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That book and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat are my go to when i want to understand why something works :)

Salt Fat Acid Heat is another great cooking theory textbook. Amazing writing and the lessons can apply to any meal you'll ever make.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat is great, as is The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez Alt. I also love The Food of Sichuan by Fuchsia Dunlop but that's more Sichuan cuisine than general cooking.

I made this point elsewhere, but honestly I think if a fascist reads Salt Fat Acid Heat (a book made by a woman, btw) they will probably become a little more in touch with reality.

The book SALT FAT ACID HEAT changed my life. I’ve gifted that book to 3 people in my life so far

Actually, you can be four! Send me your address and i’ll send it to you, email the gmail domain with the handle plusjade

it’s really that good ^_^

I would recommend "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking". It has a great focus on the fundamentals rather than specific recipes.

The book is better than the show. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat on Amazon for those interested - https://amzn.to/2OPW4PR

Some other books that might be more practical than The Modernist Cuisine:

The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nostrat

Ratio by Michael Ruhlman

According to the book "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" the optimal salinity for pasta water is about 2%. So 1 part sea water, 1 part fresh water - roughly.

I highly recommend Samin Nosrat's "Salt Fat Acid Heat" if you are interested in the fundamental basics of cooking like salt.

> This beautiful, approachable book not only teaches you how to cook, but captures how it should feel to cook

> "Just reading Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will make you a better cook, adept at seasoning, balancing..."

https://www.saltfatacidheat.com/

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/523923/

That's what I find so interesting about Samin Nosrat's "Salt Fat Acid Heat". Sure it's a list of what it takes to make food taste good, but it also happens to be a comprehensive list of what you need to stay alive. It's also why I added oranges into the list, although there's probably a cheaper way to not get scurvy?

I haven't read "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" as recommended in the article, but I swear by:

Julia Child, "the way to cook"

Jeff Potter, "Cooking for geeks"

Kenji lopez-alt's "the food lab"

The author does compare to most of these, so the recommendation seems solid.

I was underwhelmed by "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat". Good information, great presentation, but not up there with the very best books, IMO.

I like Ruhlman's "Twenty", maybe followed by "Ratio".

"How to Cook without a Book" by Anderson is great, although you probably needwhole rooms in your house for food storage if you took her "what you should have in your pantry" serious.

My most used cookbook is the one my mother gave me and all my relatives when we were living alone for the first time. It's the book she uses at school. It's for special-needs children, so extremely basic and easy, with many, many quirky illustrations.

But it has everything important. Bechamel? Sure. Choux pastry? Yes. But also how to cook potatoes or eggs.

The only infuriating thing in this book is that the index is worse than useless. I know the important recipes' page numbers by heart.

My wife and I always hate reading recipes online. We finally spent like $50 and bought three of the most amazing cookbooks. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which explains how cooking works, Food Lab, and America’s Test Kitchen.

I made a baked potato with a perfect inside and perfect crisp skin from the books, it involved like 4 steps of how to cook, like bathing them in a specific mixture of salt water, baking for 45 minutes, then running olive oil on the skins, then baking for another 15 minutes.

If they didn’t explain the why in the book, which I guess is the copyrighted part, and what the results are, I never would have tried that recipe.

The book "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" is fairly modern still but also considered a classic by many. The entire goal of the book is to break cooking down to these aspects.

Another person in this thread mentioned the Master Classes with Gordon Ramsey and Thomas Keller and I can concur that both of those are really great in teaching technique that is reusable across just about anything you cook.

Cooking is pretty easy once you get enough of it under your belt and are confident with different techniques. It's also quite liberating as many things go with each other and it isn't a mystery if something will work. You can begin to target "profiles" you want your food to take on.

If you haven't read it, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a great read. I have cooked for years and it was a short, easy read with lots of applicable tidbits. I recently tried out the Salt methods on a check steak and it is significantly better and similar to a strip cut in tenderness and flavor.

Clarifying butter and slower cooking my omelettes has been fantastic, along with salt early in the mixing bowl and letting it sit for a minute.

-Godel, Escher, Bach / There was an article on here a short while back writing about how they didn't like the book. I figured if the book was important enough that it was noteworthy when someone wrote that they DIDN'T like it, I should check it out.

-Salt, fat, acid heat / A no-nonsense approach to cooking that's made me feel a lot more confident in the kitchen

-It's your ship / Required reading for a PM class

Do you do any analog photography? That's how I got into the hobby and I love it, and a lot of my friends who used to shoot on DSLRs got tired of them and switched to analog for the quirks and simplicity.

Also, check out the book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat if you haven't already. It's not a cookbook per se, more of a technique and cooking theory book, but it really changed the way I approach cooking most dishes.

Since you mentioned seasoning, and I’ve got this in my clipboard from another reply...

Check out Salt Fat Acid Heat [0] if you haven’t seen it. It totally changed my idea of how to season things, to the point that I feel a lot more confident modifying existing recipes now.

One of the most eye opening things also sounds the most silly in retrospect: taste as you go. It makes such a huge difference! For whatever reason, I would always blindly follow a recipe until the very end, and hope that the “big reveal” turned out how I hoped. Now, I try to taste as I go (add a little salt; try it; add more). A related tip that blew my mind recently: if you’re making meatballs and want to check the seasoning, cook a tiny chunk of it and taste it before committing to a whole batch.

