Reddit mentions of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

Ruhlman's TWENTY is a good book for this. Also, I have to recommend Kenji's THE FOOD LAB because there's so much great info in there. The skillet chicken recipes section was a game-changer for me

I've been there - the beginning is tough. But it's great that you've made this choice and definitely possible to make lots of progress on this front. It's not one-size-fits-all, so just because you haven't liked the fruits, veggies, or quinoa you've tried before, doesn't mean there aren't other varieties or ways of preparing them that you will enjoy. Your mindset can make a big difference so be kind to yourself and stay positive - just try your best!

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As others have mentioned cooking for yourself is far and away the best thing you can do to eat healthier - you'll be in control of exactly what you do (and do not) eat. I would highly recommend checking out Kenji Lopez-Alt's The Food Lab - it's technically a cookbook and does have lots of recipes but it's focused on the science of cooking and very technique-driven. It's size is intimidating but I promise if you read nothing more than the introduction (most of which you can preview for free \^\^) you'll learn lots.

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A few day-to-day things that are super helpful for me:

• When you do find a healthy dish you enjoy at a restaurant, snap a photo of the menu description and have a starting point for recreating it yourself/searching for similar recipes online
  
• Make condiments like salad dressing and salsa yourself to cut down on extra calories and preservatives (they taste sooo much better, once you start you'll never want to go back)
  
• Spend a little more money on fresher/higher quality fruits and veggies if you can afford to (look for farmer's markets, grocery cooperatives, produce delivery services etc.)
  
• As many others have said: spices, spices, spices - always have your favorites on hand and experiment with those that are new to you
  
• Try to catch yourself before taking a bite and ask, "Do I want to eat this because I'm actually hungry?" I was amazed at how often I would go grab a snack just because it was something to do once I started checking myself
  
  Good luck!

I cook a lot - and have for a very long time, so I thought about the things that I reach for essentially every meal and will describe what I think is most satisfying for starting out.

When I go to the kitchen to start dinner, I pull out my chopping board, my paring knife, my chef's knife and my over the sink strainer (for washing produce as well as draining stuff) (link is an example only, I got mine at Aldi's for $5 US years ago. Those items are essential for every meal. If she does not have these - or the quality is frustrating, I would look for an upgrade for her. The over the sink strainer is replaced by a colander by a lot of folks, though I find the strainer more versatile.

I work with a mise en place, so I next pull out some metal 1 ounce and glass 4 ounce containers for the ingredients I will be pre measuring. For chopped veg type mise, I like a metal sheet - because nothing really damages it - think cookie sheet or even pizza pan depending on the quantity she is cooking. The small containers are ridiculously cheap and infinitely helpful; they stack, so they do not take up much kitchen space.

The cooking vessels she will need depend on what food she likes to cook. I could not make it a week without a Dutch Oven of highest quality, a wok that is willing to sit over propane in the back yard, a 4 gallon stock pot and a killingly heavy 16" cast iron skillet, but the right answer on cookware depends on what she likes to cook and how many she is feeding - I could live the rest of my life without a springform for cheesecake - her preferences may differ. I always have a cheap non stick skillet in the kitchen for folks who eat breakfast and like eggs - replace it every 2 years with another cheap one

On the subject of tools, silicone spatulas and the Thermopen are my must haves. Wooden spoons are third on the list, because you can use them in any pan.

Folks who love to cook also love cookbooks. The Food Lab is a great "encourager" cookbook, because it shows respect for the skills she has, while giving a great opportunity for real growth to any cook.

Pick and choose, tailor to what you have already, ask follow up questions!

You might want to buy Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything. Its a book about cooking techniques that I think is precisely the book you are looking for.

Also honorable mention for The Food Lab and The New Best Recipe books as well, those are more recipe based, but they have great info on techniques and ingredients. Both get into the science behind cooking and explain why they picked a specific recipe which helped me learn how to cook without recipes and be able to know when certain things are done(I now judge if something I am baking is done more by smell than time now) and how to save emulsions when to add salt and acids etc. The author of the food lab is also pretty active on the Serious Eats subreddit and will answer questions about his recipes.

Salt Fat Acid and Heat is also pretty good as well, I have not read this one personally though as the first part is waaaaaayyy too much personal narrative from the author for me and I turned off the audiobook after listening to her life story for 10 minutes, so get the print book so you can skip right to the cooking parts.

If you enjoy the scientific "why" as well as the "how-to", The Food Lab is accessible, interesting, and useful.

Cooking for geeks is not quite as good, but it speaks more to a reader who isn't a natural cook, I think.

https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science-ebook/dp/B00TG24C34

J Kenji is always my favorite suggestion. He makes it easy to follow but still goes into enough depth with the science of why things work to make you confident enough to use a certain technique in new recipes.

