a patch and crack, just pay for the fucking games.

Culinary school, then worked as a line cook, now work as a line cook at a better place. Hopefully will be a line cook at a really good eventually.

I don't know how to cook, but I want to learn. How would I go about doing this? Are there classes I can take or something?

By watching my father make dinner for our family. He worked 3 shifts, my mother had a day job, so usually my dad had to make food for himself, and for us at the same time.

You cant call yourself a man if ya cant cook.

>>4563702
If he can't even do a simple thing like reading an simple instruction, how do you think he will be able to get the money to pay the games

Maybe this is why /ck/ is so shitty.

None of you did any form of systematic learning. None of you bothered to figure out why things work and why things don't work, and then extrapolate ideas.

Learning from experience is useful to a certain degree, but the point is none of you have any actual background!

Start with textbooks. Understanding is half the battle, start with "Modernist Cuisine". Read the sections on "Traditional cooking techniques" to understand why things work. Then there are some good resources online, try "The professional chef", youtube etc, learn the basics, knifework, braising, baking, roasting, pan frying, sautee, steam, etc. "The professional Chef" is decent. You then want to build ideas, as cooking is not purely methodological. Explore what makes a dish good, and what pairs with what. Read the "flavor bible", research as many recipes as possible, go on food blogs and get ideas. Perfect your technique. Be observant and objective about your technique, be asine and overly critical about it, think about what you are eating!

Focus on modularity, the basic constituent techniques of cooking, after all, cooking, aside from the creative process, is simply a sequence of techniques combined to maximize a objective.

>>4564871
Do you find your job as an engineer satisfying? I have to assume you do, it seems like it's a really good fit for your personality.

Watching mom. Practicing. Buying new shit and just going with it. You learn along the way which ingredients will work together or not. It's not nearly as difficult as people make it out to be. It's only hard to replicate recipes that, for example, your mom or grandma made or something like that (at least, because my mom doesn't use measurements. She wings it)

>>4564875
Amazing..

I am a engineering student. What gave it away?

>>4564880
Your post smelled not so subtly of autism.

>>4564880
If you're not sure why I would go to engineer from "The only way to learn how to cook is to undertake a systematic, rigorous examination of cooking techniques, objectives, and scientific principles, followed by a process of experimentation and testing" I don't know what to say

>>4564871
I think most people here do things like what you're saying but felt it was already implied and are instead explaining how/why they first started cooking

>>4562157
Hello fellow Louisianian

>>4562157
same here. southern louisiana is fucking awsome for food.

Army.

i finished culinary school. as simple as that.

I moved out

>>4562004
imitating everyone I know that cooks and asking

>>4562004
>How did you learn to cook?
On my own. No choice in the matter.

looking grandfather cook. Looking mom cook to see what never do. Started eating alone for noon at the age of 14 because parent worked and I lived near school.

My mother taught me the basics. Once I left home I found that I was fairly poor, and I have a stomach of iron, so I just kept making mistakes until more of my meals turned out good than bad.

started off making eggs and bacon. simple breakfast stuff. moved to pasta, also simple. then tried out basic oven recipes like baked breaded chicken.

My mother can't, and I was sick of eating boiled eggs and cold ham.

I was a podgy little kid who grew into a podgy and strong teenager, so I was always interested in food. At first it was just be being hungry and hanging out in the kitchen as dinner was being made, or during a family gathering or holiday when the meal was being made. Eventually I took an interest in actually making food and making it well. Since I was podgy I liked cooking shows anyway, so I picked things up by observation. Also, my parents would let me do basic things in the kitchen like peeling, chopping, and cooking my own eggs and grilled cheese and pancakes and whatnot.

As a reached the end of my second decade, I was actively losing weight and my interest in cooking took a turn. I became more interested in eating healthily and well. I also started executing more technical recipes. Now I just enjoy cooking and when I am home generally make dinner a few times per week for my family. When I'm on my own, I make the vast majority of my meals.

>>4562004
Parents never home, plenty of ingredients.

My mother was not the best of cooks, dad was a little better but always working. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, and they had fallen into a pattern of eclectic moderately skilled recipes. Either of them could do something if they really applied themselves, but had zero creativity and simply ate one of maybe two dozen recipes they had completely memorized.

I tried to force myself into feeding the family. I was grilling before I hit puberty, but the women did a lot of the knifework, with rather shoddy dull knives, and took exception to me taking up a blade and taking time learning. Eventually my grandfather stepped in and gave me a decently sharp knife and basically called them out on using dull blades they had to force and that I was likely to injure myself on.

