Scots Taffer on 29/1/2008 at 12:04

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Fuck yeah. Seen Ratatouille? Anyone can cook! :D

Cooking is simple, the only way you can't get solidly good at cooking is if you have some innate inability to pay attention or find juggling factors like monitoring temperature and time too much to handle. Because, essentially, in my opinion, when you have high quality ingredients, you only need to do simple combinations and methods of cooking to have VERY good food.

Of course, if you want excellent or even amazing food, you need to be able to bring ingredients together in unusual ways or think up combinations that aren't the standard. That's where creative flair comes into it, which you could argue is something that you're born with or something that comes with time, experience and perspective, and technical flair is another component but is often largely dictated by the materials at your disposal (you can't very well griddle scallops and serve on grilled pancetta topped off with a cauliflower puree if you don't have a griddle pan, grill and food processor now, can you?) but that said, you still need to know how long you should griddle those scallops for, how long you grill the pancetta between it crisping and starting to lose its flavour to the charcoal of burning and whether your puree should be fine or coarse, etc. These are chemical and textural contexts of food that really require further study - taste-testing and reading books where they describe the actual reactions that take place when you cook steak in butter, how dairy solids bind with the protein in the meat.

For me, I began taking a serious interest in cooking when my wife got pregnant and was feeling a bit too tired to tackle the dinner. Once I start getting into something, I tend to start to learn about it at a peppy pace until I've reached a stage where I'm comfortable or where I realise I need more help than I'm going to find in a book. After a few months of making the standard stuff that we were used to (largely stir-fries, pastas and meat & veg, always using decent quality ingredients) I got bored and started mixing it, trying new things - the first dish I made up was a fresh linguine with fresh salmon fillet poached in garlic, cream, lemon and white wine. It was a big success the night I served it and after that, I was away! I kept on elaborating and adding to the menu to the extent that most meals I make are of my own devising and not some standard combo that I got somewhere else.

After about a year or so of cooking since we moved into our home, I basically started eying kitchen instruments with a rather lustful eye. Why, I wondered, was I coveting a cast iron skillet, or a solid chef's knife, surely I could be happy with teflon non-stick and a $15 utility knife... not so. It seems that I want more than being able to produce simply good food, I want to make excellent food. I need to learn a lot, like that chemistry stuff I mentioned, so I'm looking at (http://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore-Kitchen/dp/0684800012/ref=pd_sim_b_img_8) some (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0764557343/ref=nosim/tirebouchon-20) books too, as well as (http://www.blackpearl.com.au/3.html) classes.

So yeah, to cook to a decent standard, you just need patience, quality ingredients and the willingness to learn; to cook to an amazing standard, you need all of those, a fuckton more learning involved as well as expense incurred to get Shit You Need and probably a levelling-up of ingredients again and a bit of creative flair; and to be a professional, successful chef, you need all of that and food needs to be your driving force, your passion.

Start off simple, look at what you eat and see where you can strip away packet-jar sauces and where you use frozen veg or processed meats, and start to reproduce your standard menu from scratch. Even if you can't replicate an entire sauce without help, like Thai Curry pastes etc, you can at least simplify and let the ingredients speak and from there you'll be amazed at how quickly talent and creativity can evolve.

edit: oh yeah and you need a FUCKING GAS COOKER, fuck electric

Matthew on 30/1/2008 at 10:28

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Thanks PigLick and especially Scots. My family have always been big on using fresh ingredients (well, barring sauces and the like) and good quality food so I think I've inherited that; I doubt I'd have the nous to combine flavours successfully at this or any other stage, but your comments give me hope that I can have a decent crack at this cookery malarkey!

Pity gas isn't an option out here in the sticks, though. :(

Matthew on 30/1/2008 at 16:31

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The arse-end of nowhere, County Down, Northern Ireland. Well, it's not massively out of the way per se but Phoenix Natural Gas is not coming out here any time soon, believe me.

Matthew on 1/2/2008 at 10:06

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Possibly, I've never looked into it.