Topic: Pre-cooked Veg?

[meggeth]

I see a lot of recipes have pre-cooked peppers/onion, etc. I have never done this. Is there any benefit? If a recipe has onions/peppers, I just add them at the start and fry them for around 1 min, then continue wiht the recipe. I cant see how pre-cooking onion/pepper would add much extra flavour - not the same as meat which has a more ability to soak up flavour.

Anyone pre-cook veg and find it makes a big difference to the end result? 

[spiceyokooko]

I think pre-cooking vegetables in BIR's is almost soley down to expediency in order for them to produce finished dishes in a short time frame.

To properly fry onions for example can take anything from 10-15 minutes, most BIR's will have turned out a whole dish in that time frame. So to speed it up when fried onions are required they pre-cook them or pre-boil them or whatever they do so they can cook them in the finished dish much faster.

Does pre-cooking vegetables add anything to the flavour of the finished dish? Probably, if they're being pre-cooked with spices, but no more so than if you were to fry whole spices in oil first before you add your onions to be fried.

Experiment with it yourself, pre-cook some onions before frying them off in your finished dish and let your taste buds decide what difference is being produced.

[Malc.]

Generally speaking I only pre-cook potato and like you, tend to fry onion and peppers off at the start.

[Gav Iscon]

I do my peppers and onions at the start. By the time I've got the deep fat fryer out and heated it up, they're done. I agree with Spicy that its just done in the TA to speed things up and also their deep fat fryer will be on all the time.