What are the fundamental cooking methods?

Mmng23! I will try and list all the fundamental cooking methods in the following. All, cooking methods destroy some of the nutrients, so raw food recipes or food cooked in a slow cooker are healthiest.

Since man could make a fire, cooking over fire was and still is a very nice way of cooking as it gives a lot of flavor. A variety of this is digging a hole, making a nice fire in this hole and when it has burnt down place meat alone or with vegetables into a banana leaf or similar or aluminum foil and put onto the embers. Cover with soil and let bake for a few hours.

This results in a very lovely exotic flavor. Boiling: Over any flame or electric stove, we come to the next cooking method, which is boiling the food in water as in potatoes, stew and soups. Poaching is a variety of boiling something in water, like for example, you can crack an egg open and gently let the whole egg slide into the simmering/boiling water.

Simmering is the same as boiling, just on a lower temperature and you see that the bubbles in the simmering water are smaller than the ones in boiling water. Then we have pressure cookers and steam basket cookers which are claimed to be a healthy way of cooking. Blanching means to immerse cleaned and peeled vegetables or fruit for a few minutes into boiling water before they are further processed as in preserving them in cans or vinegar/water/salt/sugar/spices mixture.

Shallow frying means to heat some oil or other fat in a frying pan and fry the meat or vegetables in this at fairly high temperatures. That tastes very nice, but is less healthy. Cooking in a Wok or Paella is a variety of shallow frying.

Deep frying means to immerse vegetable or meat in very hot oil in a deep fryer which is either a deep frying pan with a metal basket into which you put the potatoes or meat or even some other vegetables that are suitable or one can even buy an electric deep fryer which is safer to use. Baking means you heat up an oven either wood fired, gas or electrical and put meat, vegetables or even fruit into the oven to bake it. This way of cooking can take some time.

You can also bake bread, pastry, cakes and many other lovely recipes in the oven. Finally we have the "bain marie" which is in its simplest form a pot with boiling water into which one places a bowl with the ingredients. This has the advantage that one can warm up the ingredients without burning them at the bottom.

Many fine desserts require this cooking method. There are also pots commercially available that already have a sort of water jacket around them. This serves the same purpose.

Hope this helps!

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.