Basting a turkey with a turkey baster Basting is a

cooking Cooking, also known as cookery or professionally as the culinary arts, is the art, science and craft of using heat to make food more palatable, digestible, nutritious, or Food safety, safe. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely, from ...

technique that involves cooking

meat Meat is animal Tissue (biology), tissue, often muscle, that is eaten as food. Humans have hunted and farmed other animals for meat since prehistory. The Neolithic Revolution allowed the domestication of vertebrates, including chickens, sheep, ...

with either its own juices or some type of preparation such as a

sauce In cooking, a sauce is a liquid, cream, or semi- solid food, served on or used in preparing other foods. Most sauces are not normally consumed by themselves; they add flavour, texture, and visual appeal to a dish. ''Sauce'' is a French wor ...

marinade Marinating is the process of soaking foods in a seasoned, often acidic, liquid before cooking. This sauce, called the marinade, can be either acidic (made with ingredients such as vinegar, lemon juice, or wine), or enzymatic (made with ingredien ...

, such as

barbecue Barbecue or barbeque (often shortened to BBQ worldwide; barbie or barby in Australia and New Zealand) is a term used with significant regional and national variations to describe various cooking methods that employ live fire and smoke to coo ...

. The meat is left to cook, then periodically coated with the

juice Juice is a drink made from the extraction or Cold-pressed juice, pressing of the natural liquid contained in fruit and vegetables. It can also refer to liquids that are flavored with concentrate or other biological food sources, such as meat ...

Method

Prominently used in

grilling Grilling is a form of cooking that involves heat applied to the surface of food, commonly from above, below or from the side. Grilling usually involves a significant amount of direct, radiant heat, and tends to be used for cooking meat and v ...

rotisserie Rotisserie, also known as spit-roasting, is a style of roasting where meat is skewered on a spit – a long, solid rod used to hold food while it is being cooked over a fire in a fireplace or over a campfire, or roasted in an oven. This meth ...

roasting Roasting is a cooking method that uses dry heat where hot air covers the food, cooking it evenly on all sides with temperatures of at least from an open flame, oven, or other heat source. Roasting can enhance the flavor through caramelizat ...

, and other meat preparations where the meat is over heat for extended periods of time, basting is used to keep meat moist during the cooking process and also to apply or enhance flavor. Improperly administered basting, however, may actually lead to the very problem it is designed to prevent: the undesired loss of moisture (drying out) of the meat. If not compensated by countermeasures, the opening of the oven door and the resulting loss of temperature and moisture content of the air circulating inside can lead to increased evaporation from the meat surfaces. Baster

Other alternatives include allowing extended cooking time, administering increased amounts of juices, coating the meat with moisture rich fruits or fat-rich cuts, such as bacon, or actual fat, place moisture rich fruits and vegetables around the cooking meats, and if possible, using a

convection oven A convection oven (also known as a fan-assisted oven, turbo broiler or simply a fan oven or turbo) is an oven that has fans to circulate air around food to create an evenly heated environment. In an oven without a fan, natural convection circul ...

. This is a type of cooking usually recommended for dishes that generally taste mild, but are served with sauces that provide complementing or overpowering flavor to them, for example chicken chasseur.

References

External links

How Stuff Works - Basting
{{Kitchen tools Cooking techniques Culinary terminology

Method

See also

References

External links