I would absolutely watch "why I use wilted cilantro in my salsa verde" or "this crusty day old cheddar that i accidentally left in my fridge still makes really good mac & cheese." i think you're underestimating how much your viewers hate food waste and want to know what to do to save ingredients a bit past their prime (but toss them because they're not confident cooks)
I think the younger generation throw MASSES of food away because they have never been taught how to use them. It’s a bit like when a packet says ‘best before’, they throw it away. They get it confused with ‘eat by’. In the UK the food waste is truly shocking!
It’s what I loved about the budget eats series from June, she is great at improvising recipes with whatever food she has that needs to be consumed soon
As an amateur cook myself, my two cents would be: "don’t chase after the idea of authenticity in food. Authenticity can be a self-imposed limitation that stifles creativity and freedom in the kitchen"
I made “Mexican mac and cheese” the other day with a melty habanero cheese, enchilada sauce, and grilled poblanos, onions, and chicken. It was authentically delicious.
I feel like making recipes have helped me actually, I've learned about techniques and flavor mixes I didn't know existed; I feel like it's the same with music, first you learn the basics, and then you start breaking the rules. If you try to break the rules from the beginning you're just gonna make a big mess.
Yeah, ive felt this too. This weird reverence for tradition just breeds narrow minded thinking. Recipes should be used as a way to learn different techniques, and not a specific set of instructions. Being able to make good substitutions and tailor food ad hoc is what makes a good cook.
This is exactly what I've been looking for in cooking classes throughout my city. No one seems to understand when I say I don't want to learn the skills to make a recipe, I want to learn the skills to CREATE a recipe.
I just realised that this is also my problem. I would really like to learn the theory behind cooking like why this plus this tastes good or why you should add this when you have this, but i cant seem to find anything like that on google
You could learn a few recipes and later you will understand the techniques and then start creating I unintentionally learnt techniques this way when I wanted to learn cooking and started with recipes for my favourite food. Now I can cook whatever it is when I'm too tired. Otherwise I follow recipes. I also know substitutes and stuff. Recipes teach you a lot of stuff!
There’s a book that I got online called Baker Bettie’s Better Baking Book. It’s supposed to teach you how the ingredients function, and how to create recipes of your own. The first three pages show every type of flour, what makes them different from each other, and how to use them the right way
Adam Ragusea is a good TH-camr to follow for this. He doesn't post cooking stuff as often as he used to, but look through all his old cooking videos. He has tons.
The fact you suggest 1 pickled item in every shopping trip illustrates excellently how different some lives are lol. I don't have a single person in this house other than me that likes anything pickled. It's not even remotely a staple, but for you it's so important it gets mention in even the most paired down list humanly possible.
@@swozzlesticks3068 Really? Thats absolutely insane to me, I know tooooons of people that hate pickles! It's not even remotely limited to my family, if you ever work fast food you would find people routinely ask for "no pickles" on their burgers.
@@Tinil0 that's true! I have heard of the no pickles on burger thing but it's not something I've personally encountered. I know plenty of people that don't like chowing down on pickles solo but I personally haven't encountered people that reject pickles on burgers.. maybe not their first choice but if presented with a few pickles on a burger they'll happily eat it up.
I think pickled is pretty cultural. Where I am a lot of people like them but also a lot of others can't eat them at all. Personaly, really dislike pickles on their own but I need them on my burger, just adds a crunchy layer with a lot of taste that can save mediocre burgers
@@Kynatosh I am split on pickles on burgers. While they can offer a nice contrast, my bigger issue is I will bite in, not bite all the way through the pickle skin, and then end up pulling the entire slice out with the first bite. THAT isn't a pleasant experience. But I actually really like pickles on their own personally, which I suppose is funny.
I'm 17 and just learning how to cook, trying to prepare for college, and your channel is an absolute life-saver. I feel like I understand and appreciate food much more since I subscribed :)
This is awesome. It's great that you are taking time to learn like this to prepare for life away from home and parents. Just the fact that you are doing this tells me you are going to have a lovely, successful life ahead of you. It's all about your mentality and yours is clearly great. Keep it up! What other channels do you watch to learn cooking? Curious if you aren't watching some of my favorites. If you aren't, I'll suggest them to ya!
@@bitterhibiscus I went and watched some stuff from Inga based on your rec and i really loved her videos, but someone i might recommend is kwoowk cause he really forced me to stop being tooo technical and stuck up with my ingredient measuring lol and he’s got a lot creative but kind of easy dishes you can riff on a bit or just get inspiration from
I've recently finished college, so I have a couple of tips you might find useful. I still use them now that I go to work, although I splurge more on delivery because I'm painfully lazy. - Be conscious of limitations you impose on yourself. If you want to go 100% authentic/homemade/picture-perfect, that's okay, but it needs to be a decision you're aware of. A jar of store-bought tomato sauce provides so much convenience, there's nothing wrong in choosing it over making your own. If you don't want to bother with making bechamel for your sauce base, just go ahead and use heavy cream. A lot of what I ate ended up looking like slop, but being tasty, filling, quick and cheap - a sacrifice I was willing to make. - Work out at least one simple framework. For me, it was noodles/rice, chicken breast, frozen Asian veggie mix, soy sauce. The point is, it needs to work as a recipe, while being as simple as I can. What I mean is that cooking the ingredients I mentioned already leads to a meal, but because it's not a carefully crafted recipe, you can modify it as much as you want. Maybe you want ground pork instead of chicken today, or you bought a jar of Thai curry; you can use brown rice today and udon noodles tomorrow, and perhaps you diced the chicken this time, so next time you'll do slices. This way, you can use one "recipe" and not get bored with it. - Always be stocked up on non-perishables. You might come home tired, without an ounce of will to go shopping - you'll be grateful for the rice and cans of tomatoes, beans and corn you bought half a year ago, or the frozen bag of veggies waiting patiently in your freezer. Perhaps it's the end of the month and you're low on money - you'll be able to scavenge your kitchen, and perhaps you can survive a week buying only some meat. Just remember to restock when you're able to! - Burgers. For less than the price of a Big Mac, I can make two (or one large) burgers that taste way better, and leave my 85kg ass wishing I didn't eat as much. Plus, my record time was a bit over 5 minutes to make an admittedly simple, but still delicious burger. The trick is that good meat speaks for itself, so you don't need to do anything fancy (although you most definitely can) to make it taste good. Just sauce the buns, put on your patties, tomatoes, pickles and onions, and you're done. - Bulk dishes require minimum work and feed you for days. A large pot of broth, tomato sauce, or chili con carne will mostly cook unsupervised with very little prep, and are generally very cheap per portion. Because of the way they're cooked, they're not great for when you're hungry and need to eat soon, but if you can make them ahead of time, the 2+ hours of cook time don't matter because you can be reading a book all that time. When you're done, you can leave enough for 2-3 days, then jar/freeze the rest. When it's time to eat, you generally just need to boil some carbs (pasta, potatoes, rice, whatever) while the food heats up. - Sauces are an amazing "cheat" option. The point is, a sauce can provide most of the flavor for your meal. For example, you can buy or whip up some sweet and sour sauce, and it makes cooking much easier. You don't need to think too hard about ingredients - a bag of frozen veggies Nothing more comes to mind right now. I can also recommend making challenges for yourself similar to those Ethan does for his videos - for example, decide it's potato week. Stock up on potatoes, and figure out as many different meals with them as you can. Or perhaps you've discovered your new love for garam masala, it's a good time to experiment with it for the week. Some meals might be duds, but some might enter your cookbook permanently. I've particularly enjoyed an "upcycling" challenge, where you buy something like ready to eat chicken nuggets, then try to build a meal around them. All those help develop a "cooking sense" so that you can do more things without following recipes.
@@MaskedDeath_ This is all so incredibly helpful!!! Thank you so much for taking the time to write it down, I'll absolutely make note of all this on my cooking notebook so I don't forget it 😊
Yes exactly! I think a super interesting video would be to show what home cooks can learn from the behind the scenes of a restaurant. Buying a large amounts of ingredients and creating a menu from them. I may have to find a place that wouldn’t mind letting me film!
I cooked in restaurants for years and worked under an Exec Chef. His cooking vs other restaurants was day and night. IHOP everything comes from a bag, box, can or freezer. Limited fresh and mixing. The EC we made most items from scratch even a bbq sauce for a one off event for the city. Fri prime rib becomes PR and eggs or tips and noodles. Ive gotten back into making my own western condiments, sauces and salsas for cost and removing shelf stabilizers. Pickling and canning to come soon. i quit making Indian food. It’s a whole process and ingredients that I can’t consume fast enough. I do still do the occasional jar of sauce add to meat and rice. I gave away my 660 curry recipe book. If I want Indian I go out same for sushi. Just because I can does not be it’s best for me time or taste. I still make a lot of nahari and lamb shanks. This topic is great as I believe you use a recipe to know the taste and texture and core of a dish. But then…….. Make your stir fry, your pasta or your salsa. You already do it for your family members, less spice for the kids but sneak in spinach or other veggies. You need to also point out cooking is art and baking is chemistry you need to understand the chemistry or follow the recipe when baking. Most restaurant food is meant to taste good and made fast not be healthy. This is why knowing what is going in your meal matters.
@@HADESPAYLOAD All good points, and yah a "cuisine" or region tends to assume you can get a particular set of ingredients for cheap enough, and you want to eat that set of stuff a lot. One of the owners I cheffed for used to test me to see what I could juggle together. He'd get something on closeout sale from a vendor or grocery outlet, bring it in and say, "So, what can you do with that tomorrow?" We had certain set daily specials 3 days per week, and the other days I would improvise out of the stuff on hand and whateverr he brought in the back door :) One thing that turned out to be really popular (so I had to just keep doing them) was rolling out a chinese won ton wrap big enough to wrap around a chicken breast stuffed with cheeses and seasoned butter, then bake on open trays for a crispty crust, almost like a medieval pastey. Once you start stuffing things into other things and wrapping in crust or crumbs, you have a hundred new toys to play with for cheap :)
@@animistchannel work with a good chef and they can blow your mind about flavor. I lived in HK for 4 years doing IT and the food there was exceptional I recall found great French food which I don’t love all that much. Certainly we used leftover similarly but the one off we did wow. Too bad he found me when I hated cooking as he wanted me for a completion team. Not sure what that meant but I was done with low wages. Regardless cooking I love and I traveled a lot and take classes when I travel. I still remember being ruined with a Japanese knife. Eat Osaka is above or near the knife shop we met at then walked to the cooking studio. They give you white carbon steel Sakai knives to use. One slice and my jaw dropped. Needless to say I bought 2 knives. I have about 12 now and no one gets to use them but me. If you see knives on my counter they are bait to keep you from the drawer. In HK my indo GF used to make me veggie spring rolls potato turmeric and man those were amazing, but she rolled for over an hour each time. Wraps rolls Pastry are great ways to reuse left overs. Once you see the tricks the Monday fish special is not what I order. Good point on one trick to reuse can be modified to make it an ethnic blend. A food truck used nahari a fried stew in paratha bread flaky placed like a taco with lemon chilies and cilantro. Only on Fridays and limited run so good.
The best part of this approach is that over time you'll find recipes that are uniquely amazing to your palate that would never survive a focus group/average preference.
Spot on. So much of food is personal preference. A large amount of people make a certain recipe a certain way, but there may be a different way to make it that more suitable for your palette!
I mean I love Ethan's channel, but if this very, very basic video on very, very basic concepts that's actually only promo for the new channel is "the wisest video" to y'all then I was right in losing my faith in humanity..
this is why I'm grateful that i was taught how to cook. what my mom taught me was that yes, follow recipes when you like, or even base something off of a recipe, but use what you have. I was taught to look in the fridge, figure out what we have, and make something. I was allowed to experiment because i was cooking for myself so often, so I was able to find what flavors and textures appeal the most to me. most of what i make looks unappetizing, or even gross, but it almsot always smells great, and it tastes somewhere between good enough and the best thing I've had so far.
this is the same reassurance internet shaquille gave me when he said that you’re better off buying locally grown things for quality taste vs “you must buy everything from the best region it’s from” even though it packaged and shipped to oblivion
There's some _nonperishables_ for which it's best to get it from the original region, and that mindset just went ham and got applied to everything. But the thing is the reason why that was the case for some very specific items was because it was only produced in that region and at best only an imitation with cost saving shortcuts was made abroad. But the thing is the number of things where that's the case is incredibly small and those things are incredibly niche, for example soy sauce double-brewed in a kioke. If you don't know what that is and what the usage of that instead of just the marudaizu at the nice Japanese grocery is, it's irrelevant to you and also why it's still niche.
