How do you learn (not copy/paste) cooking?

Question

When it comes to learning cooking, how can one move beyond mere memorization? The abundance of cooking content available online, from YouTube to various websites, mostly revolves around following recipes. However, I'm intrigued by the idea of a scientific approach to cooking. While "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking" touched on this, I'm looking for something more rigorous. For instance, when recipes specify cooking meat up to a certain temperature, I wonder about the underlying principles behind such instructions. Where can I find resources to gain a deeper understanding of the science behind cooking and learn such valuable insights?

civilitty · Accepted Answer

Practice. Practice. Practice. Cooking is all about building up an intuition about texture, time, heat, flavor, and a bunch of other things that impact the final product. It helps if you can dedicate an entire week to a single dish at a time so that you cook it over and over again, experimenting with minor variations each time. You have to practice to develop this intuition because cooking is imprecise and allows for an incredible amount of variation when selecting and performing the recipe. Only once you have some of that intuition can you actually take a scientific approach to cooking (which is mostly a waste of time unless you're a celebrity chef anyway).
If you want to get really scientific then Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking [1] by the patent troll is probably the most comprehensive resource available but if you're still trying to move beyond memorization, it is complete and total overkill. I would recommend focusing on the above advice rather than on trying to make the art of cooking scientific. It doesn't really matter how well you understand the science of meat temperatures when the natural variation in steak marbling can vary your cooking times by 10-30%.
SeriousEats.com is a great resource for very detailed recipes where the authors experiment and discuss results rather than just providing a single recipe. Whenever I'm learning a new dish (I don't learn recipes, I learn how to make dishes!), I go to SeriousEats, Reddit, and Youtube to find several recipes for the dish I'm trying to make. Using my past experience and intuition, I distill my own recipe tailored to the exact ingredients and tools available to me.
Other than Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, I can recommend On Food and Cooking, The Way to Cook and The Joy of Cooking, The Professional Chef, Essentials of Italian Cooking, Ratio, Food Lab. If you're looking for a reference on combining flavors see The Flavor Bible
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_Cuisine

GravitasFailure · Answer

I'd go for Modernist Cuisine At Home by Nathan Myhrvold, then his Modernist Cuisine set for a more thorough look at food science. Neither is exactly cheap ($90 and $500ish, respectively), but your local library might have at least the one for you to take a look at before committing. Generally, modernist cuisine/molecular gastronomy related resources can have some good info on food science, though a lot of them focus on being flashy.

hyperific · Answer

The Science of Cooking might be a good reading resource (DOI:10.1002/9781118910771) although I can't personally attest to its quality.