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Cooking isn't really that hard, right? I mean it can't be, with all the recipes and Youtube videos and Tiktok hacks and cookings shows out there to learn from. I admit there are some techniques out there that are tricky to master and take lots of practice, but they comprise the vast minority of cooking. It really should be trivial for anyone with an basic kitchen to follow some basic steps to make a basic (yet delicious meal).

I guess that finding a simple, tasty, and easy recipe can be difficult, that's why alternative formats like Instagram reels are so useful for cooking content Apart from that, though, I don't fully understand when people are completely unable to cook for themselves. A mental barrier that makes increasingly more sense to me is becoming a good improvisational cook.

Being able to take in a kitchen full of random, unmatched ingredients and turning them into a full, creative meal is a skill that never cease to be impressive to me. To do so you need to have a wide variety of knowledge about different cooking methods, the flavour relationships between different ingredients, time management to ensure all components of the meal are ready on time, and just a hint of creativity to ensure that your food stands out.

I think there is a danger to becoming an entirely needs based cook. Throwing together some unspecified combination of carbs, protein, and veggies each night to feed the family without getting bogged down in labor, or just because cooking is a chore to get done as quickly as possible. To be clear, I entirely respect this kind of relationship to cooking and there's nothing wrong with it; I just feel that I wouldn't want it for myself. I just enjoy cooking too much.

It can be really intimidating to make an unplanned meal entirely from scratch. It's not just the planning part, knowing which ingredients go well together in terms of taste and of nutrition and how you intend to cook each one. It's also being able to improvise quickly and correctly, because if you're not following a recipe then things will undoubtably go wrong. Adjusting the heat or cooking time or flavour on the fly to account for the unpredictable.

I also have a mixed relationship with spices and spice blends. I think it's not that hard to season the same things in basically the same ways, so that you know they will always taste the same kind of good. It's much harder to come up with new spice combinations to fit different flavour profiles, but if you can then it leads to consistently more interesting food. I often lean towards using less spices (except for salt of course), since unless I have a specific flavour profile in mind I'm ok with it tasting "default good".

I also much prefer when food gains its flavour from the strength of the ingredients, not from seasoning. It just kind of feels like it gives the meal a more interesting story, when individual ingredients are able to stand out in the final medley of flavor. Maybe I'm lucky enough to be able to buy high quality produce and other ingredients and this advice doesn't scale to others, but it's definitely my preferred method when I can use it.

What brought this all to mind was having a few good experiences with making a dish entirely from scratch that had some surprisingly positive reviews. I always essentially considering my cooking ability to be basically average. Nothing I did ever felt like anything other people wouldn't be able to do if they put in a little bit of time and effort. But now, maybe I feel differently.

There is a story I read about a young Richard Feynman, fixing old transistor radios. He had a very complete understanding about how they worked, and he was once faced with a particularly tricky case. After hearing the problem, instead of going through the handbook of diagnostic steps he just stopped and thought about the problem for a little bit. With some mental detective work he managed to diagnose and then fix the problem in one fell swoop. The owner remarked that "he fixes radios with his mind!".

This is kind of how I feel when people compliment my cooking. I don't do anything special, but I do think a lot about my ingredients and flavours and techniques. Surely everybody does that, right? Concocting recipes and using chemistry is one of my favorite parts about cooking. And yet, it seems like somehow, based on the fact people keep being impressed by my food, maybe I do have some special sauce.

I definitely credit the books I've read that explain cooking starting from the fundamentals. Books like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, that help you realize that if you can manage to master all four of those fundamental elements then anything you make will taste good. And, if something ever tastes off then trying to adjust one of those elements might be enough to save it.

I used this in a tomato soup I made. I didn't season it heavily because I felt that the flavour of tomatoes would be interesting enough to stand out without other spices. I used lots of cream and butter for the fat, and make sure to use some raw tomates to lend acid. There were other important pieces, but I feel like by playing with just those three variables you can get an absolutely delicious tomato flavour in your tomato soup, which can then stand on its own or pair with other parts of the meal.

I like types of cooking that can basically be intuited with strong enough fundamentals. That's why I'm also enjoying baking bread, because there are very few variables to play with, and it's all about understanding the relationship between them through trial and error. Maybe sometimes trying to understand everything from first principles can be a bit of a meme, but sometimes it really does work out and make you far better at something than you would be otherwise.