A big thing I've noticed with my friends who don't cook is that they often succumb to the fear of getting it wrong. They see a recipe that calls for Himalayan pink salt and somehow conclude that the food will be all wrong if they don't go buy that niche ingredient so instead, they just give up before they even start cooking. As a beginner, it's important to learn how to substitute ingredients, but more importantly, we need simpler recipes out there. Every food blogger tries to make their recipe unique, which often results in recipes with the title "Classic, traditional, easy, nothing fancy, just a regular old mac n cheese" calling for exotic cheeses, nutmeg, and a weird pasta shape no one has ever heard of. JUST GIVE US THE LEVEL 1 PLEASE.
This is actually where a lot of boxed meals can come into play because they often have suggestions of ways to improve the meal. Level 1 is adding butter, sausage and a couple spices to Kraft. It's cheap, simple and has lots of room to experiment.
This is so true, ive defintely been scared away from recipes i see online because they are overly specfiic with their ingredients and how you should cook something, again this is for the supposedly "begginer friendly" recipes.
@@woopnull9103 I hear you there. But the reason I personally started delving into the potentially deeper waters of food blogs and videos was to get ideas about how to get away from the processed box stuff, which has way too much sodium. 😅
I was never really taught to cook growing up because my parents were always super busy. And until recently I thought I was a good cook because I could make a lot of different things that I looked up online, from potstickers to casseroles, but I realized that I don't even know a lot of the fundamentals of cooking and seasoning properly such as this. I think that's true for a lot of people, that they skipped learning the basic steps as a kid and now any recipe you want to cook is freely available online, but you might not necessarily realize that there are a ton of gaps in your knowledge.
one thing that helped me as a beginner was actually reading the instructions on those recipe sites where it feels like the writer wont shut up abt how some memory they attached to the recipe. its not always the most interesting read, but u gain a lot of perspective into how different people cook things and ppl often explain small details about why they do this and that for each step. really helpful for beginners. kinda annoying for someone who knows what they are doing to have to scroll for 6 years to get to the recipe lol. but it was really helpful to me starting out.
This is a really interesting perspective, because I grew up in a family who hated cooking (and was always working, so I had to learn really early) and I feel like that trial and error helped me learn intuitive cooking. I think blindly following a recipe without understanding what makes it work would have really hindered me
I barely cooked before I moved abroad at 21. I'm super passionate about food and cooking though so I've managed to get my education through youtube. I definitely could improve in many ways like seasoning meat the day before cooking
As someone who finds cooking very intimidating and who's mom is a fantastic cook so I basically never had to learn until my early 20s, videos like this are seriously helpful. Every point you made was news to me and I bet there's tons more. I always felt like there was so much knowledge left out of the recipe that they just assumed you already knew. For example, making cake from the box as a kid sounded easy right? Because according to the box you just need to add one egg and 3/4c water or milk! But then my mom would come in and say "No no the box is wrong you need vanilla and two eggs, don't ever use water, and put more milk than they tell you! More! More, what's wrong with you??? Now coat the pan in butter. I know it doesn't say that, do it anyway. It says 15 minutes but put it in for 20. No 15 is wrong." It was soooo stressful. Then she'd get mad that I didn't know any of this. It just made me think you had to know all this stuff without the recipe ever telling you. Like even if you follow the recipe exactly you're still doing something wrong. You know what no one told me? You don't need to oil the pan when you're cooking meat because it makes its own grease. I just thought you had to oil the pan before cooking anything. From your video, I didn't know the pan is too hot if it starts smoking. I thought it was supposed to do that because you're cooking and it's fire lol Two ideas that were huge barriers to me learning how to cook: The idea that bad cooking is not REAL cooking. And the idea that convenient cooking is not real cooking (vs from scratch.) If somebody made a dish that came out badly or was really simplified, my mom would say it was not real cooking. And I had that idea in my head for years too until I realized it was the reason I didn't ever think I'd be able to cook. So one day she said that about some dish I made, and I challenged her about it with simple questions like "so I didn't cook it? So it's not food?" until she realized that by real she meant good and of course I wasn't going to cook good because I was just starting. But it is still real cooking. And then she stopped saying that! I don't mean to vilify my mom. She's a great person and she means well. But she definitely had a superiority complex about her cooking and without even realizing it, that attitude rubbed off on me and made cooking this unattainable goal that meant nothing unless it was perfect.
Thanks for your comment, it was great food for thought! So her high expectations about food acted like a barrier for you to concider it attainable. I believe I did that with my boyfriend, when I should have encouraged him more 😅. But really he is painfully slow with very little knowledge about ingredients and food in general.😂 I couldn't fathom why obvious things and skills weren't obvious to him and also how how his standards were so low. I guess it's some form of superiority complex. Anyway it's interesting because I was never taught how to cook myself. I learned everything on my own through media and after moving out, a lot to the fact that I cannot stand shitty processed food.
Oh my god, you basically described my experience. My mum may not be an extraoridinary cook, but she can do it since she was very young because she had to help her sick grandma. I personally never was interested in cooking. I would definitely help my mum and grandma as a child but it was mostly with preparing the ingredients, kneading the dough etc., never the ACTUAL cooking part. One thing about my mum is that she has very little patience and prefers doing stuff herself so it gets done "properly". So yes, I was yelled at for doing things wrong. Hence why now I'm lowkey terrified of cooking, I can prepare stuff but the moment I need to mix ingredients over the stove and spice things up my brain shuts off. I can really mess up the easiest thing just because I forget an important step. That's why when my mum tells me to cook something I demand a step by step recipe with details. And when my mum says "add a bit of salt" I just want to scream. I tell her "what exactly do you mean??? My bit of salt might be different than yours!". And she cannot understand why I need all the details like that but the reason is apparent: NOONE EVER PROPERLY EXPLAINED THE COOKING HACKS TO ME. Just because I was present when she does the cooking doesn't mean I caught every little thing, I wasn't interested in it before.
I always liked and was able to cook, but usually I cooked same simple things I liked (like zucchini with soy sauce and garlic or mush potatoes, mud cake etc) and found that convenience cooking helped me to develop my skills more! It's low stakes, you get to try how the stuff supposed to taste/ feel. Now I can make at least 1/2 ramen broths from scratch and make better soups in general! Plus making EVERYTHING from scratch isn't sustainable at all for most people
@@black-nails I found that convenience cooking helps me develop my skills too! Because it reduces the number of things you have to already know how to do and eliminates a loy of steps. So It feels much less overwhelming, and then you have time to learn the leftover part really well! Then once you get good at that, you feel more confident that you can try doing it from scratch cuz you're not starting from zero! And just like you said, experimenting with taste gets much easier cuz spices are really the only wild card. Just gotta be conscious and aware of how much salt and sugar they put into the package because even if it says healthy it still probably has a lot of both. At least in the US
Remember that some combo spices like “garlic pepper” or “garlic salt” do contain salt so keep that in mind when salting! The saltiness is easier to control if you use the spices on their own rather than a premixed spice
@@lst9701 My advice for that is to use separate shakers of MSG and salt to get similar results. To me MSG is the only value in buillon. Whenever I get buillon blocks I end up mashing them into a jar and using it as MSG anyway.
My husband isn't completely clueless in a kitchen, infact he is weirdly skilled at many technical aspects of cooking (cutting, food prep, and organizing ingredients while cooking). Yet, he is lost over flavor profiles. So many of my dishes he'll go "does that go together?", yes sweetheart this is the exact recipe I made last week that you asked me to make again. He still doesn't understand that tomato soup is made with chicken broth, and you can't just substitute any green thin herbs with rosemary. It's like rosemary is the only seasoning he knows, so he just tries to put it on everything. I do all the cooking, and I like it that way, but watching him get angry over how my sandwiches taste so different is hilarious.
This is a personal pet peeve of mine, but so often someone tells me a recipe or I read one online, they cannot help mentioning how quick and easy it is to prepare. As someone not well versed in cooking, it really sets you up for failure. Like even when I tell people that I'm clueless, they have to insist it's super easy and I should definitely try it. And then they list a thousand individual steps you have to adhere to in order to get the dish just right. The difference in perspective were really quite interesting, were it not also very annoying.
This is why I’ve considered starting a recipe blog ngl. Reading other blogs where instead of actually giving good tips and breaking things down they always tell some ridiculous story no one cares about. Like let’s get a breakdown, and stop saying “it’s so easy” because it’s only easy if you’ve done it before.
This and youtubers who clickbait and say a recipe is cheap only like 3,80 but it's serving price and now you're left with unused ingredients like that wagyu beef that the recipe only listed a gram of.
The best advice i can give is to start out with child cook books/ recipes and work up. The instructions there are more simple and usually have diagrams for visual learning. My parents taught us how to cook as kids, and they started us with eggs. Boiling an egg, scrambling an egg, then try an omlette, then try more egg styles. Just one ingredient but can be made it different ways, which will help strengthen that cooking muscle without a ton of confusion.
Brb showing this to my wife! I just know she’s gonna be so grateful when I tell her some internet guy agrees with me that all her cooking habits are bad!
And then there's my Dad... a 62 year old physicist who insists on weighing out 5 grams of salt and gets mad when I tell him to season "to taste" 🙄 He's getting a very fine scale for Christmas so he can weigh out every ingredient to his heart's contend 😂
atleast he seems to try different recipes, my dad (math teacher) has been alternating between the same two pasta recipes for the last 25 years lmao (they taste amazing)
My mum, a retired engineer is the same. She refuses to stray from the instructions of a recipe and insists on measuring everything. If the recipe says "cook pasta for 5 mins" she will set a timer and stop cooking after 5 mins even if the pasta isn't cooked.
@@rizahawkeyepierce1380 my dad's an engineer and he measures flour with his bare hands. None of his cakes turn out the same but they all taste fantastic; especially if he bakes them on a whim at 1:00am
The thing that changed my cooking the most was when I decided I was skilled enough to ignore parts of recipes based on my own reality, be it replacing or omitting an ingredient, using an air fryer instead of deep frying because it's easier, or knowing my stovetop seems to be colder than average so "medium" for me is actually around 6-7/10. It's liberating
For real, using different spices to suit your tastes/what you have available, using different techniques to achieve similar results, substituting meats to suit your price points. I can see a pretentious recipe on youtube that is clearly made for entertainment and rather than complaining about "who is going to make this", or "why does it have so many ingredients", I'll just think about what I can do with my uni kitchen and time and make an insane meal and be satisfied.
as a beginner this is my problem, every time i change up the recipe itll taste bad 😭 but if i follow the recipe step by step, even when sometimes it looks like too much of something, itll taste good! i think thats one of the rookie mistake beginners do, we dont know how much stuff actually goes into our food make it taste good xD
I appreciate how unpatronizing this is. I feel like you have a great gauge on when to be patronizing and when not to be patronizing. Weird skill. Love it.
another one: because your food cooks from the outside-in, you may need to have your heat lower than you expect in order to cook the inside without burning the outside. e.g., if your grilled cheese has a crust on the first side but the cheese is still cold, turn down your heat when you flip it over. this is more important the thicker your piece of food is. also: you can physically lift the pan off the burner if you need it to cool quickly, the second thing you put on the pan will probably cook faster than the first thing did (the difference will be larger the less you preheated your pan), & it would probably help to put butter or oil in the pan even if it's nonstick.
Even the second side of the same bit of food once you flip it requires you be quite careful with the heat - it's often the case (especially with my muckle great big cast-iron frying pans) that the residual heat in the pan is much higher by the time the first side is done.
It took me a while to learn this, but at some point I finally figured out that the crust turns out nice and evenly golden if I actually cook it on a lower heat. Bonus tip, when I make quesadillas I like to put stuff like mushrooms in it, but the mushrooms take longer to cook than the quesadilla. Instead of burning my quesadilla trying to finish cooking the vegetables, I cook the vegetables before making the quesadilla.
i have known some one who could not understand this no matter how much i tried to explain it to them, their retort was always "but if its cold in the middle it needs more heat", so eventually i just let them cook up burnt salmonella to their hearts content its pretty funny to think back on a bit
i think the line about “sensory cues” is the reason why I hate cooking so much. the amount of focus and sensory input AND also following directions at the same time 😂😂😂😂 it’s my nightmare hahaha
Yeah and it takes time, practice and observation to get it. However once you learn the sound difference of something cooking it makes you feel like a wizard lol
The sensory cues over time become your greatest ally. With very little practice, you can tell when a sheet of brownies is getting close to getting done just by the smell. The level of sizzle on a pan gives you direct feedback to your cooking temps. And quite frankly, you can make anything think you're making something special by throwing some butter, onions, salt and garlic in a pan. Obviously, not all at the same exact time. The smell alone will get people excited for dinner.
