2d ago

Pre made ingredients still cooking?

Not a snob on cooking and food wise, I found this to be a good question when debating my friend over beans on toast (UK here).

He says it doesn't really count as cooking cos you're just buying already produced ingredients to whack in a microwave or pot and that proper cooking is done from scratch.

I argue this is bullshit as you're still USING common cooking equipment to make as something as simple as beans on toast because you still have to watch it not burn or dry out.

What are your thoughts on what counts as proper cooking? Would you say canned soup counts? Or frozen pizza since you're still needing to use an oven and watch the food accordingly?

27 comments

Almost every single 4 star restaurant is using premade stuff to cook faster. Why laminate dough yourself if the bakery down the road makes it better than ypu at a cheaper price

You're not really making your own bread unless you grow and harvest the ingredients yourself. What do you mean you don't mill your own grains? Refine your own sugar?Can't really even call yourself a baker unless you build your own oven. /s
Cooking and baking are basically ALL prep work and cleanup. The actual cooking and baking is overall a pretty small fraction of the overall effort that goes into making dinner or a loaf of bread. Go ahead and feel proud of yourself if you take on more of those preparatory tasks, IF it makes for a better end result. But that doesn't mean you get to act superior to somebody else on a different path of their own personal cooking journey. Drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying "this is cooking, but that is not" is kind of like drawing a line between blue and indigo on a rainbow. It's arbitrary and adds little to good the discussion.
Go ahead and cheat on those components where it works. Not everybody has the time, space, energy, or skill to make every bread, sauce, or spice blend from scratch. If you can make something better by getting back to the basics and fundamental ingredients, go for it! But let's be honest when it's more about pride than the final product, enjoyment of the meal.
Personally, the biggest reason I prefer to avoid pre-prepared foods that only require heating is so that I can avoid certain common ingredients that are often pumped into those things in insane proportions, particularly salt and sugar. It's not so that I can feel proud of an arbitrary label.

I'd say it's proper cooking if you're making decisions about what goes into it. Heating up beans and bread? Not cooking. Heating up beans and bread, adding some thyme and black pepper to the beans in the process? Cooking. Very simple cooking, but cooking all the same.

Beans on toast is like crackers with soup.
Not cooking.
- Im making soup from scratch this weekend. I have no clue why you would say that isn't cooking.
  
  Making soup from scratch is not what I'm referring to. Heating up a can of soup is the same as heating up a can of beans. You can make either from scratch, and that's actual cooking though.
  So good on you, I hope your soup rocks. I have a friend that loves experimenting on me with soups and I love most of them. So good.

For me, I've always gone by the typical english definition of "combining and heating" ingredients.
If you've combined more than one item together and applied heat somehow, that counts as cooking, otherwise you're doing something else. Like, if I made myself a cold sandwich, I wouldn't say I 'cooked' a sandwich and the same for if I threw a burrito in the microwave.
So, from that, as long as you either warmed up the beans or threw the bread in the toaster and those items weren't pre-combined somehow, I'd personally say you cooked it.

Just reheating precooked food is just that, reheating.

I think the confusion is that in English we don't really have separate words for cooking-as-chore and cooking-as-art.
Lazy beans on toast or heating a frozen pizza is the first kind but not the second. There's no creative input, no method. You're just trying not to ruin your ingredients and end up with something edible. You're cooking but you're not cooking.
- I think the confusion is that in English we don’t really have separate words for cooking-as-chore and cooking-as-art.
  Heating pre-made food?
  Just like opening a tub of ice cream isn't cooking just because you went through with the effort of sticking a spoon in it.
- Theres a difference between those concepts?
  To me cooking equals to make something unpleasent/inedible edible and tasty.
  Doesnt matter if restaurant or home.
  At least restaurant food looks more pretty :)
  
  The French language, for example, differentiates cooking (you put uncooked food in the oven or on the stove and it comes out cooked) and cooking (preparing a meal.) They use "cuire" for the former, and "cuisiner" for the latter.
  You don't cook sushi (with a few exceptions), but preparing sushi is cooking.
- That's a very cool perspective, thank you for sharing it

Food Network, Tick Tock, and Youtube have turned everyone into gatekeeping snobs. Tell your friend that Carl Sagan said that it doesn't count as "made from scratch" unless the first step in the recipe is "create the universe".

it's all cooking

If I have to break out anything more than a plate/bowl and utensils then it's cooking.

Reheating is cooking. Not all cooking is reheating.

America's Test Kitchen said it was OK to use garlic powder or granulated garlic and people's heads exploded.

Cooking is just the act of preparing food, especially by heating. Anything else is just people being snobs. Just go prepare your food and stop caring about peoples opinions on it.

If all you have to do is heat something up, you are not cooking.
It counts as cooking when you start needing to prepare and combine ingredients.
Canned soup is not cooking.
Making a grilled cheese sandwich to go along with your canned soup would be cooking though, because it requires preparing bread, cheese, and butter (usually) and then combining then cooking the ingredients in a particular way.
- Is sous vide cooking?
  
  Yes because you're applying enough heat to change the chemical composition of the food.
  Reheating, nah.

Unless they're fermenting their own soy sauce out back, or making their own jello/ gelatine (look it up) if say it's fair to call it cooking.
However, cooking, made from scratch and farm to table are all different.

I think everyone has to start somewhere and if that is heating up beans then that is where their cooking journey starts. Soon there will be cheese on toast, maybe a fried egg or mashed potatoes. Baby steps, everything counts if it ends with a plate of food.

Ask him to define cooking any way he likes => point out preparing toast falls into that definition => beans on toast is cooking QED

Combine at least two things I guess? I mean like a can of soup and some grated cheese, tada! But also doing something to a single ingredient also counts (heating something, etc) so the can would count under that.
In short, I think whatever makes the person doing the cooking happy.

I cook mostly from scratch, ingredients like flour, vegetables, meats. Grow veg in the yard, and make sourdough.
I like beans from dry but you can pull the canned beans from my cold dead hands, they have been a staple of our diet forever, those and tomatoes are the only things I buy canned regularly. And yes I call it cooking, if you make a meal with them. Heating and seasoning is cooking.

27 comments