Cooking

Cooking is the art, science, profession, and hobby of preparing food for human consumption. The term is often used in the narrower sense of applying heat to chemically transform a food to change its flavor, texture, appearance, or nutritional properties. The use of heat has several uses. It sterilizes the food in addition to causing the softening the food by turning collagen into gelatin.

Because eating is a universal human drive, cooking is a nearly universal cultural feature.

Specific techniques and ingredients are often regional. See Cuisine for information about the many regional and ethnic food traditions.

Please see food writing for some authors of books on cookery, food, and the history of food.

Some major cooking (in the sense of transforming raw food with heat) techniques:

• Baking
  • High tech baking
• Barbecuing
• Boiling
  • Blanching
• Braising
• Broiling
• Frying
  • Deep frying
  • Hot salt frying
  • Hot sand frying
  • Pan frying
  • Sauteeing
  • Stir frying
• Grilling
• Poaching
• Pressure cooking
• Roasting
• Smoking
• Steaming
  • Double steaming
• Vacuum flask cooking

Other preparation techniques:

• Brining
• Marination
• Seasoning
• Pickling
• Microwaving also known as "nuking"

Other information:

• Weights and measures (includes conversions and equivalencies common in cooking)

For recipes, see the Wikipedia Cookbook.

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What are our priorities for writing in this area? To help develop a list of the most basic topics in cooking, please see cooking basic topics.