On the Food network they boil potatoes, but they poach carrots. They poach turkey, but they boil eggs. They sauté’ onions, but they fry eggs in the same pan. Likewise, they fry hash browns, but they sauté’ onions in the same pan before adding the potatoes.
I can go on for days.
Well a quick one is poaching vs boiling because it’s actually based on the water temperature itself. Boiling happens when water reaches its boiling point of 212°F where liquid water bubbles heavily and is at its hottest point. You’d cook things like pasta in this. Poaching is at a substantially cooler temperature of around 120°-180°F where you have smaller bubbles for a much gentler cook. You’d use delicate foods like shell-less eggs or fish or potatoes you don’t want to overcook or break. In between that you have a simmer, which is usually used to render a dish without overcooking it.
Frying usually means you are coating something pretty heavily in oils/fats which can be done to the point of immersion via deep frying. Fried ingredients typically need to sit longer to get a crust. Sautéing is a dryer way of cooking with oil where you use just a little to coat the ingredients and hit them with consistent heat and movement. This keeps things like vegetables from burning while still getting a good texture and flavor from the heat.
All good but I’d just like to point something out.
When you boil pasta you’re actually hydrating it, and it’s a process that occurs above 80C, you don’t need water to be boiling savagely.
In fact, it’s preferable to let pasta simmer, as full boiling is a bit too “violent” and tends to damage most kinds of pasta.
You know, when some pieces are broken and torn like when it’s overcooked? You can avoid that by keeping the temperature low.
Some people in Italy even turn the fire off after the water has started boiling ,as the water is hot enough to cook the pasta and keep it nice and firm.
Interesting, I was taught you used a rolling boil for pasta so it wouldn’t stick together. Maybe there’s a halfway where it rolls for a few minutes then gets turned down as the pieces soften and become vulnerable to tearing.
The thing I’ve always found confusing is how American terminology as far as I can make out seems to almost always say “fry” to mean what I would always specify as “deep frying” and “sauteing” where I would usually say “fry”. I think this is a Commonwealth countries thing and not just me. “Saute”, to me had always seemed a kind of unusually fancy affectation for people working in restaurants with the average person eschewing it for the term “fry” until I started using YouTube and Google for recipes and got exposed to so much American material that I discovered they make these distinctions. I guess there’s technical distinctions in how much oil you use in the pan (until the point of immersion where it’s deep frying) but that seems much of a muchness.
Confusingly though I notice Americans seem to also sometimes use “fry” the way I would, but just sometimes. Eggs for example are “fried” but this is usually not meaning dropped in to a deep fryer. And then there’s the confusion over the meaning of “grilling” vs “broiling” because as far as I can tell the term “broil” isn’t used where I’m from and the the device Americans call a “broiler” is what we’d call a “grill” and things cooked under it are “grilled”. I believe the American use of “grill” is referring to a shape of ridged cooking surface but then you get “grilled cheese” which I’d called “cheese on toast” or a “cheese toastie” which involves putting the sandwich in to a flat frying pan and which involves neither a broiler nor a ridged cooking surface and isn’t referred to as sauteing nor frying. Then there’s “griddled” which I think again is referring to a particular shape of cooking surface but given “grill” I just don’t know.
Definitely some interesting variations within mostly shared vocabulary.
Wow you definitely aren’t american as I’m scratching my head to even figure out what you mean by some of these. The average grill in america is a standalone outdoor cooking station with a metal grate used as the cooking surface. They are also found in restaurants but usually they are in a bit of a different form that what the average American thinks of as a grill. the grates give the characteristic lines of grilled food that many seek. A griddle is a grill where the grate has been replaced by a flat piece of metal, often used for small or runny foods that would fall between the grates of a regular grill.
We also dont typically have standalone broilers. Most american ovens have a broil option where the top heating element becomes very hot and can be used to brown the food.
The main difference between grilling and broiling, in my american eyes, is how they are used. Grilling is a technique for cooking food from start to finish. Broiling is a technique used at the end of cooking something to brown it or something to that effect. I wouldn’t use the broiler in my oven to cook a whole meal, and I wouldn’t turn on the grill or griddle just to brown something.
