For countless millennia, human beings have been cooking their food.
This has made possible the digestion of entirely new kinds of cuisine, and allowed us to avoid having to spend most of our waking hours cooking. In the modern era, there are more styles of cookery than anyone can reasonably count
Dry Heat Cooking
If you’re cooking in an oven, then you’re cooking with dry heat. This means that there’s no water involved, which in turn means that a higher temperature can be reached.
This is what’s necessary to achieve Maillard browning – which is the chemical process that causes food to become golden and delicious. Grilling, baking and roasting are all forms of dry-heat cookery.
Moist Heat Cooking
If you’re steaming, braising or poaching, then you’re cooking with moist heat. This means that the food you’re cooking is immersed in liquid, and that its temperature can’t exceed the boiling point of the liquid.
Food cooked in this way tends to cook more slowly, and retain more moisture. However, you can’t get the browning reaction.
Moist heat cooking isn’t inherently inferior to roasting, as in many cases you don’t want that browning reaction. Or, you need to cook the food for so long that any browning would dry out the food, and produce something acrid and unpalatable.
Induction Cooking
An induction hob works via a particular kind of magnetism. Rather than generating a heat underneath the pan, induction will generate heat inside the pan, instead. This is considerably more efficient, and it’ll produce much quicker results.
However, you’ll need to use a particular kind of man, made out of a magnetic metal. Aluminium, glass and copper cookware will not work – unless the pan has a special magnetic insert. You can pick up specialised induction pan sets online.
Combination Cooking
Remember the Maillard reaction we talked about? It’s impossible to achieve using moist heat methods, since the temperature can’t climb high enough to produce it.
It’s for this reason that steamed chicken and vegetables don’t darken in the same way as their roast equivalents.
It’s for this reason that many stews, ragus and sauces rely on first searing a flank of meat, or onions and other vegetables, in a pan – prior to adding the liquid elements of the dish. This is typically favoured for tougher cuts of meat, like beef brisket.
These comes from parts of the animal which moved more during its lifetime. The fat inside them needs to be gradually broken down over a long period of time for them to achieve that super-tender ‘pulled’ quality.
