Ivan asked how exactly one ‘draws a map’ of an ultralearning project in my last post. I’m going to explain how I’m approaching skill map drawing on my cooking skill month.
The first principle of ultralearning in Scott Young’s book is Metalearning: Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill. For me, the idea of drawing a map confused me. It made more sense when I decided that Scott means to draw a map with a dashed line and an X marks the spot on it.
In other words, survey the landscape of learning opportunities and challenges and then decide where you want to go and how you’re going to get there.
I started with the What, Why, and How:
What Do I Want to Learn?
I want to learn the principles and techniques of good cooking
So that I can make tasty, nutritious food for other people
Without worrying that what I’m making will be weird or gross.
For an ultralearning project, this is a bit too broad. How will I know when I’m done, or if I’ve succeeded or failed? To be honest I’m still working out the answers to these questions.
The best answer I have is that I’ll know I succeeded if I can cook a few different dinners and/or breakfasts for other people and a) not be stressed about it and b) be pretty sure they enjoyed the food.
And if I feel like I know enough about cooking to steadily improve in the future as I learn and practice even more types of dishes, techniques, and concepts.
Why
I want to be able to express my gratitude towards other people by cooking food they’re delighted to eat.
I want to enjoy the process of cooking for others - right now it’s stressful because I’m not confident in my skill to make food that tastes good.
Cooking - even for just myself - is an opportunity to practice devotion to a craft and engage in lifelong improvement of a skill.
I’m going to cook 99% of the meals I eat whether I know how to cook well or not, so I might as well take advantage of the ‘mandatory’ craft time.
I’m interested in bringing people together, and I see how central a role food plays in that.
How
How does one learn to cook? What materials will I use to learn? How exactly am I going to practice? What are the concepts, facts, and procedures?
How does one learn to cook?
Culinary school. I’m not going to do that.
Working your way up in a professional kitchen. I’m not going to do that either.
Cooking classes. If I lived in a city I’d consider this, but I’m out in the boonies. Not a reasonable option.
From family. I certainly learned some growing up, but being a rambunctious boy I never stood still long enough to absorb much from Mom’s good cooking.
From books + the internet + lots and lots of cooking. Bingo.
What Materials Will I Use to Learn Cooking?
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samrin Nosrat.
The Science of Good Cooking.
Various other cookbooks.
Recipes from online.
Cooking youtube channels.
Asking friends.
How Will I Practice?
I’ll cook two meals a day (I rarely eat three meals a day).
Every meal will have specific learning/practice objectives (make tortillas that don’t suck; make pico de gallo: make Mexican Rice: etc).
I’ll record everything in my cooking journal.
Each week at minimum will have a theme so that I’m not just making random dishes. Week 1 is burritos, for example, with specific subgoals of making flour tortillas, mexican beans and rice, and learning to make basic pico de gallo, salsa roja, and salsa verde.
At the end of each week I’ll try to line up cooking for friends and/family to assemble everything I learned that week, and to get used to the stress of cooking for others.
I’ll repeat every subskill until I feel like I have a good handle on it.
Every weekday I’ll aim for 3-4 hours of cooking and 1-2 hours of study.
Study looks like processing books like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, or taking notes from youtube channels, researching why my tortillas are so horrible, looking up techniques on deseeding tomatoes, etc.
Concepts
The relationship between gluten, protein, water, temperature, salt, and fats in different kinds of wheat and how these variables affect rise, chewiness, tenderness, crumb, flake, etc.
What salt does to protein strands (e.g. why is salting and resting beaten eggs for scrambling so magical?)
Salt diffusion and osmosis.
How the Maillard Reaction works.
The effect of heat on flavor lock-in.
Autolyse
etc.
Facts
16 tablespoons = 1 cup
3 tsp = 1 tblspn
etc
Procedures / Techniques
How to hold a knife
How to chop food and not my finger
How to knead, stretch-n-fold, and roll out dough
How to mix pancake batter properly, and how to flip pancakes
The sauté movement
After this month, how will I retain and/or continue skill development?
I cook almost every meal I eat, so I have literally two reps of this skill a day baked in to my life, if you’ll forgive the pun. I also can tolerate repetition.
So my continuation plan is to pick one new dish, technique, or concept to work on at a time and then repeat it until I feel like I’ve got it locked in.
For example I might decide to make myself an omelet every morning for a month, looking up a few different recipes and watching a few different videos. At the end of the month I should be pretty good at making ometeles. The next month I might decide to make sourdough bread until I don’t need to look at the instructions.
I also intend to begin a practice of hosting a hedonic dinner night once a month for friends, which will be a regular test of my ability to cook for others as well as an event to motivate learning new dishes. Plus a source of feedback.
Final Thoughts
Cooking is, honestly, a very open-ended skill. I’m not so much creating a map with an X marks the spot, I’m filling out a map and establishing an initial direction to walk in, but for this particular skill the real point is to explore the territory for the rest of my life.
Contrast this with my skill for March, in which my goal is to fix my motorcycle. That’s a much clearer project - I’ll know I’m done when all the bits are back together and the thing starts up and rips.
