4 ms·

How much of cooking protocol is to smooth over differences in heat flux? Recipes almost always seem to call for pre-heating an oven or bringing a pot to a boil

• rowanG077 4y ago
  Area under the curve is most certainly not the only thing that is important. Heat penetration over time can be completely different depending if you start the cook from a hot pan/oven or not. Searing a steak using a gas burner or sous vide are prime examples.
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• makeitdouble 4y ago
  Texture will be different depending on how long it stays in the water and at what temperature you cook it. Going to the extreme could help: dumping the dry pasta in cold water and leaving it for a day would soften it while not cooking it much. The same process is happening at a way milder scale when you dump it before the boiling point.
  • bagels 4y ago
    I've tried a related experiment: Put the pasta in the water when cold, and bring it to a boil. The texture always comes out wrong.
• nerdponx 4y ago
  If you put something in a cold pan, it steams/boils itself on the outside and cooks unevenly while the pan or oven is heating up. This almost always results in bland flabby overcooked sad food. The lower the thermal conductivity of the food, the more this matters. The shorter the anticipated cooking time, the more this matters. With certain vegetables it's OK to do this, like peppers and onions, because the lower heat "warmup" phase actually helps them soften up and break down, and they are also pretty thermally conductive (lots of water, not much hard fiber). But if you do it with mushrooms you'll just get spongy wet mushrooms, and if you do it with meat you'll get sad boiled stuff instead of something juicy inside and crispy outside. In addition, some cooking techniques specifically rely on the rapid denaturing of proteins on the surface of the food, forming a kind of crust, to prevent it from fusing to the cooking surface. This is how pan-frying fish, meat, and eggs works.
• Scaevolus 4y ago
  You can certainly cook pasta starting in cold water, it just makes the timing more uncertain because you don't have a standard starting condition. It's nice because you can use just enough water to cover.
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• at_a_remove 4y ago
  I am not a cook. I do have a physics degree. One time I pondered, "What's with the boiling water? And even caring about corrections for altitude?" Water boils at a particular temperature. While boiling, at STP, it is at that temperature and stays there. Thus, when you immerse something in boiling water for a specific amount of time, you know this food item is experiencing a particular temperature for a given time. Boiling water allows for standardization on the temperature end, so you can assure yourself that, if you get the time right, well, you've standardized both of those things and your macaroni will be like someone else's macaroni, assuming they came from similar boxes. The stability of the boiling water temperature takes away a lot of the guesswork.
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    And to remember measuring and controlling temperatures is pretty recent development. When cooking with wood there really wasn't a good way to get consistent temperatures. Neither on it, on stove or in oven. Thus water boiling always at nearly same temperature in same location was very handy.
• joveian 4y ago
  Can't help with the physics, but in addition to more variable times and potentially different textures that have been mentioned, the other convenience of boiling water first is that it can be covered without causing trouble (potentially saving some energy), while lots of stuff (including pasta) can't unless you watch them. Pressure cookers always start from cold, although the pressure and the tighter seal change some considerations. Not related to the question but buckwheat is a good pasta alternative, quick cooking and goes great with pasta sauce; should be much lower total energy use, particularly with untoasted buckwheat.