Culinary literacy: getting into the oven

We will roast in the oven?

We have already discussed that frying is the cooking of food on heated surfaces at a temperature that provides the formation of a specific ruddy crust. Heated surface can serve and heated tray of oven roasting cabinet or installed in the oven frying pan, saucepan. The crust turns brown much more slowly than on a hotplate or in a deep fryer. But your food heats more evenly.

Heating occurs not only through contact with heated cookware or a baking tray, but also through radiation from the heating elements, the hot walls of the oven, the hot air blowing by.

Oven cooking is always more economical in terms of your time and effort.

Or better – bake?

The difference between pan frying and baking in the oven is that while baking the liquid on the outside turns into steam and escapes which is not the case when roasting . Baking is easier than roasting, and it is difficult to spoil the product.

Bake meat, fish, poultry, vegetables, root vegetables potatoes and some fruits.

If the oven is equipped with convection, baking gives the finished dish a particularly refined taste, which is not comparable to that obtained with frying. But the chemical processes in the food are much the same as in frying.

Baking uses considerably more spices than roasting.

The pans for baking should be spacious and no more than 12-15 centimeters deep. In a cramped pot, baked meat can end up boiling in its own juice.

How to know the cooking time in the oven?

Cooking times in the oven, as well as in a pan on the stove, are much more difficult to determine than cooking times. Because the boiling point of the fat can vary greatly depending on the type of fat animal fats, butter, vegetable oils of different varieties, fats that are released when roasting meat, poultry, fish . The cooking speed will therefore vary.

While in boiling, the intensity of heating after boiling no longer affects the cooking time, when roasting in the oven, the cooking time depends on the intensity of heating.

Fortunately, to determine the time of cooking in the oven, we can use the results of research of some companies that create not only advanced equipment for heat treatment of food, but also develop and recommendations for cooking.

You will find a handy table of cooking times at the end of the review.

Oven: recipes on a scientific level

Ursula Kallis has been working at the Bosch-Siemens Group in Germany for many years. Her workroom is filled with stoves, ovens, and other cooking equipment. Ursula not only tests new models of equipment, but also comes up with a variety of recipes and develops the best modes of cooking.

Here are some recommendations.

Meat. Meat dishes can be cooked in any heatproof pot with a tightly closing lid. For large quantities of roast, a universal enameled tray with rims is the right choice.

If you are cooking lean meat, add 2 to 3 tablespoons of liquid such as broth or wine to the pan. When stewing, add 8 to 10 tablespoons of liquid to the meat, depending on the quantity.

To cook stew or roast beef, the pot must have a lid on. Beef sirloin, roast beef, pork, veal, leg of lamb, meat loaf are cooked in an open dish.

For all such recipes, the dish is usually placed in the oven on the second shelf from the bottom. Turn pieces of meat weighing more than 1,5 kg on the other side after half of the required time.

To cook in the grill mode, the grill tray is set to higher levels in the oven this is specified in the recipe .

Keep the ready roast for about 10 minutes more in the closed oven. This is to ensure that the meat soaks evenly with the juices from roasting.

Bird. It is most often cooked on a special grill pan installed in a multi-purpose tray, or on a rack. A universal deep pan is placed under the grill to collect the dripping fat. When cooking a duck or a goose, prick the skin of the bird under the wings so that the fat can drain out.

After two-thirds of the set time, the bird should be inverted. You can crust the poultry with a crust if you brush it with melted butter and moisten it with salted water or orange juice and the fat it yields just before cooking is finished.

The best kind of heat for cooking poultry is a blower grill.

Fish. It’s cooked in a grill tray set in a universal pan. Put the tray in the oven on the third, lower, level, if the fish pieces are about 300 gr, and on the second level – if they weigh more up to 1,5 kg . For three-hundred-grain pieces of fish, we recommend using the grill only, for larger pieces – the grill with blowing.

To fry fish in the oven or in a pan it should be rolled in flour and smeared with melted butter in that order, not the other way around, as it seems more logical . That’s when the appetizing ruddy crust forms.

And to grill fish cutlets, the grilling tray is placed on the fourth shelf from the bottom, and only the grill mode is turned on.