just try shit. just throw a bunch of things together and see what happens

https://preview.redd.it/j8qu0kftcf7d1.jpeg?width=228&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=02e1cdb356c84bdd33e832e0bb496313bf8cafe5 Fuck.

it's better than rocks

​ https://preview.redd.it/cx0cmzdovh7d1.png?width=874&format=png&auto=webp&s=03773aa6e30151e6046c748d3ee8d1eb2c3a6692

This... is underrated

Remove the censor bar 🤤

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T52Ww2_07hQ

First try whatever you can find around your house, like perhaps bleach and ammonia. Who knows what you might come up with!

pizza sauce + 1/8 cup non-toxic glue

Make it toxic for that extra spice 

I don’t think shit is very tasty

Needs more salt

Try with intention and remember that if u make a mistake u can just eat it and nobody else will know ❤️

This is the worst possible advice because you suddenly realize there are a hundred million different ingredients in the world and then you get decision paralysis Learn some staples, like chicken and rice. Learn how to make those staples so well you can do it with your eyes closed. Then from there you can start experimenting and figuring out interesting recipes and what you really like

this is the worst possible advice because it's a joke

Then it turns out inedible for the 4th day in a row, and now you're left without food for the day and you can't afford any more because you already spent your daily budget :( Wish it was that easy, and I'm saying it as someone with some basic cooking skills

I see you also leaned to cook by playing Breath of the Wild.

^ this is exactly it. There’s like, 12 or 13 ways to cook things that are practical in a standard home kitchen. Literally just find something you want to cook, follow the cooking part of a recipe and throw whatever you like in with it.

old horneater recipe. take everything you have. throw him in pot. don't let anyone airsick touch the spices.

Just invented cinnamon syrup, it foes great with vanilla icecream. Im gonna be famous mom

That's how the Powerpuff girls were born. Do you really want Mojo Jojo to turn into a villain, just because you want to learn how to cook?

Ok enjoy my peanut butter and soy sauce cake

People think I can cook but that's literally the only thing I know how to do. Cook things separately at first. Eggs is a classic newbie thing. Meat, onions, mushrooms, potatoes, many different vegetables. Then once you know the timing and feel how to fry them, fry them at the good timings. To level up learn how to make sauce which usually just involves adding some stuff during the last minute: cream, curry, soy sauce, mustard... many variations. One day I'll learn to use the oven and bake cakes but seriously, life is too short to not fry pan everything.

It definitely is annoying that people try to be funny guys under genuine questions people have (tech support, cooking, average advice seeking) like the OP isn't going to be the only one with that exact question and do you really want some dumb reddit karma seeking comment to be the legacy you leave for someone genuinely asking for help?

The ROMs subreddit is the worst for this. Every post - EVERY POST - has snarky asshole shit as over half the comments. It really gives my hobby a bad name (maybe deserved now). How hard is it to just be nice instead of mean? Or at least blunt instead of snarky?

Tbf every single post is people asking how to get roms despite it being clearly against the rules, to the point that it has ruined any other conversation in the sub.

I think you just identified the core problem, though: "other" conversations. Reddit is essentially both a place where existing communities discuss news and community contributions, _and_ where people from outside the community come to ask questions. And these are fundamentally different things. I wonder if, ultimately, a better UI _could_ have been developed to separate the two a bit, while maintaining them both as being visible, to avoid having engagement drop off a cliff for one. We're too far gone now, of course, but if the site ever loses critical mass...

It’s funny but that’s very similar to the problem they have on StackOverflow too I think

Stack Overflow gets around it by not having the news and contribution discussions.

jesus christ you’re right, i browsed that sub for 5 whole minutes and everyone has such a colossal stick up their ass

For some people that’s the only legacy they’ll leave behind

That's what I'm always saying: if you have nothing of value to contribute, shut the fuck up.

ummm methinks it was too hot in the kitchen for someone

I disagree. If there were only unserious answers then yea, but there are going to be people who take the question seriously and answer sincerely. What's the problem if other people feel like making jokes too.

There are meme subs for being funny People needing help don't want to sift through sarcastic responses to find an actual answer

That is a risk you take on a public forum tho, you can ask and people can joke. I welcome people being funny in any sub, makes the conversation more enjoyable for everyone. And there are subs you can use the "serious" tag to prevent joke answers.

The joke answers can at least be funny instead of the same brainless regurgitation

Questions like the one above warrant a smart ass response imo. You learn by doing, so either go out and do the thing and learn from mistakes and develop skills over time, or don't. Best way to get better at cooking? Cook more. Best way to learn cars? Get broken cars, fix them, make parts, just make it work. There's no magic response that makes learning any easier, like these OPs are asking for. The trick is just to do it.

Advice would be cool.

