This is the guide I wish I had when I started cooking.

Flavor is one of the three optimization targets of cooking, along with nutrition and cost. You might be really good at making nutritious slop quickly, but if it bores your guests to death, you might need to invest in flavor.

To make food which tastes good, you need to taste it. Simple.

Yes, at first that means taking small bites of the food, often, all throughout cooking. Yes, you can taste it before cooking. You can just taste things.

If you only discover what your dish tastes like once you eat it, you now have capacity to adjust. If you taste your dish while cooking, you can act upon it: more salt, more cooking, more water.

By tasting regularly, you learn how specific actions affect your food. You build up a predictive model of how saltiness, cooking time and other variables affect the flavor, and in turn, affects your enjoyment of the food. The more you taste, the better your model gets.

At some point, you acquire an inner taste simulator. You can predict internally what something will taste like and be correct about it. You don’t even have to taste the dish that often anymore. You can even explore flavor space in your mind before starting to cook.

In most types of cooking, you can navigate by taste. If the soup is too thick, add water. If the potatoes are under cooked, cook them more. Quantities don’t really matter. The recipe is just a suggestion.

In most cooking, you level up by becoming better at layering and composing flavors, like a painter composing his piece.

Baking is different. Adding the whole packet of baking soda instead of half will ruin your cake. Changing your dough’s hydration by 20% will make it unworkable. If your flour has 10% protein instead of 15%, your bread won’t be chewy.

This is the case because baking is chemistry. You’re changing the structure of your food at the molecular level. Yeast converts sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Amylase transforms starch into sugar. Baking powder contains an acid and a base, which reacts at higher temperature and form carbon dioxide. Gluten molecules cross-link and become an elastic mesh.

In baking, you level up by becoming better at controlling those reactions, like a chemist who plans out a specific reaction pathway with specific quantities of reagent to produce a final compound.

If you bake enough, you’ll acquire an inner simulator of the chemical reactions happening in your food.

Your food may be cooking fine for a long time, when suddenly the bottom of your pan is charcoal, all in less than one minute.

Water boils at 100°C, and food starts to burn only over 140°C. As most foods are full of water, your food’s temperature will stay at 100°C for a while, while water boils off. Increasing the heat input will only lead to faster boiling.

Water boiling off makes your food drier. At some point, the part of your food that’s touching the heat source get fully dry. Without any water to block the temperature at 100°C anymore, it starts rising quickly. If your heat input was high, it can go to 200°C or more in a minute. At this temperature, food starts carbonizing (i.e. burning).

However, high temperature is necessary to get browning (Maillard reaction) and caramelization, which makes food so tasty. High temperature cooking requires constant attention, as water is not stabilizing your temperature anymore.

High heat cooking triggers specific chemical reactions, like baking, and creates specific layers of flavors, like cooking. By measuring temperature and tasting regularly, you’ll train your inner simulator, and always find the perfect time to adjust the heat.

Salt makes food taste good. Burning it makes it taste bad. Emulsification makes it taste... something?

There are many basic principles of cooking. You may not know all of them.

Read Ethan Chlebowski’s Cooking Fundamentals (~2h read). They’ll give you a complete picture of what flavor even is, the whole breadth of transformation you can do to food, the main chemical reactions that happen in cooking, and the role of common food molecules.

Direct experience is what will improve your inner flavor simulator and anchor it into the real world. However, knowing the principles behind cooking will make you learn much faster, and get a much crisper model of how your choices will affect the final flavor.

I have many more advice I could give. This was originally planned as a list of rants against my flatmates’ food, but I think learning fundamental principles is a much better way to improve one’s cooking than a disconnected set of advice.

This was all put into action today to make the Inkhaven Thanksgiving feast!

[Image of Thanksgiving to be added]

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