Hello, we're S&T

Most of our best ideas have started with a phone propped against the kettle. A video is playing, something is sizzling, and one of us is saying, "Hang on, how much was that?" while the other scrolls back with a floury thumb. That's more or less how Kookbook started too, so it seems like the right place to begin.

We're S and T. S builds tech companies for a living and treats dinner as a project with dependencies. T is a human rights lawyer, which means a working day spent testing evidence and an evening doing much the same to recipes. We're married, we're British Bangladeshi, we live in London, and we have never once agreed on how many green chillies a dal needs.

Two cooks, one hob

S cooks like an engineer who has just found a new toy. If a recipe can be done in one pan, S will find a way to involve three, plus a thermometer, plus a timer on each phone. It's usually delicious. It is always followed by a sink that looks like a crime scene.

T cooks by taste and then asks questions. Does it need that much butter? Why does the video say ten minutes when the onions clearly need twenty? Is this actually better than what Amma makes, or is it just better lit? T is the reason we taste everything twice before we say anything about it.

Where we learned to cook

We both grew up in homes where nobody owned a measuring spoon, or if they did, it was being used to scoop rice into a pot. Ask either of our mums how much salt goes in, and the answer is "jotota lage": as much as it needs. Ask how long, and you get a look that suggests you should already know. Everything was andaj, a sort of educated guess built on forty years of practice.

That's a wonderful way to cook if you've been doing it since you were twelve. It's a terrible way to learn. The first time S tried to recreate a family bhuna from memory, it came out the colour of weak tea and tasted mostly of regret. The first time T made polao for guests, the rice was perfect on top and welded to the pan underneath. T served it anyway, with total confidence and a very large spoon.

So we did what everyone does now. We learned from our families on the phone, from cookbooks with sauce stains on the good pages, and from the internet. Which brings us, inevitably, to the videos.

How Kookbook started

Our camera rolls are mostly screenshots of recipes. Half of them are a single frame of someone's ingredients with no quantities. Some are 60-second videos where the onions go from raw to deep gold in a jump cut. We'd try one, it would work or it wouldn't, and we'd argue about why.

The real push came from scaling. A recipe for four is fine until a few cousins ring to say they're ten minutes away, and suddenly you're stood at the counter doing fractions on the back of an envelope while the garlic burns. S built a spreadsheet for it. T pointed out, quite reasonably, that you can't ask a spreadsheet whether the sauce is meant to look like that.

That was the idea. Something that writes you a proper recipe for the number of people actually in your kitchen, keeps the amounts right when that number changes, runs the timers so you don't have to, and answers the slightly panicked questions you have halfway through. That became Jan, the orange cooking pot who now lives on this site. Jan is an AI sous chef, and we'll always say so. Jan's job is to get you through dinner. Our job, on this blog, is the human part: the tasting, the arguing, and telling you honestly what we'd change.

What you'll find here

• Viral on Trial: recipes that went viral, credited to the people who made them famous. We cook them, then share our own take and what we changed.
• Desi Twist: everyday favourites with a Bangladeshi accent, and the dishes we grew up eating, written down properly for once.
• Weeknight Rescue and Feeding a Crowd: practical cooking for real life, whether that's a Tuesday with nothing in the fridge or eighteen people for Eid.
• Kitchen Kit & Hacks: gadgets and shortcuts, put through their paces. S is very excited about this one. T has asked for a budget.
• S&T After Hours: snacks, stories and the occasional argument, usually over a pot of chai.

The house rules

T drafted these, so they read a little like terms and conditions. We think that's a good thing.

• We credit the person who made a recipe famous, and link to them. If we can't work out who started it, we say so rather than guess.
• We only tell you about our own cooking. When we change a recipe, we say what we changed and why, and we don't claim our version is what anyone else intended.
• We'll tell you about the failures. The pan that stuck, the batch that was too salty, the time it took three goes.
• No stock photos pretending to be our food. The pictures on these posts are illustrations, and they're meant to look like illustrations.
• Food safety isn't optional. Chicken gets cooked through, rice gets cooled quickly, and we'll flag the bits that matter even when they're boring.

A word on the chilli

Every recipe on this blog has been through both of us, which means the spice levels are a negotiated settlement. Where it matters, we'll tell you who won. If you like it gentle, take S's side and start low. If you grew up eating fresh green chillies whole off the side of the plate, you already know whose side you're on.

Thanks for being here. Pull up a chair, put the kettle on, and tell us what we should cook next. If there's a recipe your feed won't stop showing you, there's a good chance we've already argued about it.

Cook it with Jan

Want to make something new tonight? Jan will scale it for your crowd and walk you through every step.

Let's cook!

• About S&T
• Kookbook
• Behind the scenes
• British Bangladeshi