Introduction

This is a book about fundamental techniques for today’s kitchen. It is also a book with recipes. Foremost, it is a book about thinking about food. All cooking rests on a set of fundamental techniques. If you know those fundamentals, there’s very little you won’t be able to do in the kitchen. Happily, there aren’t a thousand of them. There aren’t even a hundred. I’ve created a list of the twenty basics you need to know in order to do all the rest.

The goals of Twenty are straightforward. 1) To identify and describe the fundamental techniques that all cooks, regardless of their skill or station, need and use. 2) To describe the techniques with the intent of getting at their nuances, how the techniques work, why they matter, the mechanisms that make them so pervasive and useful. 3) To photograph the techniques in a way that furthers an understanding of what they are and how and why they work. 4) To create recipes that showcase and provide practical applications for these far-reaching fundamentals.