I am not aware of a good equivalent for Indian cooking (and would love one) but I’ll always recommend J Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Food Lab. Each chapter is dedicated to a different kind of cooking with a large introduction on the fundamental concepts, tools, and tips for ingredient shopping.
And while he doesn’t always ramp up the complexity of each recipe there is a lot of compounding. Like, he’ll have a recipe on how to make GOOD chicken stock, Then a recipe on how to speed through zhushing up some store bought. And then he’ll have a few recipes that actually use that stock.
Kenji’s The Wok also does that for Chinese(-ish) cooking but assumes a lot more foundational skills.
And while he is a d-bag and a recipe thief, Andrew Rea’s Basics with Babish is a book I buy for every relative/friend who is just learning to cook. Most recipes have a blog post at the start that explains a lot of the ideas and concepts. And it was from before he had a brand of white label pans and knives so the shopping tips are actually pretty good. AND you’ll even recognize a lot of recipes from some of your other favorite cookbooks (including The Food Lab…).
But yeah. Would love a similar book for Indian cuisine. A lot of the fundamentals ARE the same but I know I always have trouble figuring out what spices to blend or having an instinctual knowledge of what to do to fix a dish.
I am not aware of a good equivalent for Indian cooking (and would love one) but I’ll always recommend J Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Food Lab. Each chapter is dedicated to a different kind of cooking with a large introduction on the fundamental concepts, tools, and tips for ingredient shopping.
And while he doesn’t always ramp up the complexity of each recipe there is a lot of compounding. Like, he’ll have a recipe on how to make GOOD chicken stock, Then a recipe on how to speed through zhushing up some store bought. And then he’ll have a few recipes that actually use that stock.
Kenji’s The Wok also does that for Chinese(-ish) cooking but assumes a lot more foundational skills.
And while he is a d-bag and a recipe thief, Andrew Rea’s Basics with Babish is a book I buy for every relative/friend who is just learning to cook. Most recipes have a blog post at the start that explains a lot of the ideas and concepts. And it was from before he had a brand of white label pans and knives so the shopping tips are actually pretty good. AND you’ll even recognize a lot of recipes from some of your other favorite cookbooks (including The Food Lab…).
But yeah. Would love a similar book for Indian cuisine. A lot of the fundamentals ARE the same but I know I always have trouble figuring out what spices to blend or having an instinctual knowledge of what to do to fix a dish.