Cooking Tips Part Two: Sizzle and Sear

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Last week, in Slice and Simmer, we talked about how to prepare food on a cutting board and put it in a crock pot (or maybe one of these new-fangled Instant Pots). We were tired with all that learning, and we didn’t want to work over a hot stove just then. This week, let’s brace up and get into the hot stove stuff.

Here’s a rudimentary list of home-cooking techniques ranked by temperature in Fahrenheit:

  • Fermentation: “cellar temperature”, about 60
  • Drying/Salting: room temperature or maybe a little warmer
  • Smoking: about 170 to 200
  • Boiling Water: 212 at sea level, too many techniques to list
  • Pressure Cooker: around 240
  • Oil Cooking (Stovetop Pan or Deep Fry): 350-450
  • Roasting: 350-450
  • Searing/Browning Meat: 400-800 (This includes pan-frying, grilling, and blackening)
  • Baking: 350-500
  • Candymaking: somewhere in the high 400s

This series is focused on good people who happen to know nothing about cooking, to show the way to maximum food and survival value with minimum investment and risk. This next bit of advice takes some investment: learn to cook in a pan on your stovetop. Learn to cook in oil and sear meat on the stovetop.

Last week we talked about Student Stew. We suggested that stewing things like onions and meat would produce edible food. That’s true; it will. But processing at higher temperature produces a whole new level of food value that is worth it.

Suppose you stew an onion. The cell walls will soften and the onion will release its characteristic sulfury flavor. Nothing wrong with that.

But if you sizzle sliced onion in oil, you get this other thing called Caramelization. The starches in the onion convert into sugars, and the sugars start to melt down into caramel. Short-order professional cooks sizzle raw onions long enough to convert the starches to sugar, and maybe enough to see a little browning. That’s enough cooking to see a total transformation in food value.

Likewise with meat. Stewing will cook meat more or less okay, but at higher heat you get Maillard reactions, named for the chemist-chef who figured out what the protein and sugar were doing. Normally it’s called browning or searing meat. It smells wonderful, and it gives a better mouth feel than meat which is merely stewed.

Oil-cooking temperatures are also excellent for developing flavors from fresh herbs and spices. Garlic in particular doesn’t cook and is even kind of offensive if stewed or eaten raw. Roasting or stove-top temperatures make garlic sweet and digestible.

Oil-temperature cooking on the stovetop is done in what is called a pan. It may seem condescending to place so much emphasis on such a common word, but the meaning of the word pan is vast; it contains multitudes. Men have died over differences of opinion with regard to the pan, and in seeking a pan of your own you will find your options to be panoptional, with the occasional flame war breaking out.

So let’s break it down to the basics. The most stylish pans are called saute pans, and they look more or less like this:

“Saute” is the French word for “jump”, which refers to the practice of tossing and flipping ingredients one-handed. Saute pans come in a variety of shapes and sizes, with a shallowish nine-inch pan being common. The handle is a separate piece of metal riveted onto the cooking vessel; the handle may be slender or hollow, either way it won’t get hot. Restaurants commonly use inexpensive aluminum pans; discerning chefs use stainless-steel pans with copper inlays in the base to distribute heat more evenly. You can spend anything from six to six-hundred dollars on a saute pan; it doesn’t make a lot of difference.

Saute pans are great in a restaurant, because you can run as many as six burners at once. The cool, ergonomic handles of the pans let you keep the food moving without needing a hot pad or a spatula. And the flipping action is stylish and fun, though you will drop a few shrimp on the floor in the learning process.

Despite all these fashionable advantages, I prefer a cast-iron skillet for home cooking:

It’s possible to flip and toss in a skillet, but the ergonomics aren’t great and the skillet is much heavier than a saute pan. The short handle is the same piece of metal as the vessel, so the grip gets scorching hot. You need a hot pad or dry dish towel just to shake the pan around.

But for home cooking the skillet has advantages:

  • Easier temperature control (The skillet is massive and iron conducts heat slowly, something like ten times slower than copper.)
  • Forgiving cooking surface (Iron doesn’t like to stick, and with a little care it can be made slick.)
  • Larger capacity (A ten-inch skillet will hold about twice as much food as a 9-inch saute pan.)
  • Versatile (Try making bacon, burgers or pancakes in a saute pan!)

