I'm ending my skillathon cooking month early (kind of) and moving on to the next skill, permaculture design.
Here's the deal. I only cook two meals a day, for myself. The grocery store is 25 miles away, and I don't have anyone else to cook for nearer than that except my parents, who are oil-free vegans. So I only cook for them once a week. So I only get to small reps of cooking a day, and it is not easy to just pop on down to the market for fresh ingredients.
What that means is that the natural rate of practical, hands-on learning with cooking I can do is twice a day. And since my method of learning is to work on one dish or technique at a time, repeating it until I feel like I've got it nailed, there isn't a huge amount of effective study I can do.
For example, in week 2, I made omeletes every morning, and for evening meals I was working on sautee vegetables, peanut sauce, and making lentils and rice tasty but also not mexican, because that's what I learned last week. I also started playing with sourdough flatbread / biscuit things using 100% whole wheat flour.
I've been studying the principles of cooking actually since early December, starting with SFAH and then moving on to the Science of Good Cooking and then picking up bits and pieces from other books, and for my goals I feel like I've got a general idea of what constitute the basic ideas and principles of cooking. In other words, I've run out effective book studying on this topic. After a couple of hours a week devoted to whatever I'm working on at my two reps a day pace, my eyes glaze over because what I'm reading doesn't have anything to do with what I'm doing.
I think after the initial burst of study, the amount of effective studying you can do is tied to how many reps you can do - how much time you spend doing stuff in the kitchen. And since I've only got one stomach to feed, I've got a pretty low cap on rate of improvement.
This is great news! I'm really happy with how this went. I feel like I broke through the stagnation barrier I was at, I feel like I've overcome the activation energy it takes to learn enough to be able to improve continuously with only a moderate amount of effort on a weekly basis. So I've got a system spun up to be slowly and steadily improving my cooking skill at the pace of two reps a day, and cooking for other people when I get the chance. I am enjoying the process, my food is tastier and healthier, I've got a sense of pride in craft every time I make something that doesn't suck, I find it interesting to now be thinking and paying attention to things like texture, flavor, heat, acid, balance, composition, and all these things. I feel equipped to cook food that doesn't suck for other people now, and I'm only going to get better through time.
Things I learned:
The main thing I learned about cooking is what set of mental models to apply to it. For me, that’s “chemisty plus art/design, except in your mouth.”
The most valuable thing I learned was how to learn about cooking.
Concepts
Salt doesn't just add flavor. It changes the molecular structure of food it interacts with. e.g. it unkinks protein strands in eggs, it gels lipids in steaks, and it does XXX to proteins in hydrated dough.
Salt diffusion causes salt on the outside of food to diffuse throughout the material with enough time.
Osmosis causes water to move towards higher salt concentrations, which is why e.g. chicken or vegetables will 'sweat'.
Time is often an important factor, e.g. in salt diffusion and molecular restructuring, autolyse, of course everything having to do with bread, etc.
The wild culture of sourdough can be thought of as a process of pre-digestion, with notable positive health impacts (metabolizing phytic acid, etc). I thought sourdough was just for people who liked tangy bread. Undersanding and working with sourdough feels like a gateway concept for other types of fermentation.
Salt can be used structurally (e.g. to unkink protein molecules etc) and as flavoring.
Acid brightens flavors and can make a dish pop. I'm always thinking about acid now.
You get flaky pastries by folding cold butter into the dough and then heating it before it can melt, which causes the water to flash to steam and create pockets (my brain thinks of cavitation effects although that's not what it is) in the dough. Also preventing the oil from coating all of the flour molecules is what leads to tenderer pastries etc.
Techniques:
Improved my satueeing mostly by experimenting with different heat levels and tasting every minute or so and noticing how the flavor and textures change.
Tasting my food and thinking about it. Seems obvious, but I never paid attention to flavor balance and texture composition. I'm now able to bite into something and think "this thing has no crunch or crisp: it's all mush" or "yknow what'd make this better? If the sauce was cold and put on right at the end." or "I like this, but that's because I like X and I know a lot of people don't like X so maybe this is a 'me' recipe."
Improved my knuckles knifework.
Folding wet into dry elements e.g. for pancakes.
Pancake flipping.
Toasting rice and adding seasoning and aromatics before adding broth to make the rice by itself have flavor.
Similar with beans and legumes.
Continuation Plan:
I'll select a new technique, dish, recipe, or whatever, and then practice it until I feel comfortable preparing it for other people.