I am about to write the two longest posts in the history of the world in an attempt to make up for the last month in which I have successfully avoided updating this blog. As I was saying back in early December, before Christmas and New Years festivities took over my life, the beginning of module two was all about dry heat cooking methods. This includes sautéing, pan-frying, deep frying, grilling, and roasting.
Although we follow recipes in class, every recipe is designed to teach techniques and methods so the focus of each class is not really on the recipes. After three days of sautéing, where the exact same steps are followed in the exact same order every time, the recipe becomes more like a list of ingredients than a set of directions. In keeping with the same model, I plan to share the methodology of each technique rather than give you a giant list of recipes (and if you really want the recipe for a particular dish just ask and I will be more than happy to provide it).
Sautéing
Sauté is a dry heat cooking method in which you are trying to create a golden brown, caramelized exterior and a moist, juicy interior. Only naturally tender foods should be sautéed and the goal is to maintain that tenderness throughout the cooking process. In order to get caramelization to occur, the food must be dry and the oil must be hot. It is best to use an oil such as canola because it has a high smoke point and the heat required for a good sauté will not cause it to break down.
Step one: dry off your meat with a paper towel. I can't over-emphasize how important this is because without a dry surface the food won't be sautéing, it will be steaming. Season the meat generously with salt and pepper. If you are trying to limit your salt intake, this would still be the time to season your food (although probably not generously) because salt and pepper added at the beginning of cooking will bring out the inherent flavors of the food where as added at the end they will simply taste like salt and pepper.
NY Strip Steak
Heat just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan over a medium-high flame. The purpose of the oil is to evenly conduct heat from the pan to your food. Without enough oil the food will stick to the pan, cook unevenly, and it might even burn. The majority of the oil will be left in the pan after sautéing, so you don't have to worry about ingesting it if you don't want to. As a general rule of thumb, a medium sized sauté pan will require about 1 tbs of oil.
When the meat goes into the pan it should immediately start sizzling. In addition to sounding delicious, this sizzle is important because it is the sound of moisture evaporating from the surface of the meat. To test if the oil is hot enough, just touch the corner of the meat to the pan and listen for sizzling. If the meat sticks to the pan at all than the oil still isn't hot enough.
Once the meat is in the pan, all you need to do is maintain the temperature so you can turn down the flame a little to prevent your food from burning. To develop good caramelization, peek once or twice to see when the food is ready to turn, but turn it only once. Chicken and fish should be a nice golden brown color like in the picture below while red meat should develop a deep mahogany brown color before being turned.
Sautéed Chicken Breast
At this point the method changes depending on the thickness of the cut and the type of meat being cooked. You can see from the picture above that my chicken is still raw on the inside after being seared. To cook it through, I only partially caramelized it on the stove and then put the whole pan into a 400°F oven to let it finish cooking. Chicken needs to be cooked to an internal temperature of 165°F, but you should take it out of the oven when it reaches about 160°F because the chicken will continue to cook as it rests; this is called carryover cooking The best way to be sure the chicken has reached the correct temperature is to measure it with a thermometer. But after measuring a couple times, you should be able to tell if the chicken is done just by pressing on it.
When cooking a thinner cut of meat or something that will be served rare or medium-rare, like the lamb below, there is no need to finish cooking in the oven. Searing on the stove and resting for the appropriate amount of time should be enough.
Sautéed Loin of Lamb with Pan Sauce
I never realized how important it is to allow meat to rest after cooking. When the meat is cooking, the proteins coagulate (lose their structure) and squeeze moisture both towards the center of the meat and towards the surface of meat. Letting the meat rest allows the moist to redistribute itself throughout the meat so that when you cut into your beautiful steak the juices don't leek all over your plate. You should generally let meat rest for half the amount of its cooking time. So, if it took me 6 minutes to cook my strip steak I would let it rest for about 3 minutes before serving it. If you need more evidence, check out this experiment on the importance of resting meat.
Sautéed Strip Steak with Pan Sauce
In traditional French cooking, meat is served with a pan sauce built around any of the flavors left in the pan after the meat is finished being sautéed. I thought the pan sauces we made in class tasted delicious but unless you take the time to make really good quality veal stock and chicken stock at home, your pan sauce won't thicken properly. A better alternate for home cooking would be to make a sauce on the side. When we sautéed salmon, rather than making a pan sauce, we prepared a salsa verde. It tasted very green and its acid offset the fattiness of the salmon very nicely.
Sautéed Tranche of Salmon with Salsa Verde
(Tranche is a French word which means slice or portion of; in this case, a piece of a fillet)
Pan-Frying
I always assumed that pan-frying and sautéing were essentially the same thing. It turns out that even though they use similar pans and pan-frying only uses a little bit more oil, the two methods are completely different.
Pan-Fried Suprême of Chicken
Pan-fried foods are generally passed through what is known as standard breading procedure. This involves seasoning the food well, lightly dredging it in flour, dipping it into an egg wash or buttermilk, and coating it with breadcrumbs. Other ingredient such as nuts, seeds, ground spices, garlic paste, or chopped herbs could be used instead of breadcrumbs. The goal is to produce a crust that will seal the surface of the food and prevent it from releasing its juices. This causes the food on the inside of the crust to be steamed which creates a moist flavorful interior. The crust is also important because it produces that crispy texture people find so satisfying when they eat fried foods.
