Clear, rapid feedback on how well you did and what you need to improve. This can be self-directed, but ideally comes from a 1:1 instructor. E.g., an experienced cook telling a beginner cook what spices their dish is missing.
I don’t know that much about cooking but it would surprise me if good cooking feedback would look like that as it’s about the outcome and not about the process. If anyone considers themselves an expert here, I’m curious what they think.
I’m just a slightly advanced beginner, but you can make the food less tasty by simply adding the spice too early (even if it’s the right kind and right amount). Depends on spice. For example, I usually add garlic at the moment I finish cooking, because after short time (depending on whether it is whole or cut) it loses the spicy taste. In this case, the expert tasting the result and saying “you need more garlic” would get it wrong.
Also, it puts the bar for the “experienced cook” unnecessarily high. There are people who cook tasty food, and could give you some good advice during cooking, but if you just let them taste the result, they will not be sure what advice to give.
My woefully inexpert guess is that advanced cooking should be thought of as optimization in a space of high dimension, where gradient descent will often zig-zag, making simple experiments inefficient. Then apart from knowledge of many landmarks (which is covered by cooking books), high cooking skill would involve ability to reframe recipes to reduce dimensionality, and intuition about how to change a process to make it better or to vary it without making it worse, given fine details of a particular setup and available ingredients. This probably can’t be usefully written down at all, but does admit instruction about changes in specific cases.
So I put that example because one of the things that felt like a breakthrough in cooking ability for me was seeing a post listing a bunch of world cuisines by spices (I think it was a post by Jeff Kaufman, but I can’t find it now). Having a sense of which spices usually contribute to the flavor profile I want made me a better cook than my arbitrary “sniff spice and guess whether that would be good” previous method.
I think you have two aspects for the first cut: flavoring and cooking—maybe add visual presentation (which also is affected by cooking). Flavoring seem to be what a number here are talking about—salt, acid/spiciness, sweetness, bitterness/sharpness. For that I think just study the tongue and taste buds. Cooking is all about controlling the application of heat.
For the visual it will be balancing color and numbers (odd numbers seem to be more appealing than even numbers it seems), and a bit about shapes/patterns.
I don’t know that much about cooking but it would surprise me if good cooking feedback would look like that as it’s about the outcome and not about the process. If anyone considers themselves an expert here, I’m curious what they think.
I’m just a slightly advanced beginner, but you can make the food less tasty by simply adding the spice too early (even if it’s the right kind and right amount). Depends on spice. For example, I usually add garlic at the moment I finish cooking, because after short time (depending on whether it is whole or cut) it loses the spicy taste. In this case, the expert tasting the result and saying “you need more garlic” would get it wrong.
Also, it puts the bar for the “experienced cook” unnecessarily high. There are people who cook tasty food, and could give you some good advice during cooking, but if you just let them taste the result, they will not be sure what advice to give.
My woefully inexpert guess is that advanced cooking should be thought of as optimization in a space of high dimension, where gradient descent will often zig-zag, making simple experiments inefficient. Then apart from knowledge of many landmarks (which is covered by cooking books), high cooking skill would involve ability to reframe recipes to reduce dimensionality, and intuition about how to change a process to make it better or to vary it without making it worse, given fine details of a particular setup and available ingredients. This probably can’t be usefully written down at all, but does admit instruction about changes in specific cases.
Reducing dimensionality is the most useful cooking advice I have received. I now use a four factor model: salt, sweet, spice (heat), sour.
Is it salty enough? If no, add salt, soy sauce, or fish sauce; or reduce.
Is it sweet enough? If no, add sugar, jagery, maple syrup or caramelized onions.
The essentialism is to assign characteristics to ingredients (e.g. Tomatoes are sour.)
I learned this model from some south Indians, this model may be common in that culture. I’m not sure.
How do you reduce saltiness?
“Reduce” probably means boil off some water to increase the salt concentration of what remains.
Yes, this is what I meant.
“Add a potato (and afterwards throw it away)” is an advice I’ve heard but didn’t test.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat looks related to this concept. But some of the elements are different.
So I put that example because one of the things that felt like a breakthrough in cooking ability for me was seeing a post listing a bunch of world cuisines by spices (I think it was a post by Jeff Kaufman, but I can’t find it now). Having a sense of which spices usually contribute to the flavor profile I want made me a better cook than my arbitrary “sniff spice and guess whether that would be good” previous method.
I think you have two aspects for the first cut: flavoring and cooking—maybe add visual presentation (which also is affected by cooking). Flavoring seem to be what a number here are talking about—salt, acid/spiciness, sweetness, bitterness/sharpness. For that I think just study the tongue and taste buds. Cooking is all about controlling the application of heat.
For the visual it will be balancing color and numbers (odd numbers seem to be more appealing than even numbers it seems), and a bit about shapes/patterns.