Definitely, use local ingredients that tend to be cheaper than imported stuff or specialty items, and limit your cuisine repertoire. For example, I’m from PR and obviously the most affordable and abundant ingredients are the ones used in puerto rican cuisine, but a lot of these ingredients overlap with other cuisines, like spanish, italian, french, american, latin american, and Caribbean cuisines. So I have enough variety that comes from my ingredients list. Sure I have access to asian products and some other niche ingredients, but those ingredients end up underused cause I just don’t cook those other cuisines’ foods that often to warrant food waste and more expensive ingredients.
A lot of people don't realize that products with legally protected designations also often have boards and budgets to promote them. And one of the ways they do this is sponsoring creators. So if someone is telling you, "Oh, you can't use the cheese from that Italian region 20 miles away, you MUST use the cheese from THIS Italian region!" they might be receiving financial support for that.
@@Revelwoodiethe Italians have rules like that? Seems a little stifling of making money. In the UK for instance, Cornish pasties for retail all over the UK, HAVE to be made in Cornwall. A Melton Mowbray pork pie, HAS to be made there but on sale all over the UK and abroad.
@@johnnunn8688 in gangster rule it's not about making money as a whole, but making more money for your little slice (even if you're just getting a bigger slice of a smaller pie)
Old school home cook here. My favorite part of cooking, is look at what I have, create an idea for those items. Sometimes I win, sometimes I loose. Only rule is don’t throw good ingredients after a failed attempt. Thanks for speaking on this. Cooking is more “technique” than recipe.
At some point you just don't loose anymore. It is between good and fantastic :) you know how to elevate flavours, the acidity, that little pinch of cinnamon in a hearty meaty dish. I love that I never learned cooking by recipe, just basic principals and not to waste stuff.
Something I've always loved doing is going to the grocery store and intentionally buying whatever proteins and/or veggies are on sale and figuring it out from there! Saves money and gets your creativity going!
I work at supermarket, so I can grab the reduced items when they hit the shelves. Then I decide how to use the turkey breast and cauliflower for example or Goya products. Then there are always sales.
I’m so glad someone is addressing this in the food tuber space lol. Making fancy internet recipes is not practical more than once a week for a busy person with a bunch of other responsibilities. Not to mention feeling beat after work every day, and the cost of all these special ingredients for one meal. Right now I have a very short list of staple meals which use ingredients on the cheaper end and is very easy for me to make and improvise. I would love to extend that list and have more variety. Also I had a friend ask me for a recipe on how to make one of my dishes, so I typed it up and immediately realized how much I cook it based on “feel” 😅
Ethan I want to say thank you for this point of view. I have been cooking 98% recipe for years. Today I was able to look in my freezer and pantry and come up with a very tasty Korean dish without a trip to the store. I appreciate the time you take on your videos and believe you have changed the way I think about food prep. I have never been very creative when it comes to cooking but now I have a fresh outlook and have opened up a new door to the kitchen. Thank you so much!!!
Knowing the specific roles each ingredient plays in a dish and how they interact with one another helps you immensely with that. For example, most savory recipes that ask for heavy cream don't really "need" heavy cream, just fat, liquid and maybe some protein - meaning you can easily replace it with butter + other dairy products, coconut milk or any number of other simmilar products. Even cheese, which has a very distinct flavor, can often be replaced in sauces for some combination of butter, egg custard and an acid without people noticing the difference.
I do find myself looking up substitutes for things like heavy cream that I didn’t anticipate needing later in the week. Knowing those off hand would save time for sure
I think most experienced home cooks eventually gravitate to recipe-less cooking, but this video really nicely illustrates why that's in some ways a superior way to think about cooking, since it helps you to make the type of food you want in the moment with the ingredients you have available
People will certainly gravitate towards this naturally, but it will help many people get there faster if they understand this should be the goal in the first place. Realistic, everyday home cooking. It'll still take some time and experience, but you can save a lot of effort and money along the way.
My wife is African and she just throws whatever vegetables we have in a pot with chicken and makes a stew. She tastes and adjusts as she goes, adding seasonings and spices depending on the mood. I've learned a cooking ideology that is about solving a problem of what to do with left over food and ingredients. One example is Tatale, (spicy plantain pancakes) being a solution for over ripe plantains.
That's how I make stew. I prefer pork though, so normally my stews are comprised of a large pork shoulder, 5-7 potatoes, an onion, half a peeled and cubed squash, and leftover cabbage. And I just throw it all in a pot and top it up with water(only covering half the vegetables). Then I let it simmer for 6 hours.
I love this video and it very well sums up why some people's way of cooking seems so cumbersome to me. I never realized why, but now I get it. This channel as well as Joshua Weissmann, Derek Sarno and Adam Ragusea have taught me a lot of stuff to expand my cooking without only spoonfeeding me recipes. Sometimes even while feeding me recipes, but they always have steps in there where they explain why they are doing a certain step. These explanations make it easier for me to adapt recipes or use the technique shown on other ingredients. I do tend to find cooking along with a recipe exhausting, especially if it just lists steps or fancy ingredients without telling me why I'm using or doing this. I think I cook by recipe about 10% of the time, usually if I want to understand some traditional or fancy dish. If it's worth it, I'll follow it a few more times until I have internalised the gist of it and the to me most important parts. One good example are the szechuan-eggplants I discovered early this year. I love the recipe, I made them according to it three times now and recently used the seasoning paste that you make for it to stir-fry tofu in. It needed a bit of tweaking because tofu is not as spongy as eggplant, but it worked really well. And I guess that is how I prefer to use recipes - to get ideas for what to do with regards to more complex combinations and techniques. And then you remix whatever you liked with whatever you have on hand.
My husband is huge into meal planning, he wants to know exactly what we're eating for dinner for two weeks straight and grocery shop for those. I'm the absolute opposite, I like to buy what's on sale or what looks interesting and build meals around that. I like to think we've both learned from one another in that I've become more organized and he's becoming more okay with me freestyling meals because they're good and new and he likes them. That said I learn so much from your videos and will even rewatch your deep dives as I'm cooking sometimes for fun. You are appreciated!
4:13 is the perfect point. “all of the popular recipes were born out of the constraints of food available to the people”. This is why traditional foods CAN be improved or at e least modified with no major decrease in quality
Our family obtains food from a food bank, and we constantly have to come up with "recipes" using what has been provided. Can be challenging at times and there are hits and misses, but we are grateful for what has been provided.
I like to use a recipe as a starting point and then use the random ingredients I got as inspiration to make dishes for the rest of the week. Don’t need to deny yourself wanting to learn how to make something new by following a recipe. And after I follow a recipe the first time, I like to put my own twist on it when I make it again
I do it both ways. I look at recipes and modify them to match what I have on hand or what sounds good. I also use recipes to get me out of food ruts where I eat similar dishes and flavors for months or years. Sometimes I just forget that certain types of dishes exist, or different condiments, or different spices.
@@MrFredstt I 100% do the same now. I used to freak out if I couldn't get the exact ingredients something wanted. Now I use recipes as a loose guide for what ingredients go well together and change things up all the time. This amusingly becomes an issue when someone wants a recipe for something and I have to say "oh, I can't actually just give you my recipe paper that I have since I change like 5 or 6 different things about it each time"
@@shadowchaos7185 Yep. Making the recipe first kinda gets you the understanding of what it's going for and from there just take the things you like and mix it up when you don't have the exact ingredients on hand. I really like taco rice bowls and I know what things pair well together with and hw to achieve that flavor profile so I can now just wing it with whatever I have with no recipe needed
You hit the nail on the head w/ this one Ethan! Blew my niece's mind when I told her to add half & half to her mashed potatoes; she'd run out of milk & was headed back to the store. 😆 But this method is how you really learn how to cook, be creative and also reduce so much wasted money on products you don't use.
How do you make mashed potatoes where you need milk? My mashed potatoe recipe is: boil cubed potatoes in lightly salted water, then drain water, then add salt to taste and mash with a wooden spoon. Then pour whatever sauce/gravy goes on the meat portion on top of the potatoes too.
@@sanhakim1335 its the same as eggs, some people mix in something like milk/cream/butter (small amount) for their scrambled eggs, I like just using butter on the pan
@@sanhakim1335 ours is similar, boiled mashed potatoes with spices, salt, and some of the water it was boiling in. I was honestly surprised people put milk in mashed potatoes.
@@sanhakim1335what are you talking about? Maybe it's a European thing, but good mashed potatoes are made with at least one element of dairy. Milk or cream and butter. That's why the French and British are known for their mash potato use I guess!
This reminds me of the cooking show where each contestant is given a basket of food and is required to make an edible dish from it, using all of the ingredients. This is better though, because you get to pick the food you like and won't find things like black licorice whips or Limburger cheese. Home cooks are pretty adept at making use of leftovers, hence the casserole dishes of the 50's or so. Throw everything in a covered dish, hide it under lots of cheese, cover and bake. Great video, Ethan! 💕💕💕
Thank you Ethan for this perspective. I help run a food pantry in Danbury, CT, serving 600 or more families every week. We usually have a great variety of fresh and non-perishable pantry staples on our shelves, but we cannot offer the variety a commercial supermarket provides. Your "what is available" approach to cooking should resonate with everyone, but it is especially relevant to those facing food insecurity. It encourages innovation, creativity, and agency on the part of those we serve, while also promoting the reduction of food waste. A compelling and empowering message!
Here's a thing regarding food pantries, imhe: people using the resources don't have the _time resources_ or experience/education to utilize or even recognize food stuffs they receive. Example: helped folks at last pantry pickup recognize plums and give quick explanation of how to use...another person was only familiar with the huge apples seen in the supermarket and I kind of "talked up" the value of small apples (less food waste because easier for kids and elderly to finish one as snack). Gonna share Ethan's other channel with organizers and hopefully folks with find useful.
@@miseentrope A good point, though part of the answer is to provide culturally relevant foods as far as possible, and provide resources to help folks best use the available food.
I grew up cooking with my mom and this has been the exact approach I have been taught way before I went to culinary school to hone my skills. Many newcomers there (some of which later became my flatmates) were baffled by my approach to "bastardizing" authentic recipes for convenience when not in a professional setting. They later agreed how my cooking style was very efficient and how they struggled with making even their own meals like their parents used to do on the daily. Accessibility to global ingredients often leaves newcomers of the kitchen to be stressed about recipes and thinking of them as a checklist to fulfill to attain a exact product. This is absolutely rampant in baking and patisserie as well and I have seen senior culinary students fail at devising a new cookie flavor because they don't have a recipe at one of our culinary school competitions. I've been following your channel since the start due to the exact same reason. I enjoy your framework centric cooking because it aligns well with what I was taught since I was young. It has made me a better professional chef but even a better homecook. Your channel apart from the scientific deep dives serves as a very comfortable, cozy revising platform for my knowledge.
this video is one of the most important food videos posted to the internet on any platform. too many videos today are creating recipe followers not REAL cooks. yes there are people who have said these ideas before but saying it in this approachable way and through this medium is awesome. thank you
this skills-based approach was what got me to start watching your channel in the first place, so I'm excited to see a return to it! i like the deep dives too, but stuff like this is why i even gave them a chance
I learned to think this way when my wife was pregnant. She would get randomly hungry at odd times of the day, so I would just throw ingredients together and hope for the best. Deviled chicken mixed with steamed rice and a homemade sesame dressing was a big hit.
No, seriously, usually a lot of mustard and worcestershire sauce is involved; sometimes cayenne, sometimes Tabasco. It's a 1930s-60s word that would basically translate to "spicy" today.
I appreciate a shift in how people cook. I have several people in my life ask how my food comes together when I just throw stuff in and it definitely is a skill of poverty. I learned more during my times having to get food at the food bank and make it work than I ever did reading a recipe. I do love the inspiration that recipes offer, but there is a big advantage to being able to take whats on sale and make it work.
I only use recipes for the ingredient lists so I can get an idea of the proportions/ratios. Like how many cups of flour to stock/butter or meat:veg/bean ratios. Then I write that down and cook it my own way.
Exactly! As a child, we had a small farm, & a huge garden. Food was what was ready plus what we'd put by. (Canned, frozen, pickled, dried) Once I married, I followed that same pattern to feed not just my husband, but large field crews throughout the growing season. I've got a large selection of international ingredients, but unless I want a specific dish, or am learning a new technique, I just riff off of what I have. I recently found a technique for pickling whole heads of cabbage, & them using the leaves to make cabbage rolls. I tested the recipe using regular saurkraut, with the spices added to the jar & left to infuse for a week. Now that I know we like the flavor, we'll be pickling some cabbage, so we can make the real deal.
@@LycanFerret I don't even write it down, I look for ratios and eyeball it from there til the texture seems right. Works out pretty well most of the time.
