Time

In conventional cooking, timing can be thought of in terms not of how long to cook something, but of how long before you must stop its cooking. And this is tricky in conventional cooking, because you’re usually using temperatures far higher than the one you want the food to reach. If you’re sautéing a medallion of beef, for example, you may want the internal temperature to reach only 54.4°C (130°F), but you’re cooking it at about 200°C (400°F). That means that once the beef is at just the right temperature, the window of time you have to get it out of the heat is very small. Further complicating matters is the fact that the temperature of the food will rise at least a few degrees after it’s out of the heat, an effect called carryover cooking.