I’m really interested in these small practices (say, how much salt to add, or chopping specific vegetables) that seem like they could benefit from intentional practice, and where wide feedback loops hamper learning.
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One broad research interest I have is in design practices for naturalistic spaced repetition. e.g. it’d be interesting to orchestrate practice of, say, mincing via (varied) recipe suggestion, rather than by explicitly assigning the task “chop an onion”!
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It’s hard to construct naturalistic/authentic tasks which practice skills appropriately in many domains, but cooking seems pretty amenable.
To your root question: I wish I had a better answer! A good, though basic, approach is to buy a good book and cook everything in it.
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Some more concrete advice from an email exchange:
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THIS is exactly what I'm on about (and, unsurprisingly, the reason for tagging you.)
I may be naive, but I have to think there's some sort of sequence of recipes that applies repetitive practice of sub-skills without being a chaos-meal-train.
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Replying to @allafarce
One broad research interest I have is in design practices for naturalistic spaced repetition. e.g. it’d be interesting to orchestrate practice of, say, mincing via (varied) recipe suggestion, rather than by explicitly assigning the task “chop an onion”!
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Like in web programming, a small project entailing building a web app that hits an external HTTP API in the request-response cycle (say, web page input box -> Twilio SMS) kicks your tires on a bunch of small "muscles" involving HTTP request...
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...I'll say that the closest I've come here in cooking is with dal: the core rudiments are generally a small set, and so quick variation and experimentation is really, really easy, with quick feedback. Bonus is that you can split up a given batch with a treatment easily.
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Yes, I think it’s probably popular to create such a thing. It’s interesting to hold that up alongside my suggestion to cook through everything in one cookbook. That practice often achieves this goal: a single chef ends up using the same prep over and over again—obv imperfect tho
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I might start with theme and variations. It’s winter, and so it’s a good time to make a lot of soups. Which means it’s a good time to make a lot of stock. And cut a lot of mirepoix. And maybe make a lot of beurre manié, various glazed / confited vegetables, grains/legumes, etc
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Another good theme and variations family I’ve enjoyed is roast chicken. Every cook must master roast chicken, and it takes practice. So roast one every week, and roast vegetables with it, but change the veggies up each week. And maybe a different sauce each week…
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Also: filled pastas. A different ravioli / agnolotti every week? Why not! You’ll get very good at making pasta dough and preparing vegetable purées.