What is the point in the order you put ingredients in for cooking, or why use other clean measuring cups if they all go to the same thing?

Question

i dont even know

In: 2

Answer 1

Which type of cooking are you doing?

Doing something like a stir fry, the order matters mainly because different things take different lengths of time to cook properly – launch everything into the pan at the same time and half of the components burnt, while the other half were raw. So you add them in at appropriate intervals to ensure they are all cooked through at about the same time.

There can also be some consideration to things like which elements impart flavour to each other, so you can purposely combine certain items and keep others separate to flavour as you wish.

With baking the order is often influenced by how ingredients react to each other and to being handled, and this affects the order you will want to make something. For example if you make something utilising whipped, mixing that will cause the whipped cream to deflate again – so you will mix the other elements together first, and then add the delicate cream right at the end to minimise how much you have to mix it. You will also see similar effects with things like a bread rising, and kneading a dough causing it to deflate.

With a lot of recipes it also won’t matter which order things go in, so you are free to do it however you wish – the art is learning where you can take shortcuts and where you need to be careful.

With regards to measuring cups, it depends on what you are measuring and how you are doing it. The main issue will be ensuring you are not contaminating one ingredient with another one, and that everything is able to be measured correctly.
So if you use your measuring cup as a scoop, you will want it clean so you are not adding flour into your bag of sugar, or traces of a wet ingredient into your flour.

Again, a lot of the time it won’t necessarily matter – if you are pouring ingredients into the cup rather than scooping them with it for example, then you won’t be contaminating anything and there is no problem. So when you want to add a cup of milk to the flour you just put into a bowl, there isn’t much point in washing the measuring cup inbetween.