Cooking Theory

Cooking food is like performing a symphony.

It is a time-sensitive performance with an intro, one or more sections, then a closing.

Once the music starts and the ingredients are in the pan, you have to play till the end. It’s not like software development where you can write a few lines of code and then step away for an hour. When the heat is on, depending on the temperature, it’s only a matter of time before something gets burnt.

Recipes

Recipes are like the sheet music for a symphony, they describe how, exactly, the food should be cooked.

Like a symphony, each recipe has different sections.

Each cooking section of a recipe has 3 key components: the temperature setting, time duration, and ingredients. The temperature and time are straightforward and hard to follow. For example, “Keep the stove on medium-high for 12 minutes.” Ingredients, on the other hand, can be a little more confusing. A recipe may call for them to be added all at once at the beginning of the section, or to be added sequentially throughout a section (with some mixing and sautéing in between), sometimes in seemingly random order.

Now, there are two non-cooking sections common to every recipe:

• The Intro: Food preparation
• The Closing: Clean up the dishes and throw out the scraps

The sections in between the Intro and Closing are a heat and numbers game. The numbers that are important to know for every cooking section are the:

• Temperature setting
  • Stove top: low, medium, medium high, or high
  • Oven: 375, 400, 450ºF

• Time duration
  • 30 seconds, 10 minutes, 1 hour

• Amount of ingredients
  • Total weight used
  • Size of chopped pieces
  • Liquid volume
  • Teaspoons and tablespoons of spices

The temperature setting and time duration, combined with the type of heating element used (stove, oven, grill) and whether moist or dry heat is applied, define which cooking method is being used.

The main cooking methods include:

• Moist
  • Slow
    • Braising
    • Stewing
  • Fast
    • Boiling 😀
    • Simmering 😀
    • Steaming
    • Poaching 
• Dry
  • Slow 
    • Roasting
    • Smoking
    • BBQ
  • Fast
    • Roasting
    • Baking
    • Grilling 😀
    • Searing 😀
    • Sautéing 😀
    • Stir frying 😀
    • Frying 😀
    • Broiling 😀

The most common methods are marked with a 😀 emoji!

Before cooking a new recipe, it helps to organize the steps into higher level sections of your symphony. For each section, you should write down that this is the temperature setting, this is the time duration, these are the ingredients, this is the cooking method, and this is the sequence of steps. That will make understanding, performing, and remembering the recipe so much easier.