The cooking is a very important transformation process for the food, that changes both the sensorial and the nutritional qualities.

The most important reasons to cook the food are:

- To give to your dish more attractive aspect and color;
- To make the food more desirable;
- To make soft the consistency in order to have a more chewable and digestible food
- To destroy the bacteria
- To favor the preservation of the food

All this is possible only if you choose the correct technique of cooking for each food. In different way, the cooking can have negative effects as the formation of noxious, the dispersion of some thermolabile vitamins that are sensitive to the heat (in particular the vitamins C and B), the destruction of some essential amino acids during the long cooking, the dispersion of some vitamins and mineral salts in the cooking water.

There are different kinds of cooking:
- “the soft cooking” that are practiced with a not high heat and allow to keep the natural taste of food. The stew and the steamer are two kinds of “soft cooking”.
- “the long cooking” where the food is cooked with a long warming
- “the cooking in oven”: the dishes are cooked by the warm air that circulars around the food; this system has particular advantages: for example for the vegetable there isn’t the dispersion of the mineral salts.
- “the cooking with coverage” that is practiced with the application of a particular cover, like the crust of salt, the tinfoil wrapping and the cooking with the clay. These techniques allow to reduce the fat of the condiments and to keep low the calorific value of every dish.
- “the cooking with the microwave”: thanks to this system the nourishing principles keep unchanged, because the temperature of the food increases very fast from inside to outside thanks to the electromagnetic waves that produce a very fast vibrations of the water particles.

Published 28 December 2016