cooking is easy, actually

Posting consistently is easy, actually

360p video in this economy?

My absolute biggest recommendation to any new cook following recipes is to prep as many ingredients as you (safely) can before the recipe starts. I’ve started to cook more recently and nothing makes me more anxious/screws up a recipe like starting something irreversible and time-sensitive and then realizing that I’m not ready to move on to the next step, potentially ruining my dish. I’m talking cutting vegetables, mincing garlic, measuring out spices, prepping your meat. You don’t have to do the foodtuber thing with a million tiny bowls for all your spices and ingredients, just combine in advance where you can and boom, you just saved yourself a ton of headache AND dishes. Mise en place: it makes cooking easier to execute, easier to enjoy, and easier to learn from.

Guys i think gordon ramsay is kinda a fan of olive oil

* pauses and redirects* "You are a container". Loved it

HowToBasic is hands down the best cooking channel on the internet

I cook pretty good, on an amateur home cook scale, so I'll give you some tips on how to impress friends/family/people you want to take their clothes off with your cooking. - Basic plating. There are two ways to plate food, either you put little food on a big plate, leaving a lot of empty space where you are only allowed to put sauce (bonus points for using a spoon or those squeezy bottles to make the sauce into a funky shape), or a lot of food on a smaller plate, making it look very crowded, which is cool. In either case, the more different things you can put on top of each other, the better, and keep random bits of green stuff (parsley, basil, whatever you already seasoned the food with) on hand to put on top. Generally speaking, if some type of extra side thing (like vegetables with your rice, or a sauce for the meat) don't need to be mixed into each other for the cooking process, plate them next to/on top of each other separately, and let whoever eats it mix it for themselves. - Choose recipes that are not too out there in terms of ingredients and taste, but look "exotic". Blanching pears in a wine sauce, and plating them with vanilla ice cream is so simple, I could teach a monkey to do it, and it's a safe bet anyone will like it (it's pears and ice cream) but it looks really fancy and impressive. - The fewer ingredients a recipe has, the more important it is to make those ingredients (especially meats, and especially-especially vegetables and dairy) high quality - When in doubt, caramelize the sugar. - When in doubt, marinade the meats. - If your food tastes fine, but "something is missing", 95% of the time one of these is the solution: more butter, more garlic, more lemon juice, more salt, or you should have caramelized the sugar. - If you are cooking for a date night, prep whatever you can the day before. Clean, chop, and measure vegetables, marinade meats, etc. It will make the actual cooking faster, easier, and cleaner. - If you want a slightly more advanced technique, that is still very easy to learn the basics of, and will impress the hell out of people, learn to make your own pasta. Even if you do it badly, as long as you shape and cook it properly, it will skyrocket every meal, and make you look like an amazing cook. You can start with gnocchi with zero equipment, or if you want a non-potato pasta, orechiette is relatively easy to shape, even if you don't have a pasta machine. If you have a sharp knife, and confident cutting technique, you can hand cut fettuccine as well for extra swag points.

I'm french and there's honestly nothing but butter in my fridge, never felt more seen

No it isn’t. You see, when I last tried cooking, the spaghetti I was making somehow turned into some weird humanoid spaghetti monster, and it killed my grandma :(

