Good food is easier to digest when cooked correctly.Cooking, when done scientifically, alters all the food's components, with the exception of fats, in much the same way that the digestive juices do. At the same time, it breaks up the food by dissolving the soluble components, allowing the digestive fluids to more easily interact with the food's components. However, cooking frequently fails to achieve its intended goal;and poor preparation renders the finest materials useless and unhealthy.
It is extremely uncommon to find a table on which some of the food is not rendered unfit for human consumption through improper preparation or the addition of a harmful substance. This is probably because food preparation is such a common occurrence that important connections to health, mind, and body have been overlooked. It has also been viewed as a menial service that could be performed with little or no preparation and without paying attention to anything else but the pleasure of the eye and palate. Poor cooking has become the norm rather than the exception because, with taste as the only criterion, it is so simple to cover up the results of careless and improper cooking of food with flavors and condiments, as well as to dump all sorts of inferior material on the digestive organs.
techniques for cooking
The art of preparing food for the table by dressing it or using heat in some way is called cooking. After locating the right source of heat, the next step is to use it on the food in some way. Roasting, broiling, baking, boiling, stewing, simmering, steaming, and frying are the most common methods.
Roasting is cooking food over an open fire in its own juices. Radiant heat is used in grilling or broiling. Only very thin pieces of food with a lot of surface area can be processed using this method. Bake or roast foods that are smaller and larger.In principle, roasting and broiling are interchangeable. Although some heat is communicated by the hot air surrounding the food, in both cases, the work is primarily done by radiating heat directly onto the food's surface.The food's outer surfaces quickly sear from the intense heat, preventing the juices from escaping.The inside of the mass is cooked by its own juices if the food is frequently turned so that its entire surface is acted upon.
Baking is the process of cooking food in an enclosed oven using dry heat. This method can only be used to cook foods that have a lot of moisture in them.The oven's hot, dry air is always looking for moisture, so it will take a proportional amount of water from every moist substance it can get its hands on. Unless they are shielded from the heat of the oven or provided with moisture during cooking, foods with only a small amount of moisture emerge from the oven dry, hard, and unpleasant.
Cooking food in a liquid that is boiling is called boiling.The typical medium used for this purpose is water. Air bubbles that have been dissolved in water are released as the temperature of the water rises when it is heated. At the vessel's bottom, steam bubbles will begin to form as the temperature rises. As they rise into the cooler water above, these will initially condense, resulting in a simmering sound; But as the temperature rises, the bubbles will rise higher and higher before collapsing. They will then disappear from the water's surface in a flash, causing more or less agitation depending on how quickly they form. As a result of the bubbles rising to the surface, steam is released and water boils. Rapid bubbling increases the water's mechanical action but not heat;In addition, violent boiling does not accelerate the cooking process, with the exception of the fact that the food is broken down into smaller pieces by the water's mechanical action, making them easier to soften. However, violent boiling results in a significant waste of fuel and makes the food significantly less palatable, if not tasteless, by vaporizing the volatile and savory components. Heat increases water's solvent properties to the point where it permeates food, softening and making it easier to digest the food's tough and hard components.
Water and milk are the most commonly used liquids in food preparation. While water is best for cooking most foods, milk, or at least some milk, is preferable for farinaceous foods like rice, macaroni, and farina because it increases their nutritive value.When cooking with milk, keep in mind that because it is denser than water, less steam escapes when heated, causing it to boil earlier than water. Additionally, due to milk's higher density, cooking with milk alone will require slightly more fluid than cooking with water.
Steaming is the process of cooking food with steam, as its name suggests. The most common way to steam food is to place it in a dish with holes above a pot of boiling water. There are other methods as well. This method is superior to boiling for foods that do not require the solvent powers of water or that already contain a significant amount of moisture. Steaming is another method of cooking that involves putting food, with or without water, in a closed container that is placed inside another container with boiling water. A double boiler is the name given to such a device. It is sometimes referred to as smothering or steaming when food is cooked in its own juices in a covered dish in a hot oven.
Stewing is the process of cooking food for an extended period of time in a small amount of liquid at a temperature just below the boiling point. Stewing and simmering, which is slow, steady boiling, should not be confused. The use of a double boiler makes it easiest to maintain the right temperature for stewing. Due to constant evaporation at a temperature a little below the boiling point, the water in the outer vessel boils, while the water in the inner vessel does not. This keeps the inner vessel's water slightly below the temperature of the water from which it gets its heat.
Frying, or cooking food in hot fat, is not recommended because, unlike all other food components, cooking makes fat less digestible. It would appear that any food that is going to be subjected to a high degree of heat should not be mixed and compounded primarily of fats because nature has provided those foods that require the longest cooking times to fit them for use with only a small proportion of fat.
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