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?
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?
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.
Sorry. You said “make me a sandwich”
There’s always an xkcd for every forum thread topic.
Grills can be inside. You just need the parallel bars with heat underneath to call it grilling.
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.
The specific language you speak has significant impact here. For some, "to make food* is used to refer to cooking. Where as in English it’s not so clear. I prefer the use in terms of survival. IMO, if you can make any food enough to survive you can cook, because in English there is not a better colloquial verb. Though i wouldn’t call you ‘a cook’ or ‘a chef’ if you can’t apply heat to produce edible food from raw.
This might be different depending on the speaker, but at least for me Portuguese and Italian are even stricter on interpreting cozinhar/cozer and cucinare/cuocere as involving heat. Like, if I were to say for example ⟨*cozinhei um sanduíche⟩ (literally “I *cooked a sandwich”), I’m almost sure that people would interpret it as “I picked an already prepared sandwich and used it as ingredient for something else”
I mean that’s true of the english term as well. But if someone says they can’t cook i default to thinking they order out every meal or use a microwave fot cup of ramen. Making sandwiches, salads, and other cold foods is still a skill but there’s no word such as cold-cutlerist and i refuse andwich artist.
Perhaps I’m overthinking it, but the English verb seems to have different meanings when it’s used transitive and intransitively. For example, let’s say that you ask someone to prepare you a salad, and the person answers:
- “I can’t cook.” (sounds OK?)
- “I can’t cook a salad.” (sounds weird)
I think that’s grammatically true but i tend to think of it more in terms of colloquialisms or slang. I imagine intransitive use of the verb developed out of convenience for lack of a lazy alternative. “I can’t prepare food” would either suggest you require assistance to eat, you can’t legally work at a restaurant, or your aristocratic status is beyond that of a mere peasant who has seen a kitchen before.
Nope. In English, if it doesn’t involve the application of heat, you ain’t cooking, you’re preparing, making, or other terminology.
So toasting a sammich is cooking, but making the sammich isn’t?
Pretty much, yeah. Same as grilling a burger and putting it on bread is cooking despite the bread being pre-made.
Afaik, cooking isn’t limited to applying heat to raw foods.
Might be worth saying that I don’t remember which dictionary the definition came from, and that dictionaries only record language, they don’t prevent changes over time. Which means that usage could have changed enough since the last time I looked at any, and now have a different usage added
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.
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.
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.
I would say you’re making food, not cooking, but like, who cares? If someone says I’m cooking lunch and then comes out with sandwiches I wouldn’t really notice it doesn’t make sense, but if you say I’m cooking a sandwich, that pokes my brain in the incorrect language department
Ya gotta toast it
Only if making the sandwich involves cooking, like a grill cheese or something