Which cooking method should I use for what I am cooking?

Recipes name a method and readers follow it, which works until you have an ingredient and no recipe, or a recipe that does not suit the cut you actually bought. Underneath the list of method names there are only two families, and knowing which family you are in tells you almost everything about what will happen.

Step by step

1. Learn the ceiling that splits the two families.Water boils at 100°C and cannot get hotter — put more heat in and it leaves as steam, taking the energy with it. So anything cooking in liquid, or in steam, is stuck at or below 100°C no matter how high you turn the hob. Dry heat has no such limit: an oven runs to 240°C, a pan surface to 220°C, a grill or barbecue far higher.
2. Understand what that ceiling costs you and what it buys you.Browning reactions only run at a useful speed above roughly 140°C, so moist heat can never brown — boiled beef is grey, roast beef is not. What moist heat buys is time at a gentle temperature, which is exactly what dissolves collagen in tough cuts into gelatine without squeezing the muscle fibres dry.
3. Match the method to the piece, not to the recipe title.Tough, worked, cheap cuts — shin, brisket, shoulder, oxtail, cheeks, dried beans, older root vegetables — want moist heat and hours. Tender, quick pieces — steak, chicken breast, fish fillets, thin vegetables — want dry heat and minutes. Applying the wrong family is why a slow-cooked chicken breast is stringy and a barbecued brisket is leather.
4. Pick the dry-heat method by surface area and thickness.Thin and small: frying or stir-frying, where nearly all the surface is against hot metal. Thick and even: roasting, where hot air reaches all round it. Flat and needing colour on one face only: grilling under the oven grill or over coals. Anything you want a crust on all sides of, with no turning: deep frying.
5. Pick the moist-heat method by how much liquid you want left.Poaching at 70–80°C for delicate things you do not want to agitate — fish, eggs, fruit. Simmering at 85–95°C for stocks and pulses. Boiling at 100°C only where the movement helps, as with pasta and green vegetables. Braising for a piece part-submerged in liquid that becomes the sauce. Steaming where you want nothing leached out into water at all.
6. Use both, in order, when you want both results.Most good stews and casseroles are dry heat first for colour and flavour, then moist heat for tenderness. Most good sous vide and slow roasts are moist or gentle heat first for evenness, then a fast dry sear at the end for crust. The order matters: you cannot brown a wet surface, so the searing has to happen either before the liquid goes in or after the food comes out and is dried.

Tips

• If a recipe tells you to brown meat and you skip it to save time, the dish will taste noticeably flatter and no amount of later simmering recovers it. That step is not browning for colour, it is building the flavour compounds the sauce is made of.
• A rolling boil is not a stronger simmer, it is the same temperature with more violence. For anything that can break up or go cloudy, the extra agitation is pure downside.
• Steaming and boiling are both 100°C, but steaming does not dissolve anything out of the food into water you then throw away, which is why steamed vegetables usually taste more of themselves.

Common mistakes

• Turning the hob higher to speed up something simmering in liquid — The liquid cannot get hotter than 100°C. All you gain is faster evaporation, more mess and a greater chance of catching on the base.
• Choosing the method by how long you have rather than what the cut needs — A tough cut cooked fast is tough, and a tender cut cooked slow is dry and stringy. If time is short, change the cut, not the clock.

Questions people ask