What Hacker News says

ShadowmistAug 2025

You'd probably enjoy "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking", which has beautiful photography and possibly goes deeper into cooking than any other book. The main author was CTO at Microsoft back in the day, and another author founded a company that makes a thermometer with some pretty neat tech.

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MezzoDelCamminOct 2024

OK, how about sharing some cooking resources worth looking into (this is more for future searches)? Here's mine:

1. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. Not strictly a cooking book in the sense of recipes, but the most exhaustive encyclopedia / intro into the science and mechanics of cooking

2. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. The previous, but written with a "more is more" approach and an extra focus on modern techniques. More details, more pictures, (much) more volume and much pricier.

3. Serious eats Food Lab - Probably the best resource on "why/how" a given recipe / technique works that's accessible for free on the internet. I think the main author of this (J. Kenji Lopez-Alt) is also co-author of one part of the Modernist Cuisine.

4. Good Eats by Alton Brown. This used to be a TV show running for well over a decade. Alton Brown usually tries to do one recipe / technique / ingredient per episode and explain as much as he can in 30min or so. The first episodes / seasons are a bit dated (I think he goes over some of the older stuff in his later seasons), but overall probably the best TV show on cooking I ever saw.

5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel. This is a bit of a mixed bag, but when it comes to a channel that I'd recomend to a beginner, I'd probably start with this. Second would probably be someone like some of the Adam Ragusea older episodes (I think he lately went into body buliding a bit too much), or some of the older stuff from "@FrenchGuyCooking" (I got to him through a video done by @ThisOldTony).

6. For recipes : personally I go for David Lebovitz. Old SF cook who moved to Paris some decades ago and at some point used to publish a lot of recipes on his website (though I have the impression he lately pivoted into more of restaurants reviews / social media, the archive is still good).

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jiehongApr 2018

The fact is that not all "why"s are known in cooking yet, and the combination of ingredients is so varied that it's not always easy to go from a myth to a reasonable explanation.

Although, lots of research has greatly improved, and I warmly recommend you to read “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” (2011).

Then, for techniques, I strongly recommend following a book designed for chefs when they learn. For example, in French, I recommend “La Cuisine de Référence” (2015) by Michel Maincent that teaches you how to select ingredients, cut them, to various traditional techniques and how to correct them if you fail, and why you failed.

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317070Apr 2018

The solution I came up with (watching many many cooking videos) is different: cook the spaghetti in the sauce for the last minutes. You get the same effect, but less of the oily mouth feel which I did not like. It also helps thicken your tomato sauce.

Also, +1 on `Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking`.

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civilittyJul 2023

Practice. Practice. Practice. Cooking is all about building up an intuition about texture, time, heat, flavor, and a bunch of other things that impact the final product. It helps if you can dedicate an entire week to a single dish at a time so that you cook it over and over again, experimenting with minor variations each time. You have to practice to develop this intuition because cooking is imprecise and allows for an incredible amount of variation when selecting and performing the recipe. Only once you have some of that intuition can you actually take a scientific approach to cooking (which is mostly a waste of time unless you're a celebrity chef anyway).

If you want to get really scientific then Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking [1] by the patent troll is probably the most comprehensive resource available but if you're still trying to move beyond memorization, it is complete and total overkill. I would recommend focusing on the above advice rather than on trying to make the art of cooking scientific. It doesn't really matter how well you understand the science of meat temperatures when the natural variation in steak marbling can vary your cooking times by 10-30%.

SeriousEats.com is a great resource for very detailed recipes where the authors experiment and discuss results rather than just providing a single recipe. Whenever I'm learning a new dish (I don't learn recipes, I learn how to make dishes!), I go to SeriousEats, Reddit, and Youtube to find several recipes for the dish I'm trying to make. Using my past experience and intuition, I distill my own recipe tailored to the exact ingredients and tools available to me.

Other than Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, I can recommend On Food and Cooking, The Way to Cook and The Joy of Cooking, The Professional Chef, Essentials of Italian Cooking, Ratio, Food Lab. If you're looking for a reference on combining flavors see The Flavor Bible

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_Cuisine

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lrhegebaMar 2022

Nathan Myhrvold (of excel fame) used his microsoft money to create a test kitchen and explore the physical foundations of cooking. His published results were a spectacular success, citing https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/1734386142/ref=sr_1_2?crid=36... : "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking is a revolutionary treatment of cooking that pushes the boundaries of the culinary arts. Winner of the 2012 James Beard Award for Cookbook of the Year, inducted into the Gourmand Cookbook Hall of Fame, and named one of the best cookbooks of the century by the New Yorker, its six volumes explore the history of cuisine and explain the science of cooking in a way that’s accessible to both professional chefs and home cooks."

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