Carry over cooking
Carry over cooking refers to the phenomenon that food retains heat and continues to cook even after being removed from the source of heat.[1] The larger and denser the object being heated the greater the amount of carry over cooking. After being removed from the heat source (oven, barbecue grill, etc.) the internal temperature can continue to increase. This means that when cooking large roasts or turkeys, for instance, the roast meat should be rested before serving to allow heat to distribute from the warmer outside to the cooler middle, also allowing juices to distribute throughout the meat As mentioned above, the larger and denser the object being cooked, the greater the degree of carry over cooking. In more scientific terms, larger objects have a lower surface area to volume ratio and thus retain heat better. Denser foods typically have more water content. Water has a higher heat capacity and thus there is more energy in the food object to continue the cooking. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Thermodynamics Before the development of modern thermodynamics, it was thought that heat was a fluid, the so-called caloric. Bodies were capable of holding a certain amount of this fluid, hence the term heat capacity, named and first investigated by Joseph Black in the 1750s.[1] Today one instead discusses the internal energy of a system. This is made up of its microscopic kinetic and potential energy. Heat is no longer considered a fluid. Rather, it is a transfer of disordered energy at the microscopic level. Nevertheless, at least in English, the term "heat capacity" survives. Some other languages prefer the term thermal capacity, which is also sometimes used in English. Heat capacity (usually denoted by a capital C, often with subscripts), or thermal capacity, is the measurable physical quantity that shows the amount of heat required to change a substance's temperature by a given amount. In the International System of Units (SI), heat capacity is expressed in units of joule(s) (J) per kelvin (K). Derived quantities that specify heat capacity as an intensive property, i.e., independent of the size of a sample, are the molar heat capacity, which is the heat capacity per mole of a pure substance, and the specific heat capacity, often simply called specific heat, which is the heat capacity per unit mass of a material. Occasionally, in engineering contexts, a volumetric heat capacity is used. Because heat capacities of materials tend to mirror the number of atoms or particles they contain, when intensive heat capacities of various substances are expressed directly or indirectly per particle number, they tend to vary within a much more narrow range. Temperature reflects the average kinetic energy of particles in matter while heat is the transfer of thermal energy from high to low temperature regions. Thermal energy transmitted by heat is stored as kinetic energy of atoms as they move, and in molecules as they rotate. Additionally, some thermal energy may be stored as the potential energy associated with higher-energy modes of vibration, whenever they occur in interatomic bonds in any substance. Translation, rotation, and a combination of the two types of energy in vibration (kinetic and potential) of atoms represent the degrees of freedom of motion which classically contribute to the heat capacity of atomic matter (loosely bound electrons occasionally also participate). On a microscopic scale, each system particle absorbs thermal energy among the few degrees of freedom available to it, and at high enough temperatures, this process contributes to a specific heat capacity that classically approaches a value per mole of particles that is set by the Dulong-Petit law. This limit, which is about 25 joules per kelvin for each mole of atoms, is achieved by many solid substances at room temperature (see table below). For quantum mechanical reasons, at any given temperature, some of these degrees of freedom may be unavailable, or only partially available, to store thermal energy. In such cases, the specific heat capacity will be a fraction of the maximum. As the temperature approaches absolute zero, the specific heat capacity of a system also approaches zero, due to loss of available degrees of freedom. Quantum theory can be used to quantitatively predict specific heat capacities in simple systems.