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.
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