Rouxbe Cooking School Series: lessons for the frying pan
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Karen Hamilton
September 30, 2008
Despite what the rash of restaurant and event posts indicate, we’ve been doing a fair amount of cooking at home. Just take a look at some of the fabulous meals my husband has treated me to of late:
Lapin à la moutarde (rabbit with mustard sauce) – La Régalade cookbook
Proper chicken caesar salad – Jamie at Home
Crispy grilled trout with parsley and lemon – Cook with Jamie
My own culinary efforts are outcomes of investigations into the Online Cooking School at Rouxbe.com.
One such assignment addressed pork’s tendency to come out of my frying pan with a moisture level akin to the Sahara. It was fortuitous that Rouxbe had released two Technique Tuesday lessons on pan frying and pan sauces. A lesson on working with pork is in the official curriculum and is yet to be published, but the tenderloin and blueberries in our stash were already crying out to be cooked.
My first goal was to render the pork tenderloin with an attractive sear on the outside while retaining a most, slightly pink interior. According to the Rouxbe pan frying lesson, one way to attain this is to get the ingredients, pan, and oil to the correct temperature before the food even touches the surface. Properly heated equipment will prevent the items from sticking to the pan and minimize the risk of steaming, which will foil your efforts to achieve colour and crisp. In hindsight, this makes perfect sense to me now, but as I sat in front of my screen and absorbed the rationales and methodologies, I wanted to kick myself for not figuring this out long ago.
Testing the temperature of your pan
You can determine the temperature of metal pans using the “Mercury Ball” Water Test, which consists of dropping 1/8 teaspoon of water into your pan every 10 – 15 seconds and observing its behaviour. Pans that are too cool will cause the water to splat on the surface like normal drops of rain or bubble off into steam. Pans that are too hot will cause the water to immediately fracture into tiny beadlets (imagine silver cola balls rolling around the pan). What you should be looking for is the point where your drop of water forms a single, large, mercury-like bead that bounces around the surface of your pan with no or little to no accompanying beadlets. Take a look at how my water test turned out:
Choosing your oil
Once your pan is at the correct temperature, add an oil that is suitable for frying or searing: canola, corn oil, grapeseed oil (preferred by the Rouxbe team), or any other oil with a smoking point higher than 400F. Note that extra virgin olive oil, butter, and most cooking fats have a smoking point around or below 400F and are not recommended for frying, as discolouration / off-flavours could occur. (As I read this bit of the lesson, I smacked myself in the forehead–no wonder my pan kept turning yellow after subjecting extra virgin olive oil to max heat!)
Controlling temperature
The lesson continued with techniques throughout the frying process that rely on sensory indicators, all of which I monitored as I laid in the pork. The amount of smoke, the volume of sizzle, the shimmer of the oil–these should signal whether to adjust the heat. Varying the stove according to the needs of your food should give you better results than by following a recipe’s heating instructions to the letter.
Watch this clip as we seared the tenderloin (hopefully you can make out our commentary through the noise of Sunday football):
We then finished the tenderloin for another 20 minutes in the oven, or until the internal temperature reached 150F.
Pan frying vs. pan searing
Rouxbe CEO Joe Girard found my clip on YouTube before I published this post and clarified some differences between pan frying and pan searing: ”Pan frying is when you cook smaller pieces of meat or fish all the way through in the pan. Larger pieces [like our tenderloin] are most often pan seared, then finished in the oven.”
Thanks, Joe!
Creating a great pan sauce
If you succeed in pan frying your ingredients, you should be left with a good amount of sucs: golden, toasty bits on the bottom of your pan that can be used to create a terrific sauce to finish your dish. In my case, the pan sauces lesson helped me figure out how to make a quick blueberry and port reduction for the tenderloin that was now resting prettily on our cutting board.
Using a Googled blueberry sauce recipe as a rough guideline for ingredients, I followed the techniques outlined in the lesson to combine the port, blueberries, sugar, lemon zest, apple slices, and cornstarch in a logical order:
It resulted in a zingy glaze that was promptly poured over the pork medallions and served with steamed rice and sugar snap peas. My husband ate his meal with gusto while I chewed thoughtfully on mine, amazed at how a few additional techniques freed me to cook with what’s in our pantry instead of having a recipe control me.
And the applications continue…
One week after this culinary success, my husband applied the same techniques he observed from my meal to prepare an ambitious rack of lamb dinner for four:
He did a good job, no?
Culinary resources galore!
Relevant Rouxbe lessons and Drill-Downs:
- Pan Frying (trial access or membership required)
- Pan Sauces (trial access or membership required)
- What is Deglazing?
- Why Rest Meat?
Other useful references:
- The Elements of Cooking (especially the essay on heat)
- Elements: Done, doneness (Michael Ruhlman’s blog)
Rouxbe Cooking School series to date
- Rouxbe Cooking School is now open. Will you enroll?
- Rouxbe Cooking School Series: the rolling technique
- Rouxbe Cooking School Series: lessons for the frying pan
- Improve your cooking skills with Tiny Bites and Rouxbe
Categories: Culinary Resources, Dinner, Food, Recipes
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With food and technique this good at home, you almost don’t need to go out!
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the kind words. Great meals in restaurants and our travel adventures are some of the ways we get inspired in the kitchen. These Rouxbe lessons are also starting to be a great way to re-evaluate the recipes we decide to try at home.
[...] Rouxbe Cooking School Series: lessons for the frying pan [...]
[...] Rouxbe Cooking School Series: lessons for the frying pan [...]