I'm autistic and I used to haaaaaate cooking and love baking because of it's calmness and precision, but after a while of cooking for myself I've simply...gotten used to it lol I still get overwhelmed occasionally but it's a lot better
Gotta show this to my brother. The biggest thing I feel most new cooks are lacking is the confidence to make judgement calls. They stick with what the recipe says be it temp or cook times.
"the recipe said to 'cook onions until brown, 5 minutes', it's been 5 minutes and they're not very brown, ah well onto the next step". Chef John/Food Wishes says it a lot and it's touched on in this video too but "That's you cooking" is such an important aspect of cooking. Seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing and acting accordingly is where home cooks really level up, but that comes with confidence and experience.
@@weggles yeah I've been trying to teach him that. So he asks a million questions. But most of the time I ask him to decide whether it's brown enough or ready to flip. He has an interest in trying more complicated recipes. But he has to build up that confidence as well.
And then... The Dunning Kruger effect! And they become overconfident, thinking that their last minute changes for the recipe will result in a better product, than the one that a far better cook made and tweaked until perfection...
@@sebastianlopez9433 well for them it might. That's literally a part of cooking. I like onions and garlic. Almost every recipe I see does not call for enough of either so I always add more. Same with chili's. I like things hot, so I always have to keep seeds when it says deseed, use a hotter pepper or use more peppers. When you figure out how to cook for yourself, your food will turn out better than 90% of restaurants because its personalized to your tastes. Doesn't mean you're a better cook than their chef, just means it will taste better to you. Now, does it help that I've been cooking since I was 5 or 6? Absolutely. But you can dumb it down so far that experience doesn't matter. You can microwave a hotdog and decide to put relish on it instead of ketchup. It's the same principle.
I think an important thing to remember is also learning how to adapt a recipe to your own needs too. My dad is hypertensive and my mom never really seasoned foods properly to accommodate to that, so when I moved out I was so hyped to finally season to my heart’s content….until I found out hey, I also have hypertension because genetics are cruel, the diagnosis was just severely delayed because my mom never used salt in her cooking. But unlike my mom, who just sort of made flavor and seasoning less of a priority in her cooking, I found ways to adapt. I found salt substitutes (Mrs. Dash is frankly a life saver in those regards, albeit far from perfect) and started to learn ways to amplify the flavor of my food without salt. That meant using a lot more non-salt seasonings than what I was used to using, and investing slowly in other varieties of seasoning (I used to poke fun of people who have multiple types of pepper in their cabinet, but here I am with three variants lolol). That also meant finding salt free alternatives to some of my go to ingredients and seasoning myself (I didn’t know salt free broth was a thing until this year, and I’m stocking up, no pun intended, during the holidays while it’s more accessible). That meant frankly being a bit more creative, and a bit more risky with my cooking, because the Maillard reaction creates more flavor and over seasoning with other ingredients is better than under seasoning. And frankly, Ive never learned more about cooking more than I have this past year, because I’m adapting what I know to suit my needs.
Don't forget acid! Often dishes can feel undersalted, when they're just missing the brightness a proper bit of acid will bring to the party. A squeeze of lemon/lime/orange/clementine is a class move. There's also so many types of vinegar to add some extra zing to a lot of dishes.
Some advice for complete beginners like me, don’t worry about any of this yet. I couldn’t cook at all for such a long time because I thought I had to be able to experiment and substitute and season and everything outside of the recipe in order to cook because that was what my mom did. Once I realised that just following the step by step directions was almost always good enough I was able to start cooking.
Exactly, instructions may not make the perfect meal but they will make a good meal that wont get thrown away lol. Perfection is what comes after you’re comfortable with the recipe and say hey what if i add this?
Honestly, the reason people are afraid of spices making things salty is - a heck of a lot of the cheap spice mixes are salt. "Garlic power" is treated as synonymous with "garlic salt" which is just salt with a little bit of garlic. Same for Celery powder/celery salt. My supermarket's store brand of seasonings all contain a lot of salt. The key is using blends that are just herbs/spices, not filled out with salt and MSG.
I was thinking it might be a generational problem that's been passed down in some families. A lot of people's great-grandparents didn't have access to a lot of spices (due to wartime rationing, the Great Depression, etc), so when they taught their kids how to cook, they passed on the mentality of spices being a special thing you can only use a little bit of. And then the next generation shows their kids how to cook, and they think that's just how you are supposed to season food. Finally you reach the great-grandchildren, who live in a far more connected world and have the opportunity to try food from other cultures who didn't lose access to spices. Then they say "Wait... we can add MORE spices? That's allowed?". And finally home cooking starts to recover from the effects of the great-grand parents generation. Or something like that.
Yup, most of the spices my parents own are super salty. You can either add a little of salt and a pinch of spice, or a small-medium amount of spice and no additional salt. Otherwise it's salty af Edited for a werd
@@mollytovxx4181and then you have some families where 2 or 3 generations can't/don't/won't cook because they haven't been taught. I know a lady in her 50s like that. It's so bad that she genuinely didn't know apples grow on trees. She's now raising her grandchildren. Poor things :-(
Not to be pedantic but there is a difference between cumin - a spice and a spice MIX which has more than one spice and any addatives they felt that should be in there. My home made spice mixes rarely if ever contain salt aince i will handle that independantly - i just dont buy pre-made mixes any more unless theyre from my local spice merchant
I'm the cook of my family and whenever my sister cook, I always need to adjust the flame because she's also a "just set it and leave it" type of person. What amazes me is that even if we cooked using a same recipe, the end result is so different both in taste and texture.
@@stillnotstill - letting your sister fail at cooking is not what a good brother does especially if the rest of the family has to eat this food. Think of the rest of the family! If you think being a good family member is never telling your loved ones when they’re doing things wrong, then you have a really janky definition of love.
Ha, at least she has an excuse. My sister is a great cook, but she often does the same thing and I can't tell you how many times I've saved a pot of rice from tasting like a burning building
I would add, after helping a few mates to cook meals that felt overwhelmed by: Prep, clean, then cook. It's less stressful, you are less likely to miss something, you do a couple of mental run throughs as you get it ready, a clean kitchen from prepping looks nice and minimise the mess after cooking, and it's more fun to cook by pouring in pre-measured ingredients like a tv chef does
Also beginners, don't afraid to fail. When i started cooking, i made made some really foul inedible shit. Some i forcefully ate out of spite and pride, but some i really had to throw a huge plate of food because it would probably kill me. Over time, you just get a sense of it. The seasoning, the heat, and confidence in using knifes without amputating yourself.
Unfortunately I don't really have the money to mak inedible shit. I know my circumstances don't apply to everyone but its a really cruel cycle where you want to eat cheaper by buying ingredients and cooking but the risk of you going to bed hungry because you fucked up and can't afford a replacement stops you thus you buy more expensive frozen crap which in turns stops you from saving that money to pick up the hobbg
@@garchomowner I don't know where people get their perceptions, but a stew with multiple ingredients is definitely something you can mess up, or at least make very bland. It's also a big time investment for potential failure. To me, rice is impossible to screw up as long as you have a pot with a lid. The instructions they print on bags of rice are completely accurate. You may need to set your burner on the second-lowest instead of the lowest setting when simmering after boiling though, at least from my own experience. Another thing is ground beef. It turns brown-grey when it's done, and since the pieces are so small you don't have to worry about an undercooked interior. Chicken can also be easily cooked in the oven. Throw breasts or drumsticks in for 30-35 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. A secret here is that you actually want to cook chicken slightly longer than the point where it is technically safe to eat. Oven cooking in general is a good starting point. If you undercook it's easy to put it back in. There's less potential for variation due to equipment -- ovens are different, but with a range you have to also worry about your cookware, in addition to the range itself.
@@CrizzyEyes It all depends on how you make your stew. I make one every two weeks with the dicounted veggies at the store that lasts me 3-5 days. You only need veggies, meat and some salt for the basic stuff. I order to make it taste decent, I usually throw in some soy sauce and tomato concentrate. Add in enough water until the veggies swim a little bit, put the lid on it and put in on low flame for 2-10h. So after 2h it might look a bit like soup, you take the lid off for an hour or two and it will concentrate. Just make sure it doesn't run dry, then it will start to burn.
Another point on seasoning is that salt is hygroscopic, which comes in really handy when cooking items with large water contents. Cooking something like caramelised onions can be sped up by 10-15 minutes just incorporating salt with the onions at the start of the cooking process. With eggplant/aubergine you can use salt to eliminate the natural bitterness in eggplant.
It never occurred to me to use salt when sautéing or caramelizing onions, but it makes perfect sense because as you said the salt will pull the water out of the onions so it can boil off faster. I should do it with green peppers too for the same reason.
yeah, in Italy we use A TON of eggplants and zucchini and whenever we're frying them (and it happens often trust me), we salt them in order to drain out the moisture, so that when we fry them, they splatter a lot less and will make them absorb way less oil. One time, i was in a hurry and had to fry some eggplants but i didn't have time to leave them under salt, so i put them in the oil right after cutting them and i found myself not only having burning oil splatter everywhere, but also having to constantly refill the pan with oil because those sponges were draining it all.
another thing when frying, try adding starch, e.g. by dipping in starchy water, it makes food way crispier. also don't use too much oil, otherwise it gets absorbed and makes things mushy.
So glad you brought up the point about not using metal on nonstick pans! It's one of my biggest pet peeves yet I see it everywhere. I've surprised so many of my friends with that fact, yet it's such an important thing to know!
I canNOT with the metal on the nonstick!! My ex's sister came over once and offered to cook. She TORE. UP. my new electric nonstick skillet because she kept scraping it with a fork. She wasn't taught to cook and her mother had to be taught by her sister-in-law because her own mother didn't teach her. All of my children can cook. My 10-year-old makes better eggs than I do!
The best advice I got when I started cooking beyond either following recipes exactly or just doing the same rote things over and over again was "Start with something very basic and just do things that you think might make it taste better". I started with scrambled eggs and over the course of like a week I determined that continuing to add garlic and onion powder was a bigger concern in terms of having to go out and buy more rather than adding too much. And I just began applying the same basic idea to everything else; whenever I was working with something cheap, I would take a minute to think if there was anything I could do that might make it taste better. And most of what I learned translated pretty well to more expensive stuff that I was more nervous about experimenting with.
Obviously I can't speak for everyone, and maybe it's not the ideal situation for every channel, but I really like and respect the way you handle paid promotions and almost always watch them because of it. I think if a brand is confident enough in their product to be featured this way, it's usually a testament to its quality.
Heat control is truly one of the most CRUCIAL cooking skills that can easily be overlooked. And it is something that can’t be perfectly taught either, it does take some experience and intuition. As simple a food as a Grilled Cheese is, it is a great teacher of proper heat control.
it also varies from hob to hob, i recently moved to a house with an induction hob and it's ruined my heat control completely. the thing turns off when it gets to a certain temperature (even at the highest heat setting) and it completely puts me off! these things are my mortal enemy in cooking.
@@chefbigdog4132god yeah, we got a new cooker and went from an electric hob to a gas and boy does gas cook WAY hotter. I now weep at the mention of low heat
I truly appreciate seeing a video like this that i can send to my sister. Side note, a good chunk of seasoning advice doesnt count with pastry or baking. Cooking is an art, baking is a science.
The best tip I ever figured out for myself and tell everyone I know about seasoning, is to season it until you think it has just a *little bit* too much seasoning. That's how you know you've seasoned it perfectly.
Best seasoning tip ever is take a spoon to it (as long as its not something that would make you sick like raw meat), add some of this or that. Take a spoon to it
I also think that it's due to inexperienced cooks often having dull knives so they feel the need to push down hard with their index finger. Once you use a properly sharpened knife to glide through onions like they're butter, the pinch grip comes naturally
I used a knife like that for the longest time because I couldn't get used to the pinch method, but I cut myself all the time. Then I finally cut the hell out of my thumb and decided to work on the technique. It took me a couple months until it felt comfortable, but my knife skills have improved tremendously. It's been a few years and I haven't sliced any fingers. Hoping to keep the streak up. 🤞
As someone who is trying to teach themselves how to cook with almost no prior cooking knowledge and had no one to show them "the basics" growing up, this video is a godsend.
