Name of this process?

Question

Dear All,I need to find the name of the cooking process you can see in the below picture:(The aim is to put small drops of the yet uncooked pasta or other material in the hot water/soup below so that you get small pieces of the material instead of one big piece, like here:)Could you let me know, please, what you call this process? Thanks in advance.

Supanova7 · Accepted Answer

I think the process you're after is called mincing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincing

Anonymous · Answer

Hi Supanova, and thank you. But are you sure there isn't another, more suitable term for it? Because it is neither cutting, nor chopping, nor grinding, as far as I know the meaning of these words, but rather akin to grating... In fact it is grating, it's just that you have a less solid mass and you hold the grater horizontally, and what comes out of it falls right into the boiling water/soup. Perhaps this is the word I'm looking for...

What do you or others think?

Thank you.

Khoff · Answer

You're talking about the process of making spaetzle or something similar, right? Here's what Wikipedia says about it:

"Traditionally, Spätzle are made by scraping dough off a wooden chopping board ("Spätzlebrett") into boiling salt water where they cook until they rise to the surface. They are then skimmed and put aside.
Since this can be a cumbersome way to prepare spätzle, several devices were invented to facilitate cooking that resemble a strainer, (or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colander), a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_ricer ("Spätzlepresse"), a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_mill or coarse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grater ("Spätzlehobel"). As with scraped Spätzle, the dough drops into the boiling water."

You could use the word "ricing,"
(Wikipedia: "Ricing is a term meaning to pass food through a or "ricer", which comes in several forms. In the most basic, food is pushed or pressured through a metal or plastic plate with many small holes, producing a smoother result than mashing, but coarser than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pur%C3%A9e or passing through a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamis. The size of the product produced by ricing is about the same as grains of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice."

but it might refer to a smaller end product than you have in mind.

Grating is probably the best term available. The process you are referring to would be so unfamiliar to most American cooks that you would have to describe it anyway. You could say something like "she grated the dough directly into the soup pot to form the spaetzle." or "now press the dough through a ricer/grater/colander, letting the pieces fall into the water."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato

Edited to add: I have no idea why there is a link to an article about potatoes, or how to delete it!

Name of this process?

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