Cooking is the term of making food by using heat. Cooks choose and attach ingredients using a huge range of tools and methods. In the process, the taste, fiber, emergence, and chemical properties of the element can change. Cooking method and ingredients differ widely all around the world, repeating particular environmental, economic, and cultural traditions. Cooks themselves also differ wastly in skill and training.

Preparing food with heat or fire is an exercise particular to human beings, and some scientists trust the appearance of cooking played an major task in human evolution. Most anthropologists trust that cooking dismiss first produced around 250,000 years ago. The improvment of agriculture and buisness across civilizations provided cooks more new ingredients. New creativity and technologies, like pottery for containing and boiling water, increased cooking method. Some modern cooks used progressive scientific method to food preparation.

Most elements in cooking are derivational from living things. Vegetables, fruits, grains and nuts make from plants, while meat, eggs, and dairy products come from animals. Mushrooms and the yeast applied in baking are kinds of fungi. Cooks also exploit water and minerals like salt. Shefs can also use wine, an alcohol-based liquid from the food processing of juices of grapes or other fruits. Wine can be an element in cooking.

Proteins: Edible animal material, including muscle, offal, milk and egg white, contains substantial amounts of protein. Almost all vegetable matter (in particular legumes and seeds) also includes proteins, although generally in smaller amounts. These may also be a source of essential amino acids. When proteins are heated they become denatured and change texture. In many cases, this causes the structure of the material to become softer or more friable - meat becomes cooked. In some cases, proteins can form more rigid structures, such as the coagulation of albumen in egg whites.
Carbohydrates: Carbohydrates include the common sugar, sucrose (table sugar), a disaccharide, and such simple sugars as glucose (from the digestion of table sugar) and fructose (from fruit), and starches from sources such as cereal flour, rice, arrowroot, potato. The interaction of heat and carbohydrate is complex.
Fats: Types of fat include vegetable oils and such animal products as lard and butter. Fats can reach temperatures higher than the boiling point of water. Thus, they are often used to conduct high heat to other ingredients, such as in frying or sautéing.
Water: cooking often involves water which is frequently present as other liquids, both added in order to immerse the substances being cooked (typically water, stock or wine), and released from the foods themselves. Liquids are so important to cooking that the name of the cooking method used may be based on how the liquid is combined with the food, as in steaming, simmering, boiling, braising and blanching.