I love this video. I grew up in a household where both of my parents were terrible cooks that made bland food that was always the wrong texture (love you mom and dad). I am similar to Bree and have a "Look, it turned out fine!" attitude. A couple years ago, I took up making sourdough bread and learned to enjoy the satisfaction of caring way too much about how crispy the crust was, how even the crumb was, if the texture of the inside was soft but not gummy, etc and think it would be fun to try caring too much about my cooking as well. This video is a great way for me to start! Thanks for a concise, brilliant, easy to understand video!
Dude same! My mom is a good cook but her food can be bland bland BLAND sometimes. We've definitely all been on a cooking journey together and have for sure grown from where we were. But every once in awhile Mom loooooves cooking some bland AF food lolololol
Super happy to see other people, especially content creators, continue to use and normalize "insane-o style" as part of their vocabulary. I use it all the time and i'm glad to see others keeping it going. Great video too!
crazy to think that working in a real kitchen you are expected to do all of this. when I got promoted from dishwasher to line cook and it completely took over my whole life I had to learn all of this, basic knife skills, listening to your food while it's cooking, tasting it, and correct seasoning was just expected of the higher cooks and I just had to learn off of them. God it seems so beautiful looking back on it, if there's one skill I could reccomend to anyone it would be learn how to cook. it's the best feeling ever putting your hard work and effort and elbow grease into a dish and seeing someone enjoy it. it's magical seeing people enjoy something you made. learning is part of the experience.
The video by Razbuten is a fantastic insight into how being inexperienced can make arbitrarily simple things seem so difficult. This video perfectly encapsulates what I mean when I tell people that cooking isnt difficult its about experience and knowledge like this!
I was always shoo’d away from knives as a result of being raised by an overprotective nurse grandmother and overly coddling mother… It Blew My Mind when you pinched the metal of the knife. I had come to unconsciously see the ENTIRE metal of a knife as a bright red “danger zone” but the moment you demonstrated clearly how gripping a knife for stability feels, looks, and works, it clicked that really the only dangerous bit is the sharp end of the blade and the flat points were never anything to worry about after all. Even the sharp part isn’t much to worry about when you know how to hold it. It just demystified the whole thing for me. Thank you so much. I’m a little more than 3 years into my journey of learning how to cook and it is so refreshing to see someone try teaching beginners tips through the same angle as the non-gamers videos. Truly incredible stuff that I wish was taught for so many reasons, but gets glossed over because even I can how basic it “should” be the moment I learn it. I really appreciate your kindness here ❤
The knife thing is so very real. My mum, who's nearly 70, and has cooked dinner most nights for nearly fifty years cannot hold a knife "correctly". I have a Victorinox knife very similar to the one in the video and she still insists on holding it at the very back end of the handle and grips it almost like a hammer. I've repeatedly shown her the pinch grip (to be fair, it took me a long time before that felt like the most natural way to hold a knife) and she just goes ahead and ignores it. She seemed genuinely surprised when I used my honing steel the other day. I hone the blade probably every two or three times that I use my knife, so this isn't exactly a rare occurrence. Actually there are quite a few things that I've seen my parents do where I've simply said something like "if you do it that way, [issue] will happen, it's better if you do [alternative method] because then [issue] won't happen" to which I always get the response of "we always do it this way" or "I like it this way". For example, an issue I've noticed is crowding a pan with meat so there is no maillard reaction due to water-loss, so I'll suggest cooking the meat in batches.
I mean this with no exaggeration, you are my favourite CZcamsr. I've been watching every single video you've put out ever since you said peanut butter on a burger was more controversial than BANANAS FOSTER COMPOTE. I remember feeling elated when i was able to remember stuff from your videos to do your tamago kake gohan final exam. I love that from watching your videos, and emulating and practicing the lessons you've taught, my friends all refer to me as the best home cook in the friend group. The way you structure your videos, your inquisitiveness and your creativity one hundred percent led me to my own avant garde approach in my kitchen. You are an inspiration, you are my favourite CZcamsr notification, please never stop (or like do if like CZcams gets worse and like even if you stop there's still a veritable wealth of info on your channel)
This might be too advanced for those still trying to figure out adequate salt pinches, but I think learning to properly layer spices as I add more ingredients (season as you go), as opposed to seasoning only once in the beginning, helped me graduate from a cooklet to cookzilla. Once I perfected my patented turkey lentil chili with homemade chili paste, I became truly unstoppable. 🗣 SEASON AS YOU GO!
No amount of spices can help an under salted dish. Salinity is the most important factor in cooking. Spices enhancethe aroma (perceived by your nose) not salinity. So it’s very important to learn how/when to salt.
speaking of salt, a "pinch" is commonly understood as "3 finger grab of slightly grainy salt" in res bus which is hella annoying to explain to someone that a pinch is not their pinch aka the conversation i had with my mother 3 years ago
This video is useful to experienced home cooks, too. Even if it's something known, a reminder doesn't hurt. Plus, some things become habit and you don't consider better ways that are obvious to others. My dad was in his 40s or 50s when he called me over to show me something he learned from his friend. After wiping down the counter, he rinsed the dish cloth before putting it back in the soapy water. "To keep the water clean for longer," he explained. We shared a laugh over how something so obvious hadn't occurred to us.
Love the "raising the floor of what's acceptable" idea - anyone can enjoy cooking, and building confidence in these little things is absolutely foundational
The "Fear of Overseasoning" one was my biggest errors for a long time. I'm going to have to work on that knife holding though. In this case, my wife opened my eyes to how generous you can be with onion and garlic!!
This may sound stupid, but that small thing you mentioned about not focusing on the tip of a knife while cooking was actually eye-opening for me. I've been using knives in exactly the opposite way I'm meant to, and that's probably why I've had an issue cutting ingredients for so long! I think I picked it up from, ironically, HEMA where the ideal cut with a sword is generally done near the tip. I hadn't even thought about it until now, and the only advice I'd gotten from anyone else was always about my other hand (mostly reminders about the 'cat's paw' thing and keeping fingers tucked in), nothing about actually handling the knife besides to 'be more confident'. I was quite confident, just oblivious!
no one really taught me how to cook and slice products, i had to teach myself, and seeing that "here's how to grip a knife" instruction blew my mind. constantly get a blister or two on my fingers when I'm cooking continuously for friends and family, and think this change in grip will help me be much better (and quicker) at slicing things with a knife!
Wow this is the most eye opening cooking video ive ever seen as someone who rarely goes beyond scrambled eggs and microwaving things thank you! overly obvious? no each point was likea mind-blowing revelation to me 😅
Got to the wife guy joke and was sad that I'd already liked this video and couldn't give it another like. So funny, so informative. All new/timid cooks should watch this. Being afraid of seasoning is so real.
I come from a family where food is important and started cooking young. My boyfriend is the complete opposite, and so I'm a better cook. However, he's much more patient when making food and it reminded me of the importance of time. Sometimes watching beginners is extremely useful. That being said, he takes like an hour and a half to make a simple salad.
Hey, i appreciate all of the non-critical advice! I feel confident in the kitchen, personally, but when i was learning, i was not taught with such advice and understanding... especially in reference to knife work (i have smaller hands than most folks around me). Furthermore, i have always appreciated the "why" when it comes to doing any sort of task; not just "because." Thank you for your thorough explanations!
As a chemist, I have another reason why NOT to scratch a Teflon pan: That stuff is pretty unhealthy, and it basically never degrades. PS: DO NEVER overheat your Teflon pan, they release quite some toxins when too hot. If you had birds, those probably wouldn't survive an overheated Teflon pan in the house....
Honestly ive tossed all my non-stick teflon stuff its all awful stuff. Have gone over to carbon steel, cast iron, and enameled cast iron for my pans along with stainless. Just use a bit more fat when cooking and my pans will last longer than i do, seriously though we should take note from the european kitchens of old
Something I've seen since getting back into cooking is how most cookbooks expect you to know how to make the basics, things like beans, rice, salsa, basic sauces etc. And always give you some weird like holiday style dish that to someone just starting out can be very intimidating. Even for me who was a line cook for years was scared to start cooking again because I had no idea how to do the basics, and no cook book would tell me how. Learning how to make something like a basic tomato sauce for pasta, and then being able to build your own recipe from that is super important, but it's hard to substitute seasonings and cooking methods when you don't know the base of what your cooking, or techniques to use (like browning sausage briefly, before sauteing garlic and onions, and finally adding tomatoes and other seasonings)
That's how a lot of the old-school cookbooks used to be. I work in an archive and a lot of the old recipe books will say to "prepare rice" and then move on to the next cooking stage. There were no images either, so you had to know the basic skills in order to use the recipe books to make any dishes you wanted.
The “beginner ignored all my advice and did things their own way” resonates so hard with me. My students constantly do this with me and make their lives so much harder because of it.
I'm not even done with the vid yet but I already find this so helpful, thank you so much! I've gotten so tired of the cooks in my family treating me like I'm stupid whenever they see me practicing how to cook so this is a breath of fresh air
@@internetshaquille hey man us SOYCHADS *exclusively* season the cutting board. I throw away the steak and eat the board, even. being contrarian about everything clearly makes me the friend of the everyman, and you are just a stuck up GATEKEEPER!!!! if you criticize this I will not be able to cope and I will write a long, scathing, narcissistic diatribe informed by my totally blue-collar liberal arts degree.
This video, especially the last segment, made my day. The uplifting music, plus the inevitable realization of sleeping on the couch, and subsequent doubling down is great
As someone with instruction anxiety, even clear instructions such as you said "cook on medium heat" bring up more questions such as What burner should I be using? What exactly is medium? Do all our stoves have the same temp output? Does the pan affect temperature dispersion? Should be using a larger or a smaller pan? Things like that just freezes me and forces me to just make something simpler or order out. I love these videos that treats me like a child almost because there's too much elitism in places like cooking where people already lost touch with the fact that there are those who actually don't know what they're doin and forgot they started from somewhere.
While not the same issue, when I have choice paralysis I usually go "fuck it, doing anything is better than nothing" and choose at random. Translating to your instruction anxiety, I would just try whatever and pay attention to the result so next time I *know* the answer to all those little extra questions. In practice, I cook with my nose so when instructions unclear I put everything together and slowly up the heat until I can hear a sizzle, then pull down a bit. I "play it by ear" a lot because I live alone and I can experiment without consequences.
The first mistake I remember having corrected was that increasing the heat does not automatically decrease cooking time. I was impatient when I was young, so if something said ‘cook 10 mins on medium’, I’d try to cook it for 4 on high. As a result, I often had stuff that was charred on the outside and raw in the middle. Once I learned to think of ‘medium’ as the ‘base’ heat level and adjust from there, it made me start to reevaluate many other aspects of my cooking. And now I try to use that as a basic principle whenever I try something new - start from neutral, add as you go. This is a really nice video though - I’ve learned a lot of this through brute force and being a cheapskate, but I know so many people who spent YEARS refusing to ever learn to cook just because of having issues with basics like these. It wasn’t till the quarantines that some of them started learning, and a few of them still gave up the instant they could get delivery again.
I’m also thinking that some guys don’t understand that the 3-finger pinch requires digging your nails into the salt, and if you have nails of any length it gets trapped there and seems particularly unsanitary. Bree and I both use a 2-finger pinch, possibly for the same reason because it reduces the possibility of salty nail beds, and having smaller fingers also reduces the volume of salt delivered.
unpleasant maybe if it gets under your nail bed, but unsanitary seems unlikely. Salt is a fairly hostile environment to breeding pathogens, so it wouldn't make your nails less sanitary than basically anything else that should go into food.
@@just83542 nail beds are very bacteria rich environments though, and introducing a particle into them and then introducing that to you food might be a negligible amount of bacteria but it certainly _feels_ unsanitary. If you have longer nails, it’s very very important to remember how well they trap bacteria and crud. Even nail brushes, which are usually great for getting soap into hard to reach places, are technically unsanitary practices.
If you cook on the reg, you’re supposed to keep your nails cut pretty short for sanitation reasons. Like, salt isn’t the worst thing in the world, but imagine that every single time you go to handle ground meat and… yeah.
