The Cooking Process: Part 1

COOKING is one of those everyday marvels like television and flying and the weather that are so common place no one thinks twice about how remarkable they are. Cooking makes all sorts of interesting transformations in raw foods to whet the appetite, delight the taste buds, and nourish the body. It softens some foods like the celery stalk, the potato, and the grain of rice. It makes others firm like the egg, the cake batter, and the meringue. It enlarges some things, such as popcorn, popovers, and soufflés; deflates some (spinach, for one); and makes others disappear altogether, like a liquid left forgotten on a hot burner or the alcohol in cherries jubilee.

Cooking changes colors turns the brown lobster red and the red meat brown. The green vegetable too if you cook it too long and it changes butter from yellow to brown to black. It can bind foods together, as it does in sauces and cream soups and croquettes. It can break foods down like curdled milk, overheated hollandaise. It tenderizes flesh or toughens it, depending on how it is done. It can thin gelatin and thicken broth, liquefy fat and crystallize maple syrup. It makes some foods more nourishing by making their nutrients more available to the body, yet it can destroy other nutrients, such as vitamins. It can make foods safer to eat by killing disease producing organisms. It does remarkable things with taste, blends and mellows flavors, heightens them, sometimes transforms them entirely, sometimes ruins them by burning, scorching, or just plain cooking too long.

How do such things happen? This Series will lay the foundations for understanding at least some of them. After completing it, you should be able to:

1. Define cooking and describe the three ways in which heat is transferred to a product.

2. Explain how heat affects such food substances as proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals, and water.

3. Name and describe the various moist heats and dry heat-cooking methods.

4. Identify the major pieces of cooking equipment and their uses.

5. Take proper care of fat for the deep fryer.

Cooking defined

The changes just mentioned all come about through a single process, which use applying heat over a period. That is what cooking is: bringing about a change in a food product by the application of heat over a period of time. The overall purpose of cooking is to make the food more edible. Speaking in the language of the kitchen, we say we are increasing its palatability.

Notice that two things are necessary in cooking to bring about change: heat and time. You will find that many specific cooking techniques have to do with the interplay of these two factors: the length of time and the degree of hotness, or the temperature.

When we talk about cooking temperature, we are usually talking about the temperature of the cooking medium like the fat in the fry kettle, the air in the oven, the water in the pot. The real purpose, of course, is to raise the temperature of the food itself to the point where the desired change will take place. This is what takes time. The lower the temperature of the cooking medium, the longer it takes to bring about change.

In the ever-changing world of ours, we find more and more new ways that save us time cooking. This is because we have less time to prepare food in our busy lives. Having a job in the food industry is one way to kill two birds with one stone. You can work all day and bring home a good meal for the family after work. If everyone could spend his or her lives cooking for money, I would bet most of us would do it.