Why couldn’t something that says “Cook at 400 degrees for 15 minutes” theoretically be cooked at 6000 degrees for 1 minute?
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Why can I survive 100 tiny pin pricks, but not survive a 10 inch knife to the chest?
Let me ask you this:
Is putting your hand in 25°C water for 25 seconds the same as putting your hand in 125°C steam for 5 seconds?
Both are not the same.
Cooking hard vegetables or meat will make the food soft and easy to eat.
Raising the temperature very high will burn the food.
No, because heat doesn’t absorb/spread instantly through food, through material. If you cook it twice as fast for half as long, you’ll get a too-hot outside and a too-cold inside.
Now… at 6,000 degrees, you’re past the auto ignition temperature of the food and parts of the oven itself. It’s going to burst into flames any moment now… I’m surprised it’s still a solid object. You don’t wanna make it that hot 🙂
The purpose of the time and temperature is to cook both the inside and the outside to the desired degree. So a low temp long time gives you an even cook throughout, higher temp shorter time cooks the outside more and the inside.
Remember that absolute temperature is in Kelvin, not Fahrenheit or Celsius. So doubling the temperature in Fahrenheit is not the same as doubling the absolute temperature.
I barely remember my basic physics but tldr look up thermal conductivity/transfer as every type of material has their own specifics of how well/rate they conduct the heat to the next object ie. deeper into the food.
Your math is wonky especially using a Fahrenheit scale, but let’s assume that overall heat remains the same but over a different amount of time.
Cooking generally requires that you cook the food all the way through, and the heat takes time to get from the outside of the food to the inside. So if you cook too fast the heat will cook the outside, but never have time to cook the inside before that outside gets over-cooked and burns.
That’s how Lisa Simpson made the fries that were burnt on the outside but still frozen on the inside.
So you’ve already had some food for thought about why you can’t just turn an oven higher, like burning the outside of the food, and melting the oven.
There’s a cooking aspect too. Not all food is just instantly cooked to what we want when it reaches a specific temperature.
An example would be like beef stew, or pulled pork. It is *technically* edible very early on in the process, but the breakdown of muscle fibers, fats, collagens etc takes time to get to the soft falling apart phase appropriate for the dish.
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