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Learn to cook like a professional with top tips from Michelin-starred chef Max Coen
What is ‘cuisson’?
We often hear chefs on TV use this French word in professional kitchens, but what does it mean?
Directly translated, cuisson simply means “to cook” or “how well something is cooked”. But in professional kitchens, we use it to describe something cooked to perfection – its doneness, texture and final degree of cooking.
For me, cuisson is all about temperature. While it’s most associated with meat, it applies just as much to fish, vegetables – anything, really. Perfect cuisson on asparagus means it still has some bite and is juicy. For cod, it’s all about separated flakes and that pearlescent sheen in the middle. It’s a balance between being cooked through and retaining the best possible texture.
In recent years, Instagram has completely reshaped how we view cuisson. There’s been a growing obsession with “edge-to-edge” doneness – where meat is uniformly pink from side to side without any grey banding. It looks fantastic in photos, but the reality is, some chefs now focus more on looks than taste. Too often, meat is lightly seared, quickly rested, and served just to achieve that aesthetic.