Types of Food and Seven Methods of Cooking

Do you realize that your daily intake of food comprises of four unique types or categories of food items? You will be surprised to notice that your food consists of a portion of raw food, a portion of cooked food, and other smaller portions of fast food and junk foods.

The daily intake in a period of 24 hours generally comprises a small portion of raw food like salads, fruits, soaked or dry nuts, etc. It further includes a major portion of cooked food like rice or other grains, cereals, and the various cooked recipes. A small portion of the food also consists of fast food like ready-made recipes sold in the restaurants or retail shops in packages. And a bit of junk food also gets consumed in our lives like the salted snacks, fried chips.candies, and even the desserts that are harmful to our body. So all these four components constitute the daily consumption of our food.

1) Raw Food

Coming to raw food intake, it is the practice of consuming uncooked or unprocessed food. In this category, we can include all the fruits, some types of vegetables, roots, leaves, nuts, milk, water, and even some fish, etc. that are eaten raw.

• Fruits are consumed as it is in the whole form, or by removing the skin and outer layers. You eat them by cutting into pieces or without cutting depending upon the fruit size and texture of the outer layers.
• Vegetables consumed raw include tomatoes, various types of cucumber, etc. Some people may consume other vegetables also in raw form. Mostly these are consumed by cutting into pieces and preparing a salad.
• Roots eaten raw may include radish, sweet potato, beetroot, carrot, etc.
• Leaves consumed raw are coriander, spinach, celery which are used in salad.

2) Cooked Food

This is the normal major food that we consume daily. It includes all cooked food that we prepare daily at our homes or which is available at food courts and restaurants in the shape of main food and those recipes or side dishes that are consumed either as breakfast or regular meals in our day-to-day life.

Now, this cooked food is prepared using different methods of cooking techniques which will be discussed below.

3) Fast Food

Fast food contains all industrially processed food items involving a large scale of processing and production at a centralized point and then supplied to retail outlets for sale to customers. The retail outlets again heat the food and process it adding some more ingredients and flavors according to customers' tastes and choices. Burgers, pizza, kebab, french fries, etc. are some of these fast food items widely consumed by people.

4) Junk Food

Junk food generally refers to such food items that are highly rich in fat and sugar content and are not good for health at all. Junk food can also be treated as a kind of fast food since these junk foodstuffs also are processed in large scales at food processing centers and supplied to customers through retail outlets. Ice cream, candy, cake, hamburger, chocolate, etc. all these are examples of junk food which are highly rich in calories with abnormal levels of fat and sugar. These can be very harmful to health.

Seven Popular Ways of Cooking Food

Normal Cooking
Normal cooking is the conventional orthodox way of cooking food in utensils directly. This is a very time-consuming job and you always need to be present in the kitchen to see that it does not spill out or burn. Rice and pulses (also known as lentils) always form a lot of foam layers while cooking and often spill out, causing the extinction of the flame and spoiling of the whole workplace.

Pressure Cooking
Pressure cooking is the process of cooking food in pressure cookers, by putting the ingredients in the cooking vessel and adding the requisite water and salt, etc. to it before closing the lid and putting the cooker on a flame. In this process of cooking, the steam generated by the heated water in the vessel cooks the food. The cooker emits whistles while doing so to let you know that the food is cooked.

The frequency of whistles and the number of whistles depend upon the water level in the container, the heated volume, and the cooking time required for the food to cook. For example, if you are cooking rice, it will take 10 minutes to cook fully and the whistles may start coming from 8 minutes or so so that if you like eating semi-cooked food, you can turn off the flame. Or if you like more soft cooked food, then you will wait for 3 whistles and then turn off the flame. If you are cooking vegetables, say beans, broccoli or potatoes, then you need to add only a small quantity of water for generating pressure and you can turn off the flame after one whistle only or at the most 2 quick whistles.

This is how pressure cooking is done and you can obtain all guidelines about pressure cooking whenever you buy a cooker from popular brands through their pamphlets served to you along with those purchases.

Oven Cooking
Nowadays, a majority of people are shifting to oven cooking, if already not using it. This facilitates cooking multiple dishes at the same time, as you can place the food containers in each rack of the oven and cook simultaneously. Your time and fuel get saved in this process.

• Ovens are operated either with gas or electric power for cooking the food. It depends upon the models you purchase. 
• And, there are conventional ovens and convection ovens. Both operate with gas or electricity. But some differences are there which affect cooking styles.
• The conventional oven gets its heat straight from the bottom like gas stoves or heating plates. So cooking cannot be done perfectly since the heat does not reach evenly all through the oven.
• Convection ovens have inbuilt fans that spread the heat evenly all around the oven. So, the food gets cooked perfectly and some time also gets saved in this process.
• Ovens have three layers of cooking grills generally. The top layer is for high heat and quick cooking. The middle layer is for normal, medium cooking foodstuff. The bottom layer is for slow cooking which needs low heat also.

This is all about oven cooking. For full details of cooking in an oven, you can get the full guidelines through the pamphlet that is provided to you while making the purchase or you can obtain necessary help from the online websites of the sellers of these products.

Steam Cooking
Steam cooking is another way of cooking food. In this method, a big container with an elevated stand in it for placing some small containers or plates is used. The big container is filled with some water up to a marked limit and then only heated. The small container or the plate is filled with the ingredient to be cooked and placed on the elevated position so that it is much above the water level. The lid is closed on the big container. Now the food in the small containers or plates cooks with the steam generated out of that water. As the steam is held inside the container due to the lid on it, the heat produced so is very high enough to cook the ingredients perfectly. This system of steam cooking is very good for health as all the original nutrients and elements of the food are retained by the food so cooked.

Baking
Baking is the method of cooking food through dry heating. Food is either placed on a heated sheet or in between the heated sheets. If it is in between the sheets or layers of it it gets cooked both sides simultaneously. If it is on a heated sheet, then you need to turn it often to bake both sides. Mostly bread and loaves are prepared in this manner.

Roasting
Roasting is also a dry cooking method where you burn the food directly on flames of charcoal, wood, or gas. You may place it on the burning charcoal or wood and turn it often to cook it evenly on all sides. In the case of gas, you need to hold the food with a spanner or any holding tool and turn it all around over the flames until it gets cooked.

Frying
Food is cooked using different frying techniques also. Frying is the process of cooking food using oil. The oil acts as the heating element here. The heat and steam generated from the oil along with the moisture of the food ingredients being cooked help in cooking the food perfectly.

• Shallow frying is the method of cooking food using very much little oil. Generally, one or two spoons oil is used for frying the vegetables or cooked rice and meat, fish, etc.
• Deep frying is the technique of frying ingredients deeply immersed in oil. This method is mostly used for frying doughnuts, snacks and for preparing some types of other vegetable or meat items. But this process is not all good for health.
• Sauteing is another type of frying where you fry some food very quickly using much lesser oil as in shallow frying. But this involves cutting the ingredients into very small pieces so that they could be cooked too quickly.

There can be many more techniques for cooking the food but all of them use basically the above mentioned major elements of cooking techniques.