Cooking – Vocabulary for Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate
Vocabulary for Cooking
The intermediate vocabulary builder for cooking
Some ways of cooking
There are 3 types of cooking ways which you should know about as a home cook: dry heat cooking, moist heat cooking, and combination cooking. Each of these uses heat and different cooking wares to cook food in different ways and obtain different results.
Prepare and cook food
Peel
Peel the potatoes [remove the skin] and boil them.
Chop
While they’re boiling, chop an onion. [cut it into small pieces]
Stir
Then stir it all for a few minutes. [move it around in a saucepan using
a spoon]
Add
Fry the onion before adding some chopped tomatoes. [putting them together with the
onions]
Taste
Sweet
containing or having a taste like sugar
Sour
having a sharp, sometimes unpleasant, taste or smell, like a lemon, and not sweet
Unami (savoury)
a strong taste that is not sweet, sour, salty, or bitter and that is often referred to as “the fifth taste”
Bitter
having a strong sharp taste, like black coffee without sugar
Salty
tasting of or containing salt
Pungent
smelling or tasting very strong and sharp
Are you a good cook?
Common mistakes
worker
cook
no formal + prof. training
work under a chef
involved in cooking directly
less professional
follow recipe/ chef instruction
leader
chef
have formal + prof. training
lead a team of cook
not involved in cooking
more professional
create/ make recipe
- A person who cooks well is a good cook (NOT a good cooker). The cooker is the large piece of equipment you use for cooking. You could also say that you are good/bad at cooking (NOT good/bad in cooking), e.g. I’m quite good at cooking fish.
- Also we ‘cook’ a type of food, e.g. I’m cooking some beef, but we ‘make’ a dish, e.g. I’m making dessert. (NOT I’m cooking dessert.)
- Note: dessert /dɪˈzɜːt/ and desert /ˈdez.ət/
