Cooking Patterns

Agree 100% with the approach described in the post. The most useful cookbook I own is The Modern Cooks Handbook[1] which follows the pattern approach.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Modern-Cooks-Handbook-Lynda-Brown/dp...

L_Rahman• 11 years ago

As someone who's recently started cooking as well, thanks for putting into words something that I've been struggling to do myself.

Hoping to submit a pull request soon.

My go-to pattern is stir-fry:

- Aromatics (ginger, garlic, onions)

- Crispy vegetable (red/green/yellow Peppers, snow Peas)

- Thin cuts of meat

- Absorbent starch (Vermicelli, egg noodles, steamed rice)

- Sauce (Cornstarch, soy sauce, oyster sauce, fish sauce)

mattdotc• 11 years ago

To those of you who got into cooking later in life, consider your experience if you [ever] have kids. You will enrich the rest of their lives if you involve them in the kitchen and teach them some of what you know.

I learned how to cook by helping my mother and father for as long as I can remember. I don't honestly know when I started but it was definitely before 10, and likely around 7 or 8 when I could make meaningful contributions and not just get in the way. It has benefited me greatly and I should really make a point of thanking them more often for it.

Sure, I might have groaned when being tasked with preparing my own school lunch, or being asked to help peel potatoes, but through the years I picked up lots of valuable experience without even realizing it. I learned these patterns that the author talks about, even if I didn't have a word for them.

Cooking is one of my greatest pleasures and, to be honest, I feel sad that some people see it as only a means to an end.

Tiktaalik• 11 years ago

I believe this is actually how professional cooks discuss food.

For example the various components of a soup all have their own names.

* Stock

* Mirepoix (flavour base eg. carrots, onion)

* Bouquet Garni (more flavourful herbs eg. basil, pepper)

* Protein

Replace the various ingredients in these component categories and you get different soups.

(I am not a professional cook)

pcthrowaway• 11 years ago

I would say the example with different kinds of fritters is more a demonstration different implementations on an interface than of cooking patterns

jkscm• 11 years ago

But the recipe is the solution, the finely crafted source code, that we have to deploy. Cooking may be more similar to DevOps than software engineering.

pit2• 11 years ago

Throwing spaghetti code over the wall?

gms7777• 11 years ago

I really like Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Series for this. It has a ton of recipes, but there is also a decent amount of discussion of the concepts behind recipes and multiple ways to alter most recipes, as well as tables that make this sort of concept explicit (e.g. There is a table for soups that has a list of well known soups with a column for the liquid base, protein and vegetable). I rarely pull recipes directly out of this book, but it has completely changed the way I think about cooking.

jschulenklopper2• 11 years ago

Second that advice for Mark Bittman's book. The main advantage (for me) is that it briefly discusses the basic recipe (and some of the reasoning behind it), and then mentions 10-20 variations w.r.t. ingredient alternatives that are worth a try.

v1p1n• 11 years ago

just putting it out there: this idea is not new. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-buzzell/pattern-recipes-...

dipanddough• 11 years ago

Nice article! I definitely think this is the right approach for absolute cooking novices who also happen to think like engineers. For those who haven't learned to think like engineers, this might seem... boring. I won't say that you're taking the discovery out of the equation, but I think you're distilling this process. Discovery is important as a novice because it inevitably helps build your palate.

Patterns, in this particular viewpoint, seem to have a limit with regards to becoming a better cook. Sure, you're going to learn how to cook, but you won't really know why things come out a certain way. Rather than use the analogy of a pattern, I think it would be more advantageous to break meals down into flavor profiles. These are the building blocks AND personas of food. By learning how to make something taste salty, sweet, sour, bitter, spicy, or even French-y, Chinese-y, Mexican-y, Mediterranean-y, etc, etc, you can take very foundational dishes and produce countless variants.

