Are you new to the world of cooking and feeling overwhelmed by all the jargon? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! In this blog post, we will break down common cooking terms to help you navigate your way around the kitchen with confidence.
From “sauté” to “simmer” and “blanch” to “braise,” we’ll explain what each term means and provide practical tips on how to incorporate them into your cooking repertoire. Understanding these terms will not only make following recipes a breeze but will also enhance your culinary skills.
So, whether you’re looking to master basic cooking techniques or expand your culinary knowledge, this guide will serve as your go-to resource for unraveling the mysteries of cooking terms. Get ready to impress your friends and family with your newfound kitchen lingo!
- Al Dente – In cooking, al dente describes pasta or rice that is cooked to be firm to the bite. The term also extends to firmly-cooked vegetables. In contemporary Italian cooking, the term identifies the ideal consistency for pasta and involves a brief cooking time
- Au gratin – Sprinkled with breadcrumbs and cheese, or both, and browned. The phrase ‘au gratin’ literally means “by grating” in French, or “with a crust”.
- Au jus – With its own juices from cooking, often refers to steak or other meat.
- Au sec – Description of a liquid that has been reduced until it’s almost nearly dry, a process often used in sauce making.
- Barding – To cover a meat with a layer of fat before cooking, it maintains the moisture of the meat while it cooks to avoid overcooking.
- Baste – To drizzle or spoon juices or melted fat over food while cooking.
- Blanch – To briefly cook food in boiling water before plunging it into ice water.
- Blend – The process of combining two or more ingredients so that they become smooth and uniform in texture and lose their individual characteristics.
- Bone – Ironically, to bone a piece of meat is to remove the bone from it.
- Braise – Braising is an old French method of cooking meat. It uses a combination of dry and moist heat, dry being when the meat is seared at a high heat and moist when it’s gently cooked in a liquid. This cooking method is ideal with sinewy, tougher cuts of meat.
- Brining – The process of soaking meat in a brine, or heavily salted water, before cooking.
- Broil – Normally a cooking term used in the States, broil is what we know as grilling. Basically, you preheat the hot rod or grill at the top of your oven until it gets exceptionally hot. Place the food on an oven tray under the preheated grill until it browns and has some incredible flavour.
- Butterfly – Butterflying food refers to splitting it through the centre to thin it out, but not cutting through it entirely.
- Caramelization – is a process of browning of sugar used extensively in cooking for the resulting rich, butter-like flavor and brown color
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- Clarify – Most often refers to butter, where the milk solids and water are rendered from the butterfat. This is done by gently melting the butter, allowing the two to separate and then skimming off the solids.
- Coddle – To coddle something is to cook it in water just below boiling point. More recently, the term specifically applies to eggs using a device called a coddler. The low cooking temperature produces a much softer egg than if you were to boil it. Coddling… definitely one of our favourite sounding cooking terms.
- Consommé – A type of clear liquid that has been clarified by using egg whites and flavoured stock to remove fat.
- Confit – Regularly recognised with duck, but can include other meats, where the meat is cooked in its own fat (or other fat if necessary) at a low heat.
- Coring – To remove the central section of some fruits, seeds and tougher material that is not normally consumed.
- Curdle – When egg-based mixtures are cooked too quickly and the protein separates from the liquids, leaving a lumpy mixture behind.
- Cure – A non-heated method of cooking where the food item is packed with a salt mixture and left so that the moisture draws out.
- Cut in – A method of blending, usually for pastry, where a fat is combined with flour. The method often refers to using a pastry blender to mix butter or shortening into the flour until the mixture is the size of peas.
- Dice –A knife skill cut – the exact measurement changes but the shape is always a small square.
- Dollop – A small amount of soft food that has been formed into a round-ish shape. Yoghurt, whipped cream and mashed potatoes are all examples of foods that can be dolloped.
- Deep fry –To cook food in a deep layer of hot oil.
- Deglaze – To loosen bits of food that have stuck on the bottom of a pan by adding liquid such as stock.
- Dredging – To coat moist foods with a dry ingredient before cooking to provide an even coating.\
- Dress – Dress has two definitions when it comes to cooking, firstly to coat foods (mostly salad leaves) in a sauce. It also refers to preparing poultry, fish and venison for cooking, which essentially is breaking them down off of their carcasses and sectioning the meat.
- Effiler – To remove the ends and the string from green beans.
- Flambé – The process of cooking off alcohol that’s been added to a hot pan by creating a burst of flames. The fumes are set alight and the flame goes out when the alcohol has burnt off.
- Fillet – Most commonly known as a very tender cut of beef, but can also refer to the meat of chicken and fish.
- Flake – Refers to the process of gently breaking off small pieces of food, often for combining with other foods. For example, you would flake cooked fish to combine with cooked, mashed potatoes to make fish cakes.
- Fold – To gently mix ingredients by using a cutting and turning motion. As in fold in the cheese.
- Frenching – The process of removing all fat, cartilage, and meat, from rib bones on a roast by cutting between the bones, often referring to lamb, beef, or pork rib.
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- Gratin – A gratin is a topping that is often either breadcrumbs or grated cheese that forms a brown crust when placed under a hot grill.
- Grease – Refers to applying a fat to a roasting tray or cake tin to ensure that food doesn’t stick.
- Grill – Grilling food is applying dry heat to food either from above or below. In South Africa, grilling refers to cooking food under the grill in your oven (in the States this is called broiling) or can also refer to cooking food in a pan with grill lines.
- Grind – To break something down into much smaller pieces, for example, coffee beans or whole spices.
