I've been teaching my friends how to cook. Here's what I've learned:

Follow the recipe, then don't follow it. As a beginner, follow the damn recipe. Read the ingredients list, buy the ingredients, and follow the instructions to the word. I know too many beginners who get lazy, don't follow the recipe and then the food doesn't taste good. Then, once you've gotten it down, start to tweak and experiment. Try adding a new ingredient or substituting something you don't have. Once you're not a beginner, you can skip following the recipe.

Learn the basic science of searing, emulsions, salting and temperature (hot & fast versus low & slow). The Food Lab/Serious Eats is a great resource for this. Salt Fat Acid Heat is also good.

Gain intuition. Learn to taste the food and see what's missing. You probably need to add more salt. Maybe a little acid? Or you could slip in some butter.

You will need to use more fat and salt than you think. When beginners watch me cook, they're shocked at how much salt and fat I add. It's still a fraction of how much you eat at a restaurant. This is especially true if you're blanching or boiling something, as the water needs to be really really really salty. Pasta water needs quite a few tablespoons of salt. Don't worry about it.

I read a theory that the whole bacon wrapped whatever craze was due to bacon being essentially fat and salt. People became obsessed with adding bacon because they weren't adding enough salt and fat.

American food tends to not have a lot of vegetables, but a crapton of carbs and meat. Try to learn Indian, Chinese, Korean or Mediterranean dishes. Beans are a great meat substitute.

I am sorry to be so harsh, but this guide will not teach you anything about cooking, nor will it be of any particular relevance to founders [^].

The blog post is a 3,500 word advertisement to Amazon affiliation links. A selection of "helpful" advice given in the post:

- How to chop food? "Just search them on YouTube"

- "When you are first learning to cook I recommend avoiding complex recipes"

- "Get cooking"

Finally: "The goal of this post is [..] to provide fairly comprehensive [..] roadmap for going from a cooking noob to solid home chef." Sorry. This is not it.

[^] Alternatively, the title might be interpreted to mean "Cooking for founders [who are visiting you]". This is also not the case.

I'm bemused as to why this is aimed at "founders", but whatever. I would like to say, though, that if I'd made a list of essential kit, I would have included a sauté pan; it's like a frying pan, but deeper and with vertical sides and usually with a (transparent) lid. You can cook great meals in a sauté pan - do your onions/spices/garlic etc, then add meat (if that's your thing), then stock, pasatta (or whatever) and then the bulking stuff - pasta etc - and all on the hob, rather than in an oven. Really versatile bit of kit.

This is not good advice, it's just an attempt to cash in on Amazon affiliate links.

If you have someone who needs to learn how to quickly, you don't teach them theory, like the different kinds of heat transfer (which this says you should learn, and then names them, and then does not teach you about them). You teach them how to make some basic, healthy things that work with a bunch of ingredients.

It's really easy to teach someone to make a stir fry or a one-dish oven-baked dinner, and those are great starting points because you can use a lot of different ingredients with those techniques. Once you can manage those, you'll be able to make yourself a quick, easy, cheap and healthy dinner. You can read books about theory and heat transfer methods after that.

Love the sentiment behind the post - cooking is great life skill to get good at, but I think the "Essential Gear" is definitely far from "essential" (and maybe this will help the new cook from being too scared of the list).

Here's my version of the "minimum viable set": 1. big, sharp knife 2. cutting board 3. wooden spoon 4. pan.

IMO, the particularly dispensable: "instant read digital cooking thermometer", "micro-plane zester", "fish turner spatula", "large heat-safe glass measuring cup", "honing rod".

Again, still love the intention. Nice post!

Want to actually learn how to cook, no bullshit?

Read Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Then read Jacques Pepin's La Technique. Then watch Jacques' old tv show Fast Food My Way. You will become a decent cook just from these 3 sources. It covers all the basics you need to know, and the rest comes from experience. (Jacques also put a 3 hour video of techniques on YouTube recently, go find and watch it. And check the JP Foundation website for more recipes and videos)

All recipes are just patterns and methods applied to ingredients. Often there is a vast range of tolerance in each, and you learn the tolerances mainly by exceeding them. So experiment with recipes and you will learn what doesn't work, which leaves only what does.

> Home-cooked food is almost always healthier than restaurant food, so don’t try to learn to cook and cook the healthiest possible version of each dish. Most veggies taste better roasted in a generous amount of olive oil...

It took me way to long to learn not to be afraid of oil when cooking and grilling food. I burned a lot of food for awhile under the assumption that I shouldn't be adding too much fat to homecooked food.

Some good cooking shows.

* Matty Matheson - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpqH8-BBNTsluhcOzFKWLuw

* French Cooking Academy - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0lG3Ihe4LGV851lODRIS5g

* Bon Appetit - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbpMy0Fg74eXXkvxJrtEn3w

* J. Kenji Lopez-Alt - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqqJQ_cXSat0KIAVfIfKkVA

* Munchies - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaLfMkkHhSA_LaCta0BzyhQ

So much complication. As a long-time happy and healthy vegetarian "cook", here is my utterly simple heuristic that never goes wrong: assuming you have a good-quality non-stick pan: on medium heat olive oil you can toss in any and all vegetables, a source of protien, ginger, garlic, and some freshly ground black -- or mixed -- peppers and salt. You're set. (Also assuming no allergies to said basic ingredients.)

