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.
You are viewing a single comment
If I hand you an egg and tell you it's a poached egg, you're going to thinking about the consistency of the egg, not how I cooked it. Poached means the result, not the process.
If you hand me a poached egg, I'm not going to take it because I can see it has no shell and it's going to be all over me staining me with the runny yolk. Now if you gave me an egg with a shell and told me it was a soft-boiled egg, I would think about the consistency.
I mean... you get the result by doing the process. You can get different consistencies based on how long you cook them for.
They're different techniques with different results. You can't give me a boiled egg and say it was poached and have me not be able to tell. Nor vice-versa. You can have runny boiled eggs, you can have soft-boiled eggs, you can have hard-boiled eggs, but you can't make a boiled egg look like a poached egg.
This is a thread about why they use certain words, though. It isn't a thread about how to cook an egg. They use the word "poached" to mean a certain consistency. To poach an egg means to produce an egg with that consistency. In fact, as far as the recipe is concerned, it doesn't matter whether you heated up any water at all: if the instruction is "poach an egg" and you inject a Maxwell's demon to heat up the individual molecules of the egg the appropriate amount, the result is a poached egg and that's still what you call it.
They use words to mean what the result is.
More to the point, the reason they use language this way is that many results in cooking can be achieved through multiple different processes. Chefs come up with different solutions to the same problem. Talking about how the solutions work is interesting, but it gets in the way if you're talking about a basic step in the middle of a recipe. If you know multiple ways to get to that result, and you don't want to prescribe any particular one, you use a word like "poach" or "fry" and assume that the cook following your recipe already knows at least one way to get there.
Ok, you didn't read a word I said, that's cool. Poached egg is a consistency, whatever you say.