Okay, cooks. The subject pretty much says it all. What’s the difference between baking and roasting? They both involve sticking something in the oven to cook.
I’ve heard that baking gets rid of all moisture, while roasting leaves some – you bake bread, you roast meat. But you also bake potatoes. And you roast potatoes. And baked potatoes shouldn’t be completely sans moisture.
Is it a temperature thing? A semantic quibble? Two words for the same thing?
i was always told to bake something it had to contain a floured product with the exception of baked ham which never made sense to me
Essentially, it’s two words for the same thing, though the distinction, as you suggest, is what’s being cooked. Both terms refer to the process of cooking something in an oven with dry heat.
They are essentially the same, but baking is usually refers to a process where you put a bunch of ingredients together, mix them up and stick it in an oven and you supposedly get a tasty finished product.
Roasting tends to be more hands-on. You can do stuff to a pot roast while it’s cooking, but once your cookies are baking, there isn’t much you can do to them in there except take them out before they get burned.
I’ll ask you to note that in roasting (as opposed to baking) potatoes, you’re going to grease up the surface of the spuds first.
I’m going to suggest that your professional chef or cookbook writer will say that when you bake something, you’re basically removing moisture by applying dry heat to a product whose moisture content is overwhelmingly water. When you roast something, OTOH, you apply dry heat to a product which is high enough in fat (added, as with your oven-roasted vegetables, for instance, or inherent, as with, say, nuts and meats) that the fat (when it becomes hot enough) cooks the food.
Baked ham remains a mysterious anomaly to the above distinction.
‘Roasting’ is one of those words that has changed meaning over the years; it used to mean cooking meat on a spit over (or in front of) an open fire (‘Spit Roasting’), cooking meat in a closed oven (cooking with warm air rather than with radiant heat) is baking, so if we were to stick to the archaic meanings, we probably should say ‘baked chicken’, but language evolves and modern usage allows us to call it ‘roast chicken’ (which sounds nicer, doesn’t it?)
According to the word detective:
You can baste anything roasted (except coffee beans).
You never baste anything baked (although I’ve been known to give bread an egg wash).
Thanks for the clarifications. I’m still not sure if potatoes are ever really “baked,” either according to the juice-sealing crust or the open-faced oven definition, but it’s good to know that the words meant something different at one time. And may still, in fine cooking circles . . .
Baking means to cook by convection heat, that is, to heat the air and let the hot air cook the food. This is the kind of heat you feel when you sit in a sauna.
Broiling means to cook by radiated heat, that is, to expose the food to a heat source such as fire or an electric heating element. This is the kind of heat you feel when you step from the shade out into the sun.
Unfortunately the word roast is ambiguous, and sometimes means bake (like when you roast a turkey) and sometimes broil, like cooking on a spit next to a heat source. It probably has more to do with what you’re cooking than how you’re cooking it. Cakes bake, chickens roast.