- Hull – Refers to the husk, shell or external covering of a fruit. More specifically, it is the leafy green part of a strawberry.
- Infuse – To allow the flavour of an ingredient to soak into a liquid until the liquid takes on the flavour of the ingredient.
- Jacquarding – This cooking term means the process of poking holes into the muscle of meat in order to tenderise it, also known as needling.
- Julienne – To cut food into thin matchstick-shaped pieces.
- Jus lie – Meat juice that has been lightly thickened with either cornflour or any binding thickener.
- Knead – To work dough into a soft, uniform and malleable texture by pressing, folding and stretching with the heel of your hand.
- Larding – The process of inserting strips of fat into a piece of meat that doesn’t have as much fat, to melt and keep the meat from drying out.
- Liaison – A binding agent of cream and egg yolks used to thicken soups or sauces.
- Macerate – The soaking of an ingredient, usually fruit, in a liquid so that it takes on the flavour of the liquid. Can also be used to soften dried fruit.
- Marinate – To impart the flavour of a marinade into food; usually requires some time to allow the flavours to develop. Can also be used to tenderise a cut of meat.
- Mince – To finely divide food into uniform pieces that are smaller than diced or chopped foods.
- Mise en place – This is the OG of kitchen cooking terms and means the preparation of ingredients, such as dicing onions, chopping veggies or measuring spices, before starting to cook.
- Nappe – The act of coating a food with a thin, even layer.
- Needling – Injecting fat or flavours into an ingredient to enhance its flavour.
- Panade– A mixture of starch and liquid that’s added to ground meat for hamburger patties/meatballs. Usually a mixture of bread, breadcrumbs or panko with milk, buttermilk or yoghurt.
- Pané – This cooking term refers to coating in breadcrumbs.
- Parboil – To boil food only slightly, often used to soften foods like potatoes before roasting them. Helps to speed up the cooking process.
- Par cooking – The process of not fully cooking food, so that it can be finished or reheated later.
- Paupiette – A thin, flattened piece of meat, rolled with a stuffing of ingredients i.e, vegetables, which is then cooked before served.
- Pickle – The process of preserving food in a brine, which is a salt or vinegar solution.
- Poach – To cook in gently bubbling liquids such as a stock or a broth.
- Purée – Cooked food, usually vegetables, that have been mashed or blended to form a paste-like consistency.
- Reconstitute – To restore a dried food to its original consistency, or to change its texture, by letting it soak in warm water.
- Reduce – The process of simmering or boiling a liquid, usually a stock or a sauce, to intensify the flavour or to thicken the consistency.
- Refresh – To halt the cooking process, usually that of vegetables after being blanched, by plunging them into ice-cold water.
- Render – Using a low heat to melt the fat away from a food item, usually a piece of meat. This rendered fat can then be used to cook wit
- Roast – Technically defined as a method of dry cooking a piece of meat, where the hot air envelopes the food to cook it evenly and to allow it to caramelize nicely.
- Roux – A roux is a flour and fat mixture cooked together, which acts as a thickener in soups, stews and sauces. (link to mother sauce article)
- Sauté – Meaning ‘to jump’ in French, sauteeing is cooking food in a minimal amount of oil over a rather high heat.
- Scald – To heat a liquid so it’s right about to reach the boiling point, where small bubbles start to appear around the edges.
- Score – Shallow, diagonal cuts made on the surface of meat and vegetables for the purpose of rendering fat, encouraging crispiness and flavour absorption.
- Sear – To quickly brown the surface of meat at a high temperature.
- Shallow fry – To cook food in a shallow layer of preheated oil.
- Simmer – Process of cooking in hot liquids kept just below boiling point.
- Skim – To remove a top layer of fat or scum that has developed on the surface of soups, stocks or sauces.
- Steam – Method of cooking food by using steam.
- Steep – Similar to infuse, steeping is the process of allowing dried ingredients to soak in a liquid until the liquid has taken on the flavour of the ingredient.
- Sweat – This refers to the gentle cooking of vegetables in butter or oil under a lid, so that their natural liquid is released to aid the cooking process. Often vegetables cooked this way will end up looking translucent.
- Temper – To temper is the process of adding a small quantity of a hot liquid to a cold liquid in order to warm the cold liquid slightly. This is often be done before adding delicate ingredients to a hot mixture, where their format may be affected. An example of this would be adding eggs to a hot mixture – in order to prevent them curdling or scrambling you would add a little of the hot mix to the eggs and incorporate before adding the eggs into the heated mixture. Another example would be adding a cornflour slurry to a hot mixture; a little of the hot mixture is added to the slurry to temper the temperature before adding the mix back to the main mixture.
- Tourner – To cut and peel ingredients such as parsnips or potatoes into a barrel-like shape. For aesthetic purposes but also to ensure that they cook properly.
- Truss – To bind the legs and wings of a bird to its body, ensuring it maintains an even shape so that none of the extremities dry out.
- Ultra-pasteurization – The process of heating up milk products to 137 degrees celsius for a few seconds and chilling it down rapidly, resulting in milk that’s 99.9% free from bacteria and extending its shelf-life.
- Vandyke – To cut a zig-zag or decorative pattern around fruit or vegetables to create decorative garnishes for food presentation.
- Velouté – A type of savoury sauce in which a light stock, such as chicken or fish, is thickened with a flour that is cooked and then allowed to turn light brown, thickened with a blond roux.
- Whip – The process of beating food with a whisk to incorporate air and to increase volume.
- Whisk – The process of using a whisk to incorporate air into food or to blend ingredients together smoothly.
- Zest – The outer peel of citrus fruit used to add flavor.