"As such, I find video recipes to be far more effective."
My path to learning to cook was to watch nearly the entire run of Good Eats, picking out recipes that seemed like fun, but more focusing on using the knowledge and skills to do my own thing.
The host of Good Eats and I appear to have radically different tastes, so, ironically, whenever I've actually made one of Alton's recipes from the show that taught me how to cook, neither my wife or I have liked them. Perhaps some I simply messed up, but certainly not all of them. But with what I learned from that show I've become at least "decent". Couldn't cook in a restaurant or anything, but I can perform one of the higher skills of home cooking, "see what's left in the pantry -> make something from what you have -> get requests for the 'recipe'".
Agreed, he is teaching you the fundamentals, and how things interact on molecular levels on up and dissipates a lot of cargo culting, from a purely tv show perspective its a show that's worth watching.
My path to learning to cook was to watch nearly the entire run of Good Eats, picking out recipes that seemed like fun, but more focusing on using the knowledge and skills to do my own thing.
The host of Good Eats and I appear to have radically different tastes, so, ironically, whenever I've actually made one of Alton's recipes from the show that taught me how to cook, neither my wife or I have liked them. Perhaps some I simply messed up, but certainly not all of them. But with what I learned from that show I've become at least "decent". Couldn't cook in a restaurant or anything, but I can perform one of the higher skills of home cooking, "see what's left in the pantry -> make something from what you have -> get requests for the 'recipe'".