Anyway, I really like that book :D

0: https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering/dp/14767...

I've personally found that a necessary prerequisite to listening to an expert talking about something (at least for myself) is to read some books on it. It's boring, and it sucks, and it takes forever, but that repetition of just jamming things in your head and then going over them over and over again is a necessary prerequisite to being able to really 'get' what someone is saying at a master level.

For example, I wouldn't pay to see Gordon Ramsay teaching something without first working through Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and The Food Lab. And by the time I've worked through the books, I know if I'm actually interested in the subject, or if it's just something that I've convinced myself is interesting based on seeing someone doing it on YouTube.

That's just my own philosophy on it. You gotta chop the mesquite before you can smoke the ribs.

My advice is that recipes are best used as inspiration. Rather focus on learning how to build flavour (Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat is a good reference on this), and then have a solid reference cookbook and/or website to refer to (e.g. The Joy of Cooking, Serious Eats). Once you get familiar with cooking rather than following a recipe, it becomes really easy to branch out while identifying which recipes you find online will be crap.

The cookbooks and recipe formats that we have were never designed for someone in your situation. And if you have a background in a field with standardized parts and repeatable results, the kinds of instructions cookbooks give can be maddening. Totally understandable.

One book that helped me was Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. You may not want to cook vegetarian, but many vegetarians are young people who are also building their own cooking styles from scratch. So VCfE goes through the basics - like what is cubing and what is dicing - with illustrations. While it has complex recipes, it also includes almost absurdly simple ones, like preparing beans with olive oil and salt. But think of them like "kata"; basic exercises, that you can build up to more complex forms.

A recent book which I've recently found extremely useful is Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. It is a wonderfully readable introduction to the elements of cooking and how they combine, and it is great for complete newbies as well as experienced home cooks. It manages to be both accessible, practical and a little bit technical, perfect for the techie who wants to get better at cooking. It taught me things simple dishes like roasted chicken, which I had prepared like a hundred times before I read it, which have changed how I cook forever.

Hm this reminds me of reading Salt Fat Acid Heat, and the buttermilk chicken recipe, which has only 3 ingredients (chicken, buttermilk, salt).

She says you have to orient the chicken a specific way in the oven because the corners of the oven are the hottest and the different parts of the chicken will cook evenly that way (?) Not quite sure since I didn't try it. But my friend made it and it was fantastic.

So the way I look at it (without much experience) is that a thermometer measures one dimension, while a chicken is a 3D thing. And an expert chef noticed that enough to put the detail in her recipe. i.e. "reality is complicated".

Not sure if that's the problem with sausages (since they're not that 3D) but there's a reason that specific foods are cooked in specific ovens. i.e. why do people obsess over pizza ovens and import them from Italy? Why is clay pot cooking different than metal pot cooking, etc.?

Because temperature / heat aren't just one-dimensional. She says that good cooks look at the food and not at the thermometer. They're looking for signs in the food which stay constant across environments rather than measuring one aspect of the environment.

tl;dr Samin Nosrat rejects the use of a thermometer because it doesn't measure enough reality to cook well.

I think the first half of "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" is a good companion for the "how to cook everything" books. If you have other resources you like for recipes and techniques, you can read it just for how it breaks down the flavor of dishes, the title concept, and skim the rest.

The show is very different from the book. It's a great pleasure to watch, even though I don't feel like I learn anything that improves my cooking. I agree that the cooking demos don't add much. It feels like she isn't as comfortable looking at the camera as she is conversing in front of it, and she's already said everything so well in the book, you might as well skip to the next episode.

Yeah, I’ve had the same experience. I really like the Salt Fat Acid Heat [0] book for this.

It does have a section on recipes, but a solid half or more of the book is on technique, why certain ways work and others don’t, etc.

Lots of stuff that I imagine one would pick up by working in a kitchen or going to school for it, but could take a long time to figure out on your own.

0: https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering/dp/14767...

Author of the essay here -- I know they say you shouldn't read the comments, but the discussion on here was so thoughtful I just had to create and account and jump in.

Two thoughts to this convo:

1. One thing it took a few years of living in Europe to learn is that what seems like a logical way to learn or convey information is also -- at least partially -- cultural. I'm an experience first kind of gal -- and I judge theories by how well they explain experience. I also think it's a better way to communicate. But here in Europe the standard way of giving, say, a presentation is to begin with all the theory, definitions, concepts, and only then move on to case studies.

It was when I read Erin Meyer's The Culture Map that the whole thing clicked for me. I think it's worth reading the whole book, but here's a quick summary: https://www.mdttraining.vn/post/on-our-bookshelf-the-cultura...

One of her axes of comparison is "principles first vs applications first." It helped me to realise that my preference for applications first was also due to spending all my formative years in North America, being taught this way, consuming media structured this way, and so on.

2. I actually finally bought Salt Fat Acid Heat this spring, started reading it, and just the chapter on salt has already begun making a difference in my cooking. I do think cooking proves you can do something badly, every day, for an entire lifetime, if you don't either get some better theory or carry out a lot of experimentation and remember what works.

However... the reason I bought the Nosrat book was that I was starting to be inspired by cooking again, and what motivated me in that end was the Ramsay course! It gave me that sense of exploration and play again. So I think it's worth paying attention to what increases motivation, especially with something that can become quite a dull chore.