You don't have to do a 3 finger pinch, you can get a really big pinch by curling your index finger and cupping salt into the curl with your thumb. I'm a line cook and this is often how I season things, specifically because it doesn't require me to get my fingers nearly as deep into the salt to get a big pinch. In any case, if this is a concern at all you should probably be washing your hands more thoroughly.
I have the knife argument with my partner all the time. He keeps telling me bigger knives are safer to use, and I keep telling him they hurt my tiny lady hands. I've worked to use the bigger knives, but I think it's something that knife makers should think about, honestly.
Absolutely! Chef’s knives are made for mens hands and they are too big for the average woman’s hands. It physically hurts to hold them with smaller hands.
It really helps to have a store close by where you can try holding many different knives from many different manufacturers. Williams-Sonoma stores usually have a large selection of knives from Wüsthof, Shun, Cuisinart, and All-Clad that you can try. You can sometimes find specialty stores for chefs that carry even more brands or have more types and styles of knives in stock. I recommend Chad Ward’s book “An Edge in the Kitchen: The Ultimate Guide to Kitchen Knives - How to Buy Them, Keep Them Razor Sharp, and Use Them Like a Pro” for his great advice. Especially for saying that the knife-block sets you can buy at department stores are a waste of money, because for cooking you really only *need* one knife, a chef’s knife. (Or a santoku knife, which is the smaller Japanese equivalent to the Western chef’s knife, which you might find easier to hold and use.) Any other knives you’ll buy after that are for convenience, for making it easier to do certain things. So you’ll eventually have a chef’s knife, a paring knife, and a large slicing knife or bread knife as your most-used knives, and you might also have a boning knife for deboning poultry and a filet knife for deboning fish.
This is genuinely very helpful to me because I didn't cook much growing up and when I did it was extremely basic. My brother is a cook and so he gives me flak for stuff I'm not aware of and doesn't explain because they're bare basics to him so he takes it as common sense.
instant subscription upon mentioning nonstick pan scraping. that drives me absolutely insane. i genuinely felt like i was the only one who cared about not scraping poison into my food.
I really appreciate this vid as someone who does cook and needs to practice not hovering when my partner is in the kitchen. It is helpful to remember that I also needed time to learn all things that are second nature to me now, I just had parents who made sure I was involved in food prep as a kid.
My ex actually got very mad at me for adjusting her heat levels, she always cooked everything on high heat because she thought that the food would cook faster lol
Oh gracious. I used to be the same way. I would cook everything on high and my mom would have to buy new pans every few years because I kept burning them . 🙃 I've since learned moderation, and with my own cookware am a lot more careful. The food comes out better too.
note: some spice mixes have salt incorporated (propably to cut costs and personally annoy me :D), so read the ingredients before using regular salt and like you said taste while cooking.
My boyfriend has cooked for me a few times, usually breakfast and his knife skills are almost non existent and he doesn't know what it means to dice, spear, julienne, etc but slowly I'm teaching him and giving him confidence. He makes Indian foods fine but other things like cooking with meat are completely out f his range as a vegetarian. Even though it frustrates me as a seasoned cook sometimes I have to remember that I've been cooking meat and cutting things since I was 7 and it takes time. I've learned to explain better how to do something instead of using the words I would find in a recipie.
My favorite recipe is 'throw a load of stuff into a pan and then open and sniff every spice I own to see if it feels like it would blend well with what's already in the pan'. All the women in my life are consistently amazed by this unheard-of skill... because I'm the only one around who would use something like cumin without being specifically instructed by a recipe.
great video! I wonder if the seasoning worries is because a lot of people use spice blends that have salt, and so when they tried to add more the dish ended up too salty
for people who may be interested in using seasonings EX: adobo, etc. some of these ready-made seasonings contain salt, so if you want to avoid putting too much salt in your food buy the spices separately or practice using the seasoning first and see if you need more salt or not
There's an XKCD about this called "Average familiarity". We over estimate other peoples familiarity with something and often give advice that would be useful to them far in the future, rather than useful now.
holy shit- cooklet! i am about 18 months into my home cooking journey and i still 100% feel like a cooklet! zero experience in the industry other than catering a few bar/batmitzvahs and other similar events and i didn’t cook a damned thing. at one point my wife was tired of her cooking and tired of being the only one cooking so i said “hold our child, watch this” and went to the store armed with mr chlebowski’s advice. it’s been going great and for me it all came down to finding the right dingus on youtube. stoked to have found your channel, dingus! always happy to have a new source of approachable knowledge and i love the channel!
Just learning how to use a stainless steel pan correctly was a game changer for me. I would never have believed you if you said you could cook an omelet on a stainless pan, and have it slide right out. Now I do it all the time. Learning to cook on a non stick pan teaches you bad habits that don't work when you don't have a non stick pan.
Somewhat related…I season my burgers before forming with smoked paprika, Chipotle Tabasco, and garlic powder. It’s sacrilegious, but I find that it gives me great seasoning throughout the burger, still preserving the rendered fat flavor, and allows me to salt on the outside 5-10 minutes before cooking.
2:33... 2:33 is where I instantly decided to like and subscribe. Wouldn't imagine in a 100 years a Joel Haver reference would show up in a cooking tutorial. Great content by the way, this is really opening my eyes
I grew up in a home that ate fast food and it's only at 21 that I finally "get" how food can be good. Now that I have a taste for newer and different things, I'm hoping guides like this will teach me those cues that I can use any time instead of just following the exact numbers and praying I don't die from poisoning
Best way to check that is literally just take bits out and cut it open, if you can see its cooked inside on that piece the rest are good. Or alternatively stick a fork deep into it, pull it out and put the tip that was in the food on your tongue. If it burns its done, if it doesn’t give it longer. A cheaper test then them fancy thermometers lol
I'm the one that does most of the cooking at home. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize I was under-seasoning ground meats 😅 never assume you know everything lol
Haha only looked at the comments to find out if anyone else picked up on that 😂 It took Joel some time but it seems it is finally catching on. Insanostyle 🤪
I am thankful for having a loving skilled mother that thought me everything I know about cooking. Life starts with fundamentals, like any profession or skills you develop, it is better to get the basics right and understand what you are doing, rather than mimicking action.
I want to thank you for this video! I consider myself a decent to good cook. Even when switching to vegan/vegetarian diet i never had problems delivering a tasty dish, but your tip with seasoning was an absolute mindblower! after watching this vid I "monitored" my cooking for the things you explained, and I realised I season like a non cook (very timid). Now that I now it was an absolute game changer. Thanks!
I had pretty neglectful parents as a kid and had to learn to cook for myself because they just weren't home to cook and eat dinner with me, or even just to quickly teach me a thing or two so that I could feed myself. All on my own, I got good, and I know my way around a kitchen by now (if I was to consistently be home alone, I figured I might as well turn it into a hobby), and it's soooo cool to get to know the "why" I developped a certain instinct when cooking, and especially interesting to understand the "how" these methods make my food better! Thank you so much for this very informative video. The little version of me would've been really greatful 🙏
I just made chili in my Crock Pot today. In went the pasta sauce, then I added the chili powder. I buy chili power at the local bulk food store, then dump it into a glas container when I get it home. I pulled that container out of the cupboard then started to dump it into the pasta sauce. I just kept dumping it in until it "looked like enough". Then, to make sure it would be hot enough, I got the bottle of crushed red pepper and started dumping that in until it "looked like enough". I don't know if I got it right, but that chili will make your eyes water and your nose run and that's good chili in my book! Don't be afraid of spices, unless it causes you physical discomfort then yes, ease up a little. Disclaimer: I'm not a chef. Heck, I don't even claim to know how to cook. I just know what I like.
not a connection I expected to see to my work, but this is fantastic!
Definitely had to double check which channel I was looking at.
Unironically my fave gaming and cooking channels in one video ahaha, best crossover
A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one
Empathy is valued
I was surprised to see the connection too. I love your videos!
A big thing I've noticed with my friends who don't cook is that they often succumb to the fear of getting it wrong. They see a recipe that calls for Himalayan pink salt and somehow conclude that the food will be all wrong if they don't go buy that niche ingredient so instead, they just give up before they even start cooking. As a beginner, it's important to learn how to substitute ingredients, but more importantly, we need simpler recipes out there. Every food blogger tries to make their recipe unique, which often results in recipes with the title "Classic, traditional, easy, nothing fancy, just a regular old mac n cheese" calling for exotic cheeses, nutmeg, and a weird pasta shape no one has ever heard of. JUST GIVE US THE LEVEL 1 PLEASE.
This is actually where a lot of boxed meals can come into play because they often have suggestions of ways to improve the meal. Level 1 is adding butter, sausage and a couple spices to Kraft. It's cheap, simple and has lots of room to experiment.
This is so true, ive defintely been scared away from recipes i see online because they are overly specfiic with their ingredients and how you should cook something, again this is for the supposedly "begginer friendly" recipes.
@@woopnull9103 I hear you there. But the reason I personally started delving into the potentially deeper waters of food blogs and videos was to get ideas about how to get away from the processed box stuff, which has way too much sodium. 😅
give us magic vibrations
@@BonaparteBardithion
You add sausage to boxed mac ‘n cheese?? Huh??
Also, isn’t adding butter part of the box instructions?
I was never really taught to cook growing up because my parents were always super busy. And until recently I thought I was a good cook because I could make a lot of different things that I looked up online, from potstickers to casseroles, but I realized that I don't even know a lot of the fundamentals of cooking and seasoning properly such as this. I think that's true for a lot of people, that they skipped learning the basic steps as a kid and now any recipe you want to cook is freely available online, but you might not necessarily realize that there are a ton of gaps in your knowledge.
videos from Ethan chlebowski helped me with learning the basics, might be interesting for you too
I literally only learned how big a pinch of salt is from watching cooks on youtube. Before my pinches were a lot smaller.
one thing that helped me as a beginner was actually reading the instructions on those recipe sites where it feels like the writer wont shut up abt how some memory they attached to the recipe. its not always the most interesting read, but u gain a lot of perspective into how different people cook things and ppl often explain small details about why they do this and that for each step. really helpful for beginners. kinda annoying for someone who knows what they are doing to have to scroll for 6 years to get to the recipe lol. but it was really helpful to me starting out.
This is a really interesting perspective, because I grew up in a family who hated cooking (and was always working, so I had to learn really early) and I feel like that trial and error helped me learn intuitive cooking. I think blindly following a recipe without understanding what makes it work would have really hindered me
I barely cooked before I moved abroad at 21. I'm super passionate about food and cooking though so I've managed to get my education through youtube. I definitely could improve in many ways like seasoning meat the day before cooking
As someone who finds cooking very intimidating and who's mom is a fantastic cook so I basically never had to learn until my early 20s, videos like this are seriously helpful. Every point you made was news to me and I bet there's tons more. I always felt like there was so much knowledge left out of the recipe that they just assumed you already knew.
For example, making cake from the box as a kid sounded easy right? Because according to the box you just need to add one egg and 3/4c water or milk! But then my mom would come in and say "No no the box is wrong you need vanilla and two eggs, don't ever use water, and put more milk than they tell you! More! More, what's wrong with you??? Now coat the pan in butter. I know it doesn't say that, do it anyway. It says 15 minutes but put it in for 20. No 15 is wrong." It was soooo stressful. Then she'd get mad that I didn't know any of this. It just made me think you had to know all this stuff without the recipe ever telling you. Like even if you follow the recipe exactly you're still doing something wrong.
You know what no one told me? You don't need to oil the pan when you're cooking meat because it makes its own grease. I just thought you had to oil the pan before cooking anything. From your video, I didn't know the pan is too hot if it starts smoking. I thought it was supposed to do that because you're cooking and it's fire lol
Two ideas that were huge barriers to me learning how to cook:
The idea that bad cooking is not REAL cooking. And the idea that convenient cooking is not real cooking (vs from scratch.) If somebody made a dish that came out badly or was really simplified, my mom would say it was not real cooking. And I had that idea in my head for years too until I realized it was the reason I didn't ever think I'd be able to cook. So one day she said that about some dish I made, and I challenged her about it with simple questions like "so I didn't cook it? So it's not food?" until she realized that by real she meant good and of course I wasn't going to cook good because I was just starting. But it is still real cooking. And then she stopped saying that! I don't mean to vilify my mom. She's a great person and she means well. But she definitely had a superiority complex about her cooking and without even realizing it, that attitude rubbed off on me and made cooking this unattainable goal that meant nothing unless it was perfect.
