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siduri comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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Judging from the comments, cooking seems to be a big area where Less Wrongers feel tentative. I'm really surprised, as I'd think that paying attention to recipes and following the directions carefully would be an activity that analytical types would master quickly.
I like cooking and I do it a lot. I'd be happy to give advice if you can explain what the specific barrier to entry is? Is it understanding the terminology, choosing the equipment, finding reliable recipes...something else?
Recipes are typically badly underspecified for someone inexperienced at cooking, and the sense this creates, that there's some optimal thing to do that I'm expected to figure out but probably not going to be able to, is something I can find seriously demotivating (despite any explicit knowledge that whatever I end up doing will probably be satisfactory). I wouldn't be surprised if (something like) this is a common problem for LWers.
This problem definitely exists and I've been bitten by it personally(1), but it used to be harder to get around than it is now. In previous generations it was assumed that basic cooking knowledge would be transmitted within the family--daughters learned by helping their mothers in the kitchen, and sons, well, they'd go through a brief bachelor period of poor nutrition, but people married early and getting hot meals again would be a good inducement towards "settling down."
When this cultural context died, cookbooks were slow to catch up--they were still mostly written for people (women) who already knew their way around a kitchen. However, this has changed, and there are now excellent cookbooks available that will explain all the things other recipes assume you already know. Mark Bittman's "How To Cook Everything" and Alice Waters' "The Art of Simple Food" are two good ones.
The "America's Test Kitchen" show on PBS is also good for seeing what the cooks are doing when they talk about julienning carrots or making an herb chiffonade or whatever.
(1) When I first started cooking for myself I didn't understand the true purpose behind browning meat, and of course none of my cookbooks explained the Maillard reaction directly. I noticed that all recipes involving meat would specify that the meat be "browned on all sides" in separate batches over high heat, but I thought the purpose was simply to get it cooked more quickly. As a result I would sometimes skip this step, or even if I performed it I would crowd as much meat into the pan as I could--resulting in meat that wasn't truly brown, but grayish because it had actually been steamed rather than seared. It also tasted dull, for which I blamed the cheap cuts of meat I was buying. Actually it turns out that some of the cheaper cuts of meat have the most flavor, if you cook them right. (Filet mignon is pricey because it's a very tender cut of meat, but it has much less flavor than a cheap sirloin steak.)
This advice to brown all the meat's surface area, and to even cut it into smaller pieces to increase the available surface area, to increase the effect of the Maillard reaction is setting off superstimulus warnings for me.
What are the nutritional effects of this reaction? A Google search has turned up mostly academic papers that discuss feeding large quantities of treated food to rats and chemical analysis of the result of applying heat to some mix of organic chemicals, which I am not sure how to draw conclusions from. This abstract has negative conclusions about the nutritional effects, but doesn't really answer the question: How does the nutritional value of a piece of steak change when you brown it?
The nutritional effects do seem to be rather negative.
That article, and its external links, indicate the chemicals resulting from the Maillard reactions (AGEs) accumulated over time and contribute to the aging process. Young, apparently healthy people may have accumulated lots of AGEs but don't realize it because the symptoms are delayed.
I would say that the fact that browning meat (and vegetables) can accelerate aging is among the things that people should systematically learn before they become adults.
How much accelerated aging do you get per unit of tasting really really good? Do I stop browning meat before or after I consider it worthwhile to start a calorie restriction diet?
Why? Roasting meat over a hot fire produces the same reaction. This is caveperson science.
The effect only occurs near the surface of the meat, as the interior moisture limits the temperature. So roasting a large piece of meat over a hot fire will cause the reaction in a much smaller proportion of the meat than cutting it into small pieces and deliberately browning all surface area. So roasting the large piece could make the surface tastier while leaving nutrition of the much larger interior intact, while cutting and browning can make the entire piece of meat tastier and less nutritious. The superstimulus is the non-ancestral concentration, and possible disassociation with indicated benefits, of the ancestral stimulus.
Cutting meat into small pieces is hardly a modern invention. Shish kebabs go way back.
How way back? Ancient (thousands of years ago) civilizations may have had variants of kebabs, but did we have them pre-agriculture?
