Dry Heat Cooking Methods

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.

Exam Time!

I think it is time to take a few minutes and explain how my classes are organized. The culinary arts program is made up of six modules, each of which is divided into individual courses. At the end of each course we take a written exam and at the end of the module we take a practical exam. Friday was the last day of our first module. In the next module we will be covering:

Course 4- dry heat cooking methods

Course 5- moist heat cooking methods, vegetable preparations, grains, and legumes

Course 6- breakfast cookery, salads, and sandwiches.

The focus of module three is world cuisines, with an emphasis on France, Italy, and Asia. Module four is all about pastry, module five is about contemporary cooking and garde manger, and module six is the externship. Our class is assigned a different chef for each module (except for module six where we get to work in a restaurant kitchen of our choice).

So, as I said before, Friday was the last day of mod one, which means it was time for both a written and a practical exam. For the practical exam I had to medium dice potatoes, make mayonnaise, and make broccoli soup.

It turned out to be a really good day for knife skills because my medium dice potatoes have never been better. My mayonnaise turned out to have way too much vinegar so I ended up screwing the recipe and kept added oil until it tasted right. In addition, while I diced potatoes and made mayonnaise, I also had to blanch broccoli florets for the soup.

The key to making a successful broccoli soup is blanching your florets correctly. If they are undercooked, the soup will not purée properly. If they are overcooked, the soup will not be green enough. Remember, you should always blanch green vegetables in lots of salted, boiling water and be prepared to shock them in an ice bath once they reach the correct doneness.

Here is the recipe I used during the exam:

1 oz butter (which is about 2 tbs)

1.5 oz onions, diced

4 oz broccoli stems, peeled and thinly sliced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 oz flour (which is about 2 tbs)

1 3/4 cups chicken stock

1/4 cup heavy cream

Sachet (parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and whole black peppercorns tied into a cheesecloth)

8 oz broccoli florets, blanched and shocked (3-4 minutes)

Salt, to taste

• Melt the butter in a small sauce pan
• Add onion, broccoli stems, and a pinch of salt, cook 3-4 minutes without developing any color
• Add minced garlic, cook 30 seconds, stirring
• Add flour, cook 1-2 minutes, stirring (you're making a mini-roux)
• Whisk in 1/3 of the stock and bring it to a boil
• Add the rest of the stock and bring it back to a boil while whisking
• Add the cream and sachet
• Bring the soup to a boil again and simmer 25-30 minutes
• Heat broccoli florets in soup, 1 minute
• Remove sachet
• Transfer soup to blender and purée until completely smooth
• Taste and adjust seasoning
• Serve immediately

*Makes about 2 servings

Contemporary Sauces

I really enjoyed todays lesson. Our class was split up into 3 three groups and each group had to make five recipes to be presented at the end of the class. The contemporary sauces were also fun because they had fresh flavors that seem more applicable to the present food culture. We made Roasted Tomato Coulis, Corn and Red Pepper Relish, Rosemary and Basil Infused Oil, Mango Chutney, and Tomatillo Salsa. The last two were my favorite so I'm going to share the recipes with you.

Mango Chutney

-Makes 1 pint

10 oz sugar

4 fl oz white wine vinegar

1 tsp garlic, minced

1 tbs peeled ginger, minced

1 tsp dry mustard

1 tsp brown mustard seeds

1/4 tsp ground cloves

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

3 mangoes, peeled and diced into 1" cubes

2 oz dark raisins

3 oz slivered almonds

• Combine the first set of ingredients in a medium saucepan
• Bring the mixture to a boil and let simmer, stirring often to prevent burning
• Add the mango pieces and cook until the mango is translucent and the syrup is thick
• Remove the chutney from the heat
• Add the raisins and slivered almonds
• Cool before serving

The chutney is really sweet so either plan to eat it with something spicy (such as spicy black beans and rice) or add less sugar to the syrup.

Tomatillo Salsa

-Makes 1 pint

1 lb tomatillos

2 jalapeños

3 oz yellow onion in large pieces

3 tbs cilantro, minced

1 tbs cider vinegar

2 tbs EVOO

1/2 tsp sugar

Salt and pepper, to taste

• Roast tomatillos, jalapeños, and onions on a grill or in the oven
• Peel and chop tomatillos, jalapeños, and onions (alternatively you could just combine everything in the food processor)
• Mix with cilantro, cider vinegar, EVOO, and sugar
• Adjust seasoning

The Mother Sauces

These five sauces plus all of their derivative sauces make up the essence of French cooking. Understanding the techniques used to make them is important but in general, they take a lot of time and really, who has three hours to make dinner?