>You learn by doing You're correct. However, being an unhelpful prick doesn't expedite the process either. Not to mention all I know about computers and stuff like that has purely been from combined knowledge gained from troubleshooting which *drumroll* ###OFTEN LEADS YOU TO REDDIT THREADS People have been learning how to do things from people who know how to do them since before history. Stop acting like that's gonna change.

There is a massive difference between a targeted question, and vaguely asking "how do I do?". I'm not talking about people asking genuine questions, I'm talking about the vague "how do I cook better" which provides no context for answers and is just plain fucking lazy.

You're literally doing the thing being mocked in the original post, just acting smug and condescending to inflate your own ego while pretending that someone asking a question should already know the answer.

You're reading too far into it, bud

Youtube: Buy this $560 Damascus steel knife and buy these rare plums that are only in season for 12 minutes each year and then follow this 30 day process to make a meal that feeds 1

ah, the joshua weissman cooking school

He doesn’t do mass appeal recipes using ingredients that are rare or that take an extreme amount of time unless that’s the point of the video (ex the 200 hour burrito). If anything he does certain videos specifically with low ingredient or ‘easy’ recipes.

Also, his early videos were great, I watched him since he had like 20k subs and his recipes were super grounded. It was only after his But Better series blew up he started to make the "6 hour cook time, $150 ingredients" videos, because that's what But Better is and obviously people loved to watch it despite that. I don't watch him much anymore not because of his cooking, but because he is leaning waaay too heavily into his meme persona and it rubs me the wrong way.

Recommendations for decent cooking channels that don't use too expensive ingredients and equipment: Brian Lagerstrom Pro Home Cooks Food Wishes Adam Ragusea Ethan Chlebowski My Name is Andong J. Kenji Lopez-Alt Early Joshua Weissman videos PROTIP: Put them on while you are eating. You don't need to make the recipe, but you learn a lot just by watching.

futurecanoe

ah, the opposite of the adam ragusea school of cooking

My #1 tip is unless ur baking (or maybe making rice), don’t measure anything. You might mess up a few times, but you’ll get a much better intuition for what to do.   My #2 tip is add as many spices as you think would go good with your dish, and incorporate them as early as possible so they get cooked in and the flavors develop. There are some exceptions, like you typically add garam masala as a finisher at the end, but the best dishes have a lot of spices and they’re added at every step of cooking. Apart from salt, you will almost never add too much of a spice. I think I remember putting too much turmeric in a dish one time and it made it a little worse, and that’s like the only time I’ve ever had a problem like that. 

Obvious exception would be imo when trying an existing recipe for the first time - measure things so you get an idea of what it's "supposed" to taste like, but feel free to improvise if you don't like it after a taste test.

Well I’ll look at the measurements but I still eyeball it. And sometimes if it’s a new recipe and I feel like it’s lacking something (maybe there’s no good source of acid and I think it won’t pop enough), then maybe I can add extra tomato or lime or whatever.  Maybe if it’s a new ingredient you’ve never used before, measuring could be a good idea, but I generally do not measure, even with new recipes. 

Fair enough, that works too.

I don’t wanna ping on your helpful advice, but the opposite is also super valid. See how far you can get with the minimum. Salt and pepper is the most advanced version of this, and will need you to practice your cooking technique. But try it.

Yeah, imo you don't need crazy spices to make chicken taste good- it's chicken, of course it's good.

I have had my ass whooped in comp by someone bringing it back to basics and showing off their mastery of the preparation, serving dishes with 2-3 ingredients in compositions so perfectly balanced that I was blown away. I think there’s a lot to be said for focusing and practicing the simple, to benefit from the huge returns you’ll get from that improvement, before exploring the enhancements of more complicated compos

I think it depends on the dish yeah. Most of what I cook are curries and other dishes that very much center the spices put in. Without enough spice you would lose a lot of depth of flavor and it would taste lacking.  But I guess if I’m making something like a stir fry, I’ll put hardly any spices and focus more on the aromatics and various sauces and things.  I do stand by the fact that I think most people I know are afraid of putting too much spice in their food and ruining a dish, and I think that’s a fear you have to let go of.   But I mean you can cook however you want, if you’re happy with it that’s what matters. 

I think for someone approaching it new, there’s a lot of benefit to restraint. There is a common urge among commis to throw the kitchen shelf at a dish. This distracts from fundamentals. And yeah, blanco nino ain’t gonna take their subzero cooking skills and throw down a decent curry, on purpose or otherwise

Respectfully, I hate you. You sound like my parents teaching me to cook as a teenager. “Ok now put in [ingredient]” “How much?” “Uhhh you’ll know.” *something is wrong with the meal later* “How much [ingredient] did you put in?” “I dunno about this much?” “Oh yeah that’s not enough/too much.” Every fucking time. For like 5 years. They’d even write out the recipe so I could do it by myself and then not put how many of each thing was needed. So yeah, I’d say only don’t measure things if you’ve been cooking for a while and actually know what ur doing.

