Why can’t you cook your food at 5000degrees for 1 minute instead of 50degrees for 100 minutes?

Question

Why can’t you cook your food at 5000degrees for 1 minute instead of 50degrees for 100 minutes?

In: Other

Answer 1

Cooking is a chemical process, and the chemical reactions have a set temperature at which they start to occur. For example, you need to heat your meat enough to brown it (the Maillard reaction, 140-165°C) without charring it (300+°C). Alternatively, you may want to spend a long time rendering the meat (95°C) without browning it all, e.g. for slow cooking. For a large joint it takes significant time for the heat to permeate to the centre, and you need to make sure the outside doesn’t dry out or burn in that time.

This applies to all food: the name of the game is to control the temperature and duration of the cooking, to allow the desired chemical reactions to occur in the full depth of the food without allowing undesired ones.

Cooking something at 5000° for 1 minute will result in an atomised outside, spectacularly burned middle layer, a cold, uncooked centre, and a 1-star review on TripAdvisor.