@@notebeans3134 Well I am super awful at making anything that involves water or fat. Dough ends up too wet - all my pie crusts melt, my bread is too dense and spongy, my cookies are flat and melt. I keep overwatering any stew or soup I make and it becomes a watery mess. All my pasta and mac and cheese ends up watery too. But I am amazing at making roasts, grilling, braising etc. I instinctively know how long to cook something and I know if it is done by just staring at it. I make the best stuffing.
Yes please make that video where you go granular into a week of your shopping and cooking! I actually have gotten a lot of my own cooking ideas from your "Day in the life" style videos. And now that I think about it, I likely got those ideas because those videos don't include recipes but just showed you "throwing together" things you already had, and that would inspire me to throw my own stuff together to come up with a meal similar to one I had seen.
Your cooking videos have made me enjoy cooking so much more. I’ve always hated cooking, it felt like too much effort and my food was never really all that good. It felt daunting to have to look up a recipe and buy ingredients for it, that I wouldn’t use up and would go bad! But your videos have shifted my perspective and taught me so much, and made cooking easier and more enjoyable. And tastier! Thank you so much.
For about 40 years, I go through the store buying stuff that’s cheap, on offer or looking a bit tired. (Get a discount on the tired stuff) Then go home and figure something out. This is the first time I’ve seen this advice on a food/cooking channel, so kudos to you, mate. 👍❤️
Same here! I could never deliver such idea to my partner until I came across to this video! For me I just need to think protein + vegetables and fruits + staple food and then we go from here. With different ways to cook the same ingredient, there are unlimited amount of combination there! Tradition? Recipe? Cook like XXX did before? Not important, I really just need to feed myself.
I'd say if you're cooking for the first time / are very new to it, it's best to learn to make simple foods you enjoy (so you already know what they're supposed to taste like if well made) and stick to a recipe. Repeat until successful if you messed up and know what you did wrong (overcooked, wrong measurements, oversalted etc.). Then start studying other recipes for the same dish, figure out what impact individual ingredients have, how strict you have to be with measurements and so on. As a beginner I think it's easier to follow instructions like a robot and then once you have a "case study" start playing around and figure out why certain things are done a certain way in those recipes. Going by taste, eyeballing, freestyling always failed me when I started because I had too little practical experience and learning a bunch of theory before doing anything felt overwhelming and did not stick.
This is valid but would like to add that watching videos from knowledgeable chefs teaches technique at the same time, namely chef jean Pierre has taught me a lot while I made tasty dishes
@@ryanmcenroe8680 The technique thing is critical. I know people (no names lol) in my life who are proud of cooking without recipes, and everything they make is some kind of stir fry. Or a stew. Or whatever it is that they know how to do. It's always that one thing, with slightly different ingredients. The best way to learn these skills is as a child, annoying people in your parents' kitchen. Failing that, if someone does find themselves reaching adulthood with no kitchen skills, recipes might be a good place to start. As long as you don't become reliant on them.
Something my family taught me is shopping grocery sales, which follows the thesis of your video really well. Figure out what food you're going to get, then what you can do with it. I've made so many "fusion" fried rices too. Leftover carnitas tacos & toppings: carnitas fried rice, Leftover corned beef: add fresh cabbage for corned beef fried rice, bbq chicken: you guessed it, fried rice.
I've been watching your videos for a while now and you're the reason I've become so much more comfortable in the kitchen! I mainly cook for 1-2 people (myself included) so most recipes are often way too big. I've learned how to shrink recipes and even replace things with stuff I have at home. I now have an arsenal of ingredients ready to use at any moment. It's fun to cook and just throw stuff in because it looks good. Thanks Ethan.
This exemplifies why you're my favorite channel for anything cooking. You try so hard to teach us how to be better cooks, from skills to technique to pure instincts trying out new stuff. I'm always happy to learn and you've helped me be comfortable doing that when cooking. I now have staple foods and ingredients that I keep and use well outside their normal use largely because of what I learned from you. Thank you so much.
The timing of this video is on point, I’m currently doing a challenge right now to see how many days I can go without going to the grocery store without restocking, I’m about 50 days in and I’ve depleted a lot of the stuff in my pantry and fridge. The creative juices are flowing and I’m having fun with the process and all the little techniques I’ve learned over the years from this channel are coming in clutch.
I do that 2 times a year. Each time, it is 2 month leigths with only buying fresh ingredients at the end since I conserve all overstock in freezer or in pickle. I have so much fun and i use the leftover food money of the month in donation for food banks.
Great idea, but don´t you miss "fresh" vegetables sooner than later? I mean I could go for weeks with rice/pasta/whatever grains and some meat/fish from the freezer plus different kinds of sauces and maybe longer shelf life vegetables from the fridge, but would miss salads soon.
@@-esox-3714 Well that person is taking things to an extreme as an experiment, not really making it a lifestyle choice. Also, frozen vegetables can go a long way. I really wish I had a bigger freezer, as I could probably get away with going to the store for proper shops way less if I could store more basics.
Absolutely love this video. When people ask who taught my to cook i usually answer Alton Brown. Good Eats came out when Ethan was about six, but it did 2 things different then every other show; 1. no crazy ingredients. as someone from a small town, this made it so I could make just about everything, because i didnt need anything yo exotic, especially for the late 90s\early 2000s. Emiril was great to watch... but where am i getting ground turtle meat for turtle soup. 2. It taught you WHY you were doing something and WHAT was going ON. Not only can you fix someone that went wrong, tweek it to your taste.... but this plus simple food is EXACTLY what Ethan is doing here. What do i have, what can I do with it without spending an arm and a leg. Makes giving recipes hard at times but... Thank Ethan for promoting this.
Your content is so so refreshing in a sea of “recipes” and “home cooks”. Alton Brown was my favorite Food Network star when I was younger- I always loved his methodology and science based approach. You might be my new fave 👏🏼
Thanks for the video, it was encouraging! I've been recipe-shopping for years now and have struggled with most (if not all) of the issues you've presented here. My favourite "shopping approach" recently has been to "shop at home". Pop open the fridge and cabinets and suddenly I have a whole variety ingredients (I forgot I had 😅), for free! Saves money, time, reduces food waste, and keeps things exciting. EDIT: "You have way more knowledge than you realise. You've just never been forced to use it" is one of the most encouraging things I've ever heard in the TH-cam Cooking space.
This was definitely my favorite video of yours. I have been watching my friends fall victim to the meal subscription services, and they're doing just enough cooking to feel good, but they are all completely unbending about straying from the recipes. To the point where some won't even add butter or black pepper unless the recipe specifically asks for it or includes it. As someone who was raised to cook, it's maddening. They could easily get the same ingredients cheaper at the store, and not be locked in or bound to the recipe card. The meal subscriptions are great for introducing people to cooking but it feels like a lot of people are becoming stuck on the recipes like cultists. I am sincerely hoping I can show this video to my friends and have it wake them up and open their minds to the freedom and adventure of cooking. Thanks Ethan, this is it. This is the vibe. More of this. Go crazy, go nuts, show us what you feed yourself when your back is against the wall. That's what people need to be seeing more of.
Its really cool to see you put your philosophy for cooking down into this fundamental idea that you're trying to get people to practice. You've really turned into one of the best cooking educators on TH-cam. First video I ever saw of yours was the braise meal prep video - and I still do that on a monthly-ish basis. I think it was one of the first things that I had ever seen that taught how to deal with food as 'not a recipe' and it started me on a transformation with actually getting good at cooking. I legitimately credit you and internet shaquille for teaching me how to cook well - and now I only use recipes when i'm trying to recreate something new and specific for the first time. Thanks! It's literally been a huge positive change to my lifestyle.
Only experience in a kitchen was as a dishwasher who did some prep work as a teenager. Have cooked by “sense” my whole life. Using up my leftovers with occasional new recipes I’d try. Turns out I had basically recreated my Grandmas recipes. Sometimes ya end up back where ya started.
@@nerida3347 Not all really, she grew up during/post ww2 near middle class. I was born after the Cold War but spent most my childhood bouncing around foster care. She was just the best cook in the family. When I ate her food I knew that’s what I liked. Took me 20+ years to realize I was solving the cravings of 8 year old me.
i was like 'yes YES YES' almost from the start of this video. finally a cook that wants to teach people how feed themself! when you are young and learning having recipe can be helpful but on the way of living you will lose energy to forever follow someone else's recipes and then what? you have to IMPROVISE - that the biggest take from this video - people always did. i didnt had even one preplaned meal last week - all shopping done based on what was in good price or looked encouraging . it can ofc backfire (suddenly having too muchof anything can be boring) BUT often you learn how to CREATE food that is maybe not life changing but life supporting - tasty, filling and quick. i would argue that finding how to cook the food that you like is essential - no meal is as good as one i made cause every time - 'i' made them - it was tasty and none is hungry which should be goal of home cooking. fantastic video! as always!
This is exactly what came out of the years I spent on casual cooking. This exact system of intuitive thinking changed the game. First of all the frugality - respecting the ingredients eg. honouring every part of the animal by making stocks, freezing them in large ice cubes and popping into whatever you're making on a Wednesday night instead of water. It makes a tasty dish in 20min. Secondly, balancing some fiber, protein and starch in every meal, whipping up something to feed yourself when you just don't feel like it. These low effort home cooked meals reduced my sugar cravings and fixating on food, which in turn locked the bodyweight into place. You couldn't have explained it all better. I relate so much to your way of thinking and thank you for your work.
This is actually something that I have been trying to do over the last month, so it’s nice to see it put into words. The creativity through cooking has been a blast and incredibly rewarding
Would love a video about habits and being a home cook. I started paying more attention to my habits through out my life and I've found that if my kitchen is dirty and dishes are full, then my likelihood of cooking drastically decreases because I don't want to deal with more clean up. So, I changed my habits by making sure after every cook, I clean up everything because I know in 4-5 hours, I'll be back there needing to cook again. This has saved me SO MUCH in money from delivery services.
i just fell victim to this kind of grocery shopping, ≈$70 just for a specific recipe (and some things i forgot i already had). it’s like you read my mind man, fantastic stuff as always
My parents always used to have this vegetable subscription from local farmers. Given there were ingredients, the only question remained, what to make of them. Great way to learn to be comfortable cooking like this before you are somewhat more experienced.
ETHAN!! Thank you so much. I am an unconfident, recipe based cook and I really want to waste less and have cooking take up less mental real estate -- cook well is EXACTLY what I'm looking for!! Bless you 🙏🏼🙏🏼
fully endorse. having to cook for a large family, i long ago just started shopping for things (often based on what's on sale). the dishes were based on what i could do with the things i had with things about to expire going to the front of the line. some basic techniques and a little specialized knowledge gets you started, and before you know it you can explain why you use yukon gold for one dish, russets for another.
My spouse really wanted beef stroganoff and I had sour cream, some flank steak, beef stock, and an onion. Searched the pantry and fridge and found an umami sea salt and Dijon mustard, and made it happen! It’s a great feeling. She liked that stroganoff better than one I made weeks later with the “proper” ingredients.
@@johnnunn8688 it’s a sea salt product flavored with mushrooms or something. It’s from Trader Joe’s and the product is called Umami Sea Salt. Don’t be an ass.
I've followed this cooking pattern my whole life. Recipes are really only used as a template which I redact per preference and what's on hand or for baked items like pizza dough or cakes. I have a pretty set list of staples which are the components of my meal: starch, vegetable (typically frozen), and protein. One off ingredients or meals can be a quick grocery stop but this allows me the ability to cook nearly daily with no issue. Love this video!
Watching the Try Guys Without A Recipe series gave me more kitchen confidence. The fact that they could royally screw something up but still (SOMETIMES) it would taste good!
I like how you highlighted the fact that a lot of traditional foods came from necessity and from what people had on hand. I learned to cook as a teenager and different family members taught me different things. But what everyone would say was to always look in the refrigerator and the pantry and if I had most of the ingredients, to go ahead and make that dish. I got married when I was 21 and this approach helped me a lot since we were always on a budget for the few years of our marriage. I really liked your video because most experienced home cooks like our grandmothers or aunts cook this way, and they usually don’t have a recipe written down for anything they make. Social media can hold us back if we only learn how to cook from 2 minute videos. In my opinion, the best way to learn how to cook is helping out that family member who’s cooking you like best, ask questions, and not give up if you fail. Once you have the basic skills down, you can learn fancier techniques later.
Damn, this is all so bang on. Being the cook here in our home, I’ve proven many times that without a recipe, I’m a disaster in the kitchen, despite having made many dishes that family and friends have said it was they best they’ve ever had. Every last one of those dishes were someone else’s recipe.
1:14 I am this far in and can already see the headache I will get after my wife expresses her frustration and anxiety of not have a set meal schedule. Love it 😈
Same brother. Wife and I are living with my in laws for another 3-4 weeks while we close on the new house. Her mom is a chef and cooks food-based like this and it drives her nuts.
