Why is cooking a food item method called different things by what the item is, or what is the criteria?
On the Food network they boil potatoes, but they poach carrots. They poach turkey, but they boil eggs. They sauté' onions, but they fry eggs in the same pan. Likewise, they fry hash browns, but they sauté' onions in the same pan before adding the potatoes.
I can go on for days.
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You're correct but it begs the question, why the hell would they poach carrots? If any vegetable can stand up to boiling it's a carrot. Blanching I could see, (that's a 2 minute dunk in boiling water, OP, with a quick cooldown) if you wanted to pre-cook them so they wouldn't be harder than everything else. Maybe they were just being poncy.
Poaching in olive oil, butter, wine, etc would give a different flavor. I agree that water poached carrots would be just a slower way to cook carrots than boiling them.
Poaching in oil or butter sounds like a long way to saute them, especially when it takes sooooo long that you take your eyes off for a minute and they start browning.
If you keep your oil at the right temp (below boiling) the thing you're cooking won't ever brown. You get it cooked through evenly and infused with flavor from the poaching liquid. The texture and flavor will be much more like a boiled veggie than a sauted one. And usually if you're poaching veggies you leave them in much larger chunks than you would saute - like even a whole carrot wouldn't be weird.
Okay but I'm thinking it would take a long time and on my stove it would get hotter than that even on the lowest setting, which was what I was getting at. (I assume you meant below the boiling temperature of water, not oil. And probably below a simmer.)
Yep, 80C or 180F. I'm not sure if you can actually boil oil on a stove, but I do know that would be a bad idea. If you ever end up wanting to poach you might be able to do it in your oven on a very low setting rather than the stovetop.
Yeah, no boiling oil! Unless you need to defend the castle.
In fact, I don't think oil by itself can boil, it just smokes and then bursts into flame. The boiling effect when deep-frying is from water in the food becoming steam.
I looked it up and cooking oil definitely can boil in a physics/chemistry sense of the word. That temp is well above the smoke point. I agree that in a practical sense boiling oil is a fire ball before you'd ever have to worry about breathing too much oil vapor though.