Is cooking an art or a science? Well, the more you spend your time in the kitchen the earlier you can answer it. Fortunately, during this technologically advanced era, learning cooking does not require you to be a graduate or a chef! All you need to do is to first start enjoying cooking, adopt it as your hobby, understand kitchen utensils, gain some knife skills, and obtain some knowledge about food ingredients available in the kitchen. You have numerous resources to excel in this skill in a short period of time.
As we are aware that apart from the horrific effects of the Covid-19, this pandemic has taught many of us several home-based skills too. Cooking is one of those several skills that we have learned well during the pandemic. Every living creature needs something to eat to eliminate hunger, and thus it's our primary need to have food at all times, especially when it's not so convenient to order ready meals from outside or visit an outside eating place or a restaurant conveniently. To solve this problem, the majority of us started to learn something about cooking at home, some enjoyed it while others had to do it forcibly. But to avoid staying inept about cooking, you need to start learning the basic techniques and methods about cooking rightly.
To make your life simpler, we will guide and teach you about some of the familiar techniques and cooking methods point-wise as well as the references of some useful visual aids to get you through the kitchenalia. If you’re a beginner, the guide will provide you with the building blocks of making simple and easy cooking recipes. Lets, start our journey to understand these cooking methods in a simpler way:
Method #1: Boiling
This is one of the basics of cooking. There are many types of foods we need to boil in order to create a dish, including eggs, pasta, vegetables, rice, etc. Let's learn the boiling process with eggs. If we talk about eggs, it just depends on the type you want. Some people prefer soft-boiled eggs, whereas others prefer hard-boiled instead. In the case of soft boiled (a soft, gooey yolk in the center), you need to cook it for a short period of time. Start by filling a saucepan with water and wait until it starts to boil. Once it starts to boil, put in the eggs and let them cook for around five minutes. Once they’re ready, let them cool down first (or else the shell will stick to the eggs) and start peeling them (pro tip: if the shell does stick to the egg, dunk it into cold water while peeling. It will make the process easier and quicker). In the case of hard-boiled, only the time needed for them to boil will extend. The minimum time is around ten minutes. If you want to cook pasta, know that the average time to boil them is around 10 to 12 minutes (or when the pasta becomes soft).
Method #2: Shallow Frying
Now there’s a difference between shallow frying and deep-frying. In shallow frying, food is partially submerged into oil, which results in a less oiler and crunchier texture. Foods like vegetables, fish, meat, and sometimes chicken can be shallow fried. Shallow frying includes pan-frying and stir-frying. All you need to do is to put a small amount of oil in the saucepan, when the oil is heated place your food and cook it. That's all about shallow frying folks! Simple isn't it. Just some practice will make you kitchen-friendly. Some of the other tips include are food be dry, oil should be hot enough (keep it around 300 degrees Fahrenheit), avoid overcrowding the pan, and drain the oil from fried food on paper towels when it comes out.
Method #3: Deep frying
Foods such as French fries, doughnuts, chicken, cheese sticks, and rolls can be deep-fried. In this cooking method, foods are fully submerged into oil (or any other fat besides oil). You do not always require a deep fat-fryer for deep frying, you can do it in a pan as well. Few tips in deep frying: keep a wire basket for food lifting, pair of long-tongs to flipping food, avoid water getting mixed into the oil, use enough oil to submerge food, heat up to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, and finally cook till golden brown. So let's get cooking your favorite dishes and savory food after the above tips.
Method #4: Baking
Learning baking will take some time. In baking, you need to use the right measurements to create the perfect baked product. Eyeballing in baking can easily lead to disasters, so it’s important to weigh ingredients and do exactly what a recipe tells you to do. Baking requires practice and patience to get skilled with, but it's not impossible to do so. So it's important to stay patient when baking because many foods require some time to bake all the way through. Some important tips in this (Baking) cooking method include: Be careful about measurements of cups, tsp, tbsp, etc., the ingredients you use be careful about their preserving qualities like butter leaves moisture as it sits longer in the fridge, salted and unsalted butter uses, avoid overfilling the pans, learn about he leavening process of baking sodas that you replace baking powders in 6-8 months, non-stick utensil quality matters like mixer and spatula quality, be wary of frosting thickness, dough making and lastly master the over temperatures to obtain great cakes and pizzas. Lastly, baking, again and again, will teach you to master the servings measurements for different baking mixtures.
Method #5: Sautéing
Sautéing is one of the basic yet very important cooking methods used frequently in the kitchen and you can cook food at high temperatures using low amounts of oil; so if you see cooking oil just at the bottom of a pan, you are sauteing around. So Sauteing is used to cook food in much less oil or fat as compared to frying. So unlike searing, sauteeing cooks food fully. If you want to understand sautéing fully, watch out for a delicious mixed vegetable recipe at Let's get cooking.
Method #6: Grilling
Grilling is used to grill food (meat, vegetables, etc.) on a direct flame. It is cooked on top of a grill and results in less oiler meat, but it can sometimes become dry as well. Broiling is quite similar to grilling. In grilling, the heat source used to cook the food is below, whereas, in broiling, it is above the food. Many people also confuse BBQ with grilling. Meat, corn, steak, breast chicken, and hotdogs are popular grilled foods. Some grilling tips are: use metal utensils not plastic, oil the grill before use, heat up the grill for 5 minutes before using, create raw and cooked separate food zones on the grill, and finally clean the grill with a wire brush and scrub.
Method #7: Stewing
To create a steaming, simmering pot of richness you have to spend some time in your kitchen. Stewing is a time-taking cooking process as it requires slow cooking, and therefore all the stews have thickened consistencies. You can stew on the slow cooker, electric pressure cooker, and stovetop. Few useful tips of stewing cooking methods include: defrost meat, top-up the food surface with liquid in the pot or at least level it, choose tender and juicy meat, use a cast-iron deep casserole, and finally use chopped veggies in order to absorb sauce quickly.
Method #8: Roasting
Roasting in the dictionary means exceedingly hot or scorching. The roasting cooking method is a process in which air is used to transfer the heat to the food. So it is all about dry-heat cooking. Roasting requires a higher temperature than baking. Some tips to a great roast include seasoning well, tying the roast to make even cook, adopt temperature ranges between 350-400 degrees Fahrenheit, and finally let the roast rest for 10-15 minutes before being carved.
These are just the basic methods of cooking, and some others include poaching, searing, BBQ, etc. But for now, beginners should keep these methods in mind and they will suffice for them to champion kitchen science. So start cooking your favorite food and gain great culinary experience insights with these useful and quick tricks and tips.
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