Ask Lemmy

Beans on toast is like crackers with soup.

Not cooking.

I'd say it's proper cooking if you're making decisions about what goes into it. Heating up beans and bread? Not cooking. Heating up beans and bread, adding some thyme and black pepper to the beans in the process? Cooking. Very simple cooking, but cooking all the same.

For me, I've always gone by the typical english definition of "combining and heating" ingredients.

If you've combined more than one item together and applied heat somehow, that counts as cooking, otherwise you're doing something else. Like, if I made myself a cold sandwich, I wouldn't say I 'cooked' a sandwich and the same for if I threw a burrito in the microwave.

So, from that, as long as you either warmed up the beans or threw the bread in the toaster and those items weren't pre-combined somehow, I'd personally say you cooked it.

it's all cooking

Just reheating precooked food is just that, reheating.

I think the confusion is that in English we don't really have separate words for cooking-as-chore and cooking-as-art.

Lazy beans on toast or heating a frozen pizza is the first kind but not the second. There's no creative input, no method. You're just trying not to ruin your ingredients and end up with something edible. You're cooking but you're not cooking.

If I have to break out anything more than a plate/bowl and utensils then it's cooking.

Food Network, Tick Tock, and Youtube have turned everyone into gatekeeping snobs. Tell your friend that Carl Sagan said that it doesn't count as "made from scratch" unless the first step in the recipe is "create the universe".

Reheating is cooking. Not all cooking is reheating.

America's Test Kitchen said it was OK to use garlic powder or granulated garlic and people's heads exploded.

Cooking is just the act of preparing food, especially by heating. Anything else is just people being snobs. Just go prepare your food and stop caring about peoples opinions on it.

Unless they're fermenting their own soy sauce out back, or making their own jello/ gelatine (look it up) if say it's fair to call it cooking.

However, cooking, made from scratch and farm to table are all different.

If all you have to do is heat something up, you are not cooking.

It counts as cooking when you start needing to prepare and combine ingredients.

Canned soup is not cooking.

Making a grilled cheese sandwich to go along with your canned soup would be cooking though, because it requires preparing bread, cheese, and butter (usually) and then combining then cooking the ingredients in a particular way.

I think everyone has to start somewhere and if that is heating up beans then that is where their cooking journey starts. Soon there will be cheese on toast, maybe a fried egg or mashed potatoes. Baby steps, everything counts if it ends with a plate of food.

Ask him to define cooking any way he likes => point out preparing toast falls into that definition => beans on toast is cooking QED

Combine at least two things I guess? I mean like a can of soup and some grated cheese, tada! But also doing something to a single ingredient also counts (heating something, etc) so the can would count under that.

In short, I think whatever makes the person doing the cooking happy.

I cook mostly from scratch, ingredients like flour, vegetables, meats. Grow veg in the yard, and make sourdough.

I like beans from dry but you can pull the canned beans from my cold dead hands, they have been a staple of our diet forever, those and tomatoes are the only things I buy canned regularly. And yes I call it cooking, if you make a meal with them. Heating and seasoning is cooking.