Dude. You don’t know how much I needed this. I’m tired of meal prepping. I’m tired of spending money eating out. I’m tired of being scared to try new spices and herbs because I won’t know what to do with it after the first recipe, then it just ends up going bad. This is a great structure for me to start my home cook journey. Anyone have any tips on how to use less dishes when cooking. Thank you in advance
The way of approaching cooking on this channel is what I truly love about it. I've always cooked this way, not with any sort of intentionality, but because that's how my parents cooked and it was always a creative venture, even if it didn't always turn out great. I find it so sad when I make a dish, share it with others and they ask me for the recipe, only to see the moment I tell them there IS no recipe and when I explain the skills/methods that I used, I can see in their face that they've clocked out and don't want to try it without a guide. So many missed opportunities.
I think this would be a fun approach to try in a different season of life than mine. With little kids, meal planning is the only way I feel I can have fun with cooking but also get through the 4-7pm chaos. If I am approaching dinner with no real plan, the overwhelm of coming up with something new or creative while I’m being constantly interrupted by my kids is too much for me personally. But with meal planning I get to make new recipes and try new ideas because I thought it out beforehand. It does seem like a fun approach though, maybe something to try when my kids are older!
I need this. I love cooking and I love good food, but it often feels like a chore (mostly the shopping, ugh). My brother is a trained chef and he can whip up amazing foods out of whatever is lying around and I'm so jealous of that.
Totally, a lot chefs will come up with new dishes for a restaurant based on the food that is available to purchase or has already been purchased and needs to be used up before it goes bad!
When I started using recipes as guidelines instead of a strict set of rules I often found myself feeling a lot more free when grocery shopping or looking for something to make for dinner that night. However I do feel like the knowledge from this video will hopefully take things up another notch for me in my cooking. The "How to Grocery Shop Without a List" section was super insightful and 1000% what I've been looking for considering my food budget was butchered at the beginning of this year and I used to cook and shop well outside my current financial means.
This is how I've made food since I started cooking for myself. I always hated following recipes and typically substitute one or more ingredients every time I cook. My process is very simple: I choose a base (pasta, rice, bread, potatoes etc), then I add a protein (meat or vegetarian) and some vegetables I think would go well with the dish and then I add more flavor with spices and sauces. I focus on keeping the dish balanced: not too dry, too sweet or salty, too carb-heavy, too fatty etc. I tend to play around with techniques as well, but I keep it simple because I'm usually just trying to get food on the plate. I didn't even realize most people follow recipes until I saw this video! It's never made sense to me. On the other hand, following recipes can teach you a lot about technique and flavor combination. Maybe I will sit down and follow a recipe one of these days. Great video!
7:59 this is exactly my friend who is oblivious to cooking. He always ask how do i season the food, how long did i cook it but i just don't know what to say. It's a second nature at this point
When you're new to cooking, having a very structured approach is useful to give you an understanding of what happens to the food as you prepare it. Once they've done it a few times, try suggesting cues to them, rather than directly providing numbers (wait for the onions to brown vs saute the onions for 5 minutes)
I know it would be kinda difficult to do consistently, but one way you might be able to show this mindset in the real world would be to go to some of your subscribers homes and cook with what they have on hand. It would be a challenge for you, we'd get to see some entertaining struggles and improvisations, and also learn what can be made from the random things we have in our fridges and pantry. That would be awesome to see on the cook well channel!
That is actually a great idea and people would probably be interested in it, but obviously there are a ton of things to be solved for that, and it would be geographically constraining.
@@fenrirr22 Agreed. The vetting needed to make sure their spaces are safe, clean, good enough for filming, and not overly stocked with food would be a lot to coordinate.
@EthanDavis.w What if you brought someone to your kitchen after a blind grocery shop and let them talk through the process with you? Or you give them a mystery box and your basic stock of spices with select things removed and did something similar.
This is a refreshing, down-to-earth approach that the majority of people will benefit from! It can be fun once in a while to try a complex recipe to the letter, but thats not most days! Most days I'm exhausted from outdoors activities/studies/work/a combination of all three and then some. In this most common situation, I cook and eat with the mindset of "i need proteins, i need fibers, vitamins and carbs, assembled in a way that is also tasty enough". Will not win any internet food photography contest but if it tastes good and refuels & rebuilds my body, it has done the job.
This is the best ad for a second channel I’ve seen. Never heard of you, but I bought it. I am a student, and my colleagues are always amazed by how good I eat and still get solid 9-10 marks, and this is exactly it. I just go to the supermarket, get some basics, check what’s on sale and explore with new stuff. I am right now resting after eating fish with a buerre Blanc I made with half an onion and some leftover white wine. You have a new sub on both channels.
Good vid. Encouraging people to cook more and outlining different ways to cook food more flexibly is probably one of the biggest ways to improve the physical health of the country during tough economic times
Your content is absolutely amazing, and of incredible quality. I can't believe we can watch this "for free" on TH-cam. Honestly. Thank you so much and I love your channel man!
Awesome video! Love what you guys are doing. I learned a lot of these skills from my parents and can do this with my home cuisine. But, I've been learning to cook Indian food recently. I've started noticing common threads between the recipes, and I'm hoping I can start freewheeling with those flavors and techniques as well. Thank you for making this!
I totally relate to what you're saying here! For me, as an enthusiastic home cook and dressmaker, recipes are like sewing patterns - they provide inspiration and ideas, but rarely do I slavishly follow them in every detail. I always start from the food I have available, in my fridge, freezer and store cupboard, and figure out what to make with it. This results in endless variations in my dishes, so a stir fry or casserole may comprise different ingredients this week than last week because I had different vegetables to use up, even if the fundamentals are the same. I was saying to my husband the other day that I may as well donate all my cookery books, as I never consult them any more. They served their purpose at the time, but now they just gather dust... With a well-stocked freezer and store cupboard/pantry, you can turn the most random collection of leftovers into a delicious meal. And that's way more creative and fun than following a recipe that came out of someone else's head 😊
This channel is a huge reason why I never use recipes anymore! Now I have the "soft" cooking skills to wing it. Except for baking and pastries, but that's a different beast lol
Ethan, I have been using the food-approach for as long as I can remember, but your channel along with others has refined my skills like crazy! Cooking is one of my more advanced hobbies and I am really thankful I have access to so many good inspirations. Thank you, really.
I've always been overwhelmingly ingredient based over recipes. Unless I know that I'm making something special like a family recipe that everyone expects to be a certain way, I use what I have.
I love this and it's super important. I've loved cooking for awhile now but I was definitely the cook going all out to make the 'best' version of something and only cooking occasionally rather than an everyday cook. What changed things for me was becoming a father and partner - cooking for my family. Now I cook every day and recipes are more inspiration. And most of the time I'm not sticking to my planned meals, I'm improvising around what's happening in our life and what's in our pantry and fridge. Your videos where you cook live feel a lot like the cooking I'm doing in my kitchen. 👏
I recently got a job helping teach young cooks (high schoolers), and I want to show them this video. Or at least recommend it because this is one of the best videos on food I’ve seen. Great explanations and descriptions. Incredibly helpful and engaging. Excellent all around!
I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever washed rice. And I cook it pretty often (rice is life). Unless you live somewhere where the rice is dirty, there's no point in washing it. None. Jasmine rice only takes 15-17 minutes to cook through. Basmati rice takes 20 minutes. Washing it doesn't improve the texture much unless you want it to be sticky like sushi rice and removing the starch does fuck all.
As a self-taught homecook, I rely on recipes only when I make baked goods and things like pancake. Other times, I look at recipes to have a basis on a food I'm really not familiar with, especially with foreign cuisines. I then think about alternatives, what can be omitted, and make food loosely based on a chosen dish. But 97% of the time, I cook base on what we have on the fridge and the pantry. I have accumulated enough experience in doing so and watching content creators like Ethan is a huge help.
Oh man, this is *brilliant* dude. Instant subscribe to the second channel and bookmark of your website. As someone who watches a lot of cooking YT'ers and tries to follow recipes all the time, I can't describe to you how much I needed to hear this. Thank you thank you thank you.
I love this so much, because this is how I learnt to cook! I was pretty poor for a long time but I am picky with my food so I came up with new ways to prepare the same three to four ingredients, just so I wouldn't get depressed from having to eat the same things every day 🥲 But since I started living more comfortably with better pay, I lost some of that creativity, but also have access to new varieties of ingredients. Cooking never gets boring if you make things up as you go, with the hard and soft skills you've learnt along the way ❤️
One of the things I love about this video as that I realize this is...kind of how I cook. With one Caveat. Part of my shopping journey is, I like to go into certain stores and look for either NEW items, Items that have a Great Sale, or just items that catch my eye. I may walk into publix and see something that is buy one get one free, and then start to think of ways I could prepare that, and then start to build on the rest of the items I want to buy, based on what I also have available at home. It's a great way to be fluid, flexible and experimental.
I usually don't comment, but this video spoke to me. My dad taught me to cook without recipes. When we go shopping nowadays, he still buys whatever produce is on sale and figures out a way to make it work. Even when he looked at a recipe, there was always something where he said "oh I won't like that much salt. I'm not doing that". Nowadays, after work I open up the fridge and figure out what to do with what I have, or buy a new sauce or vegetable because it "seems fun" and figure out what to do with it later. I think this mindset also helps to be able to tune the acid/spicy level of dishes for family members with heartburn/GI issues. I think there are a few cookbooks that teach what you're preaching here -- as an American, Joy of Cooking comes to mind, as does a lot of Jaques Pepin's work, or more recently, Samin Nosrat, all of which focus on recipes as "templates" not doctrine. There's no need for another Joy (or Silver Spoon, On Food and Cooking, etc) on my bookshelf, but cookbook authors gotta get paid, and social media pros like yourself need to feed the ever-hungry beast of Content and Engagement. One final thought -- I think the incredible privilege we have to access any food from anywhere in the world, in any season, combined with following trendy recipes creates a challenge for home cooks that are interested in being adventurous - it's easy to end up with a fridge full of exotic, but challenging to combine ingredients and condiments (e.g. miso, cilantro, cuttlefish, and passion fruit). Focusing on local, seasonal ingredients may be restrictive (and usually cheaper!), but it's fun for me to figure out how to make new recipes with mostly the same ingredients, and let the seasons re-introduce old flavors so they're new again. I feel like seasonal ingredient based cooking has fallen out of fashion again after the Slow Food movement brought it back a decade ago, I hope it comes back.
I would absolutely watch "why I use wilted cilantro in my salsa verde" or "this crusty day old cheddar that i accidentally left in my fridge still makes really good mac & cheese." i think you're underestimating how much your viewers hate food waste and want to know what to do to save ingredients a bit past their prime (but toss them because they're not confident cooks)
A video on "I need to use this up" soup might be useful. That's one of my favorite ways to make use of stray bits left over.
I think the younger generation throw MASSES of food away because they have never been taught how to use them. It’s a bit like when a packet says ‘best before’, they throw it away. They get it confused with ‘eat by’. In the UK the food waste is truly shocking!
Wilted cilantro has more flavour because it is less diluted by water. Same with cheese. Same with beefsteak.
I came to the comments section to look for someone saying exactly this! (or post it in the unlikely event that nobody had)
It’s what I loved about the budget eats series from June, she is great at improvising recipes with whatever food she has that needs to be consumed soon
As an amateur cook myself, my two cents would be: "don’t chase after the idea of authenticity in food. Authenticity can be a self-imposed limitation that stifles creativity and freedom in the kitchen"
After reading that and thinking about it, it makes so much sense. Authenticity limits creativity.
As long as you're not hosting someone of that ethnicity... creative yourself away.
I made “Mexican mac and cheese” the other day with a melty habanero cheese, enchilada sauce, and grilled poblanos, onions, and chicken. It was authentically delicious.
I feel like making recipes have helped me actually, I've learned about techniques and flavor mixes I didn't know existed; I feel like it's the same with music, first you learn the basics, and then you start breaking the rules. If you try to break the rules from the beginning you're just gonna make a big mess.
Yeah, ive felt this too. This weird reverence for tradition just breeds narrow minded thinking. Recipes should be used as a way to learn different techniques, and not a specific set of instructions. Being able to make good substitutions and tailor food ad hoc is what makes a good cook.
This is exactly what I've been looking for in cooking classes throughout my city. No one seems to understand when I say I don't want to learn the skills to make a recipe, I want to learn the skills to CREATE a recipe.
I just realised that this is also my problem. I would really like to learn the theory behind cooking like why this plus this tastes good or why you should add this when you have this, but i cant seem to find anything like that on google
You could learn a few recipes and later you will understand the techniques and then start creating
I unintentionally learnt techniques this way when I wanted to learn cooking and started with recipes for my favourite food. Now I can cook whatever it is when I'm too tired. Otherwise I follow recipes. I also know substitutes and stuff. Recipes teach you a lot of stuff!
