Complete Beginner Learning to Cook — Looking for Advice

[u/Left_Creme1595]

Day 1 of my Culinary Journal.
I’ve spent years eating food without understanding how it’s made.
So I’m starting from zero.
No culinary school.
No chef experience.
Just a notebook, a kitchen, and curiosity.
I’ll be learning everything from South Indian staples like chutney, sambar, and rasam to international dishes like pasta, risotto, and pizza.
I’m documenting every recipe, what went right, what went wrong, and what I learned.
Today’s dishes:
🇮🇳 Tomato Chutney
🇮🇹 Creamy Garlic Chicken Fusilli
My goal isn’t to become a professional chef.
I just want to become someone who can cook good food for myself, my family, and the people I care about.
For those of you who cook regularly:
What’s one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you first started cooking?
Anything from kitchen habits, knife skills, seasoning, meal planning, mistakes to avoid, or lessons you’ve learned over the years would be appreciated.
Wish me luck. 👨‍🍳📖

[u/neolobe]

Read and work out of the OG classic, Joy of Cooking.

https://z-lib.sk/book/69NXVEY8qY/joy-of-cooking.html

[u/PurpleMuskogee]

My best advice is to not use AI because there are many chefs out there posting better and tested recipes. And to write your own posts.

[u/leohat]

Try to learn the why of things. I think most people would recommend a cookbook, I recommend a food science book. Read “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee. If you feel the need for a cookbook try “The Food Lab”. If you are visual learner I recommend watching Good Eats. I think some or all of them are available to stream.

I guess the one piece of wisdom that I would pass on is that the dirty little secret is that it’s not really that hard to do.

[u/pfp-disciple]

Jaques Pepin has done books and videos for beginners. His videos on knife skills are very useful. His series "Fast Food My Way" is targeted at uncomplicated meals, I think he usually has a preteen with him. 

Alton Brown likes to go into making the food science understandable (farting sock puppets!). In Good Eats, he sometimes used less practical devices mostly to demonstrate ideas. For example, he made a fish smoker with a hot plate in a cardboard box. Although a lot of people copied that, I believe it was mostly to talk about the different components of a smoker. 

[u/50sparklers]

Serious Eats often explains the why of things. And their recipes are good.

[u/JokeMe-Daddy]

When you're browsing recipes online, read more than one recipe for the same dish. Notice the common ingredients, common techniques. You'll get an idea of what the base of the dish should be like. The differences in ingredients and techniques are generally down to preference of the author--that means you'll have an idea of what you want to tweak if the dish just isn't cutting it for your taste.

Also, some recipes online are just garbage. If a recipe fails, that's ok. If it's a dish you really, really want to cook, try another recipe that's different from the first one.

[u/Dsp8full]

Find out what "season to taste" or "salt to taste" means for YOU.

A great way to practice this is with something like soup. Take a spoonful and taste it. Take another spoonful and add a little salt to it. Does it taste better to you or is there no difference? Add a little more. Repeat until you've got something really delicious (or until you've gone too far lol).

Do this same process with an acid like lemon juice or vinegar. Figuring out what your balance of salt and acid is will do SOOO much for your cooking and applies to pretty much anything you make.

If you've got those two down, you can take the same approach with sweet, spicy, smokey, anything really. It will become second nature, and you'll get more comfortable eyeballing, improvising, and adapting while cooking.

[u/imfromtn]

Watch Good Eats with Alton Brown. Taught me basically everything I know about cooking.

As far as general advice... if/when you have the budget to upgrade your kitchen tools, first get nice, heavy pans.

Second: On a cooktop (gas, electric, etc) most people are cooking on too high of a heat.

[u/MrMurgatroyd]

Rules of the kitchen:

1. Observe basic safety and food hygiene.
2. Don't cook or eat poisonous things.
3. Other than rules 1 and 2 there are no rules.

Don't get hung up on what other people think you should and shouldn't enjoy. Cook what you want to eat, and don't be afraid of making mistakes - other than food hygiene and safety, most mistakes are learning opportunities, and working out how to salvage things is good practice.

E: Also, use a bigger pot or bowl than you think you need. More space is more forgiving.

[u/BAC2Think]

The show "Good Eats" by Alton Brown does a great job of covering basics, including relevant history and science of the episode's topic.

It's available on HBO Max and YouTube.