Well I’m not saying to not know an amount to put in. You can read a recipe that says “two tablespoons” or something, but then I would approximate it. You’ll get a better feel for it by doing that, and sure you’ll make mistakes, but you’ll get better (I guess if you have no idea how much a tablespoon is you can measure it at first to learn). Then once you start getting better at cooking, you can start relying less and less on what the recipe says and more and more on intuition.   I think the benefit for me is when I’m actively measuring it out, I’ll do exactly what it says and I have no room for creativity. When I don’t measure, what goes in ends up being some combination of what the recipe says and what my intuition tells me will taste good. And I don’t think you build intuition as well when you measure it out, because you don’t really feel how much is going into the food when you’re just checking if it’s at the right line on your measuring cup or whatever.  But yeah I can relate. I have a lot of my grandmas recipes on notecards and they just say something like “lots of onions” or whatever and I have no idea even what ratio I’m supposed to add of different things. Sometimes if it’s a dish I’ve never had before, I find a few recipes online to get an idea of about what the ratios are or what it’s supposed to look like, but I think you build intuition a lot faster if you save the measuring cups for baking. 

What do you mean, measure two tablepoons. You take a tablespoon. You put it into container of salt, and put it into your dish. And then again. What is here to measure lol.

I mean don’t do that, and instead grab a large pinch of salt and add it to the dish. So you get a feel for the actual amounts and whatnot.  That’s just my advice though, you do you. 

I guess I get what you mean when it is like "take 500grams of X", then of course I won't measure it or weight it, I will just take two cups of it becuase in my head I know it is close enough. But with like tablespoons? It's much faster and simpler to just take 2 tablespoons instead of taking pinches lol. I don't measure anything nor weight, just take 2 tablespoons.

I basically dump like a fifth of a container of garlic powder and the same amount of taco seasoning every time I make rice.

Do you toast your rice before adding liquid?  When I have extra time I love to put a bit of olive oil in the pot with the dry rice and spices and toast it for like 5 minutes before adding water or veggie broth or whatever. I can’t really describe what it changes other than it makes the flavors a bit deeper if that means anything to you. I think that’s just a general thing about toasting spices in oil. Their flavors will change and since a lot of the flavor molecules are oil-soluble, you get what feels like a more cohesive final product (plus the oil keeps the flavor molecules touching your tongue for longer, which is I think a big part of so-called “depth of flavor”)

No I don’t, although I do often add olive oil to the water I boil it in. Are you supposed to toast it in oil while it’s still dry and uncooked? That sounds like a fire or burnt food waiting to happen to me.

Yeah it’s pretty common. Just make sure you’re paying attention and stirring. It shouldn’t burn in 5 minutes unless you let the oil somehow get to like 500 Fahrenheit. 

You can 100% add too much of spices, I once misread a recipe and added a tablespoon of cinnamon instead of a teaspoon. Tasted of nothing but cinnamon

Not claiming you can’t, I did say I added too much turmeric before. Cinnamon is a pretty strong spice so that’s fair. I’m just saying I think people are too scared of putting too much of a spice and that’s counterproductive to learning and stuff.    Everyone will make mistakes while cooking, that’s part of the learning process. Now you know not to put that much cinnamon in a dish lol. 

i try to think of cooking as an rpg, where as you level up, you can make progressively better and better dishes. then I think what would it be like if there were some power leveling bastards out there, cooking twelve tons of spaghetti in order to master making 5 star beef bourgignon

Idk after living off of spaghetti + pesto for like a month i don’t feel like my cooking skills improved

I was a chef once upon a time. If you ever wanna bounce questions off a stranger, feel free to ping me

Love this

Google AI mentioned, so a friendly mandatory reminder to make sure to put &udm=14 at the end of the URL string.

What does that do?

removes the clutter (AI results, knowledge box, ads, product scrolls)

Serious answer to this. To learn to cook, learn to chop onions and fry them on a pan with a bit of oil; there are youtube videos s for this. Add crushed garlic, salt and pepper, and then fry whatever you want with the onions. Stir-fry meat. Add vegetables or bell peppers or eggs or something like that. Once you can do this, then you have the necessary confidence to follow a recipe. If you just focus on frying onions, everything else will feel familiar.

i will obey the machine...

I basically look up stuff on the internet and try to do it with less ingredients because they always use expensive shit. Then use that knowledge to cook up random stuff that you feel like eating. Find out what goes well with each other and tastes good and just try to combine them. It’s always just carbs+sauce(optional)+whatever’s lying around in the fridge(optional), some sort of soup or some kind of casserole. At least for me. Also trying to recreate convenience store foods from scratch is really fun and teaches you a lot. Like for example making your own pizza. It’s also a lot cheaper.

Facebook: lol stupid young person doesn't know how to do something we didn't bother teaching them

tumblr: nobody answers but you find a good post about it a week later

Step One: Find a Rat

To cook with or cook with?

Twitter: either genuine advice or same as Reddit