I started pulling in recipes from my neighbors despite being in my early teens. I began traveling, I had to learn more and more and became less grounded with particular ingredients or methods.

Unfortunately, I now cook for a living and hate humanity. Love food though.

>>4564875
I agree 100% with his post and I'm a kitchen lifer. The only reasonable way to learn anything is to learn why things work the way they do.

>gf goes away to culinary school
>eventually breaks up with me "because of the distance"
>decide to learn to cook to get her back
>mfw shes a dropout and I now love cooking and dont care about her anymore

I got a job as a potwash at a fine dining restaurant and became a chef not long after because most of the potwashers were stoners so it was easy to be king and convince them to train me to be a chef.

Worked there for a few years then went on to other things (non-chef related) but i still try to build on my skills and make new things. I'm on a big fitness thing at the moment, so i'm bulking up. Knowing how to cook food on bulk for big events has made cooking for my poor student ass has made my life healthier, cheaper and easier.

Also, i get satisfaction from feeding others, so it goes down well with my housemates.

Honestly, I've been cooking as long as I can remember. Mostly helping my mom make food back when she didn't need to work, before the economy got bad, and before I started school.

I remember the first "big" thing I made was lemon meringue pie, completely from scratch, for mother's day, because I didn't know my mom's recipe, so I asked my dad to take me to the library, checked out a cookbook with a recipe for it, and made it. My dad helped me a little, but mostly making sure the oven was turned on right, because he doesn't know how to make much more than mac and cheese. It took me two tries, because I fucked up on the crust and the filling was too watery the first time, but the second time it came out good. It looked kind of ganky, but I remember it tasting good.

I think I was like 5 or 6.

>>4562004
Necessity.
Then god a very good starters book on everything basic in cooking, nutrition and hygiene, even has a chapter on carving meat and boiling eggs.

Should be a mandatory moving out present globally.

18 went off to uni. I didn't want to eat crap all the time so I bought a cookbook and began from there.

3 years later and I'd consider myself decent, better than 90% of people I know anyway. Pretty sure my mum didn't know how I was going to survive, I still don't think she really believes I can cook that well at all.

I started with very simple things and have progressed from there ... very slowly and not very far. It's fun though, I have no great pretensions or ambitions.

>>4562013
This

I knew basic recipes when I was like 10, but I didn't really get into more advanced cooking until I took Culinary arts in high school. I don't know if it's common for Culinary Arts class to do this, but our class acted as a restaurant for teachers who were willing to pay little extra for better food than the cafeteria.

Basically, we had to run it like a actual restaurant with different shifts and stuff. It was actually challenging work, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.

I think there's something about working together as a team in a tense environment that makes it enjoyable for me. Granted, it's easier than working in a actual restaurant, since we only served on lunch time, but it's fun and educating work, nonetheless.

I mainly learned better cooking techniques and vocabulary, some science behind baking and cooking, proper sanitary techniques, etc etc.


If you guys ever get a chance to take a culinary arts class, even if it's not your main career goal, if you got the time to spare for it, you should take it. It's very fun and enjoyable if you're disciplined enough.

>got stoned
>experimented
>got into dieting
>started making my own healthy meals
>every now and then make something bomb as fuck for friends
>they love it

>>4562004
By cooking for my family

Are there any good books or websites that give you the basics of cooking? I really don't know where to begin, aside from google and a bunch of shitty sites.

>>4568934
There's a million books out there, just look on amazon for beginner books and check out the reviews. I had two Student cookbooks and liked one a lot more than the other, even gave the measurements in common items assuming you didn't have any measuring equipment.

Mom was a good cook, with an unfortunate affinity for blandness. So I started off copying what she did, with a heavier hand on seasoning. I took it to the next step by noting which friends of mine had mothers who were good cooks, and chatting them up. This worked especially well for friends who were first generation Americans - immigrant mothers have a wealth of cooking knowledge. That's how I got started with Italian, Greek and Korean cooking.

The rest I learned from cookbooks, youtube and reverse engineering dishes I liked in restaurants.

I seem to just have a natural knack for it. My mother was a good cook but never taught me anything, and never left me any recipes. When I graduated high school, I didn't want to be eating boxed dinners the rest of my life, so I started experimenting and trying things. I fucking love Cajun food, it turns out.

>>4564880

I'm an engineering student, and I think you're full of bullshit.

To start out, you should make something simple and fun that you enjoy, and build from there. Who the fuck would care if it takes you 20 minutes to cut a potato? Once you have a solid footing and understand what you do, then you can improve with actual techniques.

I grew up watching PBS cooking shows from a young age, but it was the food looking tasty that got me interesting, not the difference between cuts.

