When is food cooked?

[jedovaty]

Hi:  Sort of a two part question.

 

First part is specific: I have whole hulled oat groats and barley, decided to grind some into flour, and made a "cream of" with 1 part flour and 4 parts water.  it took only a few minutes for it to come to a boil and thicken, which made me scratch my head because whole groats take 45 minutes or so.  Same with brown rice. Other grains and seeds take 15-20 minutes.  Instant oatmeal takes a few minutes, but.. that stuff is pre-cooked with steam.  I figure this time is how long it takes for the water to be absorbed, soften, and "cook" the insides.  Was my "cream of barts" cooked after only a few minutes?  Do things change nutrition-wise if I let the flour soak in water for a while?

 

Which leads to the second part.. a more general question, maybe rhetorical.  When does one consider food cooked?  In the US, there's correlation to temperature which kills bacteria, but then, we do eat food at lower temps.

[blue_dolphin]

I figure food is cooked if heat has been applied to it.

 

[cdh]

Food is cooked when the chemical reactions you want to happen have happened enough for your tastes.  With meats, it is protein denaturing... changing the meat from raw to cooked.  With grains it can be enzymatic, like when malts let the enzymes turn the starch into sugar, or it can be more mechanical, where kneaded dough forms a matrix that holds air and water in such a way that when you heat it, the heat will puff up the trapped air into a crumb and the water evaporates off and the crust browns... Whole heaps of chemical reactions there... So food is cooked when enough heat has been applied in the right way to get the chemical reactions you want. 

[Dave the Cook]

Good answers to the second question.

 

As for the first question, I'm pretty sure it has to do with increasing the aggregated surface area of the target food, so more of the food is exposed to the cooking medium. At the same time, you've decreased the distance from the outer surface to the center of the target food, so heat can reach the center of the food more quickly.