Thank you for sharing this, it's a long comment but I really enjoyed reading it! Good luck in the kitchen!
Thanks for your comment, it was great food for thought! So her high expectations about food acted like a barrier for you to concider it attainable. I believe I did that with my boyfriend, when I should have encouraged him more 😅. But really he is painfully slow with very little knowledge about ingredients and food in general.😂 I couldn't fathom why obvious things and skills weren't obvious to him and also how how his standards were so low. I guess it's some form of superiority complex.
Anyway it's interesting because I was never taught how to cook myself. I learned everything on my own through media and after moving out, a lot to the fact that I cannot stand shitty processed food.
Oh my god, you basically described my experience. My mum may not be an extraoridinary cook, but she can do it since she was very young because she had to help her sick grandma. I personally never was interested in cooking. I would definitely help my mum and grandma as a child but it was mostly with preparing the ingredients, kneading the dough etc., never the ACTUAL cooking part. One thing about my mum is that she has very little patience and prefers doing stuff herself so it gets done "properly". So yes, I was yelled at for doing things wrong. Hence why now I'm lowkey terrified of cooking, I can prepare stuff but the moment I need to mix ingredients over the stove and spice things up my brain shuts off. I can really mess up the easiest thing just because I forget an important step. That's why when my mum tells me to cook something I demand a step by step recipe with details. And when my mum says "add a bit of salt" I just want to scream. I tell her "what exactly do you mean??? My bit of salt might be different than yours!". And she cannot understand why I need all the details like that but the reason is apparent: NOONE EVER PROPERLY EXPLAINED THE COOKING HACKS TO ME. Just because I was present when she does the cooking doesn't mean I caught every little thing, I wasn't interested in it before.
I always liked and was able to cook, but usually I cooked same simple things I liked (like zucchini with soy sauce and garlic or mush potatoes, mud cake etc) and found that convenience cooking helped me to develop my skills more! It's low stakes, you get to try how the stuff supposed to taste/ feel. Now I can make at least 1/2 ramen broths from scratch and make better soups in general! Plus making EVERYTHING from scratch isn't sustainable at all for most people
@@black-nails I found that convenience cooking helps me develop my skills too! Because it reduces the number of things you have to already know how to do and eliminates a loy of steps. So It feels much less overwhelming, and then you have time to learn the leftover part really well! Then once you get good at that, you feel more confident that you can try doing it from scratch cuz you're not starting from zero! And just like you said, experimenting with taste gets much easier cuz spices are really the only wild card. Just gotta be conscious and aware of how much salt and sugar they put into the package because even if it says healthy it still probably has a lot of both. At least in the US
The “shoehorning humor during serious conversations to deflect emotionally” hit too close to home
I actually would love to watch a video about that, seems like something handy to have when interacting with difficult people
The documented emotional power Nae-nae
I felt for a moment that shaq was talking directly to me
i heard that and instantly thought "wait that's a bad thing?"
True! It especially hit hard when he was like.. Gonna go sleep on the couch after making this video, lol.
Remember that some combo spices like “garlic pepper” or “garlic salt” do contain salt so keep that in mind when salting! The saltiness is easier to control if you use the spices on their own rather than a premixed spice
And better than boullion... Ive ruined a few dishes with that stuff. Its insane to me that they say add a teaspoon per cup
Me when I find out "garlic salt" contains salt: 🤯
@@lst9701 how?
I mean... You'd have to be a very special doughnut to just chuck in some spices without knowing what they taste like beforehand
@@lst9701 My advice for that is to use separate shakers of MSG and salt to get similar results. To me MSG is the only value in buillon. Whenever I get buillon blocks I end up mashing them into a jar and using it as MSG anyway.
My husband isn't completely clueless in a kitchen, infact he is weirdly skilled at many technical aspects of cooking (cutting, food prep, and organizing ingredients while cooking). Yet, he is lost over flavor profiles. So many of my dishes he'll go "does that go together?", yes sweetheart this is the exact recipe I made last week that you asked me to make again. He still doesn't understand that tomato soup is made with chicken broth, and you can't just substitute any green thin herbs with rosemary. It's like rosemary is the only seasoning he knows, so he just tries to put it on everything. I do all the cooking, and I like it that way, but watching him get angry over how my sandwiches taste so different is hilarious.
@yeeter2669: Sounds like he needs to read the book: "Salt Fat, Acid, Heat"
I genuinely don’t know if this comment is my own partner writing about me. This is eerie 😂
I'm the one who cooks at home, but my rosemary is nutmeg (though I agree with him rosemary goes on basically everything, same with regular mint).
This is a personal pet peeve of mine, but so often someone tells me a recipe or I read one online, they cannot help mentioning how quick and easy it is to prepare. As someone not well versed in cooking, it really sets you up for failure. Like even when I tell people that I'm clueless, they have to insist it's super easy and I should definitely try it. And then they list a thousand individual steps you have to adhere to in order to get the dish just right. The difference in perspective were really quite interesting, were it not also very annoying.
Yeah I like how every recipe is "simple, easy, and takes almost no time to prepare"... if you're an Amish baker or professional chef maybe?
This is why I’ve considered starting a recipe blog ngl. Reading other blogs where instead of actually giving good tips and breaking things down they always tell some ridiculous story no one cares about. Like let’s get a breakdown, and stop saying “it’s so easy” because it’s only easy if you’ve done it before.
The good old 5 minute caramelised onions
This and youtubers who clickbait and say a recipe is cheap only like 3,80 but it's serving price and now you're left with unused ingredients like that wagyu beef that the recipe only listed a gram of.
The best advice i can give is to start out with child cook books/ recipes and work up. The instructions there are more simple and usually have diagrams for visual learning. My parents taught us how to cook as kids, and they started us with eggs. Boiling an egg, scrambling an egg, then try an omlette, then try more egg styles. Just one ingredient but can be made it different ways, which will help strengthen that cooking muscle without a ton of confusion.
Brb showing this to my wife! I just know she’s gonna be so grateful when I tell her some internet guy agrees with me that all her cooking habits are bad!
Godspeed 🙏🏾
This guy goes from: "cooking is whatever you want it to be, don't let the internet tell you how to live!" to this stuff the next week lol
this man is DEAD
4 day old comment???????????,, This was uploaded 11 minutes ago??????????
@@safe patreon members get videos early iirc
Ned Fulmer catching strays is the last thing that I expected, yet thoroughly enjoyed 😂😂😂
The rest of Ned Fulmer's life will be catching strays
That Ned Fulmer stray came outta nowhere and I’m laughing now 😂
Who's Ned though?
@@AB0BA_69 Ned fulmer from try guys. Cheated on his wife after years of building his career around his love for her.
He's gonna be catching direct shots from now on
"She thinks the smaller ones feel better actually" killed me
lolol same!!! was hoping for more about that in the comments XD XD
Haha peepee XD XD
@@kikk0r Zex
came here looking for this comment LOL
oh my god that didn't even REGISTER for me 😂😂😂
And then there's my Dad... a 62 year old physicist who insists on weighing out 5 grams of salt and gets mad when I tell him to season "to taste" 🙄 He's getting a very fine scale for Christmas so he can weigh out every ingredient to his heart's contend 😂
Lol my dad (an engineer) is the same.
atleast he seems to try different recipes, my dad (math teacher) has been alternating between the same two pasta recipes for the last 25 years lmao (they taste amazing)
My mum, a retired engineer is the same. She refuses to stray from the instructions of a recipe and insists on measuring everything. If the recipe says "cook pasta for 5 mins" she will set a timer and stop cooking after 5 mins even if the pasta isn't cooked.
@@rizahawkeyepierce1380 my dad's an engineer and he measures flour with his bare hands. None of his cakes turn out the same but they all taste fantastic; especially if he bakes them on a whim at 1:00am
I am your dad, I hate that aspect of cooking that's "just wing it" I need exact temperatures, time and amounts. It's so frustrating
The thing that changed my cooking the most was when I decided I was skilled enough to ignore parts of recipes based on my own reality, be it replacing or omitting an ingredient, using an air fryer instead of deep frying because it's easier, or knowing my stovetop seems to be colder than average so "medium" for me is actually around 6-7/10. It's liberating
For real, using different spices to suit your tastes/what you have available, using different techniques to achieve similar results, substituting meats to suit your price points. I can see a pretentious recipe on youtube that is clearly made for entertainment and rather than complaining about "who is going to make this", or "why does it have so many ingredients", I'll just think about what I can do with my uni kitchen and time and make an insane meal and be satisfied.
@@yousufrahman7985 After adding spices to my burger meat I refuse to go back to fast food unless it's for a social gathering.
My mind expanded when I realized I was allowed to change the dials mid-cooking. If I started something too hot I'd leave it that way and vice versa.
And stop reading comments from Italians in the internet. That helps, too :D
as a beginner this is my problem, every time i change up the recipe itll taste bad 😭 but if i follow the recipe step by step, even when sometimes it looks like too much of something, itll taste good! i think thats one of the rookie mistake beginners do, we dont know how much stuff actually goes into our food make it taste good xD
I appreciate how unpatronizing this is. I feel like you have a great gauge on when to be patronizing and when not to be patronizing. Weird skill. Love it.
Yes, his wife definitely thinks making a video with all the info she ignores for the public to see is not patronizing 😆
@@heroclix0rz She’s literally participating in the video, I doubt she’d do that if she was upset by it lol
@@heroclix0rz It's fun to rib your friends for the dumb shit they do right in front of you ^^
@@heroclix0rz bro she’s in the video you’re way overeading into this
@@cringeginge7663 i think you’re over under reading it
another one: because your food cooks from the outside-in, you may need to have your heat lower than you expect in order to cook the inside without burning the outside. e.g., if your grilled cheese has a crust on the first side but the cheese is still cold, turn down your heat when you flip it over. this is more important the thicker your piece of food is.
also: you can physically lift the pan off the burner if you need it to cool quickly, the second thing you put on the pan will probably cook faster than the first thing did (the difference will be larger the less you preheated your pan), & it would probably help to put butter or oil in the pan even if it's nonstick.
Even the second side of the same bit of food once you flip it requires you be quite careful with the heat - it's often the case (especially with my muckle great big cast-iron frying pans) that the residual heat in the pan is much higher by the time the first side is done.
That's a skill I covered in my video about developing intuition: czcams.com/video/gYwkKaK5yeQ/video.html
It took me a while to learn this, but at some point I finally figured out that the crust turns out nice and evenly golden if I actually cook it on a lower heat.
Bonus tip, when I make quesadillas I like to put stuff like mushrooms in it, but the mushrooms take longer to cook than the quesadilla. Instead of burning my quesadilla trying to finish cooking the vegetables, I cook the vegetables before making the quesadilla.
I always remove my pan OFF the burner when done cooking as I know even if I turn off the burner, the heat will still cook. Same with ovens and cakes.
i have known some one who could not understand this no matter how much i tried to explain it to them, their retort was always "but if its cold in the middle it needs more heat", so eventually i just let them cook up burnt salmonella to their hearts content
its pretty funny to think back on a bit
i think the line about “sensory cues” is the reason why I hate cooking so much. the amount of focus and sensory input AND also following directions at the same time 😂😂😂😂 it’s my nightmare hahaha
Yeah and it takes time, practice and observation to get it. However once you learn the sound difference of something cooking it makes you feel like a wizard lol
The sensory cues over time become your greatest ally. With very little practice, you can tell when a sheet of brownies is getting close to getting done just by the smell. The level of sizzle on a pan gives you direct feedback to your cooking temps.
And quite frankly, you can make anything think you're making something special by throwing some butter, onions, salt and garlic in a pan. Obviously, not all at the same exact time. The smell alone will get people excited for dinner.
I'm autistic and I used to haaaaaate cooking and love baking because of it's calmness and precision, but after a while of cooking for myself I've simply...gotten used to it lol
I still get overwhelmed occasionally but it's a lot better
For me it's specifically the fan. Can barely tolerate listening to it on the low setting.
No way did you just say "insane-o style".
This guy is just on another level...
It's going to catch on, I can feel it.
YES I just heard this! Bahaha absolutely amazing 👏
OMG yes! I love the reference
Yeah that part went absolutely bunko town™ 💯
I thought it was from The Waterboy,- Captain Insaneo
Gotta show this to my brother. The biggest thing I feel most new cooks are lacking is the confidence to make judgement calls. They stick with what the recipe says be it temp or cook times.
