/ck/ - Food & Cooking

there's an excellent show "Michel Roux's Service" for beginners in the service industry

>>10218

All I can say is that knowing how to do home cooking is way different from cooking in a restaurant. You not only need to be able to churn out the dishes fast, but you also need to be able to cook them the exact same way over and over again.

>>10225

as someone in the industry, it's much more than that. it's a lot of time management and organization, lots of cleaning, and sometimes just a straight up endurance test. if you want to get a job cooking just start looking around, you don't need to know a whole lot when you start, but it sure helps.

>>10228

honestly, sounds like a trudge and boring as fuck. i cook for fun and pleasure, and your job description is literally the opposite of that

>>10229

Don't make your job something you aren't prepared to hate for the rest of your life

>>10229

For once there's very good advice itt.

-Michel Roux (senior) really is one of the world's best chefs. Far better than Pepin, whom people seem to like, just because he got on tv and cooked for the French president decades ago.

-You need to realize there's 2 types of cooking: cooking for the mouth (taste), and cooking for the purse (money). The 2 always play a role, no matter where, for whom and when you cook. Learn the difference.

-Get to know ingredients and what you can do with them. Either use balsamic vinegar or make your own with a compote of pear, prune and white wine vinegar.

-Learn what mise en place is about. There's an enormous difference between being able to cook a risotto perfectly well at home, and doing 2 shrimp, 1 porcini, 3 summer vegetables risotti. Because if you want to do it well, you'll cook the shrimp for A minutes, the mushrooms for B minutes, and the vegetables for C,D,E minutes. Depending on how many there are. And you want them all to arrive at the same time at a table. Meanwhile other tables are ordering their stuff: salad this, amuse that, another risotto. And that stuff has to go out of the kitchen at the same time too. Night after night after night.

-And you have to work, HARD, while others are having fun. 12 or more hours a day. Don't underestimate this. The kitchen is hot and sweaty, especially during summer season.

-Get to know your produce: if you tap a melon and it sounds hollow it's bad. Smell citrus, if it smells it has taste.

-Learn how to cut an onion without crying, and tons of other techniques. Part of mise en place, but so important.

-Get Harold McGee, On food and Cooking. One of the best books out there, one of the best books out there. Has no (or very little) recipes, but it'll help you understand what ingredient interacts with another.

>>10247

>pepin is god

He realized nobody in the US could cook and made tons of money off of that, and that's fine. What's not fine is that he'll never go beyond basic European homecooking, even though he bloody well can, easily. And so can anyone else. Nowadays there are people who can cook in the US/UK: Keller, Ripert, Achatz, Boulud, Roux, Blumenthal's cooking at home, Ramsay's 3* chef. They'll show you how to do (almost) the same amount of effort but with a far more elegant result. Pepin could've done that too, instead he chose for Julia "Howling Cow" Child level entertainment.

>balsamic vin and compotes are completely different

You can make a "sauce" with the exact same taste, acidity & texture as balsamic vinegar by blending a compote of pear and prune with white wine vinegar. Look for Pierre Wynants. Ferran Adria uses quince. Redzepi uses apple compote instead and calls it apple balsamico. It's nowhere near balsamico any more but it sure is delicious. For the real thing you pay an arm and a leg, for the "fake" (it's still a very natural product) you pay one Euro, if that. Your choice.

>mise en place is a great concept, but you've done a shit job of explaining it

You're right. I learned to cook from a bunch of Italian grandma's, Pierre Wynants and Peter Goossens' kitchens. "Self-taught", heh. So when I ended up in a professional kitchen for the first time I already knew how to cook quite well. The most difficult thing then was to adapt to the "order 1! 1 this! 3 that! 2 that!". Then having to say to myself "ok, this needs that many minutes, that needs a few more etc etc". At home things would go perfectly as planned, but in the restaurant it was excruciatingly difficult when I started out. I fucked up lots.

>not trying to take the piss out of you

I never take offence from someone who makes a living putting smiles on people's faces. That's why I do it, at least. I just love it when kids smile with my granny's gelato.

>>10247

>how to cook everything

author? magnet link?

>>10248

>Julia "Howling Cow" Child level entertainment

yeah, but that's cozy as fuck. we're not all looking for a culinary messiah you insufferable elitist

>>11040

Try watching "Good Eats".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Good_Eats_episodes

>>11040

Of course.

What do you want to eat?

If you're not sure, that's fine…

I would suggest learning to make tamago gohan (egg on rice) and omelettes first. Easy, quick, quite satisfying, reasonably hard to screw up, no exotic ingredients or extremely specialized equipment required.

After that, find something that interests you and work on it. If it goes horribly wrong, you can always fall back on your basics - whip up an egg on rice, not starve, and try to figure out what went wrong.

Depending on your goals, your next step along the path will be different. If you just want to not starve, you go for Betty Crocker or similar recipes. If you want to become a good cook, maybe a bit snobby but AT LEAST YOU HAVE STANDARDS, DAMMIT… then you start with something more advanced and thorough.

The dangerous trap: following the instruction offered by a popular celebrity chef and thinking it is good when it isn't. If their goal is to help you appreciate good food, great. If their goal is to sell you their line of kitchen gadgets and seasoning blends, their instruction may not actually be helpful.