"I know how to read. I want to know how to cook."
There’s a book that I got online called Baker Bettie’s Better Baking Book. It’s supposed to teach you how the ingredients function, and how to create recipes of your own. The first three pages show every type of flour, what makes them different from each other, and how to use them the right way
Adam Ragusea is a good TH-camr to follow for this. He doesn't post cooking stuff as often as he used to, but look through all his old cooking videos. He has tons.
The fact you suggest 1 pickled item in every shopping trip illustrates excellently how different some lives are lol. I don't have a single person in this house other than me that likes anything pickled. It's not even remotely a staple, but for you it's so important it gets mention in even the most paired down list humanly possible.
That is insane to me. I've never heard someone irl say to me "I don't like pickles"
Does your family just hate vinegar?
@@swozzlesticks3068 Really? Thats absolutely insane to me, I know tooooons of people that hate pickles! It's not even remotely limited to my family, if you ever work fast food you would find people routinely ask for "no pickles" on their burgers.
@@Tinil0 that's true! I have heard of the no pickles on burger thing but it's not something I've personally encountered. I know plenty of people that don't like chowing down on pickles solo but I personally haven't encountered people that reject pickles on burgers.. maybe not their first choice but if presented with a few pickles on a burger they'll happily eat it up.
I think pickled is pretty cultural. Where I am a lot of people like them but also a lot of others can't eat them at all.
Personaly, really dislike pickles on their own but I need them on my burger, just adds a crunchy layer with a lot of taste that can save mediocre burgers
@@Kynatosh I am split on pickles on burgers. While they can offer a nice contrast, my bigger issue is I will bite in, not bite all the way through the pickle skin, and then end up pulling the entire slice out with the first bite. THAT isn't a pleasant experience.
But I actually really like pickles on their own personally, which I suppose is funny.
I'm 17 and just learning how to cook, trying to prepare for college, and your channel is an absolute life-saver. I feel like I understand and appreciate food much more since I subscribed :)
This is awesome. It's great that you are taking time to learn like this to prepare for life away from home and parents. Just the fact that you are doing this tells me you are going to have a lovely, successful life ahead of you. It's all about your mentality and yours is clearly great. Keep it up!
What other channels do you watch to learn cooking? Curious if you aren't watching some of my favorites. If you aren't, I'll suggest them to ya!
@@SponkADonk Thank you so much, you're so nice!!!
@@bitterhibiscus I went and watched some stuff from Inga based on your rec and i really loved her videos, but someone i might recommend is kwoowk cause he really forced me to stop being tooo technical and stuck up with my ingredient measuring lol and he’s got a lot creative but kind of easy dishes you can riff on a bit or just get inspiration from
I've recently finished college, so I have a couple of tips you might find useful. I still use them now that I go to work, although I splurge more on delivery because I'm painfully lazy.
- Be conscious of limitations you impose on yourself. If you want to go 100% authentic/homemade/picture-perfect, that's okay, but it needs to be a decision you're aware of. A jar of store-bought tomato sauce provides so much convenience, there's nothing wrong in choosing it over making your own. If you don't want to bother with making bechamel for your sauce base, just go ahead and use heavy cream. A lot of what I ate ended up looking like slop, but being tasty, filling, quick and cheap - a sacrifice I was willing to make.
- Work out at least one simple framework. For me, it was noodles/rice, chicken breast, frozen Asian veggie mix, soy sauce. The point is, it needs to work as a recipe, while being as simple as I can. What I mean is that cooking the ingredients I mentioned already leads to a meal, but because it's not a carefully crafted recipe, you can modify it as much as you want. Maybe you want ground pork instead of chicken today, or you bought a jar of Thai curry; you can use brown rice today and udon noodles tomorrow, and perhaps you diced the chicken this time, so next time you'll do slices. This way, you can use one "recipe" and not get bored with it.
- Always be stocked up on non-perishables. You might come home tired, without an ounce of will to go shopping - you'll be grateful for the rice and cans of tomatoes, beans and corn you bought half a year ago, or the frozen bag of veggies waiting patiently in your freezer. Perhaps it's the end of the month and you're low on money - you'll be able to scavenge your kitchen, and perhaps you can survive a week buying only some meat. Just remember to restock when you're able to!
- Burgers. For less than the price of a Big Mac, I can make two (or one large) burgers that taste way better, and leave my 85kg ass wishing I didn't eat as much. Plus, my record time was a bit over 5 minutes to make an admittedly simple, but still delicious burger. The trick is that good meat speaks for itself, so you don't need to do anything fancy (although you most definitely can) to make it taste good. Just sauce the buns, put on your patties, tomatoes, pickles and onions, and you're done.
- Bulk dishes require minimum work and feed you for days. A large pot of broth, tomato sauce, or chili con carne will mostly cook unsupervised with very little prep, and are generally very cheap per portion. Because of the way they're cooked, they're not great for when you're hungry and need to eat soon, but if you can make them ahead of time, the 2+ hours of cook time don't matter because you can be reading a book all that time. When you're done, you can leave enough for 2-3 days, then jar/freeze the rest. When it's time to eat, you generally just need to boil some carbs (pasta, potatoes, rice, whatever) while the food heats up.
- Sauces are an amazing "cheat" option. The point is, a sauce can provide most of the flavor for your meal. For example, you can buy or whip up some sweet and sour sauce, and it makes cooking much easier. You don't need to think too hard about ingredients - a bag of frozen veggies
Nothing more comes to mind right now. I can also recommend making challenges for yourself similar to those Ethan does for his videos - for example, decide it's potato week. Stock up on potatoes, and figure out as many different meals with them as you can. Or perhaps you've discovered your new love for garam masala, it's a good time to experiment with it for the week. Some meals might be duds, but some might enter your cookbook permanently. I've particularly enjoyed an "upcycling" challenge, where you buy something like ready to eat chicken nuggets, then try to build a meal around them. All those help develop a "cooking sense" so that you can do more things without following recipes.
@@MaskedDeath_ This is all so incredibly helpful!!! Thank you so much for taking the time to write it down, I'll absolutely make note of all this on my cooking notebook so I don't forget it 😊
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Yes exactly! I think a super interesting video would be to show what home cooks can learn from the behind the scenes of a restaurant. Buying a large amounts of ingredients and creating a menu from them. I may have to find a place that wouldn’t mind letting me film!
@@EthanChlebowski Please do!
I cooked in restaurants for years and worked under an Exec Chef. His cooking vs other restaurants was day and night. IHOP everything comes from a bag, box, can or freezer. Limited fresh and mixing. The EC we made most items from scratch even a bbq sauce for a one off event for the city. Fri prime rib becomes PR and eggs or tips and noodles. Ive gotten back into making my own western condiments, sauces and salsas for cost and removing shelf stabilizers. Pickling and canning to come soon.
i quit making Indian food. It’s a whole process and ingredients that I can’t consume fast enough. I do still do the occasional jar of sauce add to meat and rice. I gave away my 660 curry recipe book. If I want Indian I go out same for sushi. Just because I can does not be it’s best for me time or taste. I still make a lot of nahari and lamb shanks.
This topic is great as I believe you use a recipe to know the taste and texture and core of a dish. But then…….. Make your stir fry, your pasta or your salsa. You already do it for your family members, less spice for the kids but sneak in spinach or other veggies.
You need to also point out cooking is art and baking is chemistry you need to understand the chemistry or follow the recipe when baking.
Most restaurant food is meant to taste good and made fast not be healthy. This is why knowing what is going in your meal matters.
@@HADESPAYLOAD All good points, and yah a "cuisine" or region tends to assume you can get a particular set of ingredients for cheap enough, and you want to eat that set of stuff a lot.
One of the owners I cheffed for used to test me to see what I could juggle together. He'd get something on closeout sale from a vendor or grocery outlet, bring it in and say, "So, what can you do with that tomorrow?" We had certain set daily specials 3 days per week, and the other days I would improvise out of the stuff on hand and whateverr he brought in the back door :)
One thing that turned out to be really popular (so I had to just keep doing them) was rolling out a chinese won ton wrap big enough to wrap around a chicken breast stuffed with cheeses and seasoned butter, then bake on open trays for a crispty crust, almost like a medieval pastey.
Once you start stuffing things into other things and wrapping in crust or crumbs, you have a hundred new toys to play with for cheap :)
@@animistchannel work with a good chef and they can blow your mind about flavor. I lived in HK for 4 years doing IT and the food there was exceptional I recall found great French food which I don’t love all that much. Certainly we used leftover similarly but the one off we did wow. Too bad he found me when I hated cooking as he wanted me for a completion team. Not sure what that meant but I was done with low wages. Regardless cooking I love and I traveled a lot and take classes when I travel. I still remember being ruined with a Japanese knife. Eat Osaka is above or near the knife shop we met at then walked to the cooking studio. They give you white carbon steel Sakai knives to use. One slice and my jaw dropped. Needless to say I bought 2 knives. I have about 12 now and no one gets to use them but me. If you see knives on my counter they are bait to keep you from the drawer. In HK my indo GF used to make me veggie spring rolls potato turmeric and man those were amazing, but she rolled for over an hour each time. Wraps rolls Pastry are great ways to reuse left overs. Once you see the tricks the Monday fish special is not what I order. Good point on one trick to reuse can be modified to make it an ethnic blend. A food truck used nahari a fried stew in paratha bread flaky placed like a taco with lemon chilies and cilantro. Only on Fridays and limited run so good.
The best part of this approach is that over time you'll find recipes that are uniquely amazing to your palate that would never survive a focus group/average preference.
Spot on. So much of food is personal preference. A large amount of people make a certain recipe a certain way, but there may be a different way to make it that more suitable for your palette!
tru, i would have never discovered Goldfish and mayo sandwiches otherwise
@@snailman7989I mean this in the most respectful and kindest way, but that sounds absolutely disgusting and I'm glad you found it
@@snailman7989 Personally I keep my goldfish in a jar of mayo - they love it and taste the better for it :)
for real !!!!
Probably one of the realest, wisest videos I've seen on cooking TH-cam ever.
mike g has a video where he eats off like $2 a day in new york - really good example of all the skills discussed in this video
@@wide-awakeis Mike g, the channel title?
Couldn't agree more. Very rational and approachable
I mean I love Ethan's channel, but if this very, very basic video on very, very basic concepts that's actually only promo for the new channel is "the wisest video" to y'all then I was right in losing my faith in humanity..
this is why I'm grateful that i was taught how to cook. what my mom taught me was that yes, follow recipes when you like, or even base something off of a recipe, but use what you have. I was taught to look in the fridge, figure out what we have, and make something. I was allowed to experiment because i was cooking for myself so often, so I was able to find what flavors and textures appeal the most to me. most of what i make looks unappetizing, or even gross, but it almsot always smells great, and it tastes somewhere between good enough and the best thing I've had so far.
this is the same reassurance internet shaquille gave me when he said that you’re better off buying locally grown things for quality taste vs “you must buy everything from the best region it’s from” even though it packaged and shipped to oblivion
There's some _nonperishables_ for which it's best to get it from the original region, and that mindset just went ham and got applied to everything. But the thing is the reason why that was the case for some very specific items was because it was only produced in that region and at best only an imitation with cost saving shortcuts was made abroad. But the thing is the number of things where that's the case is incredibly small and those things are incredibly niche, for example soy sauce double-brewed in a kioke. If you don't know what that is and what the usage of that instead of just the marudaizu at the nice Japanese grocery is, it's irrelevant to you and also why it's still niche.
Definitely, use local ingredients that tend to be cheaper than imported stuff or specialty items, and limit your cuisine repertoire. For example, I’m from PR and obviously the most affordable and abundant ingredients are the ones used in puerto rican cuisine, but a lot of these ingredients overlap with other cuisines, like spanish, italian, french, american, latin american, and Caribbean cuisines. So I have enough variety that comes from my ingredients list. Sure I have access to asian products and some other niche ingredients, but those ingredients end up underused cause I just don’t cook those other cuisines’ foods that often to warrant food waste and more expensive ingredients.
A lot of people don't realize that products with legally protected designations also often have boards and budgets to promote them. And one of the ways they do this is sponsoring creators. So if someone is telling you, "Oh, you can't use the cheese from that Italian region 20 miles away, you MUST use the cheese from THIS Italian region!" they might be receiving financial support for that.
@@Revelwoodiethe Italians have rules like that? Seems a little stifling of making money. In the UK for instance, Cornish pasties for retail all over the UK, HAVE to be made in Cornwall. A Melton Mowbray pork pie, HAS to be made there but on sale all over the UK and abroad.
