We stay-home husbands can take care of many tasks at home, but cooking may not be one of them. There may come to a time when you have to go hands on for the family. Have you ever wondered why there are numerous methods to prepare the food and then to cook it? Today, we cover the common methods before going into more detail later.

Cooking Preparation

Before we even begin to cook, the food themselves may require preparation in order to add flavour to the original ingredient and making it more tender. Three common methods are:

• Marinating – soaking of the food in a seasoned liquid, the most common method and shortest time of the three;
• Brining – uses only brine or salt, the ingredient is either placed into a salted water solution or covering it with a layer of dry salt;
• Pickling – soaking the ingredient in a solution of liquid. As it takes time for the flavour to go in, this usually require a longer period of time, in excess of a day.

Cooking

There are two styles of cooking, known as dry-heat and moist-heat cooking. Today we will first introduce them and then go into detail in upcoming posts.

Moist Heat – This style of cooking involves the use of liquid as a median to heat up the food. This not only include water and steam, but also other liquids such as wine. The cooking temperature usually goes to a maximum of 100 degrees celsius  because that is the boiling point of water and thus cannot go much higher than that.  Cooking techniques within the Moist-heat method include:

Steaming     Boiling       Braising  Stewing   Simmering    Poaching

Dry Heat – As the name describes, this style of cooking involves heating the food without the use of any liquid, such as through air, metal, radiation or fat in the food itself. In doing so, the food will be cooked at a higher temperature moist heat methods as now it depends on the heat limit of the material used and are usually of higher temperature than water. Cooking techniques include:

Roasting      Baking        Grilling   Sauteing  Frying (pan-fry and deep fry)

Choosing the Appropriate Cooking Method for your Food – simplest method

Needless to say, this depends on the food and ingredients you will use to cook, so one way to decide which method to use is the size of the ingredients: larger, thicker or tougher cuts of meat usually tend to be cooked using moist heat methods. The meat is also cooked more slowly, meaning at a lower heat temperature, and for a longer period of time. This is to allow

• 1) the meat to be equally cooked outside and inside, given the thickness of the meat;
  • 2) allow the meat itself to be more tender, as the moisture remains in the meat; and
  • 3) the slow cook nature of the meat allow for the flavour to remain inside, giving more flavour.

Thus, thinner slices of meat are often cooked under higher temperatures with shorter times so that they won’t get overcooked and chewy.

In the coming posts, I will further elaborate and explain more on above methods of cooking and preparation, starting with food preparations and moist-heat cooking.