Brown veal stock is the base for Espagnole (aka brown sauce) and it is thickened with brown roux. In class, the Espagnole was reduced to make an old world demi-glace which was then used to make a fortified wine sauce. Unfortunately, I was out of town on the day we made derivative sauces but I tasted the final product and it was delicious.

The definition of Velouté is any white stock thickened with a blond roux. I would never serve velouté as is because it’s basically a bland gravy but I image the derivate sauces are pretty good.

Béchamel is the base sauce for Mornay, which makes an absolutely delicious macaroni and cheese. Here is the recipe we used in class:

*Most of the recipes we use in class will have ingredients measured out by weight because it is much more accurate. Starting next week I will be posting a lot of recipes so if you want to make any of them I suggest you invest in a scale.

3 oz butter

3 oz flour

1 quart milk

6-8 swipes nutmeg

Small piece onion

1 bay leaf

2 cloves

1 cup cream

4 oz Gruyere, grated

4 oz Parmigiano-Reggiano

Salt and pepper, to taste

• Melt butter in a medium sized sauce pan
• Add flour and stir constantly over medium heat for 2-3 minutes (you just made a roux!)
• Add 1 cup of milk and bing it to a boil while whisking
• Add another cup of milk and bring it to a boil while whisking
• Add the rest of the milk and bring it to a boil (the last three steps are important to prevent the sauce from becoming clumpy)
• Tie the onion, bay leaf, and cloves into a piece of cheesecloth and add it to the sauce with the nutmeg and a pinch of salt
• Simmer the sauce about 20 minutes and then remove the cheesecloth
• Add the cream and bring the sauce back up to a boil
• Remove the sauce from the heat and stir in the cheeses
• Season with salt and pepper
• Whisk the sauce until it is smooth
• Use immediately

The final sauce if very welcoming to other flavors so add your favorite herb, your favorite vegetable, and some pasta. I’m sure it will be delicious.

Tomato sauce and Hollandaise are the last two mother sauces. Making the hollandaise required a lot of whisking but having a sore arm was totally worth it. My favorite Chef Chris quote of the day was, “You can buy love! It comes in the form of eggs benedict with a perfect hollandaise .”

Understanding Roux

Starch is a very important molecule. Plants store the energy they generate by photosynthesis as starch and pass this energy on to humans thus contributing to about 75% of our caloric intake as a population. A molecule of starch is a chain of thousands of glucose molecules linked together as either long straight chains or highly branched polymers.

In hot water, starch granules absorb large amounts of water and swell up. Eventually, the granules lose their organized structure and form a mesh-like network which creates viscosity by slowing the movement of water. So in cooking, starch is important because it acts as a thickening agent. Starch can come from grains in the form of flour, cornstarch, or rice starch, and it can come from roots and tubers in the form of arrowroot, potato starch, or tapioca.

Let's say we are trying to thicken a sauce. If we add the starch directly to the hot liquid than the molecules will stick together and make our sauce lumpy. One way to avoid this problem is to form a slurry by mixing equal amounts (by weight) of starch and cold water to disperse the granules before they are heated and start to swell. In class we made two slurries; one with cornstarch and one with arrowroot. To thicken our sauce with a slurry we would bring the sauce to a boil and slowly drizzle in the slurry while stirring. The finished sauce should be used relatively quickly because a slurry is not very stable. Two tablespoons of slurry will thicken about one cup of liquid.

A more stable sauce can be produced by thickening with a roux. Roux is made by mixing equal amounts (by weight) of butter and flour, and then cooking it to get rid of the raw cereal taste. The word roux is derived from the French word for red because as the mixture cooks it develops color (although I personally would not call it red). There are three types of roux: white, blonde, and brown. If we wanted to thicken our sauce with roux, we would melt the butter in small pot and then add the flour before the butter became too hot. We would stir the roux constantly while cooking it over medium heat and add it to our sauce when it reached the appropriate color. As the color of a roux becomes darker it starts to lose some of its thickening power and it takes on nutty and toasted flavors. Four to six ounces of roux will thicken one quart of liquid.