@@johnnunn8688 in gangster rule it's not about making money as a whole, but making more money for your little slice (even if you're just getting a bigger slice of a smaller pie)
Old school home cook here. My favorite part of cooking, is look at what I have, create an idea for those items. Sometimes I win, sometimes I loose. Only rule is don’t throw good ingredients after a failed attempt. Thanks for speaking on this. Cooking is more “technique” than recipe.
At some point you just don't loose anymore. It is between good and fantastic :) you know how to elevate flavours, the acidity, that little pinch of cinnamon in a hearty meaty dish. I love that I never learned cooking by recipe, just basic principals and not to waste stuff.
Always eat your “mistakes”!
@@sk8crete Yep, cant go to waste if u just eat it anyways. I made this failed ground beef burrito and tbh its alright.
@@sk8crete
i learned that if you fuck up, chances are you can turn whatever that stuff into some sort of soup/stew and it will taste at least decent.
Something I've always loved doing is going to the grocery store and intentionally buying whatever proteins and/or veggies are on sale and figuring it out from there! Saves money and gets your creativity going!
That's what I also did. Opened so many doors in the kitchen
This is the way!😏
I work at supermarket, so I can grab the reduced items when they hit the shelves. Then I decide how to use the turkey breast and cauliflower for example or Goya products. Then there are always sales.
I thought this was the norm until I went grocery shopping with friends 😅
Me too.
I’m so glad someone is addressing this in the food tuber space lol. Making fancy internet recipes is not practical more than once a week for a busy person with a bunch of other responsibilities. Not to mention feeling beat after work every day, and the cost of all these special ingredients for one meal. Right now I have a very short list of staple meals which use ingredients on the cheaper end and is very easy for me to make and improvise. I would love to extend that list and have more variety. Also I had a friend ask me for a recipe on how to make one of my dishes, so I typed it up and immediately realized how much I cook it based on “feel” 😅
Ethan I want to say thank you for this point of view. I have been cooking 98% recipe for years. Today I was able to look in my freezer and pantry and come up with a very tasty Korean dish without a trip to the store. I appreciate the time you take on your videos and believe you have changed the way I think about food prep. I have never been very creative when it comes to cooking but now I have a fresh outlook and have opened up a new door to the kitchen. Thank you so much!!!
Knowing the specific roles each ingredient plays in a dish and how they interact with one another helps you immensely with that. For example, most savory recipes that ask for heavy cream don't really "need" heavy cream, just fat, liquid and maybe some protein - meaning you can easily replace it with butter + other dairy products, coconut milk or any number of other simmilar products. Even cheese, which has a very distinct flavor, can often be replaced in sauces for some combination of butter, egg custard and an acid without people noticing the difference.
I do find myself looking up substitutes for things like heavy cream that I didn’t anticipate needing later in the week. Knowing those off hand would save time for sure
I think most experienced home cooks eventually gravitate to recipe-less cooking, but this video really nicely illustrates why that's in some ways a superior way to think about cooking, since it helps you to make the type of food you want in the moment with the ingredients you have available
People will certainly gravitate towards this naturally, but it will help many people get there faster if they understand this should be the goal in the first place. Realistic, everyday home cooking. It'll still take some time and experience, but you can save a lot of effort and money along the way.
@@maynardburger Weigh your poop. It's interesting. And might also save you some effort and money along the way.
My wife is African and she just throws whatever vegetables we have in a pot with chicken and makes a stew. She tastes and adjusts as she goes, adding seasonings and spices depending on the mood. I've learned a cooking ideology that is about solving a problem of what to do with left over food and ingredients. One example is Tatale, (spicy plantain pancakes) being a solution for over ripe plantains.
That's how I make stew. I prefer pork though, so normally my stews are comprised of a large pork shoulder, 5-7 potatoes, an onion, half a peeled and cubed squash, and leftover cabbage. And I just throw it all in a pot and top it up with water(only covering half the vegetables). Then I let it simmer for 6 hours.
Ripe plantains roast well in the air fryer.
@@LycanFerret yum 😋
@@jorge69696what are they like from the microwave? (Radar range?)
Sounds legit :-)
I love this video and it very well sums up why some people's way of cooking seems so cumbersome to me. I never realized why, but now I get it.
This channel as well as Joshua Weissmann, Derek Sarno and Adam Ragusea have taught me a lot of stuff to expand my cooking without only spoonfeeding me recipes. Sometimes even while feeding me recipes, but they always have steps in there where they explain why they are doing a certain step. These explanations make it easier for me to adapt recipes or use the technique shown on other ingredients.
I do tend to find cooking along with a recipe exhausting, especially if it just lists steps or fancy ingredients without telling me why I'm using or doing this. I think I cook by recipe about 10% of the time, usually if I want to understand some traditional or fancy dish. If it's worth it, I'll follow it a few more times until I have internalised the gist of it and the to me most important parts. One good example are the szechuan-eggplants I discovered early this year. I love the recipe, I made them according to it three times now and recently used the seasoning paste that you make for it to stir-fry tofu in. It needed a bit of tweaking because tofu is not as spongy as eggplant, but it worked really well.
And I guess that is how I prefer to use recipes - to get ideas for what to do with regards to more complex combinations and techniques. And then you remix whatever you liked with whatever you have on hand.
My husband is huge into meal planning, he wants to know exactly what we're eating for dinner for two weeks straight and grocery shop for those. I'm the absolute opposite, I like to buy what's on sale or what looks interesting and build meals around that. I like to think we've both learned from one another in that I've become more organized and he's becoming more okay with me freestyling meals because they're good and new and he likes them.
That said I learn so much from your videos and will even rewatch your deep dives as I'm cooking sometimes for fun. You are appreciated!
4:13 is the perfect point. “all of the popular recipes were born out of the constraints of food available to the people”. This is why traditional foods CAN be improved or at e least modified with no major decrease in quality
Our family obtains food from a food bank, and we constantly have to come up with "recipes" using what has been provided. Can be challenging at times and there are hits and misses, but we are grateful for what has been provided.
I like to use a recipe as a starting point and then use the random ingredients I got as inspiration to make dishes for the rest of the week. Don’t need to deny yourself wanting to learn how to make something new by following a recipe. And after I follow a recipe the first time, I like to put my own twist on it when I make it again
That's what I do as well. Having a recipe in mind as just a loose guideline to follow after I've done it exactly once helps me out a lot
I do it both ways. I look at recipes and modify them to match what I have on hand or what sounds good. I also use recipes to get me out of food ruts where I eat similar dishes and flavors for months or years. Sometimes I just forget that certain types of dishes exist, or different condiments, or different spices.
@@MrFredstt I 100% do the same now. I used to freak out if I couldn't get the exact ingredients something wanted. Now I use recipes as a loose guide for what ingredients go well together and change things up all the time. This amusingly becomes an issue when someone wants a recipe for something and I have to say "oh, I can't actually just give you my recipe paper that I have since I change like 5 or 6 different things about it each time"
@@shadowchaos7185 Yep. Making the recipe first kinda gets you the understanding of what it's going for and from there just take the things you like and mix it up when you don't have the exact ingredients on hand. I really like taco rice bowls and I know what things pair well together with and hw to achieve that flavor profile so I can now just wing it with whatever I have with no recipe needed
You hit the nail on the head w/ this one Ethan! Blew my niece's mind when I told her to add half & half to her mashed potatoes; she'd run out of milk & was headed back to the store. 😆 But this method is how you really learn how to cook, be creative and also reduce so much wasted money on products you don't use.
How do you make mashed potatoes where you need milk? My mashed potatoe recipe is: boil cubed potatoes in lightly salted water, then drain water, then add salt to taste and mash with a wooden spoon. Then pour whatever sauce/gravy goes on the meat portion on top of the potatoes too.
@@sanhakim1335 its the same as eggs, some people mix in something like milk/cream/butter (small amount) for their scrambled eggs, I like just using butter on the pan
@@sanhakim1335 ours is similar, boiled mashed potatoes with spices, salt, and some of the water it was boiling in. I was honestly surprised people put milk in mashed potatoes.
@@sanhakim1335what are you talking about? Maybe it's a European thing, but good mashed potatoes are made with at least one element of dairy. Milk or cream and butter.
That's why the French and British are known for their mash potato use I guess!
This reminds me of the cooking show where each contestant is given a basket of food and is required to make an edible dish from it, using all of the ingredients.
This is better though, because you get to pick the food you like and won't find things like black licorice whips or Limburger cheese.
Home cooks are pretty adept at making use of leftovers, hence the casserole dishes of the 50's or so. Throw everything in a covered dish, hide it under lots of cheese, cover and bake.
Great video, Ethan! 💕💕💕
0:34 Somebody's made a video for me? I am so flattered ❤❤❤
Thank you Ethan for this perspective. I help run a food pantry in Danbury, CT, serving 600 or more families every week. We usually have a great variety of fresh and non-perishable pantry staples on our shelves, but we cannot offer the variety a commercial supermarket provides. Your "what is available" approach to cooking should resonate with everyone, but it is especially relevant to those facing food insecurity. It encourages innovation, creativity, and agency on the part of those we serve, while also promoting the reduction of food waste. A compelling and empowering message!
Here's a thing regarding food pantries, imhe: people using the resources don't have the _time resources_ or experience/education to utilize or even recognize food stuffs they receive. Example: helped folks at last pantry pickup recognize plums and give quick explanation of how to use...another person was only familiar with the huge apples seen in the supermarket and I kind of "talked up" the value of small apples (less food waste because easier for kids and elderly to finish one as snack). Gonna share Ethan's other channel with organizers and hopefully folks with find useful.
@@miseentrope A good point, though part of the answer is to provide culturally relevant foods as far as possible, and provide resources to help folks best use the available food.
I grew up cooking with my mom and this has been the exact approach I have been taught way before I went to culinary school to hone my skills. Many newcomers there (some of which later became my flatmates) were baffled by my approach to "bastardizing" authentic recipes for convenience when not in a professional setting. They later agreed how my cooking style was very efficient and how they struggled with making even their own meals like their parents used to do on the daily.
Accessibility to global ingredients often leaves newcomers of the kitchen to be stressed about recipes and thinking of them as a checklist to fulfill to attain a exact product. This is absolutely rampant in baking and patisserie as well and I have seen senior culinary students fail at devising a new cookie flavor because they don't have a recipe at one of our culinary school competitions. I've been following your channel since the start due to the exact same reason. I enjoy your framework centric cooking because it aligns well with what I was taught since I was young. It has made me a better professional chef but even a better homecook. Your channel apart from the scientific deep dives serves as a very comfortable, cozy revising platform for my knowledge.
this video is one of the most important food videos posted to the internet on any platform. too many videos today are creating recipe followers not REAL cooks. yes there are people who have said these ideas before but saying it in this approachable way and through this medium is awesome. thank you
Yep.
This is sooooo on point that I can't believe there is no other channel talking about it. ❤
this skills-based approach was what got me to start watching your channel in the first place, so I'm excited to see a return to it! i like the deep dives too, but stuff like this is why i even gave them a chance
I learned to think this way when my wife was pregnant. She would get randomly hungry at odd times of the day, so I would just throw ingredients together and hope for the best. Deviled chicken mixed with steamed rice and a homemade sesame dressing was a big hit.
I may have to try that deviled chicken…
How do you devil a chicken?
@@TedBarton91 Horns. Trident. The usual.
No, seriously, usually a lot of mustard and worcestershire sauce is involved; sometimes cayenne, sometimes Tabasco. It's a 1930s-60s word that would basically translate to "spicy" today.
Just reminded me of mustard dry rub I need now
I appreciate a shift in how people cook. I have several people in my life ask how my food comes together when I just throw stuff in and it definitely is a skill of poverty. I learned more during my times having to get food at the food bank and make it work than I ever did reading a recipe. I do love the inspiration that recipes offer, but there is a big advantage to being able to take whats on sale and make it work.
I only use recipes for the ingredient lists so I can get an idea of the proportions/ratios. Like how many cups of flour to stock/butter or meat:veg/bean ratios. Then I write that down and cook it my own way.
Exactly! As a child, we had a small farm, & a huge garden. Food was what was ready plus what we'd put by. (Canned, frozen, pickled, dried) Once I married, I followed that same pattern to feed not just my husband, but large field crews throughout the growing season.
I've got a large selection of international ingredients, but unless I want a specific dish, or am learning a new technique, I just riff off of what I have.
I recently found a technique for pickling whole heads of cabbage, & them using the leaves to make cabbage rolls. I tested the recipe using regular saurkraut, with the spices added to the jar & left to infuse for a week. Now that I know we like the flavor, we'll be pickling some cabbage, so we can make the real deal.
@@LycanFerret I don't even write it down, I look for ratios and eyeball it from there til the texture seems right. Works out pretty well most of the time.
