Why cook food at 300° for 60min while you could just put the temperature higher so it cooks faster?
In: Chemistry
I don’t mean to be rude but if this is a shitpost… good job. You got me to respond.
Higher temperature never means quicker cooking times. Think about this. You have 7 layers to an onion (all of this is an example and not 100% accurate). You could cook it at 350 for 1hr. The outside would be crisp and the inner most core would be nice and tender.
Now imagine you cook it at 600 for 30 minutes. The outer 3 layers would be absolutely charred and the inner most core would be crisp.
There is a limit of how much heat the outer portions of a food can take before it begins to char.
Low and slow is the tempo. You want the inside to be warm and the juices to remain and not be cooked off.
The problem with doing that is that food doesn’t heat up evenly. Instead, the outside gets hot first, and the heat slowly works its way in. If you cook at a lower temperature, there is more time for the instead to cook before the outside gets overdone.
The heat only travels through the food at a specific rate. If you were eating metal, with higher heat conductivity, this would work as you propose.
The low heat conductivity of food comes from the water present. Significant energy is required to convert liquid water to a gas. Once the water has been vaporized, the material heats more quickly. Applying a higher heat simply burns the outer surface, leaving the inside raw.
The opposite effect, putting food in a high heat capacity liquid, like water, heated to the target temperature, a process called sous vide, takes longer but produces food with no loss of moisture or charring of the outer surface
Basically, there’s a limit to how much heat can transfer into an object at a time, so extremely higher temperatures often result in the outside burning, and the inside being raw, as there wasn’t enough time for the heat to actually make its way to the inside of the food to cook it.
It takes time for the heat to transfer from the outside of something to the inside, and increasing the temperature doesn’t increase that rate of transfer nearly as much as it affects the outside of the thing you’re cooking. If you were to cook something at 600º for 30 minutes the outsides would be burned to a crisp and the inside would still be raw.
Same reason you dont put food directly into fire. It will just burn the surface and not cook the insides.
You need more time at a high average temperature, instead of a vary hot but short burst of heat, for the heat to transfer from the surface to the inside of the food.
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