Crab Cakes with Avocado Sauce
When selecting a pan for frying, make sure it is big enough to comfortably hold the food in a single layer without crowding. If the items are too close together when placed in the pan, the oil temperature will drop to quickly and the food will not develop a good crust.
Before the food goes into the pan, the oil needs to be heated to the point where it has a slight shimmer. There should be enough oil in the pan to come about half way up the sides of the item. When you add the food, tilt the pan away from you to prevent any hot oil that sizzles up to splatter you. Especially thick items may not cook though in the time it take the crust to brown so they can also be finished in the oven. Before serving any fried food, drain the excess oil on paper towels.
Tostones with Cuban Mojo Sauce
Deep Frying
Welcome to deep fried day! This was probably the most unhealthy day of the entire program, but I survived and I even managed to eat some broccoli (deep fried of course).
In general, deep fried foods have many similar characteristics to pan-fried foods; a crispy, browned crust and a moist interior. Differences in the technique between the two methods seem to be a matter of convenience more than anything else. Deep frying requires a large amount of oil and is good for cooking voluminous amounts of food because the oil can be reused several times. But can you imagine heating up a gallon of oil just to fry up a piece of chicken for dinner?That would be a huge waste of time, energy, and resources, which is why I would pan-fry my chicken instead. However, if I was cooking for a crowd I would much rather dump everything into the deep fryer instead of standing at the stove flipping each piece of food individually.
Southern Fried Chicken
Deep fried foods can either be breaded or coated in a batter. Foods should be battered immediately before frying where as breading can be done a couple hours in advance. Certain foods, like fries, are usually double fried. The first time at a lower temperature to cook the potato through and the second time at a higher temperature to brown and crisp the outside. Something like fried chicken could also be double fried to produce a crispier texture.
Fried Oysters
I guess I lied when I said I wasn't going to share any recipes while talking about techniques. The tempura that we made was so delicious that I ended up eating two heads of broccoli for breakfast. I personally didn't like the dipping sauce because it make the tempura soggy, but other people in my class like it so I"ll share that recipe too. At some point I would like to experiment with adding wasabi powder to the tempura batter but until I develop my own recipe here is the one we used in class.
Broccoli Tempura with Wasabi-Soy Dipping Sauce
Yield: 2 servings
10 broccoli spears, trimmed
2 1/2 oz corn starch
2 1/2 oz rice flour
1 oz all purpose flour
1 egg yolk
1 tsp salt
Cold seltzer, as needed
Canola oil for deep frying, as needed
4 fl oz water
2 fl oz soy sauce
1 fl oz mirin (type of rice wine for cooking)
1 tsp fresh ginger, minced
1 tsp wasabi paste
- Heat canola oil to 375 degrees
- Combine the ingredients for the dipping sauce and let flavors blend for at least 30 minutes
- Whisk corn starch, rice flour, all purpose flour, egg yolk, and salt with enough cold seltzer to form a thin batter
- Dip the broccoli spears into the tempura batter and fry until lightly golden and crisp
- Drain on paper towels
- Serve with dipping sauce
Grilling
Grilled Vegetables
The high temperature associated with grilling both produces very intense flavors and makes cooking difficult. In class we only had two days of grilling and I didn't quite get the hang of it. We were using cast iron grill pans on top of the stove and I had a really hard time maintaining the correct temperature on the grill. Either my food would cook too quickly and be completely charred on the outside before it cooked though or it would cook too slowly and never develop good grill marks.
Grilled Salmon Tranche
Both grilling and broiling cook food with radiant heat. In grilling the heat source is below the food while in broiling the heat source is above the food. In both techniques very little flavor is lost because some of the juices will get reduced directly on the food. In addition, before grilling food is often marinated which also adds a lot of flavor.
Grilled Pork Chops with Roasted Poblano and Cactus Salad
I'm not going to tell you much more about grilling because like I said before, I never quite figured out the technique. But as with all techniques, it is important to take into account carryover cooking and rest meat for the appropriate amount of time before it is served.
Grilled Shrimp Brochette
Roasting
Roasted Rack of Lamb Persillade
This is the last of our dry heat cooking methods. In roasting, food is cooked by heat conducted through the air. The outer layers of the food cook first while the inner layers are cooked by steam produced from the foods natural juices.
Roasted Chicken
The chicken that we roasted in class was stuffed with lemon slices, onions, cloves of garlic, and bay leaves. We spread butter and rosemary under the skin and seasoned it with salt and pepper. It was roasted on a bed of mirepoix (onions, carrots, and celery) instead of on a roasting rack. This allowed the chicken to roast more evenly and prevented it from sitting in its own drippings. It was rotated every 15 minutes and took just under an hour to roast at 400°F. The only way to be sure the chicken was cooked through was to measure its internal temperature with an instant read thermometer. The magic number for chicken is always 165°F. While the chicken was resting we used the pan drippings to make a gravy that was served on the side.
Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Orange and Sage
I sadly missed the second day of roasting because I was in a rush to get home and start my Christmas break. Luckily roasting is one of the easiest techniques we learned and almost everything I made for Christmas dinner was roasted so got a lot of practice anyways.
No comments:
Post a Comment