In my eyes saute is when you use only enough oil to keep something from sticking or burning, while frying is when you use enough oil that it starts to really add to the flavor of what you’re cooking.
I think the worst thing Americans have done is the air fryer though. Its just a fucking tiny convection oven, there’s no frying going on at all. They just know us fat Americans are conditioned to salivate when we hear the word fry and cower in terror from big science words like ‘convection’ lol
For saute vs fry the big difference is movement. Frying means let it sit, generally flip it once per side a food can supportitself on. Saute means near constant stirring or agitation.
Yeh a broiler here (Australia) is just as you describe and while I hadn’t given it much thought is too used in the mode you describe as well, it’s just that it’s called a “grill” and the act of using it is to “grill” which is an amusing point of confusion since it seems to have very different connotations in the states. I was aware that “Grilling” over there also connotated using the outdoor grated cooking surface that I’d call a “barbecue” but I guess where I was confused is that I thought the term also covered those otherwise flat surfaces that have the ridges like those George Foreman “grill” things but apparently that’s actually what a “griddle” is so that clears things up a bit. In either case I still can’t understand why a toasted cheese sandwich cooked in a frying pan gets called “grilled” and funnily enough it’s common to make a variation of that here that’s not quite as good but much easier and lazier to make where you put a single slice of bread covered with cheese (though not the American kind as that probably wouldn’t work very well with this method) under what I believe you’d call the “broiler”. This local method of melting cheese on bread really added to the confusion before I became aware that “Grilling” meant something different over there because I figured this must have been what was meant by “grilled cheese” before I figured that out lol.
I think this system of classifying sauteing vs frying, is quite useful, a bit more precise than what I’m used to, just doesn’t seem to get much use amongst my circles here. Still the lack of distinction necessarily made between degrees of “fried” is interesting since “fried” chicken seems to quite specifically mean deep fried even if for many dishes a person might well intend to use a lot of oil to cook some chicken but not necessarily plan to deep fry it.
I have noticed many people from outside the US get hung up on grilled cheese. We just call it that for some reason and no one really thinks about it. If we stop to think, we know it is not grilled, and as far as I’m aware, it’s the only thing we call “grilled” that is not grilled. I think the reason we do not call it a toasted cheese sandwich, or cheese toastie, as I think I’ve heard in the UK, is that would imply the use of a toaster (a standalone appliance with electric heating elements inside slots just big enough for a single slice of bread). I suppose griddled cheese might be a more accurate name, but we are too far gone to make that change.
Grilled cheese is cooked on a flat top grill/griddle, most people use a pan in home cooking because they don’t have a flat top or it’s just easier for a single grilled cheese to use a pan. Reubens and paninnis are other sandwiches that are grilled. You could probably argue that grilled generally means cooked at high heat. Then there’s pancakes which are more commonly cooked on a griddle than a pan…
There’s a few different things here that make clarity difficult. One is the precise definition of various techniques, for example:poaching water is not bubbling, simmering water is gentle bubbles, boiling water is bubbling heavily(some say “full rolling boil”, which is what boiling always is. Second is simply the name of the cooking vessel/equipment, griddle vs grill vs broiler, which is sometimes the same term used to describe the technique applied. You can grill a steak, but you wouldn’t say you ovened a roast. Last is that many terms are misused so much that it’s just become common parlance. Technically a grill is a device with grates and a radiant device that cooks food through a combination of conduction and radiation, usually powered by propane or natural gas. A BBQ is a similar object powered by wood, but it’s common for an outdoor grill to be referred to as a BBQ, though when used with the lid down is a little different than an open restaurant style grill since it acts a bit like an oven too.
That’s why I cook in French. Much clearer that way, and the recipes use proper units.
G’day mate
(slight nod of head in your general direction)
You’re correct but it begs the question, why the hell would they poach carrots? If any vegetable can stand up to boiling it’s a carrot. Blanching I could see, (that’s a 2 minute dunk in boiling water, OP, with a quick cooldown) if you wanted to pre-cook them so they wouldn’t be harder than everything else. Maybe they were just being poncy.