"the recipe said to 'cook onions until brown, 5 minutes', it's been 5 minutes and they're not very brown, ah well onto the next step". Chef John/Food Wishes says it a lot and it's touched on in this video too but "That's you cooking" is such an important aspect of cooking. Seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing and acting accordingly is where home cooks really level up, but that comes with confidence and experience.
@@weggles yeah I've been trying to teach him that. So he asks a million questions. But most of the time I ask him to decide whether it's brown enough or ready to flip. He has an interest in trying more complicated recipes. But he has to build up that confidence as well.
And then... The Dunning Kruger effect! And they become overconfident, thinking that their last minute changes for the recipe will result in a better product, than the one that a far better cook made and tweaked until perfection...
@@sebastianlopez9433 haha hopefully we can get through that stage quickly lol
@@sebastianlopez9433 well for them it might. That's literally a part of cooking. I like onions and garlic. Almost every recipe I see does not call for enough of either so I always add more. Same with chili's. I like things hot, so I always have to keep seeds when it says deseed, use a hotter pepper or use more peppers.
When you figure out how to cook for yourself, your food will turn out better than 90% of restaurants because its personalized to your tastes. Doesn't mean you're a better cook than their chef, just means it will taste better to you. Now, does it help that I've been cooking since I was 5 or 6? Absolutely. But you can dumb it down so far that experience doesn't matter. You can microwave a hotdog and decide to put relish on it instead of ketchup. It's the same principle.
I think an important thing to remember is also learning how to adapt a recipe to your own needs too. My dad is hypertensive and my mom never really seasoned foods properly to accommodate to that, so when I moved out I was so hyped to finally season to my heart’s content….until I found out hey, I also have hypertension because genetics are cruel, the diagnosis was just severely delayed because my mom never used salt in her cooking.
But unlike my mom, who just sort of made flavor and seasoning less of a priority in her cooking, I found ways to adapt. I found salt substitutes (Mrs. Dash is frankly a life saver in those regards, albeit far from perfect) and started to learn ways to amplify the flavor of my food without salt. That meant using a lot more non-salt seasonings than what I was used to using, and investing slowly in other varieties of seasoning (I used to poke fun of people who have multiple types of pepper in their cabinet, but here I am with three variants lolol). That also meant finding salt free alternatives to some of my go to ingredients and seasoning myself (I didn’t know salt free broth was a thing until this year, and I’m stocking up, no pun intended, during the holidays while it’s more accessible). That meant frankly being a bit more creative, and a bit more risky with my cooking, because the Maillard reaction creates more flavor and over seasoning with other ingredients is better than under seasoning. And frankly, Ive never learned more about cooking more than I have this past year, because I’m adapting what I know to suit my needs.
Don't forget acid! Often dishes can feel undersalted, when they're just missing the brightness a proper bit of acid will bring to the party. A squeeze of lemon/lime/orange/clementine is a class move. There's also so many types of vinegar to add some extra zing to a lot of dishes.
Some advice for complete beginners like me, don’t worry about any of this yet. I couldn’t cook at all for such a long time because I thought I had to be able to experiment and substitute and season and everything outside of the recipe in order to cook because that was what my mom did. Once I realised that just following the step by step directions was almost always good enough I was able to start cooking.
Exactly, instructions may not make the perfect meal but they will make a good meal that wont get thrown away lol. Perfection is what comes after you’re comfortable with the recipe and say hey what if i add this?
Honestly, the reason people are afraid of spices making things salty is - a heck of a lot of the cheap spice mixes are salt. "Garlic power" is treated as synonymous with "garlic salt" which is just salt with a little bit of garlic. Same for Celery powder/celery salt. My supermarket's store brand of seasonings all contain a lot of salt. The key is using blends that are just herbs/spices, not filled out with salt and MSG.
I was thinking it might be a generational problem that's been passed down in some families. A lot of people's great-grandparents didn't have access to a lot of spices (due to wartime rationing, the Great Depression, etc), so when they taught their kids how to cook, they passed on the mentality of spices being a special thing you can only use a little bit of. And then the next generation shows their kids how to cook, and they think that's just how you are supposed to season food. Finally you reach the great-grandchildren, who live in a far more connected world and have the opportunity to try food from other cultures who didn't lose access to spices. Then they say "Wait... we can add MORE spices? That's allowed?". And finally home cooking starts to recover from the effects of the great-grand parents generation. Or something like that.
Yup, most of the spices my parents own are super salty. You can either add a little of salt and a pinch of spice, or a small-medium amount of spice and no additional salt. Otherwise it's salty af
Edited for a werd
@@mollytovxx4181and then you have some families where 2 or 3 generations can't/don't/won't cook because they haven't been taught. I know a lady in her 50s like that. It's so bad that she genuinely didn't know apples grow on trees. She's now raising her grandchildren. Poor things :-(
check out my video about pre-made spice blends: czcams.com/video/QZGpI2t0NmU/video.html
Not to be pedantic but there is a difference between cumin - a spice and a spice MIX which has more than one spice and any addatives they felt that should be in there. My home made spice mixes rarely if ever contain salt aince i will handle that independantly - i just dont buy pre-made mixes any more unless theyre from my local spice merchant
"Insane-o style"? I sense a fellow Joel Haver enthusiast
LETS GO!
dude this video is full of references, now you're here too 🥵
It totally threw me for a loop when he said that lol
A Joel Haver enthusiast and Razbuten watcher? Who can teach me how to cook? Subscribed!
That's pretty insaneo style
I'm the cook of my family and whenever my sister cook, I always need to adjust the flame because she's also a "just set it and leave it" type of person. What amazes me is that even if we cooked using a same recipe, the end result is so different both in taste and texture.
Y'all gotta realize your family is more important than perfect food, my god
@@stillnotstill ? why do you think I don't love my sister? 🤔
@@stillnotstill - letting your sister fail at cooking is not what a good brother does especially if the rest of the family has to eat this food. Think of the rest of the family!
If you think being a good family member is never telling your loved ones when they’re doing things wrong, then you have a really janky definition of love.
Ha, at least she has an excuse. My sister is a great cook, but she often does the same thing and I can't tell you how many times I've saved a pot of rice from tasting like a burning building
@@umiluv Orrrr he could have already told her but she doesn't listen (quite common for siblings actually)
I would add, after helping a few mates to cook meals that felt overwhelmed by:
Prep, clean, then cook.
It's less stressful, you are less likely to miss something, you do a couple of mental run throughs as you get it ready, a clean kitchen from prepping looks nice and minimise the mess after cooking, and it's more fun to cook by pouring in pre-measured ingredients like a tv chef does
Also beginners, don't afraid to fail. When i started cooking, i made made some really foul inedible shit. Some i forcefully ate out of spite and pride, but some i really had to throw a huge plate of food because it would probably kill me. Over time, you just get a sense of it. The seasoning, the heat, and confidence in using knifes without amputating yourself.
Unfortunately I don't really have the money to mak inedible shit. I know my circumstances don't apply to everyone but its a really cruel cycle where you want to eat cheaper by buying ingredients and cooking but the risk of you going to bed hungry because you fucked up and can't afford a replacement stops you thus you buy more expensive frozen crap which in turns stops you from saving that money to pick up the hobbg
@@python1972 stick to stuff you can't mess up like simple clear stew. Put in aromatic, meat first, then veggies
@@garchomowner I don't know where people get their perceptions, but a stew with multiple ingredients is definitely something you can mess up, or at least make very bland. It's also a big time investment for potential failure.
To me, rice is impossible to screw up as long as you have a pot with a lid. The instructions they print on bags of rice are completely accurate. You may need to set your burner on the second-lowest instead of the lowest setting when simmering after boiling though, at least from my own experience.
Another thing is ground beef. It turns brown-grey when it's done, and since the pieces are so small you don't have to worry about an undercooked interior.
Chicken can also be easily cooked in the oven. Throw breasts or drumsticks in for 30-35 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. A secret here is that you actually want to cook chicken slightly longer than the point where it is technically safe to eat.
Oven cooking in general is a good starting point. If you undercook it's easy to put it back in. There's less potential for variation due to equipment -- ovens are different, but with a range you have to also worry about your cookware, in addition to the range itself.
@@CrizzyEyes It all depends on how you make your stew. I make one every two weeks with the dicounted veggies at the store that lasts me 3-5 days.
You only need veggies, meat and some salt for the basic stuff. I order to make it taste decent, I usually throw in some soy sauce and tomato concentrate. Add in enough water until the veggies swim a little bit, put the lid on it and put in on low flame for 2-10h. So after 2h it might look a bit like soup, you take the lid off for an hour or two and it will concentrate. Just make sure it doesn't run dry, then it will start to burn.
@@python1972I get what you're saying. I am in the same boat.
Another point on seasoning is that salt is hygroscopic, which comes in really handy when cooking items with large water contents. Cooking something like caramelised onions can be sped up by 10-15 minutes just incorporating salt with the onions at the start of the cooking process. With eggplant/aubergine you can use salt to eliminate the natural bitterness in eggplant.
It never occurred to me to use salt when sautéing or caramelizing onions, but it makes perfect sense because as you said the salt will pull the water out of the onions so it can boil off faster. I should do it with green peppers too for the same reason.
One time I forgot to salt the onions for French onion soup, and it was an absolutely miserable experience.
yeah, in Italy we use A TON of eggplants and zucchini and whenever we're frying them (and it happens often trust me), we salt them in order to drain out the moisture, so that when we fry them, they splatter a lot less and will make them absorb way less oil. One time, i was in a hurry and had to fry some eggplants but i didn't have time to leave them under salt, so i put them in the oil right after cutting them and i found myself not only having burning oil splatter everywhere, but also having to constantly refill the pan with oil because those sponges were draining it all.
another thing when frying, try adding starch, e.g. by dipping in starchy water, it makes food way crispier.
also don't use too much oil, otherwise it gets absorbed and makes things mushy.
So glad you brought up the point about not using metal on nonstick pans! It's one of my biggest pet peeves yet I see it everywhere. I've surprised so many of my friends with that fact, yet it's such an important thing to know!
I canNOT with the metal on the nonstick!! My ex's sister came over once and offered to cook. She TORE. UP. my new electric nonstick skillet because she kept scraping it with a fork.
She wasn't taught to cook and her mother had to be taught by her sister-in-law because her own mother didn't teach her. All of my children can cook. My 10-year-old makes better eggs than I do!
The best advice I got when I started cooking beyond either following recipes exactly or just doing the same rote things over and over again was "Start with something very basic and just do things that you think might make it taste better".
I started with scrambled eggs and over the course of like a week I determined that continuing to add garlic and onion powder was a bigger concern in terms of having to go out and buy more rather than adding too much. And I just began applying the same basic idea to everything else; whenever I was working with something cheap, I would take a minute to think if there was anything I could do that might make it taste better. And most of what I learned translated pretty well to more expensive stuff that I was more nervous about experimenting with.
Obviously I can't speak for everyone, and maybe it's not the ideal situation for every channel, but I really like and respect the way you handle paid promotions and almost always watch them because of it. I think if a brand is confident enough in their product to be featured this way, it's usually a testament to its quality.
I agree, it is really a breath of fresh air.
Completely. I've never skipped one
The quirky meme ad breaks from other CZcamsrs were funny at first, but now they've become annoying as fuck
hahah same, i just let the ad play and take a look down the comments.
@@user-gp5yz5yz4x Bro same. It's nice to see something that has effort and comedy, bit I'm still skipping an ad read
Heat control is truly one of the most CRUCIAL cooking skills that can easily be overlooked. And it is something that can’t be perfectly taught either, it does take some experience and intuition. As simple a food as a Grilled Cheese is, it is a great teacher of proper heat control.
Also pancakes
it also varies from hob to hob, i recently moved to a house with an induction hob and it's ruined my heat control completely. the thing turns off when it gets to a certain temperature (even at the highest heat setting) and it completely puts me off! these things are my mortal enemy in cooking.
Grilled cheeses, eggs, and mac n cheese are fantastic. And tasty.
@@chefbigdog4132god yeah, we got a new cooker and went from an electric hob to a gas and boy does gas cook WAY hotter. I now weep at the mention of low heat
I truly appreciate seeing a video like this that i can send to my sister.
