With meat especially, but also with fish and some vegetables, one of the prime indicators as to how far along someting is cooked, for everyone not just the visu

With meat especially, but also with fish and some vegetables, one of the prime indicators as to how far along someting is cooked, for everyone not just the visually impaired. is not sight but resistance. This is because usually the outside the things when prepared well should look the same irespective of how coocked trough it is. For meat the easiest way to learn the different ways meat feels at different points throughout the coocking scale from 'bleu chaud" to 'well done' is steak. Pushing down with a spatula a raw slab of beef feels like solid pudding. You can push it sideways with preessure on the top and without moving it, and also it will compress and bounce back. As it gets more coocked through, the elastic feel will gradually become more contrained until you end up with a rock solid charred brick. For ground meat this is similar but more subtile. For vegetables you do not use the push down method, but you feel the resistance by sticking a fork in and feel it change from pretty hard to prick in to slicing through like butter. Easiest there yo practice id with boiled potato. Smell is also usefull, but inly to an extend as there can be many strong smells in a kitchen and the differences for degrees of coocking can be very subtle and vary with each batch, and also smeling can be impeded when you have a cold.