The cooking surface of cast iron requires its own kind of maintenance. The key word with cast iron is seasoning. Here, I’ll just let Lodge explain it:

When oils or fats are heated in cast iron at a high enough temperature, they change from a wet liquid into a slick, hardened surface through a process called polymerization. This reaction creates a layer of seasoning that is molecularly bonded to the iron. Without this layer of carbonized oil, iron cookware would corrode and rust due to the oxygen and moisture in the air.

The seasoning protects against rust and also forms a slick, glossy-black cooking surface which resists stickage. The seasoning in your skillet improves with use as more oil is polymerized into the seasoning.

Some people get really invested in their skillets’ seasoning, and at least one marriage was called off because some poor sap used soap to wash out great-granny’s heirloom skillet. Don’t wash cast iron with soap.

If someone does wash your skillet with soap, or you burn the seasoning off your skillet, or you have a brand-new or bare-metal skillet you got somewhere, you’ll want to do a “preseasoning” procedure. If that’s your predicament, you can get no better advice than from Cowboy Kent Rollins:

Just had to put that last one in there! Cowboy Kent Rollins’s hash browns are heaven, I can tell you. There’s something about Rollins himself, too, the guy is a wellspring almost of spiritual comfort. If you’re in the market for recipes and techniques, Cowboy Kent can demonstrate.

Okay, so you’ve got yourself a skillet. Now what?

The basic concept is, you get the pan hot, you add oil and get the oil hot, and then you add ingredients. The ingredients will sizzle and it’s important to keep them moving so they won’t overcook on one side. Shake the skillet and stir with a fork or spatula to keep things moving. This technique will caramelize onions, cook garlic, or sear meat that has been cut up or ground. It’s simple enough and it adds a lot of flavor.

Beyond that, there’s a template for saute cooking (yeah, I’m just going to call it sauteeing from now on, even though it’s in cast iron)

  • Preheat pan / heat oil
  • Add onions and start caramelization
  • Add meat and sear (Meat can be anything from cubed lamb to mushrooms.)
  • Keep everything moving and add oil as necessary to continue caramelization and searing
  • Add minced garlic and herbs (in hot oil, these ingredients will cook in seconds)
  • Cook down until the food almost starts to stick
  • Deglaze with alcohol
  • Add liquid
  • Reduce liquid
  • Finish

There are thousands of recipes that follow this template; limitless possibilities arising from a simple set of techniques. Whatever ingredients you have on hand, whatever flavor you have a wild hair for, you can plug it into this formula and it will make food. Selecting some ingredients at random, let’s make

Shrimp in Creamy Garlic Sauce

Pre-heat the pan until it is hot. Add oil. When oil is shimmering hot, add julienned onions.

Once the onions are sizzling and starting to look clear, add peeled, deveined shrimp. Toss and cook until the shrimp are seared and beginning to cook through.

Add minced garlic, basil and chives. Toss and cook until the garlic appears snow-white, about 15 seconds.

Deglaze with white wine. (What’s deglaze? In the high-heat part of the process, a lot of sugars and aromatics and Maillard reaction products are released or produced. At the same time, the food is cooked to the point where it starts to stick. Much concentrated flavor ends up glued to the pan. Alcohol is a solvent. It dissolves this glue, returns all that flavor to the mix, and gets everything unstuck. The alcohol itself rapidly boils off.)

Add fish stock and heavy cream. Return to a boil and reduce. (Reduce just means you boil or simmer a liquid to remove water and thicken it.)

Once the bubbles in the cream sauce are large, finish with Romano cheese. (A cream sauce like this is an emulsion of creamy fat and water. One way to stiffen or thicken this emulsion is to boil away water. Another way is to add fat. A little cheese, stirred in, will thicken this sauce right up.)

Remove from heat and serve. (When you reduce and finish an emulsion, the sauce gets very “tight”. Continued heating at this point can cause the emulsion to break, leaving an oily, watery mess.)

Pro Tip: Have everything handy when you start. Working in a pan at sautee temperatures, events unfold rapidly and need constant attention. When you have a pan sizzling on the stove is not an opportune time to mince garlic or run to the pantry. Have that wine bottle within reach.

That’s all for now, see you next week!