Side note, a good chunk of seasoning advice doesnt count with pastry or baking. Cooking is an art, baking is a science.
Truer words have never been said. Now I’m no chef but i can make some tasty meals. Baking? I cant even make a sponge cake right
The best tip I ever figured out for myself and tell everyone I know about seasoning, is to season it until you think it has just a *little bit* too much seasoning. That's how you know you've seasoned it perfectly.
Best seasoning tip ever is take a spoon to it (as long as its not something that would make you sick like raw meat), add some of this or that. Take a spoon to it
That analogy for watching inexperienced home cooks use a knife could not be more accurate
I also think that it's due to inexperienced cooks often having dull knives so they feel the need to push down hard with their index finger. Once you use a properly sharpened knife to glide through onions like they're butter, the pinch grip comes naturally
@@m.f.3347 Absolutely agreed. Form follows function in this case. Part of why most home cooks perceive prep work to be brutally difficult
I used a knife like that for the longest time because I couldn't get used to the pinch method, but I cut myself all the time. Then I finally cut the hell out of my thumb and decided to work on the technique. It took me a couple months until it felt comfortable, but my knife skills have improved tremendously. It's been a few years and I haven't sliced any fingers. Hoping to keep the streak up. 🤞
@@Torqueyeel hell yeah! We all have scars, my friend. Glad you learned from yours too! 👹🙌🏼
@@wolfingitdown2047 thanks man! I just looked at your channel and your recipes look delicious! Instant sub from me!
As someone who is trying to teach themselves how to cook with almost no prior cooking knowledge and had no one to show them "the basics" growing up, this video is a godsend.
I love this video. I grew up in a household where both of my parents were terrible cooks that made bland food that was always the wrong texture (love you mom and dad). I am similar to Bree and have a "Look, it turned out fine!" attitude.
A couple years ago, I took up making sourdough bread and learned to enjoy the satisfaction of caring way too much about how crispy the crust was, how even the crumb was, if the texture of the inside was soft but not gummy, etc and think it would be fun to try caring too much about my cooking as well. This video is a great way for me to start! Thanks for a concise, brilliant, easy to understand video!
Dude same! My mom is a good cook but her food can be bland bland BLAND sometimes. We've definitely all been on a cooking journey together and have for sure grown from where we were. But every once in awhile Mom loooooves cooking some bland AF food lolololol
Super happy to see other people, especially content creators, continue to use and normalize "insane-o style" as part of their vocabulary. I use it all the time and i'm glad to see others keeping it going. Great video too!
crazy to think that working in a real kitchen you are expected to do all of this. when I got promoted from dishwasher to line cook and it completely took over my whole life I had to learn all of this, basic knife skills, listening to your food while it's cooking, tasting it, and correct seasoning was just expected of the higher cooks and I just had to learn off of them. God it seems so beautiful looking back on it, if there's one skill I could reccomend to anyone it would be learn how to cook. it's the best feeling ever putting your hard work and effort and elbow grease into a dish and seeing someone enjoy it. it's magical seeing people enjoy something you made. learning is part of the experience.
The video by Razbuten is a fantastic insight into how being inexperienced can make arbitrarily simple things seem so difficult.
This video perfectly encapsulates what I mean when I tell people that cooking isnt difficult its about experience and knowledge like this!
I was always shoo’d away from knives as a result of being raised by an overprotective nurse grandmother and overly coddling mother… It Blew My Mind when you pinched the metal of the knife. I had come to unconsciously see the ENTIRE metal of a knife as a bright red “danger zone” but the moment you demonstrated clearly how gripping a knife for stability feels, looks, and works, it clicked that really the only dangerous bit is the sharp end of the blade and the flat points were never anything to worry about after all. Even the sharp part isn’t much to worry about when you know how to hold it. It just demystified the whole thing for me.
Thank you so much. I’m a little more than 3 years into my journey of learning how to cook and it is so refreshing to see someone try teaching beginners tips through the same angle as the non-gamers videos. Truly incredible stuff that I wish was taught for so many reasons, but gets glossed over because even I can how basic it “should” be the moment I learn it. I really appreciate your kindness here ❤
The knife thing is so very real. My mum, who's nearly 70, and has cooked dinner most nights for nearly fifty years cannot hold a knife "correctly". I have a Victorinox knife very similar to the one in the video and she still insists on holding it at the very back end of the handle and grips it almost like a hammer. I've repeatedly shown her the pinch grip (to be fair, it took me a long time before that felt like the most natural way to hold a knife) and she just goes ahead and ignores it. She seemed genuinely surprised when I used my honing steel the other day. I hone the blade probably every two or three times that I use my knife, so this isn't exactly a rare occurrence.
Actually there are quite a few things that I've seen my parents do where I've simply said something like "if you do it that way, [issue] will happen, it's better if you do [alternative method] because then [issue] won't happen" to which I always get the response of "we always do it this way" or "I like it this way". For example, an issue I've noticed is crowding a pan with meat so there is no maillard reaction due to water-loss, so I'll suggest cooking the meat in batches.
That last paragraph is my in-laws. I love them dearly but they are set in their ways, extremely picky eaters, and don't like change. Sigh.
I mean this with no exaggeration, you are my favourite CZcamsr. I've been watching every single video you've put out ever since you said peanut butter on a burger was more controversial than BANANAS FOSTER COMPOTE.
I remember feeling elated when i was able to remember stuff from your videos to do your tamago kake gohan final exam. I love that from watching your videos, and emulating and practicing the lessons you've taught, my friends all refer to me as the best home cook in the friend group.
The way you structure your videos, your inquisitiveness and your creativity one hundred percent led me to my own avant garde approach in my kitchen.
You are an inspiration, you are my favourite CZcamsr notification, please never stop (or like do if like CZcams gets worse and like even if you stop there's still a veritable wealth of info on your channel)
thank u hunni buttr :')
Piggy backing to say your humus is my go-to, and the fact you put the recipe FIRST is incredible. I also season my cast iron like you advised
This might be too advanced for those still trying to figure out adequate salt pinches, but I think learning to properly layer spices as I add more ingredients (season as you go), as opposed to seasoning only once in the beginning, helped me graduate from a cooklet to cookzilla. Once I perfected my patented turkey lentil chili with homemade chili paste, I became truly unstoppable.
🗣 SEASON AS YOU GO!
No amount of spices can help an under salted dish. Salinity is the most important factor in cooking. Spices enhancethe aroma (perceived by your nose) not salinity. So it’s very important to learn how/when to salt.
@@tpn1110 exactly, which is why I said if you don't know how to salt properly first, this is useless info 🙃
ur patent sounds like FIREEE
@@LeviathanLegend I can happily confirm 🥵🔥
speaking of salt, a "pinch" is commonly understood as "3 finger grab of slightly grainy salt" in res bus which is hella annoying to explain to someone that a pinch is not their pinch aka the conversation i had with my mother 3 years ago
This video is useful to experienced home cooks, too. Even if it's something known, a reminder doesn't hurt. Plus, some things become habit and you don't consider better ways that are obvious to others.
My dad was in his 40s or 50s when he called me over to show me something he learned from his friend. After wiping down the counter, he rinsed the dish cloth before putting it back in the soapy water. "To keep the water clean for longer," he explained. We shared a laugh over how something so obvious hadn't occurred to us.
4:09 BRO THAT JOKE WAS SO LOWKEY AND SO HILARIOUS 😂
Love the "raising the floor of what's acceptable" idea - anyone can enjoy cooking, and building confidence in these little things is absolutely foundational
The "Fear of Overseasoning" one was my biggest errors for a long time. I'm going to have to work on that knife holding though. In this case, my wife opened my eyes to how generous you can be with onion and garlic!!
This may sound stupid, but that small thing you mentioned about not focusing on the tip of a knife while cooking was actually eye-opening for me. I've been using knives in exactly the opposite way I'm meant to, and that's probably why I've had an issue cutting ingredients for so long! I think I picked it up from, ironically, HEMA where the ideal cut with a sword is generally done near the tip. I hadn't even thought about it until now, and the only advice I'd gotten from anyone else was always about my other hand (mostly reminders about the 'cat's paw' thing and keeping fingers tucked in), nothing about actually handling the knife besides to 'be more confident'. I was quite confident, just oblivious!
no one really taught me how to cook and slice products, i had to teach myself, and seeing that "here's how to grip a knife" instruction blew my mind. constantly get a blister or two on my fingers when I'm cooking continuously for friends and family, and think this change in grip will help me be much better (and quicker) at slicing things with a knife!
Wow this is the most eye opening cooking video ive ever seen as someone who rarely goes beyond scrambled eggs and microwaving things thank you! overly obvious? no each point was likea mind-blowing revelation to me 😅
Got to the wife guy joke and was sad that I'd already liked this video and couldn't give it another like. So funny, so informative. All new/timid cooks should watch this. Being afraid of seasoning is so real.
I come from a family where food is important and started cooking young. My boyfriend is the complete opposite, and so I'm a better cook. However, he's much more patient when making food and it reminded me of the importance of time. Sometimes watching beginners is extremely useful.
That being said, he takes like an hour and a half to make a simple salad.
Hey, i appreciate all of the non-critical advice! I feel confident in the kitchen, personally, but when i was learning, i was not taught with such advice and understanding... especially in reference to knife work (i have smaller hands than most folks around me).
Furthermore, i have always appreciated the "why" when it comes to doing any sort of task; not just "because." Thank you for your thorough explanations!
Dude! This guy just went INSANEO STYLE all over this video!!
2:34 "insano style" that's so cool dude
As a chemist, I have another reason why NOT to scratch a Teflon pan: That stuff is pretty unhealthy, and it basically never degrades.
PS: DO NEVER overheat your Teflon pan, they release quite some toxins when too hot. If you had birds, those probably wouldn't survive an overheated Teflon pan in the house....
Honestly ive tossed all my non-stick teflon stuff its all awful stuff. Have gone over to carbon steel, cast iron, and enameled cast iron for my pans along with stainless. Just use a bit more fat when cooking and my pans will last longer than i do, seriously though we should take note from the european kitchens of old
Something I've seen since getting back into cooking is how most cookbooks expect you to know how to make the basics, things like beans, rice, salsa, basic sauces etc. And always give you some weird like holiday style dish that to someone just starting out can be very intimidating. Even for me who was a line cook for years was scared to start cooking again because I had no idea how to do the basics, and no cook book would tell me how. Learning how to make something like a basic tomato sauce for pasta, and then being able to build your own recipe from that is super important, but it's hard to substitute seasonings and cooking methods when you don't know the base of what your cooking, or techniques to use (like browning sausage briefly, before sauteing garlic and onions, and finally adding tomatoes and other seasonings)
That's how a lot of the old-school cookbooks used to be. I work in an archive and a lot of the old recipe books will say to "prepare rice" and then move on to the next cooking stage. There were no images either, so you had to know the basic skills in order to use the recipe books to make any dishes you wanted.
for those who want to skip to the good parts:
3:10 - knife guy
6:16 - wife guy
you're welcome
4 day old comment???????????,, This was uploaded 11 minutes ago??????????
@@Ok-df1uz he uploads stuff early for his patreon
@@Deythlord2112 oooh thanks
The “beginner ignored all my advice and did things their own way” resonates so hard with me. My students constantly do this with me and make their lives so much harder because of it.
You can't really learn by being told, you have to try and find out for yourself.
This was very interesting, thank you! Parents always worked so I never was taught how to cook, I just had to wing it. These tips are great!
I'm not even done with the vid yet but I already find this so helpful, thank you so much! I've gotten so tired of the cooks in my family treating me like I'm stupid whenever they see me practicing how to cook so this is a breath of fresh air
When I first started cooking somebody told me it's actually better to add seasoning late, they even seasoned their cutting board smh
gosh what a silly notion. I hope whoever told you that isn't giving out false information to millions of OTHER people too...
LOL
@@internetshaquille He told me I need to crack twenty eggs. Yes, twenty.
@@internetshaquille hey man us SOYCHADS *exclusively* season the cutting board. I throw away the steak and eat the board, even. being contrarian about everything clearly makes me the friend of the everyman, and you are just a stuck up GATEKEEPER!!!! if you criticize this I will not be able to cope and I will write a long, scathing, narcissistic diatribe informed by my totally blue-collar liberal arts degree.
what are you referring to? Is tihs a meme or joke? lol
This video, especially the last segment, made my day. The uplifting music, plus the inevitable realization of sleeping on the couch, and subsequent doubling down is great
As someone with instruction anxiety, even clear instructions such as you said "cook on medium heat" bring up more questions such as
What burner should I be using? What exactly is medium? Do all our stoves have the same temp output? Does the pan affect temperature dispersion? Should be using a larger or a smaller pan?
