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?
Just reheating precooked food is just that, reheating.
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.
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.
America’s Test Kitchen said it was OK to use garlic powder or granulated garlic and people’s heads exploded.
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”.
Ask him to define cooking any way he likes => point out preparing toast falls into that definition => beans on toast is cooking QED
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.
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
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 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.
it’s all cooking
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.
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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.
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