Anyways, I think it would be really helpful for you to check out how the French structure their mother sauces. They are very foundational and develop into so many different things. Not unlike what you're talking about, but allowing for unlimited creativity, engineering.

xutopia• 11 years ago

That's funny you say that. I am a computer programmer and I also do a once a year pop up restaurant. I cook on the level of some very good chefs without the formal training so I'm more wasteful and slower but create great dishes just the same.

I started thinking of design patterns in cooking when I took a class on stocks, soups and sauces. In traditional French cooking you see the bones, shells and carcass of any animal you cook used to make a base liquid that can then be transformed (refined) further.

Take a chicken for example. I'll debone it and use the bones, feet, head and excess skin to make stock with it. I'll either grill it before dipping it in water to extract the flavour or do a "white" stock by dipping in water without browning. To this I'll add aromatic veggies and spices. Once you understand how to extracts taste from the carcass you can expand on that and concentrate the flavour by reducing it and then you have a liquid with many good properties. You can then apply the same technique to any mammal, bird, fish or seafood you can think of.

Perhaps my favorite "cooking pattern" is the demi-glace. This takes the (usually veal) stock, concentrates flavours further with tomatoes, mushrooms and a standard mirepoix but adds a roux to thicken it. You can then use any tasty liquid you can find to mix with it and you have an instant high quality sauce. I've made demi-glace that I've used for mushroom sauce, bordelaise (red wine), tarragon poultry sauce, porto and cherry sauce, etc...

The reality is that a lot of the idea of patterns have been codified by the late Auguste Escoffier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Escoffier. His influence is huge in the cooking world. Kitchens and cooking just wouldn't be the same without him.

appplemac3• 11 years ago

Sincerely saying, I have never made a demi-glace, although I should have. Will try after studying the process, thanks for sharing!

For me, Escoffier’s book is probably comparable to Bjarne Stroustrup’s “The C++ Programming Language”, at least by complexity of the material, so I am somewhat afraid of using it. As far as I know, “Le Guide Culinaire” is used as a source of recipes for the Master Chef exam, for example.

Maybe I should try approaching it again with some patience. Cheers!

andy_wrote2• 11 years ago

I'm also a coder who has recently started attacking his kitchen incompetency! (but on the order of months ago, not years ago...) I prefer baking because I can rigorously follow directions in the worst case and get something acceptable, and because it feels a little alchemical and magical.

Something I wish recipes would discuss is "why do we do X?" or "what would happen if we did not do X here?" Like, say, the recipe calls for one teaspoon of salt. What if we added zero, or two? I think this is a little different from the pattern recognition discussed in the article.

These explanations would help beginners understand what is essential and what can be omitted (if necessary) or substituted. It would also foster creativity in the learning process. I don't want to experiment blindly and fail and have spent lots of time and effort on something inedible, especially given that I'm a novice who needs all the encouragement he can get. But if I understood the reasoning behind a particular step in the recipe, I'd be more willing to mess with it.

mercer2• 11 years ago

A friend of mine once remarked that I would probably love baking, and that I might want to start with that before I move on to cooking. Why? Because, at least according to him, baking is more like chemistry, where doing it right means doing things exactly right, whereas cooking is generally more improvisational and free-form. For 'programmer types' he figured the former would be easier.

I took his advice, and baked a really good cheesecake. I would like to say I was hooked and kept going, but I didn't. But it was the first time I started to see the fun of making food, and I'm sure I'll pick it up again soon.

andy_wrote2• 11 years ago

I agree with that distinction. Also, making food for many people is much more rewarding than making food for just yourself. (When I do the latter, it's lots of work for 5-10 minutes of payoff, and I often find myself wishing I'd ordered instead.)

Many baked goods are easy to toss in a box and bring to the office or to friends' places. You're not going to bring a tureen of polenta to work and tell your colleagues to dig in for a midday snack.

ksnicholas• 11 years ago

You might want to check out BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking by Shirley O. Corriher - the author is often featured on Alton Brown's Good Eats.

ceratopisan• 11 years ago

The BakeWise book is excellent for the listing of principles - the ratios that work for higher-fat/sugar cakes, and so on. The recipes tend to be very sweet, and very wet - i.e. Southern U.S. desserts.

