The Secret Ingredient is Experience: Learning Through Cooking

Cooking isn’t magic—it’s a process. Here’s how it applies to life and problem-solving.

Intuition is a by-product of experience

Like many, I was born without a lot of cooking experience. I joked that I could reasonably starve in a fully stocked kitchen - and indeed I’d done so before. However, despite what I thought was a universal sense of helplessness, I did encounter people who seemed to have cracked the code. I remember even my college roommates, who could enter a kitchen—no recipe, mind you—and walk out with something tasty to eat. It felt like magic. It felt unattainable.

Many years later, I was hosting a potluck and one of my guests approached me as I was finishing up in the kitchen.

“That looks great!” he said, pausing for a moment - then he asked “Where did you learn to cook? Did your parents teach you?”.

I had to stop and think. My parents definitely didn’t teach me. And I suppose I can cook now, I mean clearly, I just made food for 15 people. But how? What happened between those years of helplessness and now that had equipped me with what I needed - how was it that I learned to cook?

In reflecting on this journey - I started to realize that the framework and process I used to learn how to cook could also be applied to other aspects of my life. I saw the parallels of being overwhelmed, having analysis paralysis, and the fear of failure. I saw also the parallels of growth, of experimentation, and the eventual exhilaration of creation.

In today’s post I’d love to share with you these learnings - and it’s my hope that after reading you’ll have the tools not only to keep you from going hungry later today, but also the tools to feed your brain and your body in other aspects of your life.

Step 1: Following The Recipe

My first learning was to dispel the notion that there are people who are born into great chefdom. I’m sure, of course, that many of us are born with the potential to be savants - but I promise you, even Gordon Ramsay had to taste salt from sugar for the first time.

With that, I propose the first step on your journey to be a chef is to start with a recipe. “Really? A recipe?” I hear you ask “I could have told you that!”. And you might be right! But what is a recipe really? Well, a recipe is just a pre-made solution to a problem - the core problem in this case being that you’re hungry.

More specifically, each recipe is a different blueprint to solve different kinds of “I’m hungry” problems. With recipes we’ve now got blueprints for “I need to eat in the next 10 minutes”, or blueprints for “I need to eat something sweet” or blueprints for “I’ve been invited to a potluck and I can’t be the person who brings potato salad again”.

Recipes are great because someone else has already gone through the trouble of mapping out the steps to solve your problem. And by following a recipe, you can learn from their steps. Even famed astronomer Carl Sagan said that if you want to make an Apple Pie from scratch - you must first invent the universe. Lucky for us the universe is already here, so all we have to do is find a recipe!

Step 2: Experimenting & Adjusting

Perfect, so we have our recipe. In fact, maybe you’ve already been cooking with recipes for awhile. If you have, you probably know that sooner or later, you’re going to start running into new problems. “The food doesn’t taste like how I thought it was going to taste!”, “This is too salty… too sweet… too bland… too burnt!”. Well, it probably won’t come as much of a surprise, but our recipes, our problem blueprints, have some shortcomings.

The thing is, the blueprint wasn’t exactly written for your problem. It was written for a problem that was, well, similar to yours. And now you have a new set of problems that we need to find solutions for. Don’t panic—we’ve got a universe and a toolbelt; we just need to add some more tools.

Building these tools falls under step two of your cooking journey - adjusting. And this is the step that scares people off - because - it can be scary. We’re going off manual! And we are - but we can come up with ways to do so safely. One way to frame this is that we’re embarking on a set of experiments.

Working off the recipe was itself an experiment, but it’s one where the outcome was somewhat predictable - we have reviews, photos, maybe we’ve tried it a few times. Now we need to run a few more experiments - and in doing so, we’re actually creating new mini-recipes that we can apply whenever we encounter these problems in the future. We’re building a problem solving repository.

Reframe each new problem as a mini-experiment to run

In this phase, I challenge you to reframe each new problem you encounter as a mini-experiment to run. If I want the food to be sweet - what things can I change about what’s in this pot to achieve my outcome? If my food isn’t savoury enough, what steps could I change before I get to this point to extract more flavour from my ingredients. I’ve never tried cooking with vinegar before, what does it taste like on my spoon? What does it taste like after I add it to the pot?

It’s true, the adjusting phase can be scary - but it is by far the most rewarding part of your cooking journey. And - it is much less risky and scary than you might expect. As you run more and more experiments, the act of experimenting is going to become normal for you.

As you become comfortable with normal experiments - what other areas of your life might be overdue for some iteration? What recipe adjustments might you make to your patterns and habits?

Step 3: Creation (Magic)

And so, we come now to phase 3 - the magic phase, mad scientist phase, creation. But notice how we got here. We started with a recipe, and critically - we built a language of experimentation, intuition, and our own personal problem solving repository.

Earlier I mentioned that even Gordon Ramsey needed to know sugar from salt, and I wasn’t kidding. You absolutely can skip to this phase - you can create - without building your experiment library. In fact, all you’re doing is again - running an experiment. But without the language, process, and problem solving tools that you’ve developed - the outcomes of a creation experiment are less predictable. Put it another way - everybody makes the mistake of trying a brand new recipe for a first date exactly once.

Some of you may play music - and if you do, you know that virtuosity is the outcome of thousands of hours of practice. And here - when I say “thousands of hours” - even I, someone who has been playing guitar for a decade, shrink in fear. However, it’s not overnight. It’s spread over years and years - minutes here, hours there.

And that’s what we’ve been learning how to do in this post - I mean think about how often you need to eat, and accordingly, how often you need to cook. By applying this mindful practice of identifying problems, finding blueprints, and experimenting towards new and personal solutions - you are putting in thousands of hours of practice, without even realizing it!

And that’s the secret of this third phase. The secret behind the magic of competence you observe when your friend can enter a kitchen and whip together a meal out of thin air.

By the third phase, we’re not starting in the dark—we’re experimenting off of the recipes in our heads instead of the ones on paper.

Our third phase is more experiments, but it is also the product of our experiments, and because of your experience to get here - we’re not starting in the dark.

We are experimenting off of the recipes that are now in our heads, instead of the ones we started with on our paper. By this third creation phase, we now know what things taste like together. We know how long they take to cook. We know how to adjust and fix the problems that may occur. We know how to experiment against our inspiration.

And we know we will fail.

But those same failures are part of experimenting, and they will through time yield solutions, new mini-recipes, and eventually, we will succeed.

And we will make new recipes.

And—we will be back—at phase one.

Final Thoughts – Growth & Confidence

There are lots of things to be afraid of - but we often underestimate our ability to grow, develop, and build off the library that is our own experience.

I think cooking is an amazing way to build this library - to become familiar with the language of growth, experimentation, and iteration - and of course, I’ll never complain if good food is the side effect of good growth.

No matter where you are in the three phases—following, adjusting, or creating—or where you begin, as long as you start, you won’t go hungry.

Thanks for reading! Have you run any experiments in your life lately? Starting to cook for the first time? Let me know!

Ali