Art of Cooking

No doubt, cooking always is an art. With simple techniques we can easily make a recipe more luscious. The one who does it prayerfully should be very familiar with the words like   wonderful, yummy, appealing, delicious, delightful, excellent, marvellous, exquisite, extraordinary, fantastic, finger licking, scrumptious, superb, terrific ....  etc.

One most important point we generally ignore is the cooking speed. How many of us know that we are at the right speed?

Modern stoves have burners of different levels of power. Use high output burners for boiling cooking and frying on ‘high’. These burners are not good for slow simmering cooking. A bright housewife knows the speed each item requires. She learns it from experience. 

It all depends upon the intended taste and quality. There could be recipes that ask you to begin at high for a while and then medium high or low until the end and vice versa. Most people use medium heat burners throughout at a definite compromise heat level, for easiness. 

There are cooks who use different burners (gas/electric) to keep up the desired heating levels. Before going to any typical burner it is important to know the heat levels of the burners in use. 

Please know that everyone’s stoves are different so there may be some testing out that you need to do.

High Heat: right at the top of the heat level. This is what you will use for bringing liquids to a boil and getting the heat up quickly.

Medium-High Heat: This is usually around the mid-point on the dial. The idea here is that you still want the food to be cooking quite quickly, but not so quickly that it is burning and not so hot that the oil starts to smoke. This is likely where you will do a lot of your cooking such as sautéing, browning meat, and frying.

Medium Heat: This is usually about 2/3 of the way around towards Low. This is for a gentler cooking. This is where you will likely put the dial when vegetables need time to soften or when you want a rapid simmer.

Low Heat: This is all the way around on the dial. This is where you simmer.

Over time and with practice you will start to get a sense of things. May be you will notice that your onions are browning too quickly, then you’ll know to turn it down a little more next time. Or maybe you’ll find your sauce didn’t reduce as quickly as they said it would, then maybe you need to crank it up a bit to a faster simmer next time and the rice didn’t fully cook and it was usually that my heat was cranked up too high so I had to learn to slow things down.