Learn to Cook

Learn to Cook brings together the books that teach principles rather than recipes. They are organised around technique and method, making you self sufficient in the kitchen instead of simply giving you another dinner to cook.

Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat builds the whole of cooking around four elements and is the most influential textbook for home cooks of the past decade. In Start Here, Sohla El-Waylly spends more than 600 pages explaining why techniques work and won a James Beard Award for it. Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniques covers more than 600 techniques with a thousand photographs and has taught an entire generation of cooks how to handle a knife.

Kenji López-Alt tests his way to the answers and documents the process in The Food Lab, 958 pages of kitchen chemistry explained without losing the reader along the way, then does the same for a single piece of cookware in The Wok. In Ratio, Michael Ruhlman reduces large parts of cooking to 26 ratios by weight.

Then there is Thomas Keller's Under Pressure on sous vide and Katarina Cermelj's method for making virtually any baking recipe gluten free or vegan.

If you are going to start somewhere, start here.