If you haven't checked it out yet I definitely recommend Kenji's The Food Lab book. It's changing my life for the better.

I absolutely love to cook, especially for others. There seems to be a natural INTJ inclination for "check out this thing I learned!" and there's few better ways to do that than blowing people away with an amazing meal.

To anyone interested in learning better cooking techniques and recipes, I highly recommend checking out The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt. It completely reframes cooking through a scientific lense, and Kenji goes to extreme lengths to make sure his recipes are optimized based on provable results through the scientific method. It's the INTJ's cookbook bible for this reason, he is so thorough and leaves no stone unturned and nothing left unexplained.

Morris dancing tomorrow, then cooking Mexican. Got a recipe for making Mexican sour cream from here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00TG24C34/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

>But I want to delve a little deeper to learn more and maybe even be able to "freestyle" in the future.

I'd say the very first thing you need to learn is to grasp & adopt the concept of how you really, truly learn cooking. There's a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin that goes, "The most powerful force in the universe is compounding interest." That means that as you do little bits of work on a consistent basis, it adds up to create fluency & accomplishment. Same idea as high school...you show up every day for 4 years & suddenly you have a diploma! If you can buy into that idea, then that will serve as the 'guiding light' for how you approach cooking, i.e. as steady, consistent progress against individual recipes, techniques, and flavor combinations, rather than random shotgun blasts scattered here & there.

In cooking, you can't do all of the processes & understand all of the flavor combinations unless you've studied them & actually done them, hands-on, in-person, and that is a long-term process. Until then, you're just window shopping, you know? I have a few posts here on kind of the basics of cooking that is worth reading through:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cookingforbeginners/comments/ajrsio/what_basicgeneral_cooking_tips_and_advice_do_you_think_everybody_should_kno/eeyhpua/?context=3

And in order to do learn those processes & understand the flavor combinations & build up a personal recipe database, you need to cook - a lot! If you're really serious about it, then I would recommend cooking every single day. Not necessarily every single meal, but cook at least one thing a day. In order to do that, you need to do some meal planning, which involves picking out what to cook, going shopping, and planning out what to make & when. I have a few posts on that here as well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mealprep/comments/afdqju/meal_prep_ideas/edyhgbu/

Here is what I would recommend:

1. Commit to a plan. I'd suggest cooking just one thing a day. It can be separate from your actual meals, if you'd like, which is how I do it - I cook one meal a day for freezer storage when I get home from work every day. And because my kitchen is organized, I've made a meal-plan for the week, I've gone shopping, I've picked what day I'm going to cook each recipe, I've created a reminder alarm on my phone, and I have the recipe...I mean, it pretty much just boils down to actually doing the work, you know? Which is pretty dang easy, because at this point of preparation, it's like shooting fish in a barrel...I know what to make, how to make it, I have all the ingredients, and I'm only doing just one single solitary little recipe at a time, just one per day.
   
2. "Cook the book" - buy one cookbook & work your way through it. Personally, I'd recommend starting off with Kenji's Food Lab book. He has great pre-vetted recipes & explains them thoroughly. If you prefer baking, then check out Stella's Bravetart book, which takes a similar approach.
   
3. Create a recipe storage locker & a notes locker. I'd recommend Evernote or OneNote. They let you search, tag, and create individual notes, so you can organize things by ingredient, cooking style, and so on. All of the raw ingredients in the world already exist. All of the known recipes that are documented are already written down. There's a tremendous amount of knowledge & resources out there in terms of flavor combinations, tools, and ingredients available at your disposable...but your database is pretty empty right now. The rest of the world doesn't matter...what matters is filling up your personal database so that you can cook & bake & create delicious things for yourself, your family, and your friends. Your job is to build up that knowledge recipe by recipe, technique by technique, ingredient by ingredient. You've tried paprika, but have you tried smoked paprika? You've tried cinnamon, but have you tried roasted cinnamon? Have you used a microplane on a cinnamon stick or a whole nutmeg? You may have used garlic powder or chopped up a clove of garlic before, but have to roasted it to the point where it spreads like butter? Have you fermented black garlic in a rice cooker? That's not stuff you learn all at once, instantly, overnight, and become a pro at...you have to learn the flavors, and the process, and experiment, and see what works & what doesn't, and equally importantly, you need to write that down, because you WILL forget, but having your notes allows you to get inspired & think up great combinations & try new things & fall back on old ones.
   