If you treat it like a chore, it'll become one.

Grandad was a chef and owned his own restaurant, I learned by watching him and helping around his kitchen since I was 8.

my dad, 3 uncles, aunt (all chefs), my mum (worked in kitchens) and my grandmothers (because they are grandmothers). It's like the family trade, I worked at dad's cafe for 8 years but I don't want to get into hospo as a career, I only like to cook in a home setting

>>4564871
Modernist? Nigga what?

That is profoundly the wrong place to start. That is like starting a.child who never did any math with an abstract algebra book.

My parents really knew how to cook. Then they got divorced. I spent most of my time with my mother. Suddenly all the food sucked. I wonder how that happened.

My dad taught me so that I could survive until I moved out.

So for someone who has no friends or family members, isn't in school and lives alone, what are the chances of learning to cook successfully?

>>4569052
>>4564880
>engineering student

This is just a roundabout way of saying you dropped out of high school and have autism.

>>4569124
You sound like you've given up already anon.

If you're not mentally retarded and can follow instructions, cooking is the easiest and one of the most satisfying things in the world.

My mom is a terrible cook. She basically knows one meal. Chicken baked in lemon juice and pepper, pasta with sour cream, Kraft Parmesan and pepper, and steamed broccoli. I've eaten that more than a thousand times.

I started cooking for myself when I was around 12. It was really basic shit for a long time, but my mom was still paying, and she wouldn't buy good ingredients.

When I moved in with a roommate, we made a deal, I would cook, he would clean. Thats when I started getting really adventurous. Made a rule to never cook the same meal twice, unless someone else asked me to cook it. I've spent lots of time researching methods and the culinary histories of different regions, and I've built an arsenal of gadgets. I started by following recipes, then by combining recipes, and now I'm pretty good at improvising them. I will always push my limits so that I never fall into the habit of preparing boring food.

>>4569124
>no friends
>no family
>lives alone
That sounds like a really rough life. Has it always been like this? How are you coping?
I don't know why I feel like crying right now ;_; Best of luck, anon

>>4562004

i dont live with my parents

/thread

My dad has always been very good at cooking, but he was never home for dinner time except during the weekends. My mom can't cook and worked late, and my grandparents lived with us, so they would cook dinner on weekdays. Unfortunately, my grandfather passed away, and my grandmother's senses were starting to dull, so I was given the job of cooking weeknight meals. At first it was simple things like Mapo Tofu (with packaged sauce) and Japanese Curry (using curry blocks) under my grandmother's supervision, but after several months I discovered a ton of food blogs and tried a bunch of recipes. My dad wasn't afraid of providing constructive criticism and would call me over to watch him cook, so I'm very thankful he taught me that way. My SO pussies out from cooking if something was not to taste; dude better step it up because I'm not going to cook every damn meal if we live together.

I basically just figured it out. Watched other people cook so I had a basic idea of what tasted good with what. Started trying to throw shit together myself, and the more I did it, the better it started coming out.

If I had to give some piece of advice, I'd say make absolutely, 100% sure to always taste your food as you cook. The more you experiment with things, the more experience you'll get, and the more you'll know what to add to change the flavour of something.

Back when I was a child, my mother stopped cooking snacks for me when I got old enough to do it myself. It was liberating. I made so many goddamn brownies. As the years passed, I learned to make all of my favorite foods. Now I can learn to make pretty much anything so long as I want to eat it.

My dad started teaching me when I was 7 or so. That's the large basis of where my experience comes from. The rest has just been reading various cookbooks and trying what sounded good.

>>4569230
Don't /thread yourself you pretentious fuck.

When I was a kid I always wanted to have my own restaurant, and with a mum and dad who love good food I started cooking at a pretty young age. The restaurant dream faded away after a while but the love for cooking stayed. I started out with just helping out, cutting veggies, baking cakes, ect. Then I started looking up recipes of my own, trying them out for myself... Nowadays I'm a pretty good amateur cook (21). My friends cant stop talking about some of my dishes and I can pretty much say I'm one of the best cooks of my family (and thats saying something).

>>4562004

It came to me in a dream.

Somebody knocked me with a 2 x 4 and when I woke up, I just knew how to cook!

Naw, seriously, I got to spend countless Sundays watching the PBS cooks cook. I probably could be a postdoctorate distance ed cook by now ... and in many ways I am, actually.

When I was a kid, my mom went back to work when I was like 7. I have a little brother 2 years younger than me that I had to help take care of, so I learned how to cook. Started off with frozen pizzas, pasta, and those shitty TV dinner things, and within a couple of years I could could pretty much anything that I wanted