The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to food preparation:
Food preparation is an art form and applied science that includes techniques like cooking to make ingredients fit for consumption and/or palatable.
Essence of food preparation
The process of food preparation includes selecting the ingredients needed and correctly handling ingredients to produce the components of a meal.
Art – an art, one of the arts, is a creative endeavor or discipline. Culinary art – art of preparing and cooking foods. Skill – learned capacity to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy, or both. Meal preparation – the process of planning meals.
General food preparation concepts
Chef – a person who cooks professionally for other people. Although over time the term has come to describe any person who cooks for a living, traditionally it refers to a highly skilled professional who is proficient in all aspects of food preparation. Cookbook Cooking – act of preparing food for eating. It encompasses a vast range of methods, tools and combinations of ingredients to improve the flavour or digestibility of food. It generally requires the selection, measurement and combining of ingredients in an ordered procedure in an effort to achieve the desired result. Cooking oil Cooking weights and measures – includes conversions and equivalences common in cooking. Cuisine – specific set of cooking traditions and practices, often associated with a specific culture. It is often named after the region or place where its underlying culture is present. A cuisine is primarily influenced by the ingredients that are available locally or through trade. Eating Flavor Food is anything solid or liquid which when swallowed, digested and assimilated in the body provides it with essential substances called nutrients and keeps it well. It is the basic necessity of life. Food supplies energy, enables growth and repair of tissues and organs. Food and cooking hygiene Foodborne illness Food preservation Ingredients International food terms – useful when reading about food and recipes from different countries. Recipe Restaurant Staple food – a food that is "eaten regularly and in such quantities as to constitute the dominant part of the diet and supply a major proportion of energy and nutrient needs".
Food preparation techniques
Cooking with dry heat
Baking – the technique of prolonged cooking of food by dry heat acting by convection, normally in an oven, but can also be done in hot ashes or on hot stones. Appliances like Rotimatic also allow automatic baking.
Blind-baking – baking pastry before adding a filling. Barbecuing – method of cooking meat, poultry and occasionally fish with the heat and hot smoke of a fire, smoking wood, or hot coals of charcoal.
Grilling – a form of cooking that involves dry heat applied to the surface of food, commonly from above or below. May involve a grill, a grill pan, or griddle. Maillard reaction – a chemical reaction that occurs when amino acids and reducing sugars are exposed to heat which gives browned food its distinctive flavor Roasting – cooking method that uses dry heat, whether an open flame, oven, or other heat source. Roasting usually causes caramelization or Maillard browning of the surface of the food, which is considered by some as a flavor enhancement. Rotisserie – meat is skewered on a spit - a long solid rod used to hold food while it is being cooked over a fire in a fireplace or over a campfire, or while being roasted in an oven. Smoking – the process of flavoring, cooking, or preserving food by exposing it to the smoke from burning or smoldering plant materials, most often wood. Hot smoking will cook and flavor the food, while cold smoking only flavors the food. Searing – technique used in grilling, baking, braising, roasting, sautéing, etc., in which the surface of the food (usually meat, poultry or fish) is cooked at high temperature so a caramelized crust forms.