Ruhlman's Twenty (36 page)

7
/Strain through a fine-mesh strainer into a clean pan.

8
/Serve this soup in cups to sip.

“SAUTÉ,” CHEF PARDUS SAID TO MY
class at the Culinary Institute to begin that day’s lecture, “is a
blast.
Sauté is where the action is on a Saturday night. Sauté is where you guys all want to be in about three years, right? Sauté is the next step to sous chef. Sauté is the guy who’s juggling eight or ten pans at a time, makin’ flames, makin’ things jump. Sauté is the hot seat.”

But then he paused. The eloquent, excitable chef transformed into donnish professor, turning to an easel with the lesson’s talking bullets, his wooden spoon a pointer: “Sauté is: a rapid,
à la minute
cooking technique. It has no tenderizing effect, so the product has to be tender. You cannot
sauté
a lamb shank. The cooking is fast. That’s why it’s so much fun. Bing bang boom, it goes out the door. In a small amount of oil. Over high heat.”

That was my introduction to this particular cooking technique, in the bold strokes that begin any education. And as time went on, as should happen in any education, my understanding deepened, increment by increment, by sautéing and paying attention, and thinking about it and asking people questions. Shortly before I left the Culinary Institute of America to write
The Making of a Chef,
I interviewed its president at the time, 1996, Ferdinand Metz. We were discussing what a culinary education was all about, what defined it.

Ultimately, he said, it was about the basics. “Do I understand the basics?” he said.

“So in sautéing,” he went on immediately, “you could say, my God, there are probably ten different temperature levels of sautéing. Some things need a very harsh level; others need a very soft level that almost generates moisture. Whether it’s chicken or bacon, all those things require different levels.”

It was that moment, there in an office, that I took another step forward. I’d never considered that we sauté bacon. It may be a matter of semantics, but the truth is, words do matter and we do need to know varying levels of heat when we sauté. I sauté steak at a different temperature than I sauté julienned zucchini/courgettes. And this is why sauté is one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, of the techniques to master. Sautéing requires more judgment, is dependent on more nuance, than any of the other techniques in this section.

Chef Pardus was right in all that he said, but nothing in cooking is absolute. Learning the varying heat levels of sauté is critical, as are other factors such as the material on which you’re sautéing, the size of the pan you’re using, and the state of whatever it is you’re sautéing: Is it straight from the refrigerator or has it tempered? Has it been salted? Is it moist or dry?

The word itself comes from the French verb
sauter,
“to jump,” and referred to what chefs do when they’re cooking a lot of small items in a pan: they toss them into the air and catch them in the pan as an easy way of stirring. We now refer to anything cooked in a pan on the stove top using a small amount of oil or butter as being sautéed. We sauté a chicken breast even though we’re not jumping it.

But
sauté
is a good word. It connotes movement, action, speed. We often use the word
fry
as a synonym for sauté, which is acceptable, I suppose, but I prefer to use the word
fry
to denote plenty of oil at high heat
(see technique #19).
Frying is always done at a high temperature and uses plenty of fat. Sauté can be done at many temperatures and uses minimal fat.

Also, frying can be done in a pan with straight or sloping sides, but usually straight sides. Sautéing is done in a pan with sloping sides. (Pan nomenclature is inconsistent from company to company. All-Clad, for instance, calls a pan with sloping sides a frying pan; I call it a sauté pan. In culinary school we were taught that a pan with sloping sides, a sauté pan, is a
sauteuse,
and a shallow pan with straight sides is a
sautoire.
It’s a useful distinction.) Use clean stainless-steel pans for almost all sautéing
(see Appendix for more on pans)
. Sloping sides not only allow for the cook to jump sautéed peas in the pan, but also allow for circulation around what’s being cooked, which carries the cooling moisture away. When using a small amount of oil for high-heat cooking, use a pan with sloping sides. This is less critical with lower temperature sautés.

While the venerable Mr. Metz suggested there were ten temperature levels, I think it’s most useful to break them down into three levels.

The first and most common level is high heat. The reason for sautéing at a high temperature is to create flavor in the form of a good seared exterior, a crust. To do this, we want the fat as hot as it can get before it starts to smoke, between 350° and 450°F/180° and 230°C, depending on the fat you’re using. Vegetable oils get hotter than animal fat (lard, clarified butter, or chicken fat, for instance). The smoke point, when fat begins to smoke, is the point at which it starts to break down; the oil degrades and begins to release flammable fumes, and any food cooked in that fat will taste acrid. This is bad for the food, and it is dangerous if the fat ignites (if this happens to you, don’t panic; just put a lid on the pan).

