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Nick_Tarleton comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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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.
They didn't have to work hard, and they ate meat more than most humans could eat. I just finished reading the part of Clark's A Farewell to Alms where he covers how hunter-gatherers where far better off than basically any farmer. Going through my notes, I see:
It's not that much extra effort, and if I ate more meat at the time I would have discovered the (substantial) effect much sooner. Also, if I'd been taught to cook by a human being instead of teaching myself from cookbooks, I would never have made the faulty assumption about that step being skippable. The insight about browning meat fully is easy to discover, and once discovered is normally transmitted to other cooks as part of their training.
Respectfully, you seem to me to be clinging rather hard to an unevidenced theory.
How early did people have knives that were good enough to make cutting meat into small chunks reasonably easy?
I couldn't find it, but I would guess when we moved from bronze to iron.
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.