Please make learning a musical instrument is easy actually

I had to learn how to cook by myself with no external help as an early-20's male living on his own, and here's how I did it. For beginner books, I recommend (1) The New Cooking School Cookbook: Fundamentals (2) The New Cooking School Cookbook: Advanced Fundamentals (3) Jacques Pepin New Complete Techniques: teaches you some basic cooking techniques rather than full recipes (4) Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables: teaches you how to cook vegetables, but also teaches you best ways to select them at supermarket/farmer's market and how to store them properly. The first two books are by America's Test Kitchen and teach you everything from basic recipes you should know to baking, and it's written for the type of person who doesn't know how to fry an egg. What I also like about it is that the first few pages of both books are dedicated to recommending the very best cooking equipment they've tested alongside budget-friendly recommendations. Note that the first two books tell you how to cook for a family, which sucks so I actually also recommend buying The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook and Cooking for One (both by ATK) which basically have the same recipes just scaled down except with little explanation for what they're doing. One equipment note is that the two books recommend a stand mixer by KitchenAid, but Ankarsrum (which they recommend on their YouTube channel) is more powerful and they recommend it better. Eight equipment recommendations not by ATK I found helpful are BPA-free plastic deli containers for food prep, Ball jars for sauces and fermentation, glass ramekins to hold spices and singular egg yolks, bains for storing kitchen tools, a countertop compost bin (since going back and forth between the trash can and cutting board is annoying unless you have a bin to dump at the very end), salt cellars to store salt (I have three one for Diamond Crystal kosher salt, one for table salt, and one for Maldon sea salt), a pressure cooker such as InstantPot for cooking without needing to be attentive to the food (good for busy people to make large batches), and some tomato decore tool. I have and like their Cole and Mason pepper grinder, but most people have probably heard of Peugeot as a fancier pepper grinder. I only have one criticism of ATK's books on this list. The big one is that they don't teach you how to properly sharpen a knife using a whetstone. Although some people argue their knives are cheap and they’re thus too lazy to sharpen properly (ATK recommends Victorinox which is good but still a cheap stamped steel knife), you absolutely have to learn how to use whetstones if you wish in the future to buy more expensive forged steel European knives (Wüsthof, Zwilling) or Japanese knives, both of which are sharper and won’t go dull as fast. You don't need a book to learn how to sharpen, but if you have too much time on your hands then Knife Engineering (Thomas) is cool. Japanese Knife Imports on YouTube was how I learned how to sharpen knives. If you want proper whetstone equipment, you'll need a (1) coarse grit whetstone (2) medium grit whetstone (3) fine grit whetstone (4) whetstone holder (5) tub to hold water (6) Honing rod (for touch-ups, not sharpening) (7) Whetstone flattener (8) Optional: leather strop or some other strop like denim or newspaper. I have a 400, 1000, and 3000 grit variety of whetstones by Naniwa Chosera Pros (which are ceramic splash stones rather than aluminum oxide soaking stones), a diamond plate to flatten my stones, and a food pan by Carlisle food products off of Amazon to hold water along with some generic anti-slip mat. A cheaper alternative to all three stones is a simple double-sided King stone. If you want to do more of your own research, then consult r/sharpening and the ScienceOfSharp website. Some honorable book mentions are The Food Lab, How to Cook Everything, and The Professional Chef (CIA). They're good, but I don't think they're strictly necessary if you have the first two ATK books. Also, if you buy every single ATK recommendation from the first two books alongside the Ankarsrum stand mixer and my equipment recommendations then you can expect to spend $4500-$5500. Brian Lagerstrom has a video on saving money for kitchen equipment too if you don't wish to spend that much, but keep in mind that you get what you pay for. For advanced books, I recommend (1) Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: teaches you how to master flavor and thus understand or improvise using salt, fat, acid, and heat alongside some culinary exercises at the end to master these four (2) On Food and Cooking: basically a food science textbook for cooks rather than food scientists (3) The Flavor Matrix: good for understanding spices as well as The Flavor Bible (4) Ratio (Michael Ruhlman): gives you a bunch of recipe ratios which is helpful if you want to scale down recipes. An honorable mention is the Modernist Cuisine book series. I’ve not looked too deeply, but as far as I know they’re good but geared towar

5:32 “YOU. are a container..”😭😭

2:08 to get past the olive oil

Adam Ragusea has a great Cooking 101 series here on YouTube for anyone looking for some super basic stuff!

"You are a container" has big "my eyes are circles" energy. (Quote from James Acaster during his season on the show Taskmaster)

Do not season your cutting board i swear Seasoning is meant for your food

was here for the uncut olive oil montage

I'm a "self-taught" cook, and I say there are 6 pillars to easily learning how to cook: 1 Critique. 2 Observation. 3 Following recipes. 4 Practice. 5 Freestyling. 6 Creativity. Keep all of these in mind, and by around your twenties, you'll be making your own recipes in no time. (I made a stuffed butternut squash recipe as of late.)

The idea of being labeled a container is concerningly accurate

Watching easy, actually is easy, actually.