Ridge Zins

I remember Dougherty first mentioning the show at a dinner at his place. The original Japanese series had cooler ingredients, imo.
 
Part of the problem is that these terms were invented before there were inside ovens and stoves. Grilling, on an old open pit flame, entailed cooking something (usually meat, of course, but not always) by direct exposure of one side at a time to the flame. Roasting meant surrounding the thing cooked with heat by immersing it in the flame, thus surrounding it with dry heat (these things were done by holding the meat on a spit or a hook over the open flame). Baking entailed enclosing the thing to be cooked in a box and putting it in or near the flame so that it was surrounded by dry heat, but not directly exposed to the flame. The invention of indoor ovens changed the technique for doing these things but continued to use the old nomenclature. Exposure to direct heat on one side of the meat was done inside the oven to a direct flame, and this came to be called broiling, but it was indistinguishable from grilling as a method of cooking. If you think this is confusing, try to explain the difference between roasting and baking since the items so cooked are cooked in the same way. Mrs. Beeton's cookbook refers to a dish called a baked meat. This term is now either nonsensical or redundant, but it once meant something distinct. For my part, I'd vote for reserving the term grilling to things done over an open flame and not in an oven, but modern cooking methods will always screw up 19th century terms. Think of that flat iron sheet with ridges, which is also referred to as something that will grill meat. It isn't frying meat, which is done in oil, but it isn't either grilling or broiling. So what would you call it?
 
It's broiling if the open flame is above the food; it's grilling if the open flame is below the food.

It is indeed hard to distinguish roasting from baking. The best I can come up with is that roasting is always for savory foods; baking might be for either savories or sweets.

And that grill-pan? Just a low-fat frying method.

All hail Maillard!
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
It's broiling if the open flame is above the food; it's grilling if the open flame is below the food.

It is indeed hard to distinguish roasting from baking. The best I can come up with is that roasting is always for savory foods; baking might be for either savories or sweets.

And that grill-pan? Just a low-fat frying method.

All hail Maillard!
Click to expand...

I'm fine with this distinction. But it's an invented one. You won't find it in a definition of cooking terms that has to do with how the thing is exposed to heat. As for the distinction between roasting and baking, with regard to how it's cooked, it's a distinction without a difference. As I said, we are using nineteenth-century terms to describe cooking since the invention of the inside oven and range. If we rearrange the meanings according to your suggestions, they become obviously arbitrary. Breads and cakes are baked and not roasted because how they were once cooked,and what they were therefore called, not because of what they are. And meat is roasted because we have replace baking with roasting but, since the effect is the same, we just kept the old name. And how would you reproduce a 19th century recipe for baked meat, unless you just decided to call it that?

Those grill pans work and are to be used without oil--until you wear off the coating, so low-fat won't do it.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
It's broiling if the open flame is above the food; it's grilling if the open flame is below the food.

It is indeed hard to distinguish roasting from baking. The best I can come up with is that roasting is always for savory foods; baking might be for either savories or sweets.

And that grill-pan? Just a low-fat frying method.

All hail Maillard!
Click to expand...

I think that, inasmuch as anyone recognizes a distinction between roasting and baking, the commonly defined difference is that of temperature, Whereas.baking occurs at temperatures below 400 F, roasting occurs at temperatures above 400, typically resulting in browning via the Maillard reaction.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
It's broiling if the open flame is above the food; it's grilling if the open flame is below the food.

It is indeed hard to distinguish roasting from baking. The best I can come up with is that roasting is always for savory foods; baking might be for either savories or sweets.

And that grill-pan? Just a low-fat frying method.

All hail Maillard!
Click to expand...

I think that, inasmuch as anyone recognizes a distinction between roasting and baking, the commonly defined difference is that of temperature, Whereas.baking occurs at temperatures below 400 F, roasting occurs at temperatures above 400, typically resulting in browning via the Maillard reaction.

Mark Lipton
Click to expand...

This is just not true. Many roasts may be started at 425 or 450 to brown them, but most of the roasting occurs at 350 or less. And I could give you countless recipes that are done entirely at 375 or 350. You are all trying to make coherent rules for terms that no longer operate coherently. History alas, does not operate logically. And the history of language is no exception.The
 
Jonathan, thanks for the good comments on all of this.

Sometimes the quibbling by certain (unnamed) people about specific terms is due to agendas other than actually questioning the usage of the specific term.

And this type of "quibbling" is welcome as it leads to constructive exchanges of ideas...as in this case with cooking techniques/terms.

No agenda intended hereby...just a bit of (wine-induced?) musing!

. . . . . . . Pete
 
FWIW, in modern ovens the distinction between bake and roast modes is that the former only has heat from below whereas the latter has heat from below and above.
 
Jonathan, the reason for my initial qualification is that I am skeptical of any logic to such distinctions and lie largely in agreement with what you say. Jay, my convection oven insists on a distinction between convection baking and convection roasting. What I’ve been able to ascertain from the Web is that the baking mode using only a heating element in the fan unit, whereas roasting uses the elements internal to the oven itself, too.

Mark Lipton
 
It's true that some convection ovens have a button one pushes for roasting which raises the initial temperature for browning to occur. This change may well recreate an actual distinction between roasting and baking if everyone gets a convection oven (ours is still standard). At that point, everyone will have forgotten what the words originally meant anyway, which is what happens to language and funds etymology.

As to broiling and grilling, I am in favor of enforcing the distinction since, although it doesn't correspond to the original definitional distinctions in cooking terms, which were, rationally, according to how heat is applied rather than, irrationally, where it occurs, nevertheless distinguishing between applying heat directly to one side on a grill vs. in a broiler, is a real one. We will need to come up with a new name for those ridged thingees that grill meat on a range top, though.
 
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