Cooking For Engineers

[cabbage head]

this is suppose to be all the craze this year in cooking ,i am told. since i have been asking questions on roasting,this item is suppose to steam roast. the roast part is pertaining to a whole meat right? (like in other post) or does the roast mean something else? It sure isnt roasting! thanks......the unit says it comes with a rack and u put the meat on there and fill the bottom up with some liquid wine etc.... then put lid on. yes to me this is steaming ....but confused on the term roast.

[Michael Chu]

I'm not sure what the question is. Are you asking why the marketing team at an appliance company chose to use the language they use to sell a product to the masses? The answer is because they are selling to an audience that isn't interested in the strict use of cookery language and they want to use worlds that evoke a positive feeling in their target audience. The target audience of Ninja appliances is toward the largest audience possible (mass market) and not to culinary professionals or chefs. They can pretty much say whatever they want as long as the food gets cooked through and no one gets sick - the terms "bake", "steam", "roast", etc. aren't regulated or have legal requirements to be used in advertising and packaging.

[Michael Chu]

So, why all this trouble with language? Is it because you didn't realize how much of the world uses words like "roast" incorrectly? This is going to be true whenever non-experts talk about a field in which experts and their own vocabulary exists. (Like in computers when people refer to memory but really mean storage space or cache or something else that is measured in (millions of) bytes. Or, in medicine when people get the "24-hour" or "stomach" flu which isn't the flu at all.) It's worse in food because the technical terms (like "steaming" or "roasting") are also everyday words in English which do have extremely broad meanings.

Also, one can argue that when you stick two words together, you are creating a new word that means something entirely different that the original words. I believe Ninja uses the phrase "Steam Infused Roasting" when talking about using steam to help produce a roasted meat product faster (similar to how Hillbilly Housewife did in the recipe you pointed to earlier). Anyway, I think you're getting hung up on language a little too much. (For someone who seems to be stuck on very specific meanings of words, you aren't particularly careful in the use yourself. The product is called "Ninja 3-in-1 cooking system" or "Ninja cooking system", not "Ninja 3 and 1".)