Why is cooking a food item method called different things by what the item is, or what is the criteria?
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.
Poach equals lower temp liquid. It can be oil or water type liquid. Boil is maximum temp water type liquid only. Blanching is boiling for a short time with the intention of not cooking all of the way through (eg to get skin off or to prepare for preservation by freezing).
Fry and saute are used interchangably all the time. One person’s fried onions is another’s sauted onions. Saute should indicate small pieces turned or tossed in a moderate amout of fat. Fry can be small or large pieces and can have moderate to lots of fat as a cooking medium.
Note that this is how normal people in my region and life use these terms and I make no claim that this is ‘right’ just my experience.
As pointed out already, these terms have quite specific and different meanings but it’s worth being aware that they often get used interchangeably a lot too, and therefore possibly incorrectly. A lot of the specific terms will come from french cuisine (like saute) including all different names for exactly how you’ve sliced up your vegetables (julliene, brunoise etc). I believe this was so recipes could be written very precisely and therefore reproduced more acccurately.
I think it’s a pretty accurate answer. The OP asked why it’s sometimes calked poaching and sometimes boiling. The answer being that they aare different things.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Poaching is cooking in hot liquid, but the liquid is not boiling or even simmering, so it is a lower temp than both.
Saute generally means you're using a small amount of oil/fat and stirring/tossing the food to spread the oil/fat around on everything while cooking everything. Pan frying generally means you're cooking a larger piece of something and not tossing it around.
Boiling happens in boiling liquid, poaching happens at a lower temperature and you wouldnt boil turkey. Sauteing is frying but uses little fat, unlike deep frying for example.
Poaching is done in a lower, sub-boiling water (often flavored).
Sauté comes from a root meaning "jump" and tends to move the pan while fried items are not, sautéing also uses less fat.
It usually has to do with what chemical process happens to the food in question. Not all foods react the same to being dunked in boiling water. (Although I couldn’t tell you what the difference between potatoes in boiling water and carrots in boiling water.) In the case of onions vs eggs, the same process is 1) extracting the water and using it to make sauce, with the onions, or 2) boiling off a tiny amount of liquid and heating the proteins to solidify them, in the case of eggs. Same method, wildly different chemistry.
Sometimes it has to do with how long that cooking method is applied, since a different thing happens. For example, you can poach OR hard-boil an egg; same method, different amount of cooking time.
In short, with a few exceptions, it’s not about what process you’re applying to cook the food, but about the result that it achieves in the food item.
Poached and hard boiled eggs vary by more than just their cook time. These names are much less about chemical processes and more about differences in technique. See other comments in this thread.
If I hand you an egg and tell you it’s a poached egg, you’re going to thinking about the consistency of the egg, not how I cooked it. Poached means the result, not the process.
I mean… you get the result by doing the process. You can get different consistencies based on how long you cook them for.
They’re different techniques with different results. You can’t give me a boiled egg and say it was poached and have me not be able to tell. Nor vice-versa. You can have runny boiled eggs, you can have soft-boiled eggs, you can have hard-boiled eggs, but you can’t make a boiled egg look like a poached egg.
This is a thread about why they use certain words, though. It isn’t a thread about how to cook an egg. They use the word “poached” to mean a certain consistency. To poach an egg means to produce an egg with that consistency. In fact, as far as the recipe is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether you heated up any water at all: if the instruction is “poach an egg” and you inject a Maxwell’s demon to heat up the individual molecules of the egg the appropriate amount, the result is a poached egg and that’s still what you call it.
They use words to mean what the result is.
More to the point, the reason they use language this way is that many results in cooking can be achieved through multiple different processes. Chefs come up with different solutions to the same problem. Talking about how the solutions work is interesting, but it gets in the way if you’re talking about a basic step in the middle of a recipe. If you know multiple ways to get to that result, and you don’t want to prescribe any particular one, you use a word like “poach” or “fry” and assume that the cook following your recipe already knows at least one way to get there.
I didn’t reply to the thread, I replied to you. You said the difference between boiled and poached egg is the consistency, which is not true. The difference between poached and boiled is the process. If you poach an egg for 1 minute vs 5 minutes, you’ll get wildly different consistencies. They’ll both still be poached eggs, however
If you hand me a poached egg, I’m not going to take it because I can see it has no shell and it’s going to be all over me staining me with the runny yolk. Now if you gave me an egg with a shell and told me it was a soft-boiled egg, I would think about the consistency.
I have no answers, just pointing out that boiled carrots and poached eggs are also things.
Boiling, poaching and blanching all have to do with how long something is immersed in boiling water, for instance. (I think, and those definitions may also subtly change with the food item.)
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