Well it depends on the texture you are going for. A poached carrot will still have a little crunch and not be too soggy so they can pair well as a side dish or be a component that’s meant to stand out. Boiled carrots can lose a lot of flavor and texture since they’d be cooked too close to the core, meaning you wouldn’t serve them as a side dish or as the star of a dish. They’d instead impart their flavor and texture into things like soups or broths.
Firstly, I appreciate you breaking it down! I knew they were different terms, but never really knew them outside of the standard ‘poached eggs’.
Secondly, soggy carrots can get bent. If it doesn’t crunch it’s not for me.
Happy to help! It’s something I got frustrated with when I started cooking and wondered why my food turned out different than the times I’d ordered it or how the recipe made it seem.
Ah I wish I loved carrots. Sadly too much carrot flavor makes me feel sick and I’m not sure why. The crunch from a fresh one is immaculate. It’s unfair lol
You might be mildly allergic? Bananas as soon as they hit my stomach make me feel like I’m going to throw up.
Can’t stand soggy carrots. I can eat them in soup, but it’s not my favorite. I much prefer roasted or stir fried. Actually most veggies, I prefer that way.
I feel like I shouldn’t like them. By description alone it sounds awful but for some reason, soggy carrots in a stew are fantastic and I prefer them to the more carefully cooked carrots you might get from a more upmarket version of the same dish. Somehow the now more mild sweetness with the strong kick if what they were cooked in a small and yielding bite is pleasant to me. I’m definitely in the minority though.
I really think it’s a texture thing for me. But I also don’t really get a lot of flavor when I eat soggy carrots. It just taste like mush to me. Roasting them really brings out the flavor for me as well as gives it a nice texture. Slightly burnt is so good. I love raw carrots as well.
Poaching in olive oil, butter, wine, etc would give a different flavor. I agree that water poached carrots would be just a slower way to cook carrots than boiling them.
Poaching in oil or butter sounds like a long way to saute them, especially when it takes sooooo long that you take your eyes off for a minute and they start browning.
If you keep your oil at the right temp (below boiling) the thing you’re cooking won’t ever brown. You get it cooked through evenly and infused with flavor from the poaching liquid. The texture and flavor will be much more like a boiled veggie than a sauted one. And usually if you’re poaching veggies you leave them in much larger chunks than you would saute - like even a whole carrot wouldn’t be weird.
Okay but I’m thinking it would take a long time and on my stove it would get hotter than that even on the lowest setting, which was what I was getting at. (I assume you meant below the boiling temperature of water, not oil. And probably below a simmer.)
Yep, 80C or 180F. I’m not sure if you can actually boil oil on a stove, but I do know that would be a bad idea. If you ever end up wanting to poach you might be able to do it in your oven on a very low setting rather than the stovetop.
Yeah, no boiling oil! Unless you need to defend the castle.
In fact, I don’t think oil by itself can boil, it just smokes and then bursts into flame. The boiling effect when deep-frying is from water in the food becoming steam.
I looked it up and cooking oil definitely can boil in a physics/chemistry sense of the word. That temp is well above the smoke point. I agree that in a practical sense boiling oil is a fire ball before you’d ever have to worry about breathing too much oil vapor though.
Le sigh. Your answer makes me really wish we could have the equivalent of r/askculinary here.
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I will think of some super obscure and technical question and/or a random stupid food safety question and ask it ASAP ;)
Thanks, hope this gains some traction!
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Looks like we were typing at the same time. I totally agree with everything here.
Wait you dont boil potatoes?
I noticed that too, but I think they meant, “in the situation where you want the potatoes to come out a particular way”.
Their wording was “You’d use delicate foods like shell-less eggs or fish or potatoes you don’t want to overcook or break.” Which could be a list of things that you don’t boil including potatoes or a list of things that you don’t boil and also potatoes in the special circumstance where you don’t want those potatoes breaking.
Honestly though I can’t think of any circumstance where I’ve heard of potato being cooked by immersion in water where that water wasn’t set to boil, they just take a long time to cook and need pretty heavy heat to soften so even when trying to be careful I’d find it strange not to boil them at all even if for just a shorter time frame.