There are three classic "mother sauces" that are thickened with roux: Béchamel, Espagnole, and Velouté. Guess what three sauces we're making in class tomorrow?

Anatomy and Physiology

I have always wanted to take an anatomy class and although I missed out on my opportunity while I was in college, the last week of culinary school has felt like a crash course. The first day of meat fabrication wasn't too bad because we were working with poultry and having an entire chicken or duck on your cutting board makes identifying anatomy easier. Unfortunately, growing up as a vegetarian has resulted in me having incredibly limited knowledge and experience when it comes to working with meat. When we moved on to working with primal cuts of beef, veal, pork, and lamb, I was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of raw meat on my cutting board. It's also a lot more difficult to identify an animals anatomy when you're only given the loin or a Boston Butt (which it turns out, actually comes from a pigs shoulder).

Knowing where on an animal each cut of meat is coming from is important because it determines both the type of flesh and the type of cooking method that would best enhance its texture and flavor. For example, from the loin primal cut of beef you get the short loin, the tenderloin, the round, and the flank. The tenderloin comes from a muscle called psoas major which sits beneath the ribs right next to the backbone. It does almost no work and is probably the most tender piece of meat you can find on a cow. The fact that the tenderloin doesn't do much for the cow means that a cut such as filet mignon, which comes from the small forward end of the tenderloin, has very little flavor. Mario Batali says, "Filet mignon is the Paris Hilton of meats. There's nothing there...everyone wants a piece of it but no one knows why".* In contrast, the flank has more flavor because it is part of the cows abdominal muscles which are used more often. Achieving good texture from a flank steak requires a moist heat cooking method such as braising.

The day we were working with veal was a little scary because Chef Chris was constantly reminding us that if we screwed up we would ruin $180 worth of meat. I learned how to prepare a rack from the foresaddle and then cut some massive veal chops which we will be stuffing with fontina cheese and porcini mushrooms in a later lesson.

All of the trimming and bones that we collected from our meat fabrication was used to make stocks. Tomorrow we are straining the last of our stocks and on Thursday we will be using them as we start our unit on sauces.

*Chewing the Fat: Batali and Bourdain on Paris Hilton

Fonds de Cuisine

I hope I never have to kill another lobster. Although stabbing it through the head with a knife is much kinder than boiling the lobster alive, just the thought of it gives me shivers. Worse than killing the lobster though was trying to dismember it while it was still twitching. Ugh...it was a rough day, but overall I'm glad I had the experience because I believe that if I am going to eat something I should know where it came from and how it got on my plate. I'm also glad that I do not like the taste of lobster.

In general, shellfish, crustaceans, and cephalopods (octopus and squid) all creep me out. In todays class we learned how to clean and prepare clams, oysters, mussels, scallops, shrimp, and calamari. I ate my first raw oyster and its wasn't too bad, although it mostly tasted like the mignonette sauce that I ate it with.

Today was also the day first day of our education in making stock. Stocks, aka fonds de cuisine, truly are the foundations of French cooking because they are used as the basis for almost every sauce. By definition, a stock is a flavorful liquid prepared by simmering bones from meat, poultry, or seafood, and mirepoix (2 parts onion, 1 part carrots, 1 part celery), in water with aromatics.* I confess the only reason I am telling you all this information is because I have to memorize it for my exam next week and writing about it helps me to remember it, but hopefully you will find it a least a little bit interesting.

There are two basic types of stock: white stock and brown stock. The main difference is in a brown stock you brown the bones and mirepoix in the oven before simmering them. You also add tomato paste in a process called pinçage, which is just a fancy word that means to brown or caramelize a tomato product.* Today we made white fish stock, shrimp stock, and lobster stock, but today was just the beginning. Next week we are making vegetable stock, mushroom stock, brown duck stock, chicken stock, white veal stock, brown veal stock, white rabbit stock, and pork stock. Just looking at that list is daunting because making stock is a lot of work: cleaning the bones, chopping the mirepoix, skimming constantly, straining the stock, and washing the dishes. A good stock is both beautiful and delicious, so even though it's a lot of work, it's definitely worth it.

*The Professional Chef, 8th Edition from The Culinary Institute of America