Healthy Cooking Techniques

Introduction
Healthy cooking doesn't mean that you have to become a gourmet chef or invest in expensive cookware. You can use basic cooking techniques to prepare food in healthy ways.
The methods described here best capture the flavor and retain the nutrients in your food without adding excessive amounts of fat or salt. Once you've mastered these techniques, use them often to prepare your favorite dishes. Click on the tabs to the left for a description of these cooking methods.

Baking
Besides breads and desserts, you can bake seafood, poultry, lean meat, and vegetable and fruit pieces of the same size. Place food in a pan or dish surrounded by the hot, dry air of your oven. You may cook the food covered or uncovered. Baking generally doesn't require that you add fat to the food. In some cases, you may need to baste the food to keep it from drying out.

Braising
Braising involves browning the ingredient first in a pan on top of the stove, and then slowly cooking it covered with a small quantity of liquid, such as water or broth. In some recipes, the cooking liquid is used afterward to form a flavorful, nutrient-rich sauce.

Grilling and broiling
Both grilling and broiling expose fairly thin pieces of food to direct heat. To grill outdoors, place the food on a grill rack above a bed of charcoal embers or gas-heated rocks. For smaller items such as chopped vegetables, use a long-handled grill basket, which prevents pieces from slipping through the rack. To broil indoors, place food on a broiler rack below a heat element. Both methods allow fat to drip away from the food.

Poaching
To poach foods, gently simmer ingredients in water or a flavorful liquid such as broth, vinegar or juice until they're cooked through and tender. The food retains its shape during cooking. For stove-top poaching, choose a covered pan that best fits the size and shape of the food so that you use a minimum amount of liquid.

Roasting
Like baking, but typically at higher temperatures, roasting uses an oven's dry heat to cook the food. You can roast foods on a baking sheet or in a roasting pan. For poultry, seafood and meat, place a rack inside the roasting pan so that the fat in the food can drip away during cooking.

Sauteing
Sauteing quickly cooks relatively small or thin pieces of food. If you choose a good-quality nonstick pan, you can cook food without using fat. Depending on the recipe, use low-sodium broth, nonstick cooking spray or water in place of oil.

Steaming
One of the simplest cooking techniques to master is steaming food in a perforated basket suspended above simmering liquid. If you use a flavorful liquid or add seasonings to the water, you'll flavor the food as it cooks.

Stir-frying
A traditional Asian method, stir-frying quickly cooks small, uniform-sized pieces of food while they're rapidly stirred in a wok or large nonstick frying pan. You need only a small amount of oil or nonstick cooking spray for this cooking method.

Using herbs and spices
Creating meals using spices and herbs is one of the best ways to add color, taste and aroma to foods. Choose fresh herbs that look bright and aren't wilted, and add them toward the end of cooking. Add dried herbs in the earlier stages of cooking. When substituting dried for fresh, use about one-third the amount.

Cooking Technique for Beginners!

"It's my belief that the best way to become a good cook is to learn these basic cooking techniques."

Once you learn how to handle these fundamental techniques, you will be able to handle most recipes. Cooking is not just about recipes....it is about how to take ingredients and make them taste as good as possible.

Recipes are great road maps to show us how someone else got there, but one of the joys of cooking is to find your own paths. Knowing these techniques is like taking the car out for a spin in a new location. You're not sure where you are going to end up, but getting there will be fun.

	Saute learn to sauté properly and you will be able to create hundreds of dishes without a recipe.
	Cooking Pasta quick tips on cooking your favorite pastas
	Roasting who doesn't love a roasted chicken or Sunday roast beef.
	Braising may be my favorite way of cooking.
	Grilling it's what us guys do best....at least that's what we think
	Brining It's what we should be doing before grilling but don't
	Mise en Place in my opinion, one of the most important steps in cooking and one most often not done.
	Sauces How to Make Incredible Sauces at Home?
	Pan Roasting How professional cooks do it. A little pan searing. A little oven roasting.
	Stir Fry quick, easy, nutritious, and a lot of fun
	Deglazing an essential part of learning how to sauté.
	How to Cut an Onion Learn this simple but effective method for cutting an onion that I learned from a professional chef.

Creat Magic In Your Kitchen by Nestle

How do chefts make cooking look so easy, almost like magic, with perfect- looking recipes, unsoiled kitchen counters, and no burnt dishes? For homemakers, cooking like a pro has become an aspiration, even a dream. But without attending cooking school, and with no modern gadgets, no powerful stove, and no exotic spices to whip up magical recipes, homemakers perennially ask two questions: How do I turn simple, ordinary things into great tasting food? And, how do I prepare difficult recipes without having to use exotic ingredients, go through tenious preparation procedures, and upset the household budget?

The magic, of course, is not in the modern gadgets and exotic ingredients but in the hands of a clever homemaker who wants to simplify her cooking without necessarily simplifying her menu. The simple pleasures of the kitchen are an important part of our lives, and good food certainly creates the magic that never fails to bring us smile to family and friends.

Good Way to Cook Meat

Cooking meat too long and too hot increases stomach cancer risk.
A team of researchers has recently discovered that people who prefer meat medium, medium well-done, or well-done are about three times as likely to get stomach cancer as those who eat their beef rare or medium rare. So, to avoid E. coli infection it has been recommended that all meat should be cooked thoroughly.

Unique Cooking Techniques

Ever ask yourself this questions:

How do different cultures and traditions affect the way we cook our food?

Cultures and traditions tend to affect the way we cook our food. For example, the Filipino like their food to taste more sweet or salty whereas for the Chinese, they prefer their food to be sweeter and lighter in taste. Indonesians wants their food more spicy while some cultures are not.
When we get into new cultures we do hard time adopting to their way of preparing food and taste. Taste matters above all. Let us discover the uniqueness and passion of cooking food...