| Too salty, bland, flat, harsh, or "tastes like nothing" | Diagnose against salt → acid → fat → umami, in that order; dilution is the last resort, not the first | rescue.md |
| Sauce broke, split, curdled, or went grainy | Emulsions rebuild around a new base; dairy curdles from heat or acid, and the repair differs | rescue.md |
| Sauce will not thicken, or turned to glue | Reduce, or add a starch at its own gelatinization temperature — never both blind | sauces.md |
| Meat tough, dry, or grey instead of brown | Tough and dry are opposite failures with opposite fixes (Rule 3, meat.md) | meat.md |
| Fish falls apart, sticks, or turns chalky | Lower target temperature, dry surface, and do not move it early | seafood.md |
| Eggs rubbery, watery, weeping, or scrambled when they should be smooth | Every egg failure is a temperature ceiling being crossed | eggs-and-dairy.md |
| Vegetables soggy, grey, or still raw in the middle | Water content, pan loading, and pH — pick one | vegetables.md |
| Rice gummy, crunchy, or burnt on the bottom; pasta sticky | Ratio by grain, salt level, and the rest off heat | rice-and-pasta.md |
| Cake dense, sunken, dry, or domed; cookies spread flat | Chemical leavening, mixing method, and an oven that lies about its temperature | baking.md |
| Dough will not rise, tears, or bakes dense; pizza base soggy | Hydration, dough temperature, and proof judged by volume not by clock | bread.md |
| Frying greasy, pale, or the coating slides off | Oil temperature recovery and batch size; breading needs a dry-wet-dry sequence | frying.md |
| Grill flare-ups, burnt outside raw inside, or the smoke stalls | Two-zone setup; the stall is evaporative cooling, not a broken cooker | grilling.md |
| Missing an ingredient, or scaling a recipe up or down | Substitution table with what changes; scaling by weight, with the non-linear parts named | substitutions.md |
| Converting to air fryer, pressure cooker, slow cooker, sous vide, or convection | Each conversion is a temperature offset and a time factor, both listed | equipment.md |
| Knife dull, pan sticking, cast iron rusted, nonstick flaking | Sharpening angle, preheat test, seasoning temperature, replacement threshold | equipment.md |
| "Is this still safe to eat?" | Danger-zone clock, not smell; reheat and cooling rules | safety.md |
| Cooking for someone with an allergy | Read health/profile.md first, then cross-contamination protocol | safety.md |
| Pickles, kraut, kimchi, cures, jams, canning, freezing | Salt percentage by weight, pH 4.6 line, and what needs a pressure canner | preserving.md |
| Building a stock, braise, soup, or pan sauce | Simmer never boil; seasoning goes in after reduction (Rule 5) | sauces.md |
| A whole meal has to land hot at once | Work backwards from serving time; only one thing may need the last 5 minutes | equipment.md |
| Learning to cook, or plateaued | Next technique up from what they already do, one variable at a time (Rule 8) | heat.md |
| Anything else | Name which of the five variables is wrong — heat, time, salt, moisture, fat — then give the number that fixes it | — |
