Cooking is interesting and non-trivial. It is interesting for 3 reasons. Firstly, it is far more flexible than buying ready made food, whether it is take away, or fresh/frozen ready meals. (I exclude restaurant food, because that is about the full experience rather than the food on the plate. That is interesting in its own right.) Cooking is flexible because you can choose the level of taste and health balance that you want. Secondly, you also get full control over the ingredients involved, you can experiment with quality and quantity to achieve something other than the lowest unit price for the highest profit. Thirdly, what you are dealing with, essentially, is controlling a series of chemical reactions, which has to be interesting.
It is however, as I say, non-trivial. It is not as easy as following the heating instructions on your ready meal or telephoning the local take away. You have to learn to manage the application of heat, as well acquire various preparatory skills such as chopping, peeling etc. This is basically down to practice. There is no magic easy way to learn this stuff.
When I recently started cooking for the family on a daily basis, I felt I needed to get to grips with the basics, so I started out with a couple of how to cook books from two of the UK's TV chefs. I got Jamie Oliver's Cook with Jamie, and Delia's How to Cook books. I was disappointed. Both texts seemed to me to suffer from the same problem. They had a few words, Delia probably slightly more, about the techniques and equipment involved and then just proceeded with the usual list of recipes that you would find in any cookbook. This is not the kind of thing that one expects from a book on how to cook. There are no lessons. There is no progressive development of skills.
At the other end of the scale are the sciencey books. This category is dominated by McGee On Food and Cooking, and the category is fleshed out by anything by Heston Blumenthal, who bases all of his stuff on McGee's research in any event. This is fine in and of itself, but what I found lacking was a simple application of the sciencey stuff to the practicality of cooking. Blumenthal's Family Cookbook probably comes closest.
So my intention in this blog is to set out a system of instructions to produce food, which allows for skills to build up. This mirrors in a sense my own culinary development, but hopefully with the errors edited out. To achieve the progression of skills that seems to me to be missing, I will be describing each dish in three different ways. First will be the absolutely bare minimum steps so that you can put something on the table that someone else may eat. In other words, this is going to be the absolute basics of the dish. Secondly, I will take things further, and we will consider things like seasoning, flavours, ingredients and so on. Thirdly, and lastly we will consider what is actually going on in the cooking process for each dish, how to enhance various factors with that knowledge, and where you may wish to make your own changes once you have your basic knowledge. This will be the real chef's area for techniques.
And why Skeptical? First of all, because I have yet to meet a Cookbook which claims to teach cooking which actually does anything of the sort, and so I am skeptical of any which claim to do so. But the blog isn't called Buying Cookbooks Skeptically is it? Skepticism, at a fundamental level, is about evidence. The whole approach I intend to take is to explain the basics of a dish and recommend that you try it. Test it out. Experiment. Then, slowly, when the basics are clear we will add a bit more complexity on top. Then test that. At no point should you take my word for anything. I will try, and fail, to cite proper sources for any claims so you can go and read up on the theory as well. THAT is a skeptical approach to cooking.
