Cooking Methods

Cooking is the process of preparing food by applying heat, selecting, measuring, and combining of ingredients in an ordered procedure for producing safe and edible food. The process encompasses a vast range of methods, tools, and combinations of ingredients to alter the flavour or digestibility of food. Factors affecting the outcome include the variability of ingredients, ambient conditions, tools, and the skill of the individual doing the actual cooking.

The diversity of cooking worldwide is reflection of the myriad nutritional, aesthetic, agricultural, economic, cultural, social, and religious considerations that impact upon it.

Applying heat to a food usually, though not always, chemically transforms it, thus changing its flavour, texture, consistency, appearance, and nutritional properties. Other methods of cooking that involve the boiling of liquid in a receptacle have been practiced at least since the 10th millennium BC, with the introduction of pottery.

Because every cooking method uses either dry heat or moist heat (or sometimes both), classifying them this way ensures that every known method falls into one category or the other.

Dry-heat cooking requires temperatures of 150°C or hotter, and it is the only way to achieve the browning of meats, vegetables and baked goods that in turn develops complex flavours and aromas.

Moist-heat cooking refers to various methods for cooking food with, or in, any type of liquid -whether it's steam, water, stock, wine, or something else. Relative to dry-heat cooking methods, moist-heat cooking uses lower temperatures, anywhere from 60°C on the low end to a maximum of100°C - which is as hot as water can get.

Foods that are cooked using both moist and dry heat methods, such as braising and sweating, are classed as combination cooking methods.