The Best Cooking Methods

Excessive cooking takes away nutrients from the food, period. There is no second opinion on this, except perhaps in Ayurveda, which recommends certain foods to be more nutritive cooked. Tomatoes fall in that category. But by and large, any form of cooking that uses high heat to cook the food takes away some nutrition from it, and reheating effectively makes it totally devoid of any nutrition. That is why most experts recommend freshly cooked food for health values.

Seasonally speaking, the best of nature's produce is usually in the temperate climate, so in regions with severe winters, it is usually spring and some points in a mild summer that the best foods are available while in tropical countries, it is usually winters and the spring months. Tender greens and vegetables are always more plentiful in the spring season but again, in tropical areas, spring season brings with it some very typical infections. Nature has her own ways of blessing humans with good health, if only we take time to listen and follow. The interesting thing is that Mother Nature instantly throws up vegetables and vegetation that have the power to counter these infections- tender, bitter leaves and vegetables like the bitter gourd, the new neem leaves that can be incorporated in one's diet to avoid seasonal diseases and infections.

Generally speaking, the best known methods of cooking are:

Steaming
Stovetop Searing
Stir-Frying
Sauteing
Quick Broil

In the warm summer months, light vegetables occur and they should also be cooked lightly, maybe just steamed or sauted with minimal amount of grease and spices.

In the winters, warm and eating foods are a good idea. Boiling, stewing and searing will provide the taste as well as the required nutrition suitable for the time. The spring season has fresh, green veggies galore and again, light cooking is the best option to retain the fresh crunchiness as well as the nutrients.

Meats should always be well cooked, a rare done steak maybe a feast for the senses but there are innumerable problems that can crop up because of it, infections and viruses being just a few of them. Meats need to be cooked longer than fish, so baking, broiling or poaching is the best option. Frying meat again adds on unhealthy calories and grease. Microwave cooking is an excellent idea, while roasting ads the flavor to an otherwise dull leg of meat. Chicken can be cooked while stir frying while lamb or any other tougher meat needs to be boiled before stir frying, to make sure it is cooked.

We almost always tend to overcook seafood; most chefs prescribe a quick steam or saut, because the high protein content takes very little to become digestible. Prawns, lobsters and most fish will become rubbery if overcooked and long cooking like boiling or stewing is best avoided.

For fish, once the meat becomes opaque and starts flaking, the fish is done; this should be the thumb rule. If baking, it should never be more than 10 minutes at 450 degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes with a brush of oil. Wrapped in aluminum foil, fish cooks more evenly. Broiling is another good option but once again, it should not be for too long or over too intense heat.

Frying, though followed religiously in most tropical countries, is not a good idea at all, especially when dealing with soft, tender seafood. Most fish become seared and overcooked when fried, of course, some people like the overdrawn flavors, but it is not flattering to the dish. The best way to fry a fillet of fish is to crumb it with bread crumbs or semolina, this way the outer layer is crispy fried while the fish inside doesn't lose its tenderness nor does it soak up oiliness from the frying medium. If frying is absolutely required, insists on shallow frying or even sauting with a dusting of flour. The oil film on the pan should be sufficiently hot and the fillet should never be cooked for more than 3 to 5 minutes.

One of the best ways to cook seafood is stir frying; a quick method used by the Oriental Chefs to much appreciation, the only catch being, everybody cannot do it. It requires the just right amount of oil, just THAT much time and of course, just that much tossing. Then again, tender fish will break if stir fried, so it has to be firm textured seafood that can be tossed around thus in a wok. Prawns and other crustaceans cook well this way and it is not uncommon to add some say sauce or barbeque sauce while stirring, to make a sauce in the same flavors.

While on crustaceans, poaching is a good idea. This applies to any fresh fish, but tender fish should be placed inside a boiling pan of stew for no more than ten minutes. Poaching is actually the healthiest way of cooking since it requires no oil, retains all the flavors and also the nutrition of the fish. Steaming too is a great idea, the only thing to be careful about is that the cooking pot needs to be tightly shut, and no steam should be allowed to escape. Besides, the fish needs to be held above the boiling liquid providing steam. Chinese, Japanese and other East Asian cuisines traditionally have a bamboo steamer to accomplish this.

Almost all the food we eat can be cooked with minimum oil and fat, and can provide all the nutrition we need, with the flavors we like. Still, most of us insist on over-cooking, under-cooking or using wrong methods for the wrong food. It would serve us well; if we took the trouble to find out what cooking method best serves the purpose of a certain food, taste wise and also healthiest.