Home ∘ Next Lesson ➡️
<aside>
</aside>
My goal with this course is to equip you with the knowledge and skills you need to feel confident in the kitchen and cook well at home. This course is called 80/20 Cooking because it’s named after the 80/20 Principle, which states that 80% of your results in any given endeavor are driven by 20% of your efforts. In general, this means that you can make a lot of progress in anything that you want to learn by focusing on the few high-leverage skills that actually drive results. This course is my attempt to identify and distill those down.
I’ve spoken to tons of home cooks over the years, and I’ve noticed some familiar patterns. A lot of people feel stuck when it comes to cooking. Sure, they can follow a recipe, but it doesn’t always turn out how they want and they don’t feel comfortable expanding beyond that. They can follow instructions, but they don’t understand how to cook.
To get good at cooking, you have to understand that it is a sensory, intuitive process— not one that’s guided by directions in a recipe. Great cooks don’t follow instructions— they use taste, smell, feel, sight, sound, and touch to guide them. They know how to adapt, improvise, and use their instincts. Anyone can follow a recipe, but true cooking goes beyond that and requires sensory awareness and an understanding of the process that’s happening.
The good news is that cooking well requires only a few foundational skills that anyone can learn. Once you have those, you just have to get into the kitchen, get your reps in, and practice. This isn’t a guarantee that every dish you cook will turn out exceptional. I’ve been cooking regularly for well over a decade and I still make mistakes and have dishes that turn out poorly. But even those mistakes help make you a better cook, provided you use them as an opportunity to understand what went wrong and course correct in the future.
Once you’re armed with an understanding of the fundamentals of cooking, those mistakes become much more rare. In this course I will teach you how to think like a chef so that you can move beyond a process of following instructions and into one that’s intuitive, creative, and fun. You’ll understand what’s happening in the cooking process, learn how to build and balance flavor, and acquire some practical skills that make the cooking process easier and less stressful.
In order to do this, you need to start by thinking beyond recipes.
<aside>
</aside>
Cooking based on senses and intuition can feel like a big leap for people who are used to following recipes, but it’s essential to becoming a great cook. One of the first steps is to stop thinking just in terms of recipes and start thinking in terms of techniques and methods.
Let’s define some terms here.
Recipes are step-by-step instructions for creating a specific dish. They tell you what to do, in what order, with what ingredients, and in what proportions.
Recipes are great for learning new dishes, passing along info about how to cook something, exploring new cuisines, and understanding flavor combinations. They’re especially useful when you’re just starting out and don’t feel confident cooking something from scratch. But recipes have a lot of limitations.
I’ve written hundreds of recipes, and I know as well as anyone that nothing translates perfectly. The person who wrote the recipe was cooking in a different kitchen, using different equipment, and cooking with different food. Even if you’re using the same ingredients, there are always subtle variations because no two carrots, onions, or ribeyes are ever exactly the same.
When you follow a recipe exactly, what you’re really trying to do is achieve the same outcome (in terms of flavor and presentation) as the person who wrote the recipe. But once you recognize that recipes aren’t always exact and that you’re always **working with slightly different variables, you’ll realize that you often need to adapt in order to be successful. The real way to ensure that you’re going to get the same outcome isn’t by blindly following the recipe, but by paying attention, tasting continuously, and adjusting based on what your own senses tell you.
This is perhaps the one thing I need to emphasize most to newer cooks who are used to following recipes to a tee— in the long run, following recipes too strictly actually makes you a worse cook. You need to learn to rely on your own senses, rather than the specific instructions of a recipe, and you need to be able to deviate from the recipe at times.
This can feel really intimidating at first, and that’s okay! It’s a gradual process, but there are some things you can do to help you make this transition. The first is to learn to think in terms of techniques and methods rather than recipes, and the second is to focus on building your kitchen intuition via pattern recognition. We’ll dive into both below.
<aside>
</aside>