@@notebeans3134 Well I am super awful at making anything that involves water or fat. Dough ends up too wet - all my pie crusts melt, my bread is too dense and spongy, my cookies are flat and melt. I keep overwatering any stew or soup I make and it becomes a watery mess. All my pasta and mac and cheese ends up watery too.
But I am amazing at making roasts, grilling, braising etc. I instinctively know how long to cook something and I know if it is done by just staring at it. I make the best stuffing.
Yes please make that video where you go granular into a week of your shopping and cooking! I actually have gotten a lot of my own cooking ideas from your "Day in the life" style videos. And now that I think about it, I likely got those ideas because those videos don't include recipes but just showed you "throwing together" things you already had, and that would inspire me to throw my own stuff together to come up with a meal similar to one I had seen.
Atomic Shrimp has a neat video format that really shows how to use a limited array of ingredients.
Great to get some ideas
Your cooking videos have made me enjoy cooking so much more. I’ve always hated cooking, it felt like too much effort and my food was never really all that good. It felt daunting to have to look up a recipe and buy ingredients for it, that I wouldn’t use up and would go bad! But your videos have shifted my perspective and taught me so much, and made cooking easier and more enjoyable. And tastier! Thank you so much.
For about 40 years, I go through the store buying stuff that’s cheap, on offer or looking a bit tired. (Get a discount on the tired stuff) Then go home and figure something out.
This is the first time I’ve seen this advice on a food/cooking channel, so kudos to you, mate. 👍❤️
Same here! I could never deliver such idea to my partner until I came across to this video! For me I just need to think protein + vegetables and fruits + staple food and then we go from here. With different ways to cook the same ingredient, there are unlimited amount of combination there! Tradition? Recipe? Cook like XXX did before? Not important, I really just need to feed myself.
I'd say if you're cooking for the first time / are very new to it, it's best to learn to make simple foods you enjoy (so you already know what they're supposed to taste like if well made) and stick to a recipe.
Repeat until successful if you messed up and know what you did wrong (overcooked, wrong measurements, oversalted etc.).
Then start studying other recipes for the same dish, figure out what impact individual ingredients have, how strict you have to be with measurements and so on.
As a beginner I think it's easier to follow instructions like a robot and then once you have a "case study" start playing around and figure out why certain things are done a certain way in those recipes. Going by taste, eyeballing, freestyling always failed me when I started because I had too little practical experience and learning a bunch of theory before doing anything felt overwhelming and did not stick.
This is valid but would like to add that watching videos from knowledgeable chefs teaches technique at the same time, namely chef jean Pierre has taught me a lot while I made tasty dishes
@@ryanmcenroe8680 The technique thing is critical. I know people (no names lol) in my life who are proud of cooking without recipes, and everything they make is some kind of stir fry. Or a stew. Or whatever it is that they know how to do. It's always that one thing, with slightly different ingredients. The best way to learn these skills is as a child, annoying people in your parents' kitchen. Failing that, if someone does find themselves reaching adulthood with no kitchen skills, recipes might be a good place to start. As long as you don't become reliant on them.
Bake potatoes in the microwave and add variois toppings. If you mess up, you're down a cheap potato and a little bit of topping.
@@fractalgem And $2 steak?
@@tedchirvasiu i can't speak for the meat side of the equation. Ovo lacto vegetarian, y'see.
Something my family taught me is shopping grocery sales, which follows the thesis of your video really well. Figure out what food you're going to get, then what you can do with it.
I've made so many "fusion" fried rices too. Leftover carnitas tacos & toppings: carnitas fried rice, Leftover corned beef: add fresh cabbage for corned beef fried rice, bbq chicken: you guessed it, fried rice.
I've been watching your videos for a while now and you're the reason I've become so much more comfortable in the kitchen! I mainly cook for 1-2 people (myself included) so most recipes are often way too big. I've learned how to shrink recipes and even replace things with stuff I have at home. I now have an arsenal of ingredients ready to use at any moment. It's fun to cook and just throw stuff in because it looks good. Thanks Ethan.
This exemplifies why you're my favorite channel for anything cooking. You try so hard to teach us how to be better cooks, from skills to technique to pure instincts trying out new stuff. I'm always happy to learn and you've helped me be comfortable doing that when cooking. I now have staple foods and ingredients that I keep and use well outside their normal use largely because of what I learned from you. Thank you so much.
The timing of this video is on point, I’m currently doing a challenge right now to see how many days I can go without going to the grocery store without restocking, I’m about 50 days in and I’ve depleted a lot of the stuff in my pantry and fridge. The creative juices are flowing and I’m having fun with the process and all the little techniques I’ve learned over the years from this channel are coming in clutch.
I do that 2 times a year. Each time, it is 2 month leigths with only buying fresh ingredients at the end since I conserve all overstock in freezer or in pickle.
I have so much fun and i use the leftover food money of the month in donation for food banks.
Great idea, but don´t you miss "fresh" vegetables sooner than later?
I mean I could go for weeks with rice/pasta/whatever grains and some meat/fish from the freezer plus different kinds of sauces and maybe longer shelf life vegetables from the fridge, but would miss salads soon.
@@-esox-3714 Well that person is taking things to an extreme as an experiment, not really making it a lifestyle choice. Also, frozen vegetables can go a long way. I really wish I had a bigger freezer, as I could probably get away with going to the store for proper shops way less if I could store more basics.
Absolutely love this video. When people ask who taught my to cook i usually answer Alton Brown. Good Eats came out when Ethan was about six, but it did 2 things different then every other show; 1. no crazy ingredients. as someone from a small town, this made it so I could make just about everything, because i didnt need anything yo exotic, especially for the late 90s\early 2000s. Emiril was great to watch... but where am i getting ground turtle meat for turtle soup. 2. It taught you WHY you were doing something and WHAT was going ON. Not only can you fix someone that went wrong, tweek it to your taste.... but this plus simple food is EXACTLY what Ethan is doing here. What do i have, what can I do with it without spending an arm and a leg.
Makes giving recipes hard at times but... Thank Ethan for promoting this.
Absolutely, I learned my core skills from his book "Food + Heat = Cooking"
14:52 love that video idea!!
Your content is so so refreshing in a sea of “recipes” and “home cooks”. Alton Brown was my favorite Food Network star when I was younger- I always loved his methodology and science based approach.
You might be my new fave 👏🏼
Thanks for the video, it was encouraging!
I've been recipe-shopping for years now and have struggled with most (if not all) of the issues you've presented here.
My favourite "shopping approach" recently has been to "shop at home". Pop open the fridge and cabinets and suddenly I have a whole variety ingredients (I forgot I had 😅), for free! Saves money, time, reduces food waste, and keeps things exciting.
EDIT: "You have way more knowledge than you realise. You've just never been forced to use it" is one of the most encouraging things I've ever heard in the TH-cam Cooking space.
This was definitely my favorite video of yours.
I have been watching my friends fall victim to the meal subscription services, and they're doing just enough cooking to feel good, but they are all completely unbending about straying from the recipes. To the point where some won't even add butter or black pepper unless the recipe specifically asks for it or includes it.
As someone who was raised to cook, it's maddening. They could easily get the same ingredients cheaper at the store, and not be locked in or bound to the recipe card.
The meal subscriptions are great for introducing people to cooking but it feels like a lot of people are becoming stuck on the recipes like cultists.
I am sincerely hoping I can show this video to my friends and have it wake them up and open their minds to the freedom and adventure of cooking.
Thanks Ethan, this is it. This is the vibe. More of this. Go crazy, go nuts, show us what you feed yourself when your back is against the wall. That's what people need to be seeing more of.
Its really cool to see you put your philosophy for cooking down into this fundamental idea that you're trying to get people to practice. You've really turned into one of the best cooking educators on TH-cam.
First video I ever saw of yours was the braise meal prep video - and I still do that on a monthly-ish basis. I think it was one of the first things that I had ever seen that taught how to deal with food as 'not a recipe' and it started me on a transformation with actually getting good at cooking.
I legitimately credit you and internet shaquille for teaching me how to cook well - and now I only use recipes when i'm trying to recreate something new and specific for the first time.
Thanks! It's literally been a huge positive change to my lifestyle.
Only experience in a kitchen was as a dishwasher who did some prep work as a teenager. Have cooked by “sense” my whole life. Using up my leftovers with occasional new recipes I’d try. Turns out I had basically recreated my Grandmas recipes. Sometimes ya end up back where ya started.
If your grandma was born in the same area and economic status you were, that makes a lot of sense
@@nerida3347 Not all really, she grew up during/post ww2 near middle class. I was born after the Cold War but spent most my childhood bouncing around foster care. She was just the best cook in the family. When I ate her food I knew that’s what I liked. Took me 20+ years to realize I was solving the cravings of 8 year old me.
i was like 'yes YES YES' almost from the start of this video. finally a cook that wants to teach people how feed themself!
when you are young and learning having recipe can be helpful but on the way of living you will lose energy to forever follow someone else's recipes and then what? you have to IMPROVISE - that the biggest take from this video - people always did.
i didnt had even one preplaned meal last week - all shopping done based on what was in good price or looked encouraging . it can ofc backfire (suddenly having too muchof anything can be boring) BUT often you learn how to CREATE food that is maybe not life changing but life supporting - tasty, filling and quick. i would argue that finding how to cook the food that you like is essential - no meal is as good as one i made cause every time - 'i' made them - it was tasty and none is hungry which should be goal of home cooking. fantastic video! as always!
This is exactly what came out of the years I spent on casual cooking. This exact system of intuitive thinking changed the game.
First of all the frugality - respecting the ingredients eg. honouring every part of the animal by making stocks, freezing them in large ice cubes and popping into whatever you're making on a Wednesday night instead of water. It makes a tasty dish in 20min.
Secondly, balancing some fiber, protein and starch in every meal, whipping up something to feed yourself when you just don't feel like it.
These low effort home cooked meals reduced my sugar cravings and fixating on food, which in turn locked the bodyweight into place. You couldn't have explained it all better. I relate so much to your way of thinking and thank you for your work.
This is actually something that I have been trying to do over the last month, so it’s nice to see it put into words. The creativity through cooking has been a blast and incredibly rewarding
Would love a video about habits and being a home cook. I started paying more attention to my habits through out my life and I've found that if my kitchen is dirty and dishes are full, then my likelihood of cooking drastically decreases because I don't want to deal with more clean up. So, I changed my habits by making sure after every cook, I clean up everything because I know in 4-5 hours, I'll be back there needing to cook again. This has saved me SO MUCH in money from delivery services.
i just fell victim to this kind of grocery shopping, ≈$70 just for a specific recipe (and some things i forgot i already had). it’s like you read my mind man, fantastic stuff as always
My parents always used to have this vegetable subscription from local farmers.
Given there were ingredients, the only question remained, what to make of them.
Great way to learn to be comfortable cooking like this before you are somewhat more experienced.
ETHAN!! Thank you so much. I am an unconfident, recipe based cook and I really want to waste less and have cooking take up less mental real estate -- cook well is EXACTLY what I'm looking for!! Bless you 🙏🏼🙏🏼
fully endorse. having to cook for a large family, i long ago just started shopping for things (often based on what's on sale). the dishes were based on what i could do with the things i had with things about to expire going to the front of the line. some basic techniques and a little specialized knowledge gets you started, and before you know it you can explain why you use yukon gold for one dish, russets for another.
My spouse really wanted beef stroganoff and I had sour cream, some flank steak, beef stock, and an onion. Searched the pantry and fridge and found an umami sea salt and Dijon mustard, and made it happen! It’s a great feeling. She liked that stroganoff better than one I made weeks later with the “proper” ingredients.
Umami sea salt, is a made-up thing, not really real.
@@johnnunn8688 it’s a sea salt product flavored with mushrooms or something. It’s from Trader Joe’s and the product is called Umami Sea Salt. Don’t be an ass.
@@johnnunn8688salt plus msg. That's not real?
It is probably just salt + msg.
Unless it is salt mix with some dry ground sea leaf/animal.
@@jintsuubest9331 it’s probably salt with soy, mushroom, and/or seaweed. It’s definitely not *just* salt.
I've followed this cooking pattern my whole life. Recipes are really only used as a template which I redact per preference and what's on hand or for baked items like pizza dough or cakes. I have a pretty set list of staples which are the components of my meal: starch, vegetable (typically frozen), and protein. One off ingredients or meals can be a quick grocery stop but this allows me the ability to cook nearly daily with no issue. Love this video!
This is exactly how I do it too!
Watching the Try Guys Without A Recipe series gave me more kitchen confidence. The fact that they could royally screw something up but still (SOMETIMES) it would taste good!
