February 1, 2019
In order to cook delicious meals that everyone will want to eat, a chef must have a good understanding of all their ingredients – and how to cook them!
Each specific type of meat, seafood and vegetable has specific ways of being cooked. Some can only be cooked one way, whilst some can be cooked a number of different ways to bring out different flavour profiles.
Matching ingredients to their correct cooking methods is key to creating traditional and authentic Indian and Pakistani dishes that we serve here at Royal Nawaab. But what are these types of cooking methods?
All methods of cooking fall into one of three separate categories:
Moist-heat cooking methods are any style of cooking which involves water. This can come in the form of poaching, steaming, deep poaching or simmering. This is one of the most popular cooking methods for the majority of vegetables, and some meats and seafood, all over the world. Moist-heat methods don’t draw out the water-soluble nutrients from the food, leaving you with a dish which is tender, delicately flavoured and healthy.
The dry-heat method of cooking mainly involves methods such as grilling and roasting: methods that cook food using a direct or indirect application of heat without the use of any liquid.
Cooking with any sort of fat is also counted as a dry-heat method: shallow-frying, deep-frying, stir-frying and sautéing are all forms of dry-heat methods. Although cooking with oil may seem more like a moist method, it is the fact that oil and water do not mix well which makes cooking with oil the opposite to the moist-heat method.
There are some ingredients which require chefs to perform a combination of dry and moist heat methods in order to get the best out of it, or simply to make it edible in the first place. Some meats, for example, will be too tough cooked any one way, therefore requiring a dry heat method to start with (shallow fry) to sear the meat, before going through a moist heat method (stewing).
At Royal Nawaab’s halal restaurant in London you can try a huge number of different dishes, all made using different cooking methods to bring out the best flavours possible.
