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Commit to a path.

If you’re reading this, I assume that you have a strong desire to improve your skills in your kitchen. You want baking/cooking/cocktails to be something of a hobby, not just something you do when you need to. I also assume you have the knowledge and skills to follow recipes of all different sorts. Finally, I assume you still want to know more, and learn more comprehensively. If this sounds like you, then I suggest the following books to work through:

• The King Arthur Baking School by King Arthur Baking Company, for baking
• The New Cooking School Cookbook: Fundamentals, followed by Advanced Fundamentals, by America’s Test Kitchen, for cooking
• Raising the Bar: A Bottle-By-Bottle Guide to Mixing Masterful Cocktails at Home by Brett Adams and Jacob Grier, for cocktails

Look through a copy of your chosen book(s) before moving any further in this process. Borrow a copy from a friend or a library, or flip through it at the bookstore. See if the book matches what you want to learn. If it doesn’t, find another book or resource to work through that does. Don’t try to force yourself to use a resource that doesn’t work for you.

Don’t buy a bunch of stuff to get started. Maybe don’t even buy the books at first.

Upon opening any of the recommended texts, and most other cooking books, you will soon see a list of recommended supplies. In the America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks, they even suggest specific brands and items to buy. If you have the budget you could theoretically just buy all their suggestions at once and be done with it. But you should generally only buy things as needed. It would be a waste of money and material to buy three different knives from a brand only to find out you don’t actually like the way they fit in your hand.

Only buy what you truly need to get started. A scale for baking or a cocktail shaker make a big difference to learning techniques, for instance. Researching and buying supplies beyond the basics can be a form of procrastination. Your kitchen skills will improve more by starting and improvising on materials than spending several hundred dollars at Williams Sonoma!

Do absolutely start with a reasonably clean and tidy kitchen.

I apologize for this step, because tidying and then cleaning a kitchen can suck. But a clean and tidy kitchen helps motivate you to spend time improving your skills in there and makes your practice more efficient and pleasant.

I personally take the approach in my kitchen where not even oil, salt, and pepper stay out on the counters. When I clean up after cooking and eating, I put them all away. If I had a larger kitchen with a lot more counter space, I might approach this differently. But as it is, I don’t have room to keep a nice and cleanable baking setup, cooking setup, and drinks setup on my counters at the same time, so I find it easiest to put everything away when I’m done with it. This also makes scrubbing my counters much easier.

The tidiness of a kitchen goes beyond the countertops, however. Go through the insides of cabinets and de-clutter them, at least in part so you don’t buy redundant equipment or ingredients. Once again, however, don’t use cleaning and tidying as a way to procrastinate on actually starting working in your kitchen!

Follow the recipes as written, in order, to start.

If you use one of my recommended texts, the authors write the recipes in that order for a reason. As this process deals with learning techniques and recipes methodically, rather than by improvising, do follow the recipes as written the first time you make them. Obviously, common sense still plays a role here. Don’t put off cooking or baking practice for several weeks while you track down diastatic malt powder or wait for a special occasion to splurge on smoked salmon. Sometimes things have to be done out of order, and consistent practices matters more than avoiding any modifications.

Variations of recipes in the texts allow you to practice a technique multiple times in pretty quick succession without having to repeat the same exact meal too often. That said, at some point the temptation to make your own variations on the recipes will arise. You’ll start to wonder if you could make buns with your dough, or if you could try a rose simple syrup in your French 75. After you make the recipe as written once, you should absolutely try your variations. You learn techniques and ideas better when you play with them.

Definitely acquire physical copies of the books at some point, and annotate your cookbooks as you work through them.

For a start, cooking out of a physical cookbook has practical advantages in many circumstances. The physical page stays awake and flips between pages easily. I also find it more pleasant to keep my studies as analogue as possible, with fewer interruptions from group chats and advertisements. And finally, physical annotation works more smoothly. (Please don’t do this when cooking from a library book.)

You can keep a notebook rather than writing in your cookbook, by the way. If you don’t like how something tastes, or find a recipe works better if you do it differently, write that down. You should especially note any areas you would like to explore further. Do you particularly like working with pastry or fermenting pickles? Then make a note of that so you can look into further resources.

Realize that these skills can all develop for a lifetime!

People spend their whole professional lives working on baking and cooking and drinks skills, leaving no shortage of things to learn in the home kitchen. Please be sure to not let skills improvement get in the way of having fun and eating tasty meals.

Edit: After completing two chapters, here is an update!