Cooking food without adding any more heat

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What do you picture when cooking food is mentioned? Is it stir-frying over a flame, with continuous attention to keeping the food moving? But there also is different style of cooking without adding more heat or attention.

 

One example is a recipe at Food.com for Nif’s perfect poached egg. Water is boiled in a frying pan, and eggs are added. Then heat is turned off and the lid goes on (similar to the saucepan shown above). After about five minutes of waiting the eggs are ready. Another recipe by Alton Brown at FoodNETWORK is titled Perfect Poached Eggs. He also has a recipe for The Final Fried Eggs, which involves preheating a carbon steel frying pan in a 450 F oven to store heat. The the pan gets taken out and set down, a pat of butter and then two eggs are added. Then the pan gets covered, and after a four-minute wait the eggs are done.

 

Preparing polenta or grits sometimes is described with lots of details. An Italian grandma stirs polenta clockwise continuously, with a wooden spoon in a copper pan. I found a simpler recipe from Abra Berens on page 255 in her 2021 book Grist: A practical guide to cooking grains, beans, seeds, and legumes:

 

“For the longest time, cooking polenta or grits was my least favorite kitchen task. Inevitably throughout the process I was burned by molten hot porridge spilling from the pan. Said porridge, flung from the pot, would adhere to the kitchen wall (sometimes the ceiling). More often than I like to admit, the bottom of the pot would scorch, rendering the whole process futile.

 

To avoid all this, I devised a way to cook corn porridge with very minimal active heat, minimizing the potential for burning ourselves or the grits. Bring a pot of salted water four times the volume of grits you want to cook to a rolling boil, whisk in the ground corn, turn off the heat, and let the hot water hydrate the grits over the course of an hour or so. It worked perfectly and continues to be my preferred method to this day.”

 

Steel-cut oats typically take from a quarter to a half-hour to cook. At Food.com there is an alternative simple recipe for Steel cut oatmeal in a thermos overnight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These recipes depend on the stored heat from boiling water. They are analogous to a cyclist coasting downhill using stored potential energy (as shown above).

 

Other traditional recipes for group cooking call for using a fire to preheat rocks. Then they are  placed in a pit along with the food and covered.  Three examples are a clambake, bean hole beans, or a Kālua.

 

An image of a covered pan came from Wikimedia Commons. The cartoon cyclist came from Openclipart.