Blanch, Poach, and Scald: Cooking Methods

Its origin is uncertain, but baste is an essential word in the kitchen. By brushing food — usually a hunk of meat or a whole bird — with fat and flavorful liquid while it cooks, the resulting dish tastes better and often has a browner, crispier exterior.

Blanc or blanche means "white" in French, and if you take raw almonds and plunge them briefly into boiling water, their brown skins slip right off, revealing their pale insides. So this technique of quickly boiling food — usually vegetables — became known as blanching. If someone becomes pale, as if they're about to faint, that's also called blanching.

Broil may have come from the French brûler, to burn, but it's not clear. Whatever its origins, broiling normally involves putting food under a heat source, usually a gas or electric burner located on the ceiling of your oven. It's the best technique for getting a bubbly brown top on your mac and cheese, lasagna, or enchiladas.

There's something that happens to food when it's exposed to extreme heat, but before it burns. It's called the maillard reaction, and it means that the sugars in the food — meat and vegetables have sugars, too! — begin to turn brown and become more complex and savory. This is exactly what happens to sugar when you heat it in a pan to make caramel, so this phenomenon is known as caramelizing.

Idro- is the Greek root meaning "water." So dehydrate means "to remove water," or "to dry out."

In French, pocher means "to cook an egg — out of its shell — in water" and by an amazing coincidence that's also what it means in English. You can also poach vegetables or a piece of fish by cooking them gently in broth.

Render means "to give back." When you put raw animal fat in a pan and cook it gently, it liquefies, leaving solids behind to get brown and crispy. That's called rendering the fat.

Cream rises to the top of milk, so skim milk has the cream scooped off. When you simmer meat and vegetables together in water to make stock, it's a good idea to regularly skim the fat, foam, and other solids that float to the top using a spoon. That's how you get a beautiful, clear stock.

Steep in this sense probably comes from Old English, and refers to soaking something to soften it or extract its essence. When you drop a tea bag into boiling hot water, you're steeping it to release its flavors into the water.

Scalding refers specifically to a quick, intense, and damaging heat delivered by water or steam. A lot of recipes will call for scalded milk, where it's brought quickly up just to a boil and then allowed to cool a bit.