Cooking Verbs

Personally, I had a hard time pinpointing the differences between roast and bake, partially because they both can mean a lot of different things when they are used in different contexts. I thought it was interesting, though, that even though we could not agree on a specific distinction between the two verbs, everyone seemed to have the same vague connotations about what they meant and specific uses of them. To find out more about the 'official' definitions of these two cooking methods, I looked them up in the cooking dictionary at www.epicurious.com. Here is how epicurous defined them:

bake- to cook food in an oven, therefore surrounding it with dry heat. It's imperative to know the accurate temperature of the oven.

roast- to oven-cook food in an uncovered pan, a method that usually produces a well-browned exterior and ideally a moist interior. Roasting requires reasonably tender pieces of meat or poultry. 

I think these definitions are a lot different from what we were thinking of, because they make it seem like roast is a hyponym of bake. At first it seems like these definitions are clear and make sense, but after thinking about our discussion in class, I don't think they are complete because they don't consider a lot of the ways in which we use these verbs. For example, one of the uses of roast we were having trouble fitting in to a category was roasting marshmallows, which clearly does not work with their definition, which seems to be limited to meat. Other things can be roasted in the oven as well, like vegetables and potatoes. 

I thought 'The Culinary Triangle' was an interesting way of thinking about how humans universally look at cooking, but I didn't fully agree with a few of the points it made. I'm not sure about the connection between the triangle of raw-cooked-rotted and roasted-boiled-smoked. I do think that some forms of cooking can be closer to nature and some are more human-involved, but I don't think there is as clear a connection between these two concepts as the author did.  Also, I'm not sure if this is a contemporary analysis or if it is old, but I think that the three cooking methods used in the triangle could be updated. Especially smoking. First of all, smoking is not really that common of a cooking method in everyday life, and also, smoking seems more on the raw side than the cooked side to me.