You can usually tell by how well they explain everything. There are channels like "Ethan Chlebowski" that often go into indepth analysis and there are many channels that goers into techniques. You can judge for yourself by trying it out. Eventually you gain enough technique where you can use it as a framework to cook. This is useful if you have a fridge full of random stuff and you need to cook dinner.A lot of people have recommended YouTube but how does one know the YouTuber is legitimate? Number of views and subscribers is not a good case here (look for financial advice on YT and you’ll find the biggest influencers about it give absolutely false and toxic information).
My concern with cooking that hopefully some people can chime in is simple: how does one learn tried and true techniques that are consistently used throughout recipes?
I don’t know what this looks like but certainly there has to be a fair amount of techniques that are consistently used for many different types of foods. I can follow a recipe to a T but when I’m done and the food is good and dandy I feel like I just followed some instructions.
Luckily I’m not the cook at home. From what I’ve seen a chicken meal at a mid to high end restaurant (not franchise) is worlds away different than at home marinated chicken. How? I’m not talking about texture or juiciness but actual taste. We’ve followed plenty of recipes but I’ve never had chicken at home as I’ve had at nicer restaurants.
You can get pretty close to restaurants. I can probably do better than most Chinese Restaurant that are not auenthetic. I can usually cook diner food better or as good. I can't beat high end restaurant. It might be possible to do, but I don't have a team of train chefs prepping and I usually have less than an hour to cook.
The advantage of cooking from a video over a book is that you can see what the dish is like. I once tried to cook risotto to impress my girlfriend (now wife), but the problem was I never had risotto before and didn't realized it was supposed to be "wet"
Statistics: Posted by gavinsiu — Thu Jan 29, 2026 12:34 pm — Replies 53 — Views 1199