xantoxis@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It usually has to do with what chemical process happens to the food in question. Not all foods react the same to being dunked in boiling water. (Although I couldn’t tell you what the difference between potatoes in boiling water and carrots in boiling water.)
Sometimes it has to do with how long that cooking method is applied, since a different thing happens. For example, you can poach OR hard-boil an egg; same method, different amount of cooking time.
In short, with a few exceptions, it’s not about what process you’re applying to cook the food, but about the result that it achieves in the food item.
mypasswordistaco@iusearchlinux.fyi 11 months ago
Poached and hard boiled eggs vary by more than just their boiling time. These names are much less about chemical processes and more about differences in technique. See other comments in this thread.
xantoxis@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If I hand you an egg and tell you it’s a poached egg, you’re going to thinking about the consistency of the egg, not how I cooked it. Poached means the result, not the process.
angrystego@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If you hand me a poached egg, I’m not going to take it because I can see it has no shell and it’s going to be all over me staining me with the runny yolk. Now if you gave me an egg with a shell and told me it was a soft-boiled egg, I would think about the consistency.
nyctre@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I mean… you get the result by doing the process.
They’re different techniques with different results. You can’t give me a boiled egg and say it was poached and have me not be able to tell. Nor vice-versa. You can have runny boiled eggs, you can have soft-boiled eggs, you can have hard-boiled eggs, but you can’t make a boiled egg look like a poached egg.
xantoxis@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This is a thread about why they use certain words, though. It isn’t a thread about how to cook an egg. They use the word “poached” to mean a certain consistency. To poach an egg means to produce an egg with that consistency. In fact, as far as the recipe is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether you heated up any water at all: if the instruction is “poach an egg” and you inject a Maxwell’s demon to heat up the individual molecules of the egg the appropriate amount, the result is a poached egg and that’s still what you call it.
They use words to mean what the result is.