I like how you highlighted the fact that a lot of traditional foods came from necessity and from what people had on hand. I learned to cook as a teenager and different family members taught me different things. But what everyone would say was to always look in the refrigerator and the pantry and if I had most of the ingredients, to go ahead and make that dish. I got married when I was 21 and this approach helped me a lot since we were always on a budget for the few years of our marriage. I really liked your video because most experienced home cooks like our grandmothers or aunts cook this way, and they usually don’t have a recipe written down for anything they make. Social media can hold us back if we only learn how to cook from 2 minute videos. In my opinion, the best way to learn how to cook is helping out that family member who’s cooking you like best, ask questions, and not give up if you fail. Once you have the basic skills down, you can learn fancier techniques later.
Damn, this is all so bang on. Being the cook here in our home, I’ve proven many times that without a recipe, I’m a disaster in the kitchen, despite having made many dishes that family and friends have said it was they best they’ve ever had. Every last one of those dishes were someone else’s recipe.
1:14 I am this far in and can already see the headache I will get after my wife expresses her frustration and anxiety of not have a set meal schedule. Love it 😈
Same brother. Wife and I are living with my in laws for another 3-4 weeks while we close on the new house. Her mom is a chef and cooks food-based like this and it drives her nuts.
Dude. You don’t know how much I needed this. I’m tired of meal prepping. I’m tired of spending money eating out. I’m tired of being scared to try new spices and herbs because I won’t know what to do with it after the first recipe, then it just ends up going bad. This is a great structure for me to start my home cook journey. Anyone have any tips on how to use less dishes when cooking. Thank you in advance
The way of approaching cooking on this channel is what I truly love about it. I've always cooked this way, not with any sort of intentionality, but because that's how my parents cooked and it was always a creative venture, even if it didn't always turn out great. I find it so sad when I make a dish, share it with others and they ask me for the recipe, only to see the moment I tell them there IS no recipe and when I explain the skills/methods that I used, I can see in their face that they've clocked out and don't want to try it without a guide. So many missed opportunities.
I think this would be a fun approach to try in a different season of life than mine. With little kids, meal planning is the only way I feel I can have fun with cooking but also get through the 4-7pm chaos. If I am approaching dinner with no real plan, the overwhelm of coming up with something new or creative while I’m being constantly interrupted by my kids is too much for me personally. But with meal planning I get to make new recipes and try new ideas because I thought it out beforehand. It does seem like a fun approach though, maybe something to try when my kids are older!
The beauty of home economics!!! 🎉
I need this. I love cooking and I love good food, but it often feels like a chore (mostly the shopping, ugh). My brother is a trained chef and he can whip up amazing foods out of whatever is lying around and I'm so jealous of that.
Totally, a lot chefs will come up with new dishes for a restaurant based on the food that is available to purchase or has already been purchased and needs to be used up before it goes bad!
this whole intro was a personal affront
😂 I don't even want to look in my fridge right now.
😂😂
Bro my harissa has been staring at me for 3 years I screamed 💀💀
Same, when he said unused cilantro I immediately felt called out lol
It's always the lettuce for me.
When I started using recipes as guidelines instead of a strict set of rules I often found myself feeling a lot more free when grocery shopping or looking for something to make for dinner that night. However I do feel like the knowledge from this video will hopefully take things up another notch for me in my cooking. The "How to Grocery Shop Without a List" section was super insightful and 1000% what I've been looking for considering my food budget was butchered at the beginning of this year and I used to cook and shop well outside my current financial means.
This is how I've made food since I started cooking for myself. I always hated following recipes and typically substitute one or more ingredients every time I cook.
My process is very simple: I choose a base (pasta, rice, bread, potatoes etc), then I add a protein (meat or vegetarian) and some vegetables I think would go well with the dish and then I add more flavor with spices and sauces. I focus on keeping the dish balanced: not too dry, too sweet or salty, too carb-heavy, too fatty etc. I tend to play around with techniques as well, but I keep it simple because I'm usually just trying to get food on the plate.
I didn't even realize most people follow recipes until I saw this video! It's never made sense to me.
On the other hand, following recipes can teach you a lot about technique and flavor combination. Maybe I will sit down and follow a recipe one of these days.
Great video!
PREACH, brother!
7:59 this is exactly my friend who is oblivious to cooking. He always ask how do i season the food, how long did i cook it but i just don't know what to say. It's a second nature at this point
When you're new to cooking, having a very structured approach is useful to give you an understanding of what happens to the food as you prepare it. Once they've done it a few times, try suggesting cues to them, rather than directly providing numbers (wait for the onions to brown vs saute the onions for 5 minutes)
I know it would be kinda difficult to do consistently, but one way you might be able to show this mindset in the real world would be to go to some of your subscribers homes and cook with what they have on hand. It would be a challenge for you, we'd get to see some entertaining struggles and improvisations, and also learn what can be made from the random things we have in our fridges and pantry. That would be awesome to see on the cook well channel!
That is actually a great idea and people would probably be interested in it, but obviously there are a ton of things to be solved for that, and it would be geographically constraining.
@@fenrirr22 Agreed. The vetting needed to make sure their spaces are safe, clean, good enough for filming, and not overly stocked with food would be a lot to coordinate.
@EthanDavis.w What if you brought someone to your kitchen after a blind grocery shop and let them talk through the process with you? Or you give them a mystery box and your basic stock of spices with select things removed and did something similar.
He could just do it with friends and family instead. No need to deal with random fans.
This is a refreshing, down-to-earth approach that the majority of people will benefit from! It can be fun once in a while to try a complex recipe to the letter, but thats not most days! Most days I'm exhausted from outdoors activities/studies/work/a combination of all three and then some. In this most common situation, I cook and eat with the mindset of "i need proteins, i need fibers, vitamins and carbs, assembled in a way that is also tasty enough". Will not win any internet food photography contest but if it tastes good and refuels & rebuilds my body, it has done the job.
This is the best ad for a second channel I’ve seen. Never heard of you, but I bought it. I am a student, and my colleagues are always amazed by how good I eat and still get solid 9-10 marks, and this is exactly it. I just go to the supermarket, get some basics, check what’s on sale and explore with new stuff. I am right now resting after eating fish with a buerre Blanc I made with half an onion and some leftover white wine. You have a new sub on both channels.
Please make the video you mentioned at the 14:45
Good vid. Encouraging people to cook more and outlining different ways to cook food more flexibly is probably one of the biggest ways to improve the physical health of the country during tough economic times
Finally, validation for my approach to cooking, especially when 'there is no food in the house '
Your content is absolutely amazing, and of incredible quality. I can't believe we can watch this "for free" on TH-cam. Honestly. Thank you so much and I love your channel man!
Awesome video! Love what you guys are doing. I learned a lot of these skills from my parents and can do this with my home cuisine. But, I've been learning to cook Indian food recently. I've started noticing common threads between the recipes, and I'm hoping I can start freewheeling with those flavors and techniques as well. Thank you for making this!
how refreshing to find a cooking youtube star who hasn't changed his whole channel/game because he is successful!!! BRAVO ETHAN and Thank you too!
I totally relate to what you're saying here! For me, as an enthusiastic home cook and dressmaker, recipes are like sewing patterns - they provide inspiration and ideas, but rarely do I slavishly follow them in every detail. I always start from the food I have available, in my fridge, freezer and store cupboard, and figure out what to make with it. This results in endless variations in my dishes, so a stir fry or casserole may comprise different ingredients this week than last week because I had different vegetables to use up, even if the fundamentals are the same. I was saying to my husband the other day that I may as well donate all my cookery books, as I never consult them any more. They served their purpose at the time, but now they just gather dust... With a well-stocked freezer and store cupboard/pantry, you can turn the most random collection of leftovers into a delicious meal. And that's way more creative and fun than following a recipe that came out of someone else's head 😊
This channel is a huge reason why I never use recipes anymore! Now I have the "soft" cooking skills to wing it. Except for baking and pastries, but that's a different beast lol
Ethan,
I have been using the food-approach for as long as I can remember, but your channel along with others has refined my skills like crazy!
Cooking is one of my more advanced hobbies and I am really thankful I have access to so many good inspirations.
Thank you, really.
You're so good at what you do!
7:38 I'd watch those videos
I've always been overwhelmingly ingredient based over recipes. Unless I know that I'm making something special like a family recipe that everyone expects to be a certain way, I use what I have.
For me, recipes are ideas... I don't actually fully follow them, I just use them as a guide and mess with what I have...
I love this and it's super important. I've loved cooking for awhile now but I was definitely the cook going all out to make the 'best' version of something and only cooking occasionally rather than an everyday cook.
What changed things for me was becoming a father and partner - cooking for my family. Now I cook every day and recipes are more inspiration. And most of the time I'm not sticking to my planned meals, I'm improvising around what's happening in our life and what's in our pantry and fridge.
Your videos where you cook live feel a lot like the cooking I'm doing in my kitchen. 👏
I recently got a job helping teach young cooks (high schoolers), and I want to show them this video. Or at least recommend it because this is one of the best videos on food I’ve seen. Great explanations and descriptions. Incredibly helpful and engaging. Excellent all around!
3:22, your fly is down
Got em
10:25 "I didn't waste time washing my rice" SHAME on you SHAME
I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever washed rice. And I cook it pretty often (rice is life). Unless you live somewhere where the rice is dirty, there's no point in washing it. None. Jasmine rice only takes 15-17 minutes to cook through. Basmati rice takes 20 minutes. Washing it doesn't improve the texture much unless you want it to be sticky like sushi rice and removing the starch does fuck all.
Why you reading my mind 😂
Omgg frr😅🤣 I hate following recipes I just improvise everytime😊🤣🤣
GET OUT (of my head 😂)
It’s a hilariously common issue for people like us who are beginner intermediate cooks who learned from TH-cam.
As a self-taught homecook, I rely on recipes only when I make baked goods and things like pancake.
Other times, I look at recipes to have a basis on a food I'm really not familiar with, especially with foreign cuisines. I then think about alternatives, what can be omitted, and make food loosely based on a chosen dish.
But 97% of the time, I cook base on what we have on the fridge and the pantry. I have accumulated enough experience in doing so and watching content creators like Ethan is a huge help.
Ethan, you are a true class act! One of your videos usually delivers more useful content than a full cookbook. I'll keep watching! Thank you.
Oh man, this is *brilliant* dude. Instant subscribe to the second channel and bookmark of your website. As someone who watches a lot of cooking YT'ers and tries to follow recipes all the time, I can't describe to you how much I needed to hear this. Thank you thank you thank you.
I love this so much, because this is how I learnt to cook! I was pretty poor for a long time but I am picky with my food so I came up with new ways to prepare the same three to four ingredients, just so I wouldn't get depressed from having to eat the same things every day 🥲
But since I started living more comfortably with better pay, I lost some of that creativity, but also have access to new varieties of ingredients.
Cooking never gets boring if you make things up as you go, with the hard and soft skills you've learnt along the way ❤️
One of the things I love about this video as that I realize this is...kind of how I cook. With one Caveat. Part of my shopping journey is, I like to go into certain stores and look for either NEW items, Items that have a Great Sale, or just items that catch my eye. I may walk into publix and see something that is buy one get one free, and then start to think of ways I could prepare that, and then start to build on the rest of the items I want to buy, based on what I also have available at home. It's a great way to be fluid, flexible and experimental.
I usually don't comment, but this video spoke to me. My dad taught me to cook without recipes. When we go shopping nowadays, he still buys whatever produce is on sale and figures out a way to make it work. Even when he looked at a recipe, there was always something where he said "oh I won't like that much salt. I'm not doing that". Nowadays, after work I open up the fridge and figure out what to do with what I have, or buy a new sauce or vegetable because it "seems fun" and figure out what to do with it later. I think this mindset also helps to be able to tune the acid/spicy level of dishes for family members with heartburn/GI issues.
I think there are a few cookbooks that teach what you're preaching here -- as an American, Joy of Cooking comes to mind, as does a lot of Jaques Pepin's work, or more recently, Samin Nosrat, all of which focus on recipes as "templates" not doctrine. There's no need for another Joy (or Silver Spoon, On Food and Cooking, etc) on my bookshelf, but cookbook authors gotta get paid, and social media pros like yourself need to feed the ever-hungry beast of Content and Engagement.
One final thought -- I think the incredible privilege we have to access any food from anywhere in the world, in any season, combined with following trendy recipes creates a challenge for home cooks that are interested in being adventurous - it's easy to end up with a fridge full of exotic, but challenging to combine ingredients and condiments (e.g. miso, cilantro, cuttlefish, and passion fruit). Focusing on local, seasonal ingredients may be restrictive (and usually cheaper!), but it's fun for me to figure out how to make new recipes with mostly the same ingredients, and let the seasons re-introduce old flavors so they're new again. I feel like seasonal ingredient based cooking has fallen out of fashion again after the Slow Food movement brought it back a decade ago, I hope it comes back.
this is so great! i have been trying to explain this idea to my family for a long time. Now I can send them the video!