Where the Heat Comes From: Eleven Ways Cooks Use Fire, Steam and Machines

Cooking is defined by its source as the art, science and craft of using heat to make food more palatable, digestible, nutritious, or safe, which makes it the starting point for every technique that follows on this path.

Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed the culinary triangle around three kinds of cooking, boiling, roasting and smoking, usually done to meat, and used it to place other techniques in relation to those three.

Cooking away from a kitchen sorts its methods by heat: direct dry heat over a campfire or charcoal, indirect dry heat such as a Dutch oven, and wet heat such as steaming or an earth oven.

A masonry oven, also called a brick or stone oven, has a baking chamber of fireproof brick, concrete, stone or clay, and is most closely associated today with artisan bread and pizza.

A griddle is built around a broad, usually flat cooking surface, called a girdle in Scotland, and gives direct even contact heat for foods such as pancakes and flatbreads.

Low and slow smoking leaves a band of pink meat in the outer 8 to 10 millimeters, the smoke ring that barbecue cooks prize.

A churrascaria is a restaurant where meat is cooked in churrasco style, the Portuguese word that translates roughly as barbecue, often served by roving waiters who carve at the table.

Chinese cooking techniques are grouped by whether they use wet heat, dry heat, or a mix of both, and wet heat methods such as simmering make up the largest class.

Double steaming cooks delicate foods such as bird's nest soup in a covered ceramic jar steamed for several hours, and its basis in Chinese dietary philosophy is dated as far back as the 6th century BC.

Microwave cooking heats food from the inside by dielectric heating, and the Raytheon Radarange, the first commercial microwave oven, was first sold in 1947.

Dishwasher salmon is a fish dish made by wrapping salmon in aluminum foil and running it through a full dishwasher cycle, the most unusual heat source on this path.