Is anyone an amazing cook who is self taught?

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I've convinced myself I'm never going to be able to learn how to cook properly. I had a mother who hated cooking and provided us with ready meals (not slating her, nobody is perfect). I once spoke to a chef who worked at a Michelin star restaurant who said when it comes to cooking he either thinks you've got it or you haven't which I found quite discouraging. I'm not the best with books and magazines and YouTube because I'm not good at estimating things and winging things. I'm such a perfectionist. But I'm going to really give it a bash now as I'm fed up of eating awful ready meals. And I actually really want to eat healthy and hearty meals. Are there many people who have taught themselves and have become a really good cook?

You don't need to be an 'amazing' cook to eat nice, healthy homemade food.

I'm not the best with books and magazines and YouTube because I'm not good at estimating things and winging things

This is what recipes are for, so you don't have to estimate or wing it. I started with the Hugh F-W Veg Every Day cookbook when I wanted to cook more and eat healthily.

My mum is self taught and an amazing cook.

What sort of things do you make now?

I grew up on ready meals. Whilst I am not a Michelin start chef, I think I now make pretty tasty homemade food.

I use bbc good food at first a lot, and over the years adapt some.

The chef was talking rubbish. Good recipe books spell out exactly what you need to do. You can't go wrong with any Delia Smith book. If you can read you can follow a recipe.

Also, watch YouTube tutorials and cookery shows.

I didn't teach DD to cook, but she is a fantastic cook.

IMO there are no people who can't cook, just people who hate cooking or don't want to learn (disabilities excepted)

I'm not a brilliant cook but a good home cook with a degree of confidence to get myself out of trouble if things go wrong.
My mum was a veg overcooked, meat boiler type cook, so I pretty much taught myself.

My son has learned to cook: it wasn't great at first but he's pretty good now. Half the battle is to allow yourself enough time so that everything comes out together. Consider tryingrecipe kits (we did Hello Fresh for a few weeks) to get into the swing of preparing different components and then cooking is a matter of putting them together at the right time.
It is so rewarding to be able to make something delicious from a handful of things. Even my husband, the king of beans on toast, has started being more adventurous since he's seen ds Enjoy it so much. I hope you enjoy the journey. Even when it's a bit wrong, it teaches you something for next time Good luck!

Sure! I’m not big-headed enough to claim
I or DH are amazing cooks but we’re pretty good and self taught. It’s just about taking an interest.

When DH was in university he had beans on toast, microwaved jacket potatoes or a chilli made with a Colman’s sachet. That was it.
(His poor roommates! 💨)

He can spatchcock a bird, fillet and pinbone a fish, cook any number of delicious meals and knock up a 2 course meal for 6 without recourse to a cook book. It took him until his 30s to get interested in food but he’s great at it.

Every few years I decided I want to get good at a different sort of food. At one point it was cooking with meat (I don’t eat it but my family does), at another it was working through Ottolenghi cookbooks, at another it was becoming confident with Indian and Pakistani food. I grew up on Italian and Eastern European food, and like to broaden my horizons a bit.

Learning to cook is just like learning any other skill (but with added bonus of dinner). Start simply, it’s ok to make mistakes, and prioritise the kind of things you actually enjoy eating.

Nigella’s How To Eat is a good all-rounder.

My friend did hello fresh and wasn’t a cook. He found it simple to follow.

I'm a really good self taught cook.
I started with the basics and went from there, Delia is good and I swear by Jamie's Ministry of Food for family meals.

I recommend batch cooking to take some of the thought out of it. I have a big slow cooker and once a month I make a big pot of bolognese and chilli - just mince, chopped tomatoes, loads of veggies plus herbs/spices/seasoning (basically paprika and cumin for chilli, oregano, Worcester sauce and garlic for Bolognese) and freeze in portion sized boxes. That does one or two meals a week where you just have to heat it up in the microwave up some pasta or rice. This was absolutely game changing for me and stopped me thinking "oh I cba to cook I'll get a takeaway" multiple times a a week! It's pretty easy to do things in the slow cooker if you remember not to add as much liquid as you do in a saucepan, and that might give you some confidence to try more complex recipes.