E.g. tonight (I'm in CET) I made this simple veggie delicacy; happens to be vegan too:

1. toss in some freshly chopped ginger and garlic in some olive oil on medium heat

2. add a couple of finely chopped shallots (or even a plain white onion is fine)

3. sprinkle some cumin seeds, salt, and freshly ground black pepper

4. next up: two chopped green courgettes

5. then, toss in two chopped, medium-sized portobello mushrooms

6. finally, add some precooked chickpeas (but if you have the discipline for it, the best chickpeas are dried peas that you soak overnight for 10 hours, and boil the next morning for 30 minutes; no contest).

Stir-fry it all for 10 minutes or so, and you'll intuitively know it when it is ready. You can have this with any kind of carbs -- couscous, tortilla wraps, rice, some variants of pasta, bulgar, you name it.

Rinse, repeat with many other vegetables and protien combination (flavoured tofu, seitan, et al). No need to go wild over following a recipe to the dot, or on heat transfer mechanics.

> I’m calling it Cooking For Founders because I think it will resonate with a lot of entrepreneurs who think like me.

Uhh, ok. Includes tips like "Make it taste good"

I like how much thought went behind this post. I think it can be very useful to anyone looking to start in the kitchen.

However, it really doesn’t resonate with me. I was hoping to get some extra tips for min/maxing my kitchen time or some tasty slow cooker recipes. Perhaps a recipe for a macro and micro nutrient rich smoothie with minimal ingredients.

I worked as a line cook for half a year, changed my life. I learned how to live on $10/hour and how to cook anything quickly and have it come out tasty. And I only cried in the walk in occasionally.

Cooking well is mostly attitude and confidence. Prep and cook everything at the same time, figuring out the order to do it all in parallel is a fun puzzle and executing it gives you a rush. I never measure any ingredients and improvise recipes constantly.

"Don't cook everything evenly" is very good advice. Let things sit at appropriate heat, amateur cooks are too touchy. But I disagree about recipes, they are just suggestions to me, good to know the outline and then leverage your general knowledge of cooking to get it done.

> [...] others, like searing in a pan, use convection where the heat is transferred directly surface to surface.

Maybe cooks use these terms differently but in physics this is heat conduction not convection. Convection is when heat is moved by moving matter in gases or fluids.

>Baking is much harder and less forgiving than any other kind of cooking. If you’re just starting to get into cooking, don’t start with baking.

Well, that depends a lot on what you're baking. Baking bread can be very easy, and very rewarding. There are few things more delicious than freshly baked bread with butter. There are some simple cakes that are also easy to make. But yes, fancy desserts are hard.

How about "avoiding cooking for founders that want to eat healthy but really hate cooking?"

Lately I buy a healthy roasted nut butter (pistachio, walnut, pecan etc) and dip it (covered completely) in a mix of hempseeds/shredded-coconut/flaxseeds and eat that with a spoon. I'd buy a non-cookbook that gave me more paleo/AIP/low-lectin food-combinations like that. Or just info on how to make better salads. (I add a lot of fermented foods like pickled red onions lately)

I do sometimes bake a bunch of turkey meatballs and eat those over a couple days - but I've given up on making turkey burgers or chicken. It's just too much work. I'd rather heat up frozen broccoli daily with a side of canned tuna. I really hate cooking, it's a huge time-sink and extremely unenjoyable.

It is not convection but conduction!

I’ve wanted a Cooking For Founders book for a while. Particularly tips of foods that are easy to preprep and remix and reheat easily, for people who have little cooking experience.

One tip: get a sound vide cooker. It’s so foolproof and you have a lot more leeway, sometimes even hours, when you actually eat. Great if you get locked into something and don’t want to be interrupted until you’re done.

Tyler, baking is not hard! All you have to do is follow the instructions. Which recipe scorned you? I will help you learn to bake.

The key to understanding roasting is that every cookbook and Google result is lying to you. Roasting doesn't mean just putting something in the oven on high heat, the things you're roasting need to be far enough apart on the tray that there is space for air in between them. Otherwise you're steaming, not roasting. The point of roasting is to make the outside super crispy, while keeping the inside moist and chewy.

E.g. how to roast chicken thighs:

- Preheat cast iron pan in oven until the oven has been at 450 for at least 10 min.

- Place four chicken thighs in the cast iron pan with a good amount of space in between, after tossing them in a gallon ziplock bag with olive oil, sea salt, and pepper.

- Roast for 20 min at 450, then pour out excess fat. (If you don't do this, then again you're just steaming the chicken.)

- Turn down oven to 400, and cook for another 25 - 30 min.

You can apply the exact same technique to most vegetables and mushrooms, but understanding and nailing the principle is key. This recipe for roast maitake mushrooms also explains it well: https://foragerchef.com/simple-roasted-hen-of-the-woods/

this made me think of what my take on "Cooking for Engineers" would be- roughly based on what I do personally.

essential gear would be a chef's knife, a stainless or cast iron pan, a nonstick pan, a large dutch oven, a sous vide circulator w a large bucket, a 10qt instant pot, and a vacuum sealer.

learn braising, roasting, sauteeing, and baking (veggies and proteins)

whenever you cook something where you can make extra, make a LOT extra, keeps a couple portions and vacuum seal the rest off and freeze them flat (keep your freezer really well organized)

find your core recipes and keep those perpetually in the freezer in small portions

learn to improvise and make gold out of whatever's in the kitchen (if you need inspiration, watch chopped)

Looking forward next to reading Founding for Cooks.

Huge fan of Tyler Tringas. Do you have any advice for startups founded by parents with toddlers?

Thank you for this resource and the conversation! Trying this year to really up cooking game.

Why are founders special in the kitchen?