This is not high technology: all you need is a knife, a stick, a fire, and some meat. I'm pretty sure the technique is about as old as cooking. It just wasn't until Maillard that people understood what was happening.
You seem to be trying to convince pre-agricultural hunter gatherers who did not even eat meat all that often and had to work hard for every calorie of food they consumed to put a substantial extra effort into cooking their meat that you yourself, with your modern access to inexpensive raw ingredients and pre-manufactured metal cookware, often skipped when told to do so by a recipe because you didn't think it did anything more than cook the meat faster.
How early did people have knives that were good enough to make cutting meat into small chunks reasonably easy?
Find a cookbook, which often contains more fleshed-out recipes, instead of searching online. You can of course evaluate a cookbook for this property before you buy one. I find watching Alton Brown (Good Eats) helpful, in that he covers things too simple to be a recipe (eggs), mentions specific problems you might have, explains such things, and of course you can see it being done, which helps. He also explains some of the science behind cooking, which is fun. I assume other cooking shows fix many of these same problems (Julia Child? I haven't watched). I often cook Alicorn's recipes, and can ask her for help if something is underspecified. Finding a somewhat experienced cook to help (preferably in person) might be useful?
German recipes are even worse. They don't specify things like pans, oil, how to combine ingredients, or sometimes even baking temperatures. They're basically a list of ingredients and assume you know... well, more than I do. Plus I don't speak German very well, so I had a nightmare making the one recipe I properly translated.
Yes, this is part of what I am tring to get at. What's needed are not cookbooks but cooking textbooks. Though apparently these exist now - I recently got one - but since I've not yet had time to actually start learning to cook I can't personally vouch for it.
I don't find it surprising at all. At least for myself, my brain tags cooking under the category of "boring housework chores", giving me negative motivation to actually learn it. The "pay attention to recipes and follow directions carefully and it's easy" part may actually be making it worse, since it strengthens the image of a dull, uninteresting task.
Intellectual types often find basic household chores as the kind of things that aren't worth wasting their time and smarts on, not when there are more interesting / important things to do. I can certainly admit being guilty of this.
Cooking is applied chemistry, and at the higher levels, it's art.
I categorize cooking as an organizational skill - I have some ingredients, and I'm going to arrange them in a way that suits me. The algorithms I engage aren't that different from the ones that come into play when I organize the junk on my desk.
A task many people also find boring and painful, sadly.
I see it as a process. The few things I can cook and cook regularly I tend to optimize to their absolute minimum effort needed.
I don't dispute that. Nonetheless it easily gets emotionally tagged as "boring chore", even if it could be made interesting once you overcame that emotional tag.
I definitely used to have the same attitude towards cooking, back when my dad and I were first learning to cook. There's a few things I did to alter my perceptions (in no particular order):
Start thinking of cooking as nifty biology/chemistry. There's a lot of books out there that go in-depth on this, but I think my favorite is "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" (Harold McGee 2004), which covers pretty much every foodstuff I've ever used.
Think of the last time you went out to a nice restaurant to eat, specifically of the best portion of food you got. Imagine being able to eat food of close to this quality multiple times a week, at much lower cost (I generally pay as much to make an 8-serving dish as a restaurant charges for 2). This probably only helps if you're big on food and/or eating fairly low-quality food now, but I found it a big motivator when I was learning.
If you're one of the many people posting in the dating advice comments above, consider the fact that cooking is an attractive skill in a romantic partner, so the time taken to learn it could be a useful investment.
Try starting with recipes you don't need to pay much attention to, such as stews; this helps to minimize the feeling of wasting time, as you just combine the ingredients and leave.
As always, your mileage may vary, especially if you don't think with your stomach like I do.
Duplicate comment?
Alicorn and I aren't the same person, if that's what you're asking!
I didn't see her comment before I started writing mine.
Just a goof on my part, I was thinking in terms of verbatim duplicates. I actually realize, on some level, that reading a post twice -- even several minutes apart! -- doesn't mean it's been posted twice, but didn't quite put this knowledge into action...
My apologies.