It may be true that when it comes to being a top chef you either have the talent or not, and I do think there are some people very lacking in cooking ability. Probably these people would have a poor sense of taste or lack an innate sense of time or be very clumsy or something. In general I do think that most people can learn to cook well enough to be a decent home cook who can make nice simple dinners, and some of them a very good home cook who can cook restaurant quality
meals on a small scale, if they are willing to put in the effort and practice and invest in some good equipment.
The thing is in order to make nice dinners you don't need to be Gordon Ramsey or even Delia Smith. Just learn a few simple recipes that you can do well and you can even take a few shortcuts using good bought ingredients.

I'm good - I learnt how to do basic stuff from the original Delia books from the late 70s and progressed from there. I think to be a good cook you need to really enjoy food and it goes from there. I am not great at cake decoration because I'm much more keen on savoury stuff.

I'm (now) a great cook. Can't do curries, still, for some reason. But I started cooking at 18. I got the Delia How To Cook books 1-3, and they are essentially brilliant instructions for most things you can think of. From that, I now have a great cooking knowledge. So if I see a recipe I like, I can often make my own tweaks or substitutions as necessary, and home cook most nights from scratch. DH even moans when we have takeaway because it's never as nice as what I cook. We don't go out for Sunday roasts because they're never as good either.

You can absolutely teach yourself. I'd call myself a natural talent in the kitchen, but when you think about it, it's just following instructions until you've made something enough times you could do it with your eyes closed. I love it, so it hasn't felt like hard work as I've learned through the years. If I can do it, anyone can.

BBC good food is a great website, because the recipes have people's comments under each recipe. Eg "Found recipe only required half the stock it asked for" and if ten people are agreeing with this, you know to adapt the recipe before you start.

Good luck OP xx

Growing up in my country of origin, we had a cook so my mother would cook very less or only special dishes at occasions etc. So I saw very less of my mother cooking but I did used to bake a lot since I have a sweet tooth and gradually then transitioned into cooking. I started when I was to move to the UK and I'd follow recipes to the letter (just as when we bake) but slowly slowly as you become confident in a specific recipe you can start changing it up for example (more spice etc) so that helps. Pick any recipe (the ones on BBC Goodfood and Tasty ones are very easy to follow). If you start with those and slowly develop you can cook really great food. I enjoy cooking now and my husband compliments the food I make so I guess slow and steady and you'll win the race. Good luck!!

I would suggest going from all ready meals to home cooking everything if a large leap as well. Find one next dish each week max to cook homemade. By the end of a year you will have tried 52 recipes and repeated favourites several times. Your favourites then become easier and easier

Agree with the Delia books 1-3. Charity shops will have them! Everyone had them about 25 years ago. It'll teach teach everything from how to boil an egg, to (probably) how to gut a pheasant. She really focuses on technique and also has loads of online tutorials too. No idea why she has gone out of fashion, although I suspect we're only allowed 1 older cooking woman on telly at one time and Mary Berry then Prue have usurped her.

OR if you're looking for something more basic and you're an absolute beginner and you want to get to the level of cooking well for family dinners, Jamie's Ministry of Food is a good bet.

Then it's just practice.

I'm a pretty good self taught cook. We ate fairly plain when I lived at home, but since I left home I've tried new stuff and I go in phases - relying on the staples but then trying new things. In Oct last year I realised it has all got a bit stale so had a look through my books and did a new dish every week until Christmas. Most of these have been repeated and I'm planning on doing the same this year.

Ds is 19 and still living at home, but has a vegetarian girlfriend. He's become a good cook as she's been teaching him things. Both my girls are good, esp dd2 who is 17 and rustles things up from what's in the fridge. She makes fancy things for her lunch at college.