However, the book is poorly edited. Visually messy, with typos, repeated text, and odd text highlight passages that are right next to the exact words shown. It almost appears to be unfinished. There's lots of attention to the sweet cakes, but the bread section appears to be practically ghostwritten, with a lot of copy/pasted text.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a more scientific discussion of sweet desserts in book form. If you're looking to get better at straightforward bread production - Jeffery Hamelman's "Bread" is excellent, and goes very well into the science of the work.

pjmorris2• 11 years ago

Alton Brown's 'Good Eats' television programs (now streamable) did a nice job explaining whys. His books are good too. 'Cooking For Geeks', mentioned in the thread is interesting here as well. Also consider Harold McGee's 'On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen'... chefs turn to it when they want to know why (until they start doing their own experiments, then you get Adria, Achatz, and folks like Nathan Myhrvold turning out 'Modernist Cusine').

germinalphrase• 11 years ago

"The New Best Recipe" by Cook's Illustrated Magazine is a great cookbook along these lines. Before each recipe (and scattered throughout for niche techniques) the authors spend two-three pages explaining all the different options they tried, what worked, and why some things failed.

I've learned a great deal about technique by reading these recipe forewords.

HeyLaughingBoy• 11 years ago

If you are looking for a book that does this (explains why things are done) with baked goods, I recommend The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. Hopefully it's still in print: I literally bought mine half my life ago.

batbomb2• 11 years ago

They aren't called patterns, they are called techniques.

There's tons of books about all the techniques you can use. When you understand some of the basic techniques, it's apparent what techniques are being used when you read a cook book. The problem is, even if you only got as technical as saying "make a velouté sauce" in half the cookbooks you see, then people would freak out if you didn't tell them how.

When you learn the fundamental techniques, you can easily extrapolate them and realize half the recipes you read in your cookbooks are (necessarily) overcomplicated and can be reduced (no pun intended) to a few techniques.

Jacque Pépin is an good resource for beginners and intermediate cooks to learn french techniques. You can find techniques online and in his book New Complete Techniques. The CIA book is good, but a big gripe with the CIA book and the FCI/ICC book (Fundamental Techniques of Classic Cooking) is that the portions are pretty huge because they are for professional chefs and caterers. That aside, they are still a good resource for learning that. IIRC the James Peterson "Cooking" book is pretty good at basic techniques.

The Joy of Cooking is still one of my favorites, because the recipes are basic (but delicious), and because it's a compendium of recipes, it builds on itself more than nearly every cookbook you can find. So the recipes include in the ingredients do say "2 cups béchamel (Page 400)", and you can backtrack to that recipe and learn.

One problem with these books people don't usually like is the basic recipe isn't often fancy enough to be novel. It's kind of up to the cook to understand "Oh Coca-Cola would be a good substitute for the acid and sugar here" or "maple syrup would be better than brown sugar here" or whatever.

For that, it's nice to have McGee's "On Food and Cooking", as it goes into details about ingredients you've never really thought about.

wiz21• 11 years ago

They aren't called patterns, they are called techniques.

I totally agree. That's weird to see the n+1-th geek discovering something people have been doing since the dawn of humanity.

Damn, we're just talking about basic cooking. I understand many of us didn't learn the basics, but nonetheless, it's basic.

Imagine somebody saying he discovered "patterns to ride a bicycle" and explaining how to go from A to B with a regular bike in the most obvious fashion...

appplemac3• 11 years ago

Patterns to ride a bicycle? Sounds interesting…

mercer2• 11 years ago

I think it's great that someone is trying to make cooking more approachable by using 'geek jargon'. Who cares that it's slapping a different label on an old thing?

jeffyee• 11 years ago

I saw "Ratio" by Ruhlman mentioned below, but also wanted to mention "The Flavor Bible". Technique is half of the battle, and flavor combination is the other. The Flavor Bible is basically a encyclopedia for food combinations. Look up a food and see what goes well with it. Eg apples go well with cinnamon, pork, and nuts. It's based on interviews with chefs, but I've also built a version myself with recipe ingredient analysis.

