[netaustin]

I want to endorse the process and maybe not worry so much about the result. I started on a similar journey in the pandemic of making pizza for my wife and kids every Friday night. They all receive their own (small) personal pizzas, which I knead, roll, and transfer from a pizza peel to a pizza stone. Starting from a NYTimes recipe for Roberta's pizza dough — a pre-children favorite of ours — and iterating from there, I became confident over dozens of repetitions. My pizzas now are very crisp on the bottom without being burned on top, and I can "sense" when the pizza is done, no timers needed. I can feel when the dough is hydrated, I can see when it's rolled flat.

All this isn't about knowledge that can be imparted in a book; it's frankly about kaizen. The art of doing it a little better this time than you did it before. If you do it 2% better each time, after ~35 times, you're twice as good. Don't get me wrong, I love (love!) the open knowledge here. But OP cannot put in the reps for you. Only you can put in the reps.

[zamfi]

I love this. Also, in my experience doing the same thing with recipes from pancakes to roast chicken, I think it’s not just about kaizen—it’s also about the “tacit knowledge” that can’t necessarily be communicated through words.

I definitely wasn’t doing it 2% better each time — I was experimenting, trying out new things, seeing how they changed the outcomes, and building an intuition for how stiff the pancake batter was, what color it was, how much the chicken skin glistens, etc. When I tried something new, sometimes it was 2% better, but more often it was 25% better or 40% worse. Either way a success, because I learned what kinds of things were likely to work and what weren’t.

The “reps” help you not just get better, but (as you describe!) they build your mental connections between what you see, smell, and feel, and results. You start to recognize when things look or feel a little different, and adapt.

Honestly it’s a lot like developing expertise in programming!

[bombcar]

This is where an experienced cook in the kitchen with you now and then can be so helpful. A book might give some pointers, but they can say "this happened because of that".

If you don't have that, try to not vary more than one thing at a time.

[2rsf]

The problem with cooking books is that they represent the author's experience, local products and equipment. Different flours and yeast behave differently and ovens are not the same making a recipe just a starting point.