Both dh and I are very decent, totally self-taught cooks. There is absolutely no need to be able to wing it as long as you can read a recipe. Not sure what you mean about not being good with books and magazines - the recipes you find in books and magazines enable you not to have to estimate!

The BBC website and the BBC Good Food website are full of reliable recipes. If you google 'simple chicken pie bbc' etc you'll usually find a nice standard, pretty simple recipe for what you're looking for. Or just go for a basics recipe book like Delia's.

Chef was probably deliberately trying to put you off. I'm self taught & people seem to like my food (and not die).

I consider myself a good, self-taught, cook ; so is Raymond Blanc - although I suspect he's better than me.

My brother is as well, & we both agree we're glad that DM never taught us as she was a terrible cook, so we learned from books.

There are plenty of tutorials on-line, I agree with the BBC website ,but not the "BBC Good Food" magazine - too many mistakes. Not too keen on Delia either - I've followed her recipes instead of trusting my instinct & ended up with disasters.

I think i'm a pretty good cook but i've only really been doing it for the past 7-8 years. I also used to think i was the kind of person who could burn water but i gradually built up and now I really like my own food.

Another thing that helps is once you start cokking you find that you are suddenly the kind of person who just has things like white wine vinegar, oyster sauce, turmeric etc in your larder so it's no longer intimidating looking down a list of ingredients because i've built up supplies over time.

I started with recipes like lasagnes and pasta sauces. The Pinch Of Nom recipe books are good for cooking from scratch as well.

I got interested in cooking because I was always on a 'diet', that started about 25 years ago and I'm no longer on a diet, I can gladly say. I waited tasty food that wasn't like rabbit food. I would attribute TV programmes, books and travel to my passion for cooking good food. And, I'm not fussy about what I eat. Although I eat less meat these days.

Nigella Lawson said in one of her books that she is clearly not a trained or professional chef, she's a home cook and her qualification is as an eater. Same.

Delia’s books are really good and easyto follow. No 100’s of fancy ingredients.
I’m not amazing but quite good (I’d like to think). Self taught by asking women at the butcher’s queue what I could do with what cut of meat (back in the 90’s),experimenting a bit then all the joys of internet recipes and cook books came.

Get the basics first (I’d recommend Delia again) or tell us what would you like to cook? Start with what do you like eating?

I’d make a crap chef but still can manage good,balanced and nutritious meals for my family.
Maybe the Michelin chef was talking about job abilities. Give yourself some more credit and try. It’s worth it and there’s a bunch of friendly people here willing to help 🙂

I’m not an amazing cook but I do learn as I go along. YouTube videos are amazing so I can just watch and rewind and in most cases, I just improvise because I don’t have all the ingredients at hand. I learnt some dishes from my mother and grandmother and the rest of chef YouTube

I agree with building up your larder and I always make sure that I have enough of my herbs and spices. I also make my own herb/spice blends (my favourite so far is the ras el hanout) and I usually make a big jar full and give them away as gifts.

I think maybe the key to being a really good cook is really liking food and being curious as to how things taste or what makes food taste that way.

And buying the best quality ingredients you can like organic - that taste is so much better.

If you can explore tastes and ingredients like herbs and spices etc, work out sweet and sour/ bitter and experiment a bit then you’ll be able to embellish recipes and get the best out of your ingredients.

Start with recipes and taste everything before and after adding the ingredients to spot the changes.

Also, lots of salt, pepper and butter!

I grew up in pubs so was always around good but I wasn't really taught
Trial and error and recipe books! I also like reading food magazines so pick up ideas from there. Jamie Oliver ministry of food is a good one
Picked up a lot from gousto too, they have a good recipe section to browse and I found some stuff I would never have made before
I'm not great (never cooked a roast as always lived alone) but if I follow a recipe it doesn't ever go wrong so that'll do me

What do you want to be able to make?