There's scientific analysis that can be done on flavor compounds in foods as well to find complementary flavors, foodpairing.com is working on this.

appplemac3• 11 years ago

Yep, foodpairing.com is a great tool for this. In the longer term I would prefer to not to need it at all, but for now foodpairing + a set of cooking patterns is what I am concentrating on.

Thanks for the book titles, added to the top of the reading list!

tptacek2• 11 years ago

The Flavor Bible is interesting (and so badly wants to be a web app). There are things it's amazing at; for instance, if you have one or two base ingredients, The Flavor Bible will generate thousands of plausible soup ideas. I don't find that it informs my cooking all that much though; the most important combinations are also very well-known.

tptacek2• 11 years ago

This is the premise behind Ruhlman's books _Ratio_ and _Twenty_. Both are great.

Another interesting prism through which to look at cooking is the format used by the CIA's _New Pro Chef_, which covers technique, still focuses on recipe, but also introduces evaluation criteria for each dish: you're not simply following steps, but also judging the outcome carefully, which forces you to focus on what you're actually doing.

And then there are recipe books that use recipes as a vehicle for teaching a broader technique. A good example would be _Sauces_, which is compromised of recipes for sauces, but is a survey of the techniques involved in saucing a dish.

jpp• 11 years ago

I couldn't agree more. So much so that I wrote the O'Reilly book on the topic: http://www.cookingforgeeks.com

ascorbic• 11 years ago

It's a great book! I use it often.

arafalov• 11 years ago

I am a beginner cook and was moving countries. I had to start the kitchen setup from scratch. So, I got a Thermomix.

It's very expensive but was a great match for my use case. Usually, the target audience is mothers with multiple kids, especially when kids have allergies. But to me, it was a gadget that allowed to select temperature, time, and strength of pulverization/cutting/mincing. It also has built-in scales. And it came with recipes that were using absolute quantities for weight and all settings, so no guesswork required.

So I could follow the recipe/algorithm to the letter and get perfect result. Then, I could slowly learn _why_ that happened in the repeatable conditions. Then, I could start change things and see what happened. And adapting non-Thermomix recipes based on understanding the temperature/time/cutting axis.

So back in September 2014 I was looking up how to fry an egg (seriously! Not, apparently, at the highest heat). By now, I've made risottos, soups, breads, sweets, chocolate, smoothies, Indian Chai, some Russian specialties (hrenoder), etc.

I am feeling a lot more comfortable in the kitchen. And, since I eat at home most of the time now, Thermomix - nearly - paid for itself already.

So, the kitchen equipment is also about patterns, not just the ingredients/steps.

Bad news: Thermomix is not available in the USA. Not yet anyway, maybe in a year.

pjmorris2• 11 years ago

Julia Child built a career out of using recipes to teach reusable techniques, starting here [1] and culminating with [2]. In each of these books, she embeds what a software person would call a pattern in each 'master recipe', illustrates with a handful of variations, and offers suggestions of applications.

[1] 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' [2] 'The Way to Cook'

zwieback• 11 years ago

Good to see coders getting excited about cooking but if we now call technique and process "pattern" then I wonder what else is a pattern. Pretty much any creative process would end up being a pattern of some sort so the term ends up being meaningless.

venomsnake• 11 years ago

Cooking is really simple. Lets take meat:

Tender - keep the juices inside. Heat to the minimum possible safe temperature on the inside.

Tough - nuke it till its gelatinized.

Brown generously because people love that taste.

Salt is your friend in 1-2% range.

Just by knowing these four things you will be able to convert any cut of meat into something edible with whatever equipment you have on hand.

Cooking Patterns

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