To the men who learned how to cook – how did it start?

37 comments

1. Good Eats and America’s Test Kitchen. If it’s not there, it’s not worth knowing.

2. When my family members would cook, I helped them as a child. Now I, too, can cook.

3. With Julia Child.

4. Rachel Ray-before all the fame and pot making. 30 minute meals! Made quick and cheap!

5. Being raised by a single dad will do the trick

6. when you want to save money and be frugile you learn.

7. Loved my mother’s cooking and knew she wouldn’t be around forever. lol

8. I got into weightlifting/amateur bodybuilding when I was a teen, and doing that you pretty much have to learn how to cook. You can teach yourself pretty easily just using Google/Youtube, and I’ve just kept it up till now (30 years old).

   Now I pretty much only cook food, and I may go out to eat once every 2-3 months.

9. While I was growing up, I somehow fell into watching cooking shows on Food Network (back when they had those) as a way to relax and unwind after school. At some point I fell into watching a lot of Alton Brown’s Good Eats, which was exactly my sense of fairly weird, kinda corny, and fairly geeky, and learning about how cooking worked got me interested in how to actually do it, which lead to binge reading stuff on Serious Eats by J. Kenji Lopez Alt as well as a bunch of other cooking books and blogs.

   Once I was living on my own I started cooking for friends as an occasional hobby because it would be fun and I had to do *something* with the stupid culinary trivia in my head. Later I started cooking more because I had to save money and bringing lunch to work just made sense. But yeah, it’s mostly because food is delicious and I have a shitton of leftover knowledge from watching too much TV.

10. Ok goofy story but here it goes, my ex and I watched an anime about a bunch of kids in a cooking academy and I don’t know why but it just looked fun as hell. So I started looking up some of the recipes from the show and tried my hand at making them and discovered I really enjoyed it. After that the kitchen pretty much became my little sanctuary, I cooked all our meals and would come up with and make different sauces and mix my own spice combinations and just experiment and have fun.

11. My Dad.

    My Mom was no rockstar in the kitchen. Even though my Dad worked over 40 hours a week running a pizza place, he’d take me and my brother shopping Sunday mornings and he planned the meal he’d cook for dinner than night.

    We’d chat and cook and watch the football game and the Nascar race, switching between them both.

    Damn good times. He’d pass on his skills, we’d get into food fights, and we’d all sit down and fight over Mom’s leftovers.

    Miss you Dad. Every. Damn. Day.

12. Gordon Ramsay and Binging with Babish – both really great YouTube channels that taught me the bare minimum; as long as you know how to measure ingredients out, all that’s left is learning the techniques.

13. I was hungry

14. I needed food so I looked up random recipes.

15. From a fat guy on youtube in 2015.

16. Got tired of the same stuff all of the time. I started to experiment with stuff like making my own taco seasoning and switching meats in recipes (turkey meatballs, chicken meatloaf, mahi pasta bake). It really took off when I started paying more attention to the temperature of meats and allowing a rest period. Makes such a difference in taste and texture. Never cared for it until then.

    I enforced the habit of cleaning as I go so I couldn’t use the excuse of cleaning up to deter myself. The hardest parts were learning not to cook too much and not cooking everyday.

    My wife certainly loves the effort I place into cooking haha.

17. my parents weren’t home and I wanted to survive.

18. I watched the first 20 minutes of Kitchen Nightmares where they just microwave and throw stuff together and thought, “I could probably do better than that!” Then in high school we had a home ec class that everyone had to do a come in and cook a dish for the entire class to try and you could recreate someone else’s for extra credit so I just absolutely abused that. My mom loved it though, once I got good enough with the knives and stuff, she’d get a text from me with a list of ingredients and she knew she didn’t have to cook that night.

19. I like to eat well when camping. So that’s where I started.

20. When my parents got tired of making instant ramen for me all the time.

    But it took off when I moved out and watched Food Wishes on youtube.

21. I’m learning now.

    Finally got my own apartment. It’s time to stop relying on the pizza rolls everyday. My main concern when I was looking for a new apartment was close to work and a big kitchen so I’d have room to prep food. Everywhere I’ve lived the kitchen was tiny so I had no interest in spending more than 3 seconds in it.

    [Some disgusting overcooked burnt broccoli stuffed chicken](https://i.imgur.com/6XbjMwG.jpg)

    [Some fire jalapeno poppers](https://i.imgur.com/etaMOwP.jpg)

    [Bomb ass ham and cheese omelet ](https://i.imgur.com/5lMQce3.jpg)

22. My mom taught me how to cook! But primarily coz I was pretty damn sure as a kid that that’s how girls are impressed!

23. Cook books

24. I went to work and to get a pay raise from dishwasher I became a prep cook. A few years later I was asked to train as a line cook. I still cook as if I work in a restaurant 10 years after I quit.

25. learned the basics very young and developed quick improvisation skills to make ok “meals” in small amount of time with whatever is available. Then supplemented that with basic knowledge of nutrition science to basically be able to feed myself well with minimal cooking time (and improvise with what is left in my fridge). Not sure if I’ll ever migrate to “taste” optimization at some point but right now my time is better spent on higher priority tasks.

26. Mum said it would get me girls. Now I just spend too much time in the kitchen.

27. Single mom was never home, literally days at a time she was gone… I had to cook, or starve.

28. When you no longer live with your parents, you either cook or you starve.

29. Between 2017-22: Starvation.

    2022 onwards: Inflation.

30. Gordon Ramsay vids + British baking show

31. just need to not be lazy. Use internet recipes. Buy ingredients. And get at err. Even when it dont work out, it can be kind of funny and learning experience. Cast iron on stove top and the slow cooker is amazing tools to feed everyone

32. My mother cooks amazing food and has gastronomy courses, my sister is second only to my mother in her cooking, my Brother cooks really well because of my sister in law, and my girlfriend is a goddess basically, she looks at something and practically knows how to make it. I took lessons from everyone of them lol, i could say I’m doing well

33. Did a cooking class when i was 11 at the local youth centre, learned how to make a simple carbonara that hasnt failed me since. Other stuff i learned how to make cus I either just liked the food and wanted to learn how to make it myself, or i bought a cookbook that looked interesting and looked for anything that interested me.

34. The fact that people exist that can’t or refuse to prepare decent food for themselves or their families is absurd. Some of my coworkers said their wives literally buy takeout almost every night of the week. Pathetic.

35. My mom did all the cooking, but she only made white people food. I had a lot of non-white friends, whose moms taught me how to make food from their ethnic backgrounds. I then taught my mom how to cook without boiling everything to hell and forgetting to season it.

    >!Her cooking wasn’t actually that bad, but pretty much nothing but meat and potatoes!<

36. Set fire to a pot trying to make vegetable soup in food tech. After finally convincing my mum to let me use the stove for super noodles after that phone call from the school it basically developed from there

37. Mom: ”I have to start working late and you know dad is always working late, so you need to start dinner for me now. Here is what I want to have for dinner tomorrow night. Just put the plate on this setting and put these things in the pot. After that, put this in that dish and put it in the oven on this setting for ‘X’ minutes”.

    12-year old me: ”Okay”

    Then eventually mom stops telling you what to do and you just starting winging it.