Things like that just freezes me and forces me to just make something simpler or order out.
I love these videos that treats me like a child almost because there's too much elitism in places like cooking where people already lost touch with the fact that there are those who actually don't know what they're doin and forgot they started from somewhere.
While not the same issue, when I have choice paralysis I usually go "fuck it, doing anything is better than nothing" and choose at random.
Translating to your instruction anxiety, I would just try whatever and pay attention to the result so next time I *know* the answer to all those little extra questions.
In practice, I cook with my nose so when instructions unclear I put everything together and slowly up the heat until I can hear a sizzle, then pull down a bit. I "play it by ear" a lot because I live alone and I can experiment without consequences.
The first mistake I remember having corrected was that increasing the heat does not automatically decrease cooking time. I was impatient when I was young, so if something said ‘cook 10 mins on medium’, I’d try to cook it for 4 on high. As a result, I often had stuff that was charred on the outside and raw in the middle. Once I learned to think of ‘medium’ as the ‘base’ heat level and adjust from there, it made me start to reevaluate many other aspects of my cooking. And now I try to use that as a basic principle whenever I try something new - start from neutral, add as you go.
This is a really nice video though - I’ve learned a lot of this through brute force and being a cheapskate, but I know so many people who spent YEARS refusing to ever learn to cook just because of having issues with basics like these. It wasn’t till the quarantines that some of them started learning, and a few of them still gave up the instant they could get delivery again.
I’m also thinking that some guys don’t understand that the 3-finger pinch requires digging your nails into the salt, and if you have nails of any length it gets trapped there and seems particularly unsanitary. Bree and I both use a 2-finger pinch, possibly for the same reason because it reduces the possibility of salty nail beds, and having smaller fingers also reduces the volume of salt delivered.
unpleasant maybe if it gets under your nail bed, but unsanitary seems unlikely. Salt is a fairly hostile environment to breeding pathogens, so it wouldn't make your nails less sanitary than basically anything else that should go into food.
@@just83542 nail beds are very bacteria rich environments though, and introducing a particle into them and then introducing that to you food might be a negligible amount of bacteria but it certainly _feels_ unsanitary. If you have longer nails, it’s very very important to remember how well they trap bacteria and crud. Even nail brushes, which are usually great for getting soap into hard to reach places, are technically unsanitary practices.
If you cook on the reg, you’re supposed to keep your nails cut pretty short for sanitation reasons. Like, salt isn’t the worst thing in the world, but imagine that every single time you go to handle ground meat and… yeah.
@@tisvana18 gloves are my friend. I can’t imagine making burgers or meatballs without them :/
You don't have to do a 3 finger pinch, you can get a really big pinch by curling your index finger and cupping salt into the curl with your thumb. I'm a line cook and this is often how I season things, specifically because it doesn't require me to get my fingers nearly as deep into the salt to get a big pinch. In any case, if this is a concern at all you should probably be washing your hands more thoroughly.
I have the knife argument with my partner all the time. He keeps telling me bigger knives are safer to use, and I keep telling him they hurt my tiny lady hands. I've worked to use the bigger knives, but I think it's something that knife makers should think about, honestly.
Absolutely! Chef’s knives are made for mens hands and they are too big for the average woman’s hands. It physically hurts to hold them with smaller hands.
It really helps to have a store close by where you can try holding many different knives from many different manufacturers. Williams-Sonoma stores usually have a large selection of knives from Wüsthof, Shun, Cuisinart, and All-Clad that you can try. You can sometimes find specialty stores for chefs that carry even more brands or have more types and styles of knives in stock.
I recommend Chad Ward’s book “An Edge in the Kitchen: The Ultimate Guide to Kitchen Knives - How to Buy Them, Keep Them Razor Sharp, and Use Them Like a Pro” for his great advice. Especially for saying that the knife-block sets you can buy at department stores are a waste of money, because for cooking you really only *need* one knife, a chef’s knife. (Or a santoku knife, which is the smaller Japanese equivalent to the Western chef’s knife, which you might find easier to hold and use.) Any other knives you’ll buy after that are for convenience, for making it easier to do certain things. So you’ll eventually have a chef’s knife, a paring knife, and a large slicing knife or bread knife as your most-used knives, and you might also have a boning knife for deboning poultry and a filet knife for deboning fish.
That's pretty much why they make chef's knives in different sizes. There's the classic 8" standby, and then there's the 6" for smaller hands.
"Tiny lady hands" omg yes lol
This is genuinely very helpful to me because I didn't cook much growing up and when I did it was extremely basic.
My brother is a cook and so he gives me flak for stuff I'm not aware of and doesn't explain because they're bare basics to him so he takes it as common sense.
instant subscription upon mentioning nonstick pan scraping. that drives me absolutely insane. i genuinely felt like i was the only one who cared about not scraping poison into my food.
I really appreciate this vid as someone who does cook and needs to practice not hovering when my partner is in the kitchen. It is helpful to remember that I also needed time to learn all things that are second nature to me now, I just had parents who made sure I was involved in food prep as a kid.
I love watching CZcams vids from my favorites and they just spice in Insaneo Style. It's gonna be huge, trust me
6:04 and also the fact that this video is short is the reason i subscribed
I'm glad Walugi found meaningful work after leaving tennis
My ex actually got very mad at me for adjusting her heat levels, she always cooked everything on high heat because she thought that the food would cook faster lol
it does, just that the outside gets burned lol
Oh gracious. I used to be the same way. I would cook everything on high and my mom would have to buy new pans every few years because I kept burning them . 🙃 I've since learned moderation, and with my own cookware am a lot more careful. The food comes out better too.
I always use the highest heat for the first 30 secs then just decrease it because i cba to wait for the pan to reach a temperature
note: some spice mixes have salt incorporated (propably to cut costs and personally annoy me :D), so read the ingredients before using regular salt and like you said taste while cooking.
My boyfriend has cooked for me a few times, usually breakfast and his knife skills are almost non existent and he doesn't know what it means to dice, spear, julienne, etc but slowly I'm teaching him and giving him confidence. He makes Indian foods fine but other things like cooking with meat are completely out f his range as a vegetarian. Even though it frustrates me as a seasoned cook sometimes I have to remember that I've been cooking meat and cutting things since I was 7 and it takes time. I've learned to explain better how to do something instead of using the words I would find in a recipie.
My favorite recipe is 'throw a load of stuff into a pan and then open and sniff every spice I own to see if it feels like it would blend well with what's already in the pan'. All the women in my life are consistently amazed by this unheard-of skill... because I'm the only one around who would use something like cumin without being specifically instructed by a recipe.
great video! I wonder if the seasoning worries is because a lot of people use spice blends that have salt, and so when they tried to add more the dish ended up too salty
for people who may be interested in using seasonings EX: adobo, etc. some of these ready-made seasonings contain salt, so if you want to avoid putting too much salt in your food buy the spices separately or practice using the seasoning first and see if you need more salt or not
There's an XKCD about this called "Average familiarity". We over estimate other peoples familiarity with something and often give advice that would be useful to them far in the future, rather than useful now.
holy shit- cooklet! i am about 18 months into my home cooking journey and i still 100% feel like a cooklet! zero experience in the industry other than catering a few bar/batmitzvahs and other similar events and i didn’t cook a damned thing.
at one point my wife was tired of her cooking and tired of being the only one cooking so i said “hold our child, watch this” and went to the store armed with mr chlebowski’s advice. it’s been going great and for me it all came down to finding the right dingus on youtube. stoked to have found your channel, dingus! always happy to have a new source of approachable knowledge and i love the channel!
Love going insaneo style with my seasonings. It's a lifestyle.
With Internet Shaquille referencing Insaneo Style, we can now confirm that he is part of the Joel Haver Extended Universe, and that makes me happy.
Just learning how to use a stainless steel pan correctly was a game changer for me. I would never have believed you if you said you could cook an omelet on a stainless pan, and have it slide right out. Now I do it all the time. Learning to cook on a non stick pan teaches you bad habits that don't work when you don't have a non stick pan.
As a professional chef this is gold and I’m going to send it my parents. Everyone this man is spitting FACTS
Somewhat related…I season my burgers before forming with smoked paprika, Chipotle Tabasco, and garlic powder. It’s sacrilegious, but I find that it gives me great seasoning throughout the burger, still preserving the rendered fat flavor, and allows me to salt on the outside 5-10 minutes before cooking.
That sounds really yum!
2:33... 2:33 is where I instantly decided to like and subscribe. Wouldn't imagine in a 100 years a Joel Haver reference would show up in a cooking tutorial. Great content by the way, this is really opening my eyes
I grew up in a home that ate fast food and it's only at 21 that I finally "get" how food can be good. Now that I have a taste for newer and different things, I'm hoping guides like this will teach me those cues that I can use any time instead of just following the exact numbers and praying I don't die from poisoning
Best way to check that is literally just take bits out and cut it open, if you can see its cooked inside on that piece the rest are good. Or alternatively stick a fork deep into it, pull it out and put the tip that was in the food on your tongue. If it burns its done, if it doesn’t give it longer. A cheaper test then them fancy thermometers lol
I'm the one that does most of the cooking at home. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize I was under-seasoning ground meats 😅 never assume you know everything lol
Joel Haver is the most influential CZcamsr of all time. People just can't see the effects properly.
...do go on.
Insane-o style is a phrase coined by Joel Haver
@@somefishhere didn’t catch this one, but I regularly enjoy Joel!
Haha only looked at the comments to find out if anyone else picked up on that 😂 It took Joel some time but it seems it is finally catching on. Insanostyle 🤪
i mean we renamed "rotoscoping" to "joel haver style"
the man is truly an icon
How was this posted 47s ago and there are comments from 4 days ago
patreon folks get early access, and they use that time to suggest edits and make comments before everyone else.
www.patreon.com/shaq
some of us know how to waste $9 🐼
I am thankful for having a loving skilled mother that thought me everything I know about cooking. Life starts with fundamentals, like any profession or skills you develop, it is better to get the basics right and understand what you are doing, rather than mimicking action.
I want to thank you for this video! I consider myself a decent to good cook. Even when switching to vegan/vegetarian diet i never had problems delivering a tasty dish, but your tip with seasoning was an absolute mindblower! after watching this vid I "monitored" my cooking for the things you explained, and I realised I season like a non cook (very timid). Now that I now it was an absolute game changer. Thanks!
Is that a Joel Haver reference at 2:34? Just when I think Shaq's videos can't get better, they keep improving anyway
It's gotta be czcams.com/video/hQ40jNXMDlk/video.html
Yeah, he went INSANEO STYLE
Happy to see insaneo style has caught on
4:05 you can actually see the happiness on his face while he says that
I had pretty neglectful parents as a kid and had to learn to cook for myself because they just weren't home to cook and eat dinner with me, or even just to quickly teach me a thing or two so that I could feed myself. All on my own, I got good, and I know my way around a kitchen by now (if I was to consistently be home alone, I figured I might as well turn it into a hobby), and it's soooo cool to get to know the "why" I developped a certain instinct when cooking, and especially interesting to understand the "how" these methods make my food better! Thank you so much for this very informative video. The little version of me would've been really greatful 🙏
Did not expect a Joel Haver reference 😂
Love your videos, and how you make more advanced topics more approachable by simpliying how people can approach the topic
I just made chili in my Crock Pot today. In went the pasta sauce, then I added the chili powder. I buy chili power at the local bulk food store, then dump it into a glas container when I get it home. I pulled that container out of the cupboard then started to dump it into the pasta sauce. I just kept dumping it in until it "looked like enough". Then, to make sure it would be hot enough, I got the bottle of crushed red pepper and started dumping that in until it "looked like enough". I don't know if I got it right, but that chili will make your eyes water and your nose run and that's good chili in my book! Don't be afraid of spices, unless it causes you physical discomfort then yes, ease up a little. Disclaimer: I'm not a chef. Heck, I don't even claim to know how to cook. I just know what I like.
Can we get the biggest high five in the world to Shaq for throwing down a Haver “Insane-o Style”?!