Our three tips for cooking food and avoiding wasting energy

Adapt your recipes

Simple cooking methods are perfectly suited to dishes with sauces, compotes and soups. More surprisingly, it also works very well with fish and meats. You just need to review your time scale and anticipate more. Thus, a roast beef, previously browned over high heat in the pan, will need two hours to cook in the oven at 80°C… and it will be cooked to perfection. At the same temperature, salmon steaks cook in 30 minutes Another very appreciable point: there is no risk of your preparations burning, you can leave the kitchen with a free mind while waiting for the time to eat!

Lower the temperature

The seven-hour leg of lamb… a great classic of French cuisine, based on gentle cooking: here, it involves cooking the dishes by stewing, between 65 °C (temperature necessary to destroy harmful bacteria) and 80 °C, in a preheated oven or in a casserole dish. Advantage: less energy is consumed to reach 70°C than 220°C, and nutrients are preserved. Obviously, the cooking time is extended. Even longer, this gentle cooking remains economical. Do you have a wood stove? Place your dish on top: the temperature will be maintained easily (verifiable with a probe thermometer).

Use passive cooking

His speech had divided Italy. Giorgio Parisi, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021, had dared to get involved in cooking pasta. His recommendation: immerse the pasta in boiling water, turn off the heat after 2 minutes of boiling, place a lid on the pan, wait the time indicated on the package. It’s cooked! This so-called “passive” cooking relies on the inertia of the heat stored in the contents and in the container (with a thick bottom, for greater efficiency). This is the principle of the “Norwegian pot” (read box below). Most simmered dishes (blanquette, stew, ratatouille, etc.) can thus slowly finish cooking off the heat, provided that they are placed in a well-insulated box.