The Three Cookbooks that Build Your Cooking Knowledge
There have been too many days, where I question my cooking knowledge. I’ll want to make changes to a recipe but don’t quite know where I should start. I have a pretty good foundation of cooking knowledge, being around chefs, being an occasional sous chef and working in an interactive dining restaurant for starters. That alone has proven to not be enough. This is when I turn to cookbooks.
To be honest, I probably second guess myself more than I should in the kitchen. The stove smells fear so I pretend to know what I’m doing, lol.
In order to stop pretending, trust myself and the process, there are three cookbooks that build my (and your) foundational cooking knowledge.
These three cookbooks will help develop your understanding about seasonings, layering, why you need certain spices and how they build upon and enhance what you are cooking, not to mention techniques that will make you feel like a chef!
Along with reinforcing your cooking foundation, they also include recipes to actually experience why and how the techniques work. Let’s check them out!
1. Seasoning (Jade K. Nguyen)
Seasoning breaks down the elements that help make or break a meal, spices and seasoning blends. Inclusive of recipes, explanations, and flavor profiles of spices, herbs, oils, alcohol, and dairy and other cheeses, this cookbook is your go to when you want to make your food pop!
This will help you season like a pro and stop being jealous of people who can make a dish flavorful without having to measure.
2. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (Samin Nosrat)
This modern classic is an invaluable guide to the four elements present in every dish: Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat. Nosrat breaks down each element in a way that any cook can understand. What makes it even better, is its ability to empower, guide, liberate you from the idea of making your dishes perfect.
This cookbook offers not just hidden gems and new ideas, but reinforcement that you belong in any kitchen.
3. Start Here (Sohla El-Waylly)
Start Here, literally. Reach for this cookbook when you want to learn techniques that have created many a disastrous cooking story in your kitchen. From learning how to cook from a recipe to jealousy inducing knife skills, this cookbook will teach you how to cook everything from sweet to savory and anything in between by developing your ability to sauté, roast, butter, bake and more.
This cookbook is sure to be your companion for years to come.
Why These Three Work Together
Seasoning builds you flavor intuition.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat gives you why, when, and how to enhance your dishes.
Start Here gives you the techniques and recipes to put it all together.
With all three, you begin to the understand the science, art, and skill involved in cooking.
For the next three weeks, I will share in-depth insights from each cookbook and share recipes from those cookbooks that I have made my own.
My hope is that you all start to trust yourself in the kitchen and start to feel your way through cooking opposed to being tied to the recipe with the help of these cookbooks.
To better develop these skills, I’m building a cookbook community that will help you all take any recipe in a cookbook and make it your own. We will actually cook from those cookbooks collecting on your shelves barely opened, most sitting unused.
Each month we will:
Explore a featured cookbook together
Curate a menu, make the recipes your own, and how to best use the cookbook to in your life
Create a supportive group of fellow cookbook lovers, cooks, and aspiring cooks to share wins, flops, and discoveries
Sound fun? Sign up for my newsletter to know when the From the Kitchen Of Cookbook Club will go live and how you can officially join the club!
As always,
xoxo~Christilisa