Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking
I&#x27;m a culinary school graduate and former professional chef. I appreciate this app touching on techniques and ingredients rather than just throwing recipes at you. Trying to learn how to cook by following recipes is like trying to learn a language by reading pamphlets. The &#x27;why&#x27; behind recipes is learnable, the knowledge is useful before you master it, and the shift in results is dramatic.<p>Resources:<p>Maybe this app? Haven&#x27;t really dug into it but it looked hopeful from the description.<p>An approachable, well-written introductory read on the topic is Michael Ruhlman&#x27;s <i>Ratio</i>. Start there. Most tech types start with more technical books like Harold McGee&#x27;s <i>On Food and Cooking.</i>   Don&#x27;t. Technical knowledge helps, but isn&#x27;t required. Cooking is an art! Approaching it like organic chemistry yields enjoyable nerding but mediocre food. A biology class would be useful for an artist, but if you&#x27;re learning to draw, take a life drawing class. Taking biology first won&#x27;t help.
Once you are comfortable with <i>Ratio,</i> grab the Flavor Bible for reference. It&#x27;s a huge paper database of flavor affinities. 
After getting comfortable with the <i>art</i> of cooking, read McGee. It&#x27;s well-written enough to read straight through but dense enough to use as a reference. Many decry his less-than-perfect understanding -- his PhD is in Poetry, after all. I&#x27;ve never seen a critic as good at cooking as criticizing people. If they were as interested in cooking as criticizing people, they&#x27;d have paid more attention to his book.<p>Advice on learning to cook really damn good food:<p>1) Season.
Get comfortable with seasoning. Maybe 70% of professional cooking polish stems from proper seasoning. Your tongue only senses 5 things: saltiness, sweetness , sourness , bitterness, and savoriness (glutamates.) Everything else is sensed by your olfactory bulb. Activating your tongue with those senses makes your brain pay much closer attention to what you smell. If your food tastes flat or boring, there&#x27;s a 90% chance it&#x27;s under-seasoned. This requires considering ALL of those senses, not just salt. Your folk explanations of seasoning or &quot;common knowledge&quot; approaches to seasoning are probably wrong.<p>2) Smell everything. Taste everything. 
Eat a spoonful of Dijon mustard. Bite a bit off of a sage leaf and compare that with dried sage. Contemplate Worcestershire sauce. Let it sit in your mouth and breath through your nose so you really hit your olfactory bulb. Smell that cooking oil that&#x27;s been sitting around for a few months and compare it to a brand new bottle. Ponder the differences. This practice avoids putting bad ingredients in your food and expands your palate.<p>3) Move away from recipes.
Start thinking about cooking in terms of ingredient ratios and techniques rather than recipes.<p>4) Learn about heat. 
Get comfortable with the appropriate application of heat. Learn about dry heat and moist heat techniques. Figure out how things like ingredient temperature and salt content can change that. Pay attention to browning and searing. Learn why you shouldn&#x27;t crowd a pan.<p>5) Stop timing things. 
Start using your 5 senses and tools like a thermometer to tell when something is done. If Rice-a-roni can cook by time, why can&#x27;t you? The ingredient size, density and moisture content is pretty uniform. Boiling water is uniform enough to yield predictable results. None of that is true when you&#x27;re, say, roasting broccoli or cooking a steak.<p>6) Watch relationships.
Pay attention to what happens to ingredients when treated in specific ways, and how they interact. E.g. caramelizing onions vs sauteing vs raw... and how they hit differently in salad or onion dip or meat loaf. These differences exist in most ingredients we use.<p>7) Get experience.
Push yourself to experience new things and challenge your reflexive food rejections.<p>8) Nobody owes it to you to like your dish. 
Accept that food is emotionally complicated for people. Tastes vary widely and are influenced by everything from cultural exposure to genetics. No matter how much effort you put into a dish, some people just won&#x27;t like it, and that&#x27;s <i>fine.</i><p>9) Be humble. 
Deep understanding of food is not a superpower. Little ol&#x27; gram gram made the same 15 dishes her whole life, but probably knows more about the subtleties of those dishes and their ingredients than I know about everything else. Complexity is not the pinnacle of good taste or sophistication. Simplicity executed perfectly is often more sophisticated and more difficult than complexity. Focus and good taste are the keys.<p>Here&#x27;s a related anecdote. I worked in nightclubs in my early twenties. We got free, ice-cold bottom-of-the-barrel light beer after our hot, stressful, exhausting shifts. I still enjoy reliving that on a hot summer day. I also regularly drank with some household names in craft beer, and a few Sommeliers. Their focused education and experience blew mine away, but my palate was easily on par. So when I order a lawnmower beer in some mediocre bar the 23 year bartender says &quot;here&#x27;s your glass of horse piss. You know there are some craft options that are just as...&quot; well... he should just be very thankful I&#x27;m no longer a chef.