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Why is cooking a food item method called different things by what the item is, or what is the criteria?
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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The thing I've always found confusing is how American terminology as far as I can make out seems to almost always say "fry" to mean what I would always specify as "deep frying" and "sauteing" where I would usually say "fry". I think this is a Commonwealth countries thing and not just me. "Saute", to me had always seemed a kind of unusually fancy affectation for people working in restaurants with the average person eschewing it for the term "fry" until I started using YouTube and Google for recipes and got exposed to so much American material that I discovered they make these distinctions. I guess there's technical distinctions in how much oil you use in the pan (until the point of immersion where it's deep frying) but that seems much of a muchness.
Confusingly though I notice Americans seem to also sometimes use "fry" the way I would, but just sometimes. Eggs for example are "fried" but this is usually not meaning dropped in to a deep fryer. And then there's the confusion over the meaning of "grilling" vs "broiling" because as far as I can tell the term "broil" isn't used where I'm from and the the device Americans call a "broiler" is what we'd call a "grill" and things cooked under it are "grilled". I believe the American use of "grill" is referring to a shape of ridged cooking surface but then you get "grilled cheese" which I'd called "cheese on toast" or a "cheese toastie" which involves putting the sandwich in to a flat frying pan and which involves neither a broiler nor a ridged cooking surface and isn't referred to as sauteing nor frying. Then there's "griddled" which I think again is referring to a particular shape of cooking surface but given "grill" I just don't know.
Definitely some interesting variations within mostly shared vocabulary.
Wow you definitely aren't american as I'm scratching my head to even figure out what you mean by some of these. The average grill in america is a standalone outdoor cooking station with a metal grate used as the cooking surface. They are also found in restaurants but usually they are in a bit of a different form that what the average American thinks of as a grill. the grates give the characteristic lines of grilled food that many seek. A griddle is a grill where the grate has been replaced by a flat piece of metal, often used for small or runny foods that would fall between the grates of a regular grill.
We also dont typically have standalone broilers. Most american ovens have a broil option where the top heating element becomes very hot and can be used to brown the food.
The main difference between grilling and broiling, in my american eyes, is how they are used. Grilling is a technique for cooking food from start to finish. Broiling is a technique used at the end of cooking something to brown it or something to that effect. I wouldn't use the broiler in my oven to cook a whole meal, and I wouldn't turn on the grill or griddle just to brown something.
In my eyes saute is when you use only enough oil to keep something from sticking or burning, while frying is when you use enough oil that it starts to really add to the flavor of what you're cooking.
I think the worst thing Americans have done is the air fryer though. Its just a fucking tiny convection oven, there's no frying going on at all. They just know us fat Americans are conditioned to salivate when we hear the word fry and cower in terror from big science words like 'convection' lol
Yeh a broiler here (Australia) is just as you describe and while I hadn't given it much thought is too used in the mode you describe as well, it's just that it's called a "grill" and the act of using it is to "grill" which is an amusing point of confusion since it seems to have very different connotations in the states. I was aware that "Grilling" over there also connotated using the outdoor grated cooking surface that I'd call a "barbecue" but I guess where I was confused is that I thought the term also covered those otherwise flat surfaces that have the ridges like those George Foreman "grill" things but apparently that's actually what a "griddle" is so that clears things up a bit. In either case I still can't understand why a toasted cheese sandwich cooked in a frying pan gets called "grilled" and funnily enough it's common to make a variation of that here that's not quite as good but much easier and lazier to make where you put a single slice of bread covered with cheese (though not the American kind as that probably wouldn't work very well with this method) under what I believe you'd call the "broiler". This local method of melting cheese on bread really added to the confusion before I became aware that "Grilling" meant something different over there because I figured this must have been what was meant by "grilled cheese" before I figured that out lol.
I think this system of classifying sauteing vs frying, is quite useful, a bit more precise than what I'm used to, just doesn't seem to get much use amongst my circles here. Still the lack of distinction necessarily made between degrees of "fried" is interesting since "fried" chicken seems to quite specifically mean deep fried even if for many dishes a person might well intend to use a lot of oil to cook some chicken but not necessarily plan to deep fry it.
I have noticed many people from outside the US get hung up on grilled cheese. We just call it that for some reason and no one really thinks about it. If we stop to think, we know it is not grilled, and as far as I'm aware, it's the only thing we call "grilled" that is not grilled. I think the reason we do not call it a toasted cheese sandwich, or cheese toastie, as I think I've heard in the UK, is that would imply the use of a toaster (a standalone appliance with electric heating elements inside slots just big enough for a single slice of bread). I suppose griddled cheese might be a more accurate name, but we are too far gone to make that change.
Grilled cheese is cooked on a flat top grill/griddle, most people use a pan in home cooking because they don't have a flat top or it's just easier for a single grilled cheese to use a pan. Reubens and paninnis are other sandwiches that are grilled. You could probably argue that grilled generally means cooked at high heat. Then there's pancakes which are more commonly cooked on a griddle than a pan...
There’s a few different things here that make clarity difficult. One is the precise definition of various techniques, for example:poaching water is not bubbling, simmering water is gentle bubbles, boiling water is bubbling heavily(some say “full rolling boil”, which is what boiling always is. Second is simply the name of the cooking vessel/equipment, griddle vs grill vs broiler, which is sometimes the same term used to describe the technique applied. You can grill a steak, but you wouldn’t say you ovened a roast. Last is that many terms are misused so much that it’s just become common parlance. Technically a grill is a device with grates and a radiant device that cooks food through a combination of conduction and radiation, usually powered by propane or natural gas. A BBQ is a similar object powered by wood, but it’s common for an outdoor grill to be referred to as a BBQ, though when used with the lid down is a little different than an open restaurant style grill since it acts a bit like an oven too.