When you know how to sauté, then you have power over your food choices. It’s quick, easy, and you can sauté almost anything!Most cookbooks concentrate on the list of ingredients and forget to tell you HOW to cook. When you can repeat one cooking method, then the ingredients don’t matter.
Certainly there are other very important skills to have in the kitchen, such as using your knives for cutting vegetables, and how to make sauces, but HOW you transfer heat to food makes the biggest difference of all.
Saute’ is a conductive cooking process. This means that the heat is directly transferred to the food via the sauté pan. As opposed to cooking with hot air in an oven, which is convective cooking, conductive is quicker and easier to control.
It’s easy to learn how to sauté, because the steps are always the same regardless of what you’re cooking. Mastering this one method will have you creating dinner without recipes in no time.
The basic sauté procedure is this:
1) Pan Hot First – Always start with a hot sauté pan. The best way to judge the relative heat in the pan is to sprinkle a little water from the tips of your fingers. If the water immediately boils and evaporates, you know the pan is at least 212F/100C.
2) Add Fat – A small amount of fat is used for sauté. It’s not pan frying and it’s not deep frying. Only enough butter or oil is used to barely cover the bottom of the pan. The role of fat in sauté is less about flavor and more about transferring heat.
3) Fat Hot – You must heat this fat to a point JUST BEFORE it’s about to smoke. Once the oil reaches its smoke temperature, it will impart burnt flavors to your food. However, if you start cooking right before it smokes, you’re capturing the most heat. Most fats will change from being perfectly smooth in appearance to
