AN ENGINEER’S GUIDE TO COOKING🍲

HOW TO GO FROM ZERO TO HERO IN COOKING!😌💪

If you are this person, “I want to get into cooking, but I don’t know where to start and the investment needed is so high 🫤 At home I am not allowed to cook either 😛,” then this guide is exactly for you.

This page consists of resources that I have curated teaching on the theory and practices to help you get started (or discover new methods and vegetarian recipes) on your cooking journey! Food is very personal, essential to all life, brings people together, and quite literally - you are what you eat. In my opinion, every person should know how to cook food, even if for a few meals a week, and is certainly one of the best hobbies to have at the least.

My sources of information are:

Generational knowledge (recipes from my great-grandmother) passed down to my mom.
Recipes, techniques and methods I tested out, explored and discovered through my own cooking journey.
Cookbooks, YouTubers, and other nutritional information guides that I have curated.

I am grateful to my mom, for her vast knowledge on various recipes across diverse cuisines. We’d never get bored of the food at home. She has so many variations on common recipes. Building on her knowledge, I am exploring more cuisines, and will document the information discovered on this page.

🌱 The information on this page is for vegetarian cooking. Even “hardcore meat lover”s and “foodies” know that they have to reduce their meat consumption, so hope you may see the value in vegetarian and vegan cooking.

SO MANY TOPICS TO DISCUSS!

I will roughly segregate the topics into these categories:

For Absolute Beginners - Tips and Resources
For Experienced Cooks - The Road Ahead
For Everyone - Food Guides and Resources
Veganism and Vegetarianism

For Absolute Beginners - Tips and Resources

Welcome to the start of your cooking journey! Trust me, you won’t regret it.

As children we learn from observation. Languages are best learnt when immersed and surrounded by it. When in school, for my Hindi language exams, I’d be listening to only Hindi music the day before the exam to try and make my mind think in Hindi. Similarly, cooking is a language and form of expression. The fastest way to learn cooking would be to shadow cooks, although they’d be annoyed :P The next best thing is thus to watch cooking videos! Tons of it. Search up your favorite recipes, find channels you like and just watch videos. That’s how my journey began.
In your mind you start assembling building blocks of the language of cooking noting how different ingredients and foods interact with each other, to different kinds of heat, etc.
Be curious. Be determined and aim to want to be able to cook confidently one day. The first few recipes and attempts may be disastrous. Do not let that deter your faith and determination. It’s all a part of the learning journey. Everyone starts somewhere.
Now that you are able to speak words, form sentences and express yourself through cooking, it’s time to join school, the school of cooking. Some of our parents learnt cooking directly and purely through practice and exposure. Ask them why add a certain ingredient, and they may not be able to explain why and would get annoyed at further questions :P At the same time one can get too lost in the theory of it, and for daily cooking eventually ultimately it’s more about practice to get more efficient. However theory goes hand in hand, and the fastest learning is through simultaneous investments - practicing, experimenting, understanding, questioning, etc. - in both practice and theory, to take cooking to the next level.

THEORY PRINCIPLES

Here are some principles to get you started:

The effect of temperature in the processes of steaming, roasting, frying, baking, microwave, and more.
The effect of cooking at different altitudes (air pressure) - cooking in an open pot, cooking with a closed lid, cooking in a pressure cooker.
Food bases and how they vary across cultures.