Man, since the war on fire, has understood that the use of cooking was not just a matter of taste to consume hard or difficult to assimilate foods, but a real chemical manipulation essential for our development. And if steaming is still a doctor’s favorite, barbecuing is not the worst method. So do not hesitate to grill meats, fish or vegetables with the return of the sun… Even if steaming is still the best.
Let’s start from the war of fire and the history of cooking, since with the barbecue, our annual regression phase will follow the return of the sun. With good luck for our taste buds, but also for our health, no offense to certain scientists who make an association between barbecue smoke and the occurrence of certain cancers through… the skin. The risk seems so minimal that there is no point in following the resulting stupid recommendations: clothes with long sleeves and a shower at the end of cooking! The interest of the barbecue is a rather natural cooking and without a lot of fat which makes it an excellent method of cooking for fish or vegetables. For meats, the ideal would certainly be a vertical barbecue that allows the fat to escape other than on the embers. But to end the debate on over-grilled meats supposedly carcinogenic, it should be noted that there are fewer dangerous substances in 50 kilograms of over-grilled meat than in… a single cigarette. So do not hesitate to use this cooking method, as much as possible, as soon as the weather or ventilation allows you. A special mention for the plancha version, this baking sheet that comes to us from Spain, where, however, watering the food with too much olive oil makes the method lose its dietary interest a little.
Soup, a cultural broth
The man quickly realized that he could also boil. For the sake of economy and for certain efficiency. Unfortunately, if soup was a constant in our diet for a long time – it remains so in many countries – it is a poor way to maintain the nutritional quality of food. For example, vegetables cooked in water lose almost all their vitamins, hence the importance of drinking the cooking broth.
Papillote
Very quickly also, the most evolved civilizations knew how to equip themselves with the furnace, which did not stop evolving since the dawn of time. From burial underground to microwaves, via the papillote – which is a perfectly suitable microwave oven – we have here a very good cooking model which favors the quality of food and its nutritional quality, to condition of not adding dangerous substances, which our ancestors did not understand very well when they cooked with butter. Because frying or reheating leftovers with a good piece of fat, this is certainly the main mistake of our gastronomy when it comes to cooking – even if, as many food critics say, “it’s damn good”. Sorry, colleagues, one could even imagine that the microwave was invented only for that, to heat without cooking in the fat!
Steam
Finally, the last mode, perhaps the most widely used in the world – because it is predominantly in the Far East – steam. If there is a process on which it would be interesting to bet, invest in all the “start-ups” which in the field of cooking will take the path traced a few centuries ago by a brilliant Blésois: Denis Papin.
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