Personally, I don’t* but I was curious what others think.
*some sandwiches excluded like a Cubano or chicken parm; those do require cooking.
No, I would call that “preparing”. Cooking is the act of using heat to prepare food for consumption.
Which means that it might be, depending on the sandwich. For example, you cook a panini or grilled cheese.
What about using my George Foreman grill?
What matters is the loaf. Use the upper cut
How much needs to be heated? If I toast the bread but not the other ingredients, then clearly I did cook by that definition, yeah?
I don’t think it’s cooking unless you are applying heat to cause a chemical reaction. So, making a grilled cheese sandwich counts as cooking, but a BP&J does not.
Making ceviche or sushi officially not cooking confirmed - how dare those posers call themselves sushi chefs.
gotta cook the rice for sushi. checkmate.
Sashimi: do I not even exist, bro?
Slap a whole fish down in front of you.
You: “Not cooked”
slice fillet of fish off and present it.
You: “Not cooked”
slice fillet into small bite size pieces and squirt some neon green horseradish next to it
You: “Dis is cooked!”
?
Ha, you actually believe in Sashimi? Crazy.
Just because it’s preparing food and not cooking doesn’t mean that it is lesser.
I think of a chef as a “preparer of food” not necessarily “food cooker”
So sushi chef is still accurate to their opinion, disclaimer I agree with them so I could always be rationalizing it.
chef is french for chief. they are the head of the kitchen.
The acid from the lime is doing the cooking in ceviche.
I agree - and it specifically isn’t doing so through an application of heat.
Some of the constituent ingredients have to be cooked, but ceviches and sushi rolls aren’t cooked any more than salads or burritos. They’re assembled or prepared.
You’re ignoring the chemical process in ceviche.
Yea, ceviche is cooked with acid rather than heat - you can also cook some foods with salt!
You could cook using an exothermic reaction between ingredients, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening when making ceviche, so a ceviche is not cooked.
The proteins are being chemically denatured.
By heat?
It’s only cooking if it’s done in the Cooke region governed by the Earle of Sandwich. Anything else is sparkling food preparation.
Cooking (in the English I was taught) involves the application of heat - frying, baking, roasting, boiling etc are the names for specific ways to do this. A sandwich would be made or prepared.
Some go as far as saying cooking requires a chemical change, else youre just heating
Yeah - an application of heat to create a chemical change. You’re correct there. My answer was incomplete.
Just for the heck of it, if you heat protein enough to denature it but have no Maillard reaction (let’s say you’ve just made a hard boiled egg), would that not be considered cooking by that definition?
My understanding is that denaturing is a physical structure change, not a chemical one (and according to Wikipedia can be reversible in some cases), not a biochemist or food scientist though so totally accepting that my understanding is incorrect/incomplete.
No, it’s food preparation but nothing is being cooked.
Depends on your start point. You can bake your own bread, cook/combine your own condiments, and roast/cure your own meats.
You can grow your wheat, and raise pigs, but to really make it from scratch, first you need to create the universe.
If you cook it, like a grilled cheese, then yes. Otherwise, it’s sandwich arts.
Tuna melt?
Cooking is a process of transformation, both physical and symbolic. Combining ingredients intentionally to create something flavorful and nutritious, making a sandwich certainly falls under the act of cooking.
No one ever says “I’m cooking a sandwich”
True, but, turn that into ‘I’m cooking up a sandwich’, and now the phrase potentially expands its domain to basically mean any kind of food preparation.
The addition if ‘up’ makes it less literal, more jovial and less bounded.
The word cooking, to me, means using heat with a stove. Baking is for the oven. Grilling, is outside on a grill. But a sandwich is only ever “made” in my house. “Will you make me a sandwich?”, “I’m making a sandwich”
Good question though. Never thought about it.
Grills can be inside. You just need the parallel bars with heat underneath to call it grilling.
Sorry. You said “make me a sandwich”
There’s always an xkcd for every forum thread topic.
I see cooking as a more general term. Both baking and grilling are forms of cooking. You can also roast and grill things in the oven. Cooking on a stove also has different specific terms, boiling, simmering, frying etc.
So would you cook a salad?
i think combining watery things and oily things counts as emulsion, which is a cooking sort of word. i thought “cooking” was a word for “changing the chemical properties of” or just “heating up because it’s better hot”
I mean more general than heat with a stove. Not as is every form of meal preparation.
But yes. I would cook a salad - stir frys are basically just cooked salads with some rice or noodles. I would not consider every salad to be cooked though.
Hot German potato salad is a thing.
I guess it would depend on the type of sandwich
. Peanut butter and jelly? No
A simple cheese sandwich? No
Grilled cheese sandwich? Yes
Preparing food and cooking food are two different things.
I wouldn’t even say making a grilled cheese would be cooking. I don’t think heat has anything to do with it. I mean, am I cooking if I’m microwaving a frozen dinner? Are the “cooks” at an Applebee’s cooking if all they do is warm up bags of premade food and microwave steaks?
I would say cooking requires you to prepare ingredients, combine them, and cook them.
I like this definition the best. If someone is making a super complex sandwich with many ingredients and passion, then I’m fine to call that cooking. Same with a cold soup, a cous-cous salad or a fancy appetizer. Many dishes in top notch cuisine are served cold. In molecular kitchen, there’s even stuff served below freezing. Still all cooking to me.
If someone just warms up a can of Ravioli, microwaves convinience food, etc. I’d consider that rather food prep. If using the microwave is just one step of multiple in a recipe, than that’s fine again.
For me cooking requires a minimum level of effort rather than a minimum level of heat.
I had thought of editing the title to include microwaving food, too. I would say “I cooked it in the microwave” but it at the same time absolutely does not have the same weight as “I cooked this” implying I did all the work and not just re-heating someone else’s.
I mean, you could cook something in the microwave. Like microwaving a potato in order to make mashed potatoes, or heating other things to create a dish. Like I used to microwave spaghetti squash and then shred up the strands to make spaghetti.
But like, if I reheated some leftovers, or put a frozen dinner in the microwave, Id probably say “I microwaved this” or “I heated this”.
Ehhh food preparation more than cooking. You’re just assembling things. I’m a pro at a good sandwich if I do say so myself. Sometimes I have to cook to make that happen. But a basic sandwich…nah, no cooking involved.
By that logic, salads and sushi aren’t cooking.
I wouldn’t say that they are cooking. They are preparing food.
The question is inadequatly phrased. You must describe what kind of sandwich we are speaking of. Unless op is speaking about cold sandwiches exclusively, many sandwiches require cooking.
Croque Monsieur
Grilled Cheese
Cubano
Monte Cristo
Panini
These are just a few that I came up with off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many more.
It you cook the sandwich, the bread, or any part of the filling, yes. If you toast your bread and warm up your ingredients in a pan, why not ? But if you are just cuting and filling. You’re assembling a sandwich, not cooking it.