For this last reason, it’s a good idea to heat your clean, dry pan first, then add your oil. You can add your oil to a cold pan, but this increases the chance that you will become distracted by other kitchen work and forget about the pan on the stove until you see or smell the smoke or, worse, a pan aflame. When you add oil to a hot pan, the oil heats very quickly. You don’t want to add too much oil, but you don’t want to add too little, either. If you add too little oil, the meat can cool the oil and pan down so much that the meat will stick.

The next stage of good high-heat sautéing is knowing when to put the food into the pan. If you haven’t heated the pan and the oil enough, the food can stick to the pan. More important, the food can steam rather than brown, and browning is the main reason for high-heat sautéing.

Learn to gauge the heat of the oil by sight. How does it behave when it hits the pan? Is it slow and viscous (if so, the pan is not that hot)? Does it immediately begin moving quickly and fluidly in the pan (indicating it is very hot)? Or does it immediately start smoking (it’s too hot!)? High-heat sautéing should be done when the oil is very hot. It shouldn’t start smoking on contact with the pan, but instead should begin to ripple and wave in perceptible currents.

The next phase of good high-heat sautéing is putting the meat in the pan. The meat should already have been taken from the refrigerator and seasoned with salt at least a half hour earlier so that it can absorb the salt and also temper, that is, have a chance to warm up a little to ensure more even cooking. Look at the meat. Is it dry or is it sitting in a puddle of juices? This is very important. If wet meat goes into the hot oil, the moisture will drop the temperature of the oil immediately, preventing browning and potentially causing the meat to stick to the pan. If it’s damp, pat it dry before putting it into the pan. Some chefs even like to give the meat a very fine dusting of flour to ensure that the surface is completely dry and to give the browning a little more complexity. Don’t use too much; if flour falls off the meat into the oil, it can burn.

Lay the meat gently into the pan. Don’t be afraid of the heat and the oil; don’t throw the meat. Let your hand get close to the surface and allow the meat to fall away from you. The hot fat shouldn’t splash, but if it does, it will splash away from you.

Once the meat is in the pan, the next most important thing to do is this:
nothing.
Don’t touch it; don’t move it; don’t shake the pan. Let it cook.
If you’ve heated your pan and allowed the oil to get hot, you shouldn’t have a problem with sticking. The meat may stick at the beginning; if so, it’s especially important not to move it and risk tearing the flesh. If the pan is hot, it will give the meat a good sear, and the meat will pull easily away from the pan.

When you turn the meat, consider the heat level. If what you’re cooking is very thin, you may want that high heat. If what you’re cooking is a little thicker or requires a little more time to cook through (chicken, for instance), you may want to reduce the heat so that the exterior doesn’t overcook (or you may want to turn the meat and put it in a hot oven, a
technique called pan roasting
. The point is that once you’ve got a flavorful sear, what you’re concerned with next is cooking the food through.

The final critical moment in sautéing is knowing when to remove the meat from the pan. This is only accomplished with practice and by paying attention. The best way to judge doneness is by touch. Learn touch. Press a finger into the raw meat and pay attention to how it feels. Press a finger into it while it’s cooking. Press a finger into it when it has cooked for too long and note the difference. By practicing and paying attention, you can teach yourself how done a piece of meat is by touch. The more cooked the meat gets, the firmer it becomes. Another way to gauge doneness is with an instant-read thermometer, but this is impractical when we sauté, especially for very thin cuts. A piece of meat and some fish will begin to get squishy and grow increasingly stiff as they become hot inside. Again, learning the distinctions is a matter of practice and paying attention.

After you remove the meat from the pan, let it rest for about half as long as it took to cook in the pan. It’s good form to let it rest on a paper towel/absorbent paper, which will absorb residual cooking fat. Resting meat is the final stage of its cooking. The heat, concentrated at the exterior, needs time to equalize throughout the meat. When you’re determining how long to leave meat in the pan, keep in mind that the food continues to cook even after it’s out of the pan. This resting period conveniently gives you time to finish anything else you might be serving.

For medium- and low-heat sautéing, you have even more control. Use lower temperatures when you don’t need to develop flavors through browning, when you simply want to heat something through (blanched vegetables, for instance) or to render fat (the
duck breast
, for example). Tender, lean cuts benefit from a tasty browned crust—this requires high heat. But not everything does. The way we chose the level of heat to use is by evaluating what it is we’re sautéing and the effects we want to bring to it.

The recipes in this chapter feature the sauté technique and differing heat levels:

• Sautéed Chicken Breasts with Tarragon Butter Sauce
  
• Sautéed Scallops with Asparagus
  
• Sautéed Mushrooms
  

• Spicy Beef with Bell Peppers
  

• Sautéed Summer Squash
  
• Brussels Sprouts Sautéed in Spicy Bacon Fat
  
• The Way to Sauté Bacon