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.
Boiling and poaching are not the same. Frying and sautéing are not the same.
Yes, there are differences between those things.
Poaching is cooking in hot liquid, but the liquid is not boiling or even simmering, so it is a lower temp than both.
Saute generally means you're using a small amount of oil/fat and stirring/tossing the food to spread the oil/fat around on everything while cooking everything. Pan frying generally means you're cooking a larger piece of something and not tossing it around.
So is Saute the same or similar thing like stir-frying?
Similar, but I've only ever heard the term stir-fry used in combination with a wok over EXTREME heat.
Ah, ok, thanks to the both of you!
I think you saute at a lower heat than stir-frying
I guess you replace the oil with the extra stirring to stop it sticking when you stir-fry
It is actually the extreme heat that prevents sticking more than the oil. You can stir fry in a dry wok. The stirring is for even cooking.
As pointed out already, these terms have quite specific and different meanings but it's worth being aware that they often get used interchangeably a lot too, and therefore possibly incorrectly. A lot of the specific terms will come from french cuisine (like saute) including all different names for exactly how you've sliced up your vegetables (julliene, brunoise etc). I believe this was so recipes could be written very precisely and therefore reproduced more acccurately.
It usually has to do with what chemical process happens to the food in question. Not all foods react the same to being dunked in boiling water. (Although I couldn't tell you what the difference between potatoes in boiling water and carrots in boiling water.) In the case of onions vs eggs, the same process is 1) extracting the water and using it to make sauce, with the onions, or 2) boiling off a tiny amount of liquid and heating the proteins to solidify them, in the case of eggs. Same method, wildly different chemistry.
Sometimes it has to do with how long that cooking method is applied, since a different thing happens. For example, you can poach OR hard-boil an egg; same method, different amount of cooking time.
In short, with a few exceptions, it's not about what process you're applying to cook the food, but about the result that it achieves in the food item.
Poached and hard boiled eggs vary by more than just their cook time. These names are much less about chemical processes and more about differences in technique. See other comments in this thread.
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.
Poach equals lower temp liquid. It can be oil or water type liquid. Boil is maximum temp water type liquid only. Blanching is boiling for a short time with the intention of not cooking all of the way through (eg to get skin off or to prepare for preservation by freezing).
Fry and saute are used interchangably all the time. One person's fried onions is another's sauted onions. Saute should indicate small pieces turned or tossed in a moderate amout of fat. Fry can be small or large pieces and can have moderate to lots of fat as a cooking medium.
Note that this is how normal people in my region and life use these terms and I make no claim that this is 'right' just my experience.
It's not based on the item. You can boil turkey and poach eggs as well. Here's various definitions to get you started:
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/454/types-of-cooking-methods.html
I have no answers, just pointing out that boiled carrots and poached eggs are also things.
Boiling, poaching and blanching all have to do with how long something is immersed in boiling water, for instance. (I think, and those definitions may also subtly change with the food item.)
Boiling happens in boiling liquid, poaching happens at a lower temperature and you wouldnt boil turkey. Sauteing is frying but uses little fat, unlike deep frying for example.
Well now i am going to boil a turkey.
They're slight variations in technique. Poaching is usually at a lower temperature than boiling, for instance.
There has to be a guide about this stuff somewhere on the web, right?
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71395
Well, until this post, I had never heard of poached carrots
i think you lack cooking technique. all of these things are different.. ie;
Poaching refers to cooking in hot—not boiling—waterSous Vide enters the room,
We fry onions, you know "fried onions". Boil vegetables like carrots, broccoli, potatoes.
Poach a turkey? Poaching is illegally hunting game, like pheasant. Turkeys and chickens and other meats are roasted, surely?
Sounds like Food Network wants to sound..... Posh.
Poaching is also a cooking method lol
Turkey is not meat, it's a country!