   I mean, basically that's it - create a plan that involves doing a little bit of work on a regular basis, commit to it, and create some processes & reminders that enable you to easily slip into cooking mode when you want to. It's nothing more than a simple checklist, and you can be all over the map with it - learn how to cook marshmallows, and chicken tikka masala, and how to make your own jello, and what crystals are in chocolateering & how to temper your own chocolate using sous-vide, and how to cook using an electric pressure cooker, and what a good basic kitchen toolset looks like. Imagine if you only learn one thing a day or cook one thing a day...in a year, you'll have 365 new tidbits of knowledge under your belt; in five years, you'll have nearly two thousand bits of information under your belt.
   
   Please feel free to ask questions! To me, cooking isn't about going hardcore every day by cooking lots of stuff for hours & hours, it's about specifically focusing on one individual thing at a time & mastering it so that you "own" that knowledge, you know?
   
   For example, I went through a marshmallow phase. I went to a dessert shop a few winters ago & they had this amazing ultra-premium hot chocolate that was just out of this world, then they topped it off with a giant 2" hand-made marshmallow that they skewered & finished with a torch. It was sooooo good that I HAD to learn how to make it! As it turns out, like with anything else, you can deep-dive into just those two topics alone - hot chocolate & marshmallows. Here's some good introductory reading from one of my favorite hot chocolate shops in NYC, "City Bakery": (I'm pretty sure they just melt a chocolate bar into a cup, haha!)
   
   https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-4172562/Make-best-hot-chocolate-City-Bakery.html
   
   Four of my favorite NY chefs (Dominque Ansel, Jacques Torres, Maury Rubin, and Michael Klug) have some very different opinions on it:
   
   https://food52.com/blog/15460-how-to-make-the-best-hot-chocolate-according-to-the-experts
   
   part 1/2

Can't recommend that book enough, it's pretty great even just to read various techniques and handling. He extensively covers eggs because it's insane how much you can do with that one ingredient.

Also making your own mayo is super easy. Well, until you want to add olive oil, then it's a workout but well worth it

Here's the book for any interested, I'd recommend the hard cover

I recommend The Food Lab by Kenji of Serious Eats. The ebook is $20, and the chapter on fried foods is worth the price alone.

Kenji discusses stirring a little bit of the wet ingredients into the seasoned flour to create moist bits that will stick to the chicken for more texture.

There seems to be some confusion in this thread about the difference between breading and batter. The chicken in your picture is soaked in buttermilk, then rolled in seasoned flour (and then probably back in the buttermilk then back in the flour) and deep fried. A lot of people here seem to have the technique right, but this is breading, not battering. It's still called breading, even though you're using flour rather than breadcrumbs. Battering is a one step process: you dip into the batter, then fry.

Definitely. If you are interested in the science of cooking:

• McGee, On Food and Cooking
  
• Lopez-Alt, The Food Lab

Video series or anything? I really learned a ton reading The Professional Chef, which is a textbook in a lot of culinary schools I hear. I have the eTextbook version that has a lot of video links and interactivity.

If you're into the science behind cooking I'd also really recommend The Food Lab, I have the hard back version and it's also just a beautiful book.

I also have Cooking and Sauces by Peterson, also textbook quality books.

And of course, the ever popular Better Homes & Gardens Ring-Bound Cookbook, How to Cook Everything, and The Joy of Cooking are staples on my bookshelf as well. Great for reference or a quick look to find a particular recipe just to see how others do it.

I also browse a lot of websites and watch a lot on YouTube. I'll save recipes I find online using the Evernote Web Clipper and tag them so I can find them easily in the future. This works great because I can pull them up on my iPad while I'm cooking.

When a recipe calls for a method, tool, or ingredient I'm not very familiar with I'll usually just search it on YouTube and get some ideas about how to use it. That's worked really well for me so far.

Check out the Food Lab, might not be AS technical as you'd like but it is along the lines of what you're talking about

https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science-ebook/dp/B00TG24C34/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549666085&sr=1-1&keywords=the+food+lab

Also, something was done with Watson and flavor profiles. Highlighted in this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Flavor-Matrix-Science-Ingredients-Extraordinary/dp/0544809963/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549666129&sr=1-1&keywords=flavor+matrix

the food lab by kenji is amazing for these sorts of questions! https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00TG24C34/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501704141&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=food+lab+kenji

Aprecio el perfil tecnico que le das a el proceso quimico que sucede en la cocina, por lo cual te recomiendo, si es que no lo tienes ya, que te compres este libro nuevo. Yo lo voy a comprar.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TG24C34?keywords=cooking&qid=1450983812&ref_=sr_1_6&s=books&sr=1-6

I would highly recommend buying a copy of The Food Lab as it has essentially every style of cooking and some amazing tips on how to make it Ignis-grade delicious