Use The Right Cooking Methods For The Right Food
1. Stir-frying
This method suits smaller cuts of food such as chicken cubes or chopped cauliflower florets as the pan can heat up pretty fast. You’ll want to have everything sliced, cut and prepped before you even turn on the fire or the oil will burn quickly, resulting in charred spices and ingredients.
2. Steaming
Besides being a really healthy (and also clean!) cooking method, it helps to seal in the ingredients’ natural flavours. This means that steaming is ideal if you have a light palate or if you are just bad with seasoning and marinating food. This is also why steaming suits food with a distinctive natural taste, such as certain vegetables like broccoli and carrots, and fish.
3. Roasting
Fans swear by how you can toss everything into a baking tray and pop it into the oven, and not worry about an overcooked or undercooked dish. There’s also very little cleaning-up needed. But roasting works best on meats that have been marinated as the sauces will give the skin a delicious charred, caramelised texture and taste. If you are short on time, you can also cheat by throwing in cut lemons, onions, garlic cloves and fresh herbs as they will all lend more flavour to the meat in the oven.
4. Pressure cooking
This requires very little water and time, and also retains vitamins and minerals in food so you’ll want to save it for nutrient-rich food such as beef, lamb and beans, for instance. As pressure cooking is usually used to make stews and soups in the least time possible (and with the least effort too!), choose ingredients with rich and strong flavours.
5. Sous vide
A modern-day innovation, this technique has gone from gourmet restaurants to home kitchens in more recent times. It is basically about putting food in an airtight vacuum bag and then placing it in a temperature-controlled water bath. Thanks to the precision involved here, sous vide works on meats that are tricky to get right. Think steak and lamb (though you’ll still need to sear them in a pan afterwards).
