Mary Gallert - What You Need to Know about Sautéing
Mary Gallert is a writer from California passionate about cooking.
Sautéing is also known as pan frying. It is usually associated with French cuisine. However, many other cuisines use sautéing to sear and cook steaks, fillets of fish, and vegetables.
Sautéing is just another word for cooking food in a really hot pan, usually with an addition of a little bit of fat to avoid sticking. Sautéing gives foods a crispy texture and highlights the flavors of spices and herbs. If you sauté a steak for several minutes, it will quickly get a dark crust. This feature gives the steak a crunchy texture and brings out the flavors from herbs and spices located on the exterior of the meat. Seafood and vegetables benefit from sautéing in exactly the same way. They develop a crust that intensifies the flavor of seasonings.
The word sauté in French means “to jump.” Chefs shake the pans back and forth and toss the food in them to apply the heat evenly to it.
Since sautéing is done using high heat, you need to watch the food as it can burn very quickly.
When you sauté any kind of food, be it meat, vegetables, or seafood, you need to use some kind of fat to prevent sticking. The decision whether to use butter or oil depends on the kind of sautéing you want to do. Oil is less likely to burn, which is why you want to use it when cooking over extremely high heat. Butter can add a lot of flavor, but will burn at high temperatures, which means that butter is suitable for sautéing over medium heat.
Chefs usually sauté meats in oil and vegetables in butter because meats need a very high temperature to develop a crunchy texture while vegetables achieve the same effect over lower temperatures. You can use either method to sauté seafood. Some chefs opt for a combination of oil and butter when sautéing seafood. Butter adds flavor and oil prevents the food and butter from burning quickly.
Remember that some oils have higher smoke points than others. This means that they don’t start to smoke at lower temperatures, which makes them the preferred choice for sautéing. Canola, peanut, and corn oil all have high smoke points and are suitable for sautéing. If the recipe doesn’t specify which oil you should use, go with one out of the three mentioned above.
If you are using butter, you can prevent it from burning by mixing it with a few drops of these oils, too.
To sauté food properly, you want the oil in the pan to be extremely hot, but not burning. Butter, when in the pan by itself, should turn into a foam, but not become brown in color. Mary Gallert knows of some chefs only use clarified butter because it doesn’t burn as quickly as regular butter does.
