The flavor bible

What Hacker News says

1. ZeWakaMay 2026
   Sounds like The Flavor Bible - it's a great reference book to find pairings of ingredients.
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2. JadeNBMay 2026
   > Sounds like The Flavor Bible - it's a great reference book to find pairings of ingredients.

   I think fpshero says exactly that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294459):

   > I have a wonderful book that explores this idea of an atlas of flavours that work together.

   > The flavor bible.

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3. 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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4. bolt7469Sep 2022
   The Flavor Bible is an excellent book for pairing foods. They also have a vegetarian version.
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5. chefandyJul 2022
   I'm a culinary school graduate and former professional chef. I appreciate this app touching on techniques and ingredients rather than just throwing recipes at you. Trying to learn how to cook by following recipes is like trying to learn a language by reading pamphlets. The 'why' behind recipes is learnable, the knowledge is useful before you master it, and the shift in results is dramatic.

   Resources:

   Maybe this app? Haven't really dug into it but it looked hopeful from the description.

   An approachable, well-written introductory read on the topic is Michael Ruhlman's Ratio. Start there. Most tech types start with more technical books like Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. Don't. Technical knowledge helps, but isn't required. Cooking is an art! Approaching it like organic chemistry yields enjoyable nerding but mediocre food. A biology class would be useful for an artist, but if you're learning to draw, take a life drawing class. Taking biology first won't help. Once you are comfortable with Ratio, grab the Flavor Bible for reference. It's a huge paper database of flavor affinities. After getting comfortable with the art of cooking, read McGee. It's well-written enough to read straight through but dense enough to use as a reference. Many decry his less-than-perfect understanding -- his PhD is in Poetry, after all. I've never seen a critic as good at cooking as criticizing people. If they were as interested in cooking as criticizing people, they'd have paid more attention to his book.

   Advice on learning to cook really damn good food:

   1) Season. Get comfortable with seasoning. Maybe 70% of professional cooking polish stems from proper seasoning. Your tongue only senses 5 things: saltiness, sweetness , sourness , bitterness, and savoriness (glutamates.) Everything else is sensed by your olfactory bulb. Activating your tongue with those senses makes your brain pay much closer attention to what you smell. If your food tastes flat or boring, there's a 90% chance it's under-seasoned. This requires considering ALL of those senses, not just salt. Your folk explanations of seasoning or "common knowledge" approaches to seasoning are probably wrong.

   2) Smell everything. Taste everything. Eat a spoonful of Dijon mustard. Bite a bit off of a sage leaf and compare that with dried sage. Contemplate Worcestershire sauce. Let it sit in your mouth and breath through your nose so you really hit your olfactory bulb. Smell that cooking oil that's been sitting around for a few months and compare it to a brand new bottle. Ponder the differences. This practice avoids putting bad ingredients in your food and expands your palate.

   3) Move away from recipes. Start thinking about cooking in terms of ingredient ratios and techniques rather than recipes.

   4) Learn about heat. Get comfortable with the appropriate application of heat. Learn about dry heat and moist heat techniques. Figure out how things like ingredient temperature and salt content can change that. Pay attention to browning and searing. Learn why you shouldn't crowd a pan.

   5) Stop timing things. Start using your 5 senses and tools like a thermometer to tell when something is done. If Rice-a-roni can cook by time, why can't you? The ingredient size, density and moisture content is pretty uniform. Boiling water is uniform enough to yield predictable results. None of that is true when you're, say, roasting broccoli or cooking a steak.

   6) Watch relationships. Pay attention to what happens to ingredients when treated in specific ways, and how they interact. E.g. caramelizing onions vs sauteing vs raw... and how they hit differently in salad or onion dip or meat loaf. These differences exist in most ingredients we use.

   7) Get experience. Push yourself to experience new things and challenge your reflexive food rejections.

   8) Nobody owes it to you to like your dish. Accept that food is emotionally complicated for people. Tastes vary widely and are influenced by everything from cultural exposure to genetics. No matter how much effort you put into a dish, some people just won't like it, and that's fine.

   9) Be humble. Deep understanding of food is not a superpower. Little ol' gram gram made the same 15 dishes her whole life, but probably knows more about the subtleties of those dishes and their ingredients than I know about everything else. Complexity is not the pinnacle of good taste or sophistication. Simplicity executed perfectly is often more sophisticated and more difficult than complexity. Focus and good taste are the keys.

   Here's a related anecdote. I worked in nightclubs in my early twenties. We got free, ice-cold bottom-of-the-barrel light beer after our hot, stressful, exhausting shifts. I still enjoy reliving that on a hot summer day. I also regularly drank with some household names in craft beer, and a few Sommeliers. Their focused education and experience blew mine away, but my palate was easily on par. So when I order a lawnmower beer in some mediocre bar the 23 year bartender says "here's your glass of horse piss. You know there are some craft options that are just as..." well... he should just be very thankful I'm no longer a chef.

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6. de_niedJan 2021
   As another post has stated, this isn't a very helpful post on learning to cook, and is more Amazon affiliate links than anything else. If people are genuinely interested in cooking and Culinary Arts, below is a book suggestion list, which should have free online PDF versions of them. This list is meant for people who wish to cook professionally, but for themselves, at home, for friends, so on. The list circles around recipes, theory, history, technique, so forth. More generally put, "kitchen knowledge."

   Note, these books are meant for dedicated inquisitive cooks who are eager to learn. If they're gonna sit on a coffee table or be used for average homemade meals, then these aren't for you. These books are the starting point and foundation of some of the most important chefs in history. It's up to you to Google the book and figure out what it's about and why it's so important (most should have Wiki pages). This is list is only meant to serve as a starting point for what to Google in the first place.

   All the books (should) have English translations, however they vary. Some translations leave things out, or give literal translations rather than the meaning, etc. The original title is used so you can have a source point to choose your own translations based on reviews/descriptions.

   Listed by order of importance (per my opinion). Mostly focused on haute cuisine and Italian, but another list for Japanese at the bottom. Note, I am biased against nouvelle cuisine, so you'll have to Google that for yourselves.

   [Haute Cuisine] Le Guide Culinaire - Auguste Escoffier

   [American/Haute] The Professional Chef - The Culinary Institute of America (As well as the Bakery/Pastry version)

   [Haute Cuisine] Le Répertoire de la Cuisine - Louis Saulnier

   [French/Haute Cuisine] Larousse Gastronomique - Prosper Montagné

   [Haute Cuisine] L'Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle - Marie-Antoine Carême (Completed only 3/5 volumes before death)

   [Italian] La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene - Pellegrino Artusi

   [Italian] Il cucchiaio d'argento - Domus

   [Haute Cuisine] Ma Gastronomie - Fernand Point

   [Italian] Ecco il tuo libro di cucina - Pellegrino Artusi (Still looking for a copy, much less a translated one)

   [Technique] La Technique [OR/AND] New Complete Techniques - Jacques Pepin

   [Why ___?] On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen - Harlod McGee

   [Pairing] The Flavor Bible - Andrew Dornenburg

   ---[Japanese]---:

   Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art

   Sushi: Jiro Gastronomy

   *[Next 3 are "maybes", haven't had time to read/research them fully.]

   Ivan Orkin (Chef focused on Ramen)

   Cooking with Kimiko-san

   Kimiko's World: Cooking, culture, and festivals of Japan

   ---[Additional]---:

   Ruhlman Twenty - Michael Ruhlman

   White Heat - Marco Pierre White

   Sauces - James Peterson

   Cookwise/Bakewise

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