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When is the best time for cooking?
The variety and flavor of Chinese dishes are not only due to the rich cooking materials, numerous seasonings, diverse cooking techniques, changeable cooking time, flexible and wonderful seasoning and many other factors, but also due to the application of different thickening pastes to different dishes, which is called "thickening" in the industry.

thickening is the process of pouring the mixed starch juice on the dish or the soup to make the soup thick and adhere or partially adhere to the dish when the dish is close to maturity. Yuan Mei said in "Notes on the Use of Fiber in Suiyuan Food List": "The common name of bean flour is fiber, that is, pulling marine fiber. As the name implies. Because the meat healer wants to make a group but can't get together, he wants to make a soup but can't get tired, so he pulls it together with powder. When frying, worry about sticking the meat to the pot, it will be burnt, so use powder to hold it. This fiber is also meaningful. " It is called "thicken" because it comes from fiber-to-sound.

thickening is one of the basic cooking techniques. It is widely used in Chinese cooking, and many dishes have to be thickened in the cooking process. The sauce is also one of the important criteria for evaluating the quality of dishes.

Due to the different flavor requirements of dishes, thickening has the following functions:

1. Increase the viscosity of soup. During the heating process of dishes, the juice in the raw materials will flow out and merge with the added soup and liquid seasoning to form the marinade. Generally, the marinade in cooking is thin, which is not easy to adhere to the surface of raw materials, and it will have a "tasteless" feeling after cooking. After thickening, the gelatinization of the thicken juice increases the viscosity of the marinade, so that the marinade can attach more to the dishes and improve people's feelings about the taste of the dishes.

2. When the sauce is hooked into the dish, it will tightly wrap the raw materials, thus preventing the water inside the raw materials from overflowing, which not only keeps the flavor characteristics of the dish fresh, fragrant and tender, but also makes the dish full and not easy to break.

3. After thickening, due to the gelatinization of starch, it has a transparent colloidal luster, which can reflect the color of dishes and seasoning more vividly and make the color of dishes brighter and more beautiful.

4. After the dishes are thickened, the soup can be thickened, which can slow down the heat dissipation inside the raw materials, make the dishes have thermal insulation, prolong the cooling time of the dishes, and facilitate diners to eat hot dishes.

to thicken dishes, we must first prepare the sauce or the juice. Thickened juice is the juice made by mixing dry starch used for thickening with clear water, which is often called "wet starch" or "water starch"; Juice-nourishing is to add other seasonings to the juice used for thickening, which has the dual functions of thickening and seasoning.

We should pay attention to the following technical keys when preparing the sauce:

1. When preparing the sauce, we should master the consistency of the sauce according to the amount of raw materials and the water content of raw materials. Generally speaking, 5 grams of dry starch and 6 grams of water can be used to make 11 grams of water starch; When preparing juice, the water content of liquid condiment should also be considered, and the amount of water used for preparation should be reduced appropriately. In a word, the ratio of dry soybean powder to liquid is 1∶1, whether it is water starch or juice. 2~1? 5 is appropriate. Of course, the difference between the water content of raw materials and the quality requirements of vegetables, as well as the concentration and gelatinization degree of the juice reflected by the solubility of different starches, determines that the ratio of the two is not static, and the specific ratio remains to be grasped by the chef himself in actual operation.

2. The thickening degree of the sauce should also be adjusted according to the needs of the dishes. Different kinds of dishes must be prepared with different sauce:

① The semi-fluid sauce of the second-rate sauce is mostly used for cooking, stewing and soup, such as Mapo tofu, bean fish and home-made tendon. Second-rate jelly requires that the juice and the main ingredients blend together and be in a fluid state, so as to achieve what is commonly called bright juice and bright oil. If it is used for soup, it should be like a thin paste.

② Rice soup is also called "clear second-rate soup", and the juice of cooked vegetables is like rice soup, which is mostly used for stewed and white-roasted dishes, such as golden hook stick vegetables, golden hook vegetable heads, scallops and sunflower vegetables. Rice soup is the thinnest sauce in the sauce, and its function is to make the dishes with more soup slightly thicker, so that the main ingredients can float and the raw materials can taste.

③ The glass sauce refers to the crystal clear and fluid slurry sauce. Glass drizzle is bright and clean on dishes, which is suitable for some dishes with beautiful appearance and rich colors, such as yipin vegetarian stew, sanyuan white chicken and so on.

3. The demand for watercress powder or nourishing juice in dishes. Generally speaking, it takes about 1 grams of gravy to fry 5 grams of shredded pork or sliced meat. Of course, it depends on the quality requirements of specific dishes, or it can be mastered flexibly according to the degree of heat. Our predecessors' chefs have long had an experience about this: the vegetables are dried and the juice is dried. Too much or too little juice will affect the quality of dishes.

4. After the juice is matched, it needs to be put into the heated dish to make it gelatinized into the sauce. There are two methods of thickening for different dishes: cooking and pouring.

① The cooking method quickly pours the good nourishing juice into the pot, and quickly mixes the dishes, so that the dishes are covered with thickening juice. This method has the characteristics of wide coverage, rapid ripening of the juice and uniform wrapping.

② drenching method: slowly drench the nourishing juice into the pot, while pushing the dishes, drench the nourishing juice, so as to make it slowly gelatinize into the thick juice. This method has the characteristics of uniform gelatinization, stability and slowness. The drenching method is generally used to thicken dishes cooked with a certain amount of marinade, especially some fragile or bulky raw materials. If the cooking method is used to thicken, it is difficult to achieve uniform gelatinization.

5. Because of the diversity and complexity of cooking methods and dishes, it is very important to grasp the opportunity of cooking. The best time for cooking is when the dish is out of the pot. Too early, it will be easy to coke because of too much water evaporation. Too late, it will damage the concentration of the sauce and even prolong the heating time for the gelatinization of the sauce, which will lead to the old and tough texture of the raw materials of the dish.

6. Under normal circumstances, it is only after the taste and color of the dish are adjusted that the sauce is used to thicken. It is not easy to taste if seasoning is added after it is soaked. It is not appropriate to change the color of dishes after cooking.

7. In addition, we need to pay attention to a small detail when thickening. When preparing powder juice or mixing juice, we must first disperse the dried bean powder with water, so as not to be mixed with powder bumps, so as not to affect the quality of thickening and the flavor of dishes.

Although thickening is an important means to optimize the quality of dishes, it is by no means necessary to thicken all dishes. If you thicken dishes that are not suitable for thickening, the effect will be counterproductive, such as steamed dishes that are not suitable for thickening; Stir-fried crisp seasonal fresh vegetables are not suitable for thickening; Some raw materials rich in fatty protein should not be thickened by burning, grilling and stewing. Clear soup or milk soup dishes should not thicken, otherwise it will damage the flavor characteristics of dishes.