Pan Secrets Chefs Don’t Tell You

if you put some wonder bread into your pan and set it on the heat you can learn an awful lot about your pan and your burner [Music] today we're exploring the subject of preheating your pans the rules you'll often hear are numerous and contradictory put the oil in the cold pan before setting it on the heat don't put the oil in the pan until it's hot hold your hand above the pan to test how hot it is splash some water into the pan to test how hot it is test your pan with an infrared thermometer to better understand which of these ideas work better than others it helps to visualize what's happening in your pan as it's preheating and for that i'm going to use my favorite surface heat measuring tool the wonder bread the one the bread for cooks is kind of like the fruit flies for biologists you might be wondering why i don't use something more high-tech like an infrared thermometer the accuracy of the thermometer depends on the reflectiveness of your surface for a stainless steel pen an infrared is kind of hopeless a thermometer is also measuring the temperature in only one spot of your pan sure you can move it around and try multiple spots but since the temperature isn't static it doesn't give you nearly as good of a visual as the breath so here is my test i removed the crust from the bread and cut it to fit the entire surface of a stainless steel pan a teflon pan a seasoned cast iron pan and an enamel coated dutch oven i put the bread in the cold pans i gently place the wooden droplet on the bread to make sure the bread came in perfect contact with the pans then i set the pans one at a time on the burner over high heat i used the same burner and the same heat setting it took my stainless steel pan and my teflon pan two minutes to brown the bread and as you can see it browned quite evenly the similarity between these two pans isn't surprising they both have an aluminum core although the lining is different the material that does most of the heat transfer is the same it took my cast iron pan and my dutch oven three minutes to brown the bread and as you can see it didn't brown evenly see how the bread in the center of the pan is pale while the outside is very brown the similarities between these two pens also makes sense because they're both made of cast iron cast iron is a worse conductor than aluminum so it preheats longer and less evenly think of aluminum like kayak and think of cast iron like a titanic a kayak can switch directions speed up and slow down very quickly a titanic takes a lot of power to get going but once it's going it's hard to stop it the downside of cast iron is that it's not very responsive the upside of cast iron is that when the food goes in it doesn't cool off as much would you get the same result on a different stove not necessarily i am on a large gas burner here with the flames shooting out to the sides that's what makes the outside hit faster than the inside if you repeated this experiment on a different stove you'd get different hot spots for example some induction and electric burners hit the center much more than the outside but it's very unlikely that your cast iron pen would preheat quickly and evenly no matter what stove you are on eventually even cast iron will come to more or less of an equilibrium but it will take some time so now that we got to visualize a preheat how can we use this information obviously you aren't going to put one bread into your pan every time you cook something so how are you going to know when the pan is hot enough to produce steady brownie does holding your hand of the pan work not very reliably let's start with the fact that some materials radiate a lot like cast iron and some not so much like aluminum so how much heat your hand will feel really depends on the material it will also depend on your heat sensitivity and the burner some burners produce a lot of radiation like a flame and some produce none like induction if you test your pen by holding your hand above it and it's working for you there is absolutely no problem with that but if you often misjudge how long to pre-heat the pen the hand method might not help you much a more visual test is to splash some water in the pan i don't normally do it so i decided to try it to make it a bit more reliable i measured the water for each splash i used an eighth of a teaspoon here is what it looks like in a stainless steel pan after one minute of preheating the water fizzes and evaporates this pan is not hot enough for a sear after two minutes of preheating the water forms bubbles that hover and roll around all over the pan this is the point when a steak would brown nicely but here is the interesting thing if we keep heating the pan the water doesn't behave any differently i tried this after three minutes and four minutes and i still got that hovering rolling bubbles so what the water test is good for is making sure that the pan is not too cold but it's not very good at testing that the pan is not too hot remember that sand filled episode where jerry is talking to george about drying laundry and he says that you can't over dry just like you can't over die once you're dead you're dead and once you're dry you're dry unfortunately that doesn't apply to your pants you can totally overheat them and that's not good some pants will warp if you do that on a regular basis your oil will develop a yaki of flavor and your food will taste burnt some people do that on purpose charred vegetables are all the rage these days and that's cool as long as you're doing that intentionally so i don't think the water method is bad i just think it's important to understand its limitations for stainless steel and teflon pans i prefer the oil method i put the oil in the pan as it's preheating this way i get a continuous update on the temperature of my pan when my oil shimmers the pan will produce good steady browning let me find a better angle to shoot this at here see that shake as if the oil is shivering that's it and see how it's not just doing that in one spot it's not just a hint of shimmer it's really obvious that's what i'm waiting for but what i don't want to see is smoke if my oil is smoking my pan is too hot speaking of smoke i find that smoke is sometimes misunderstood a lot of what you see when you put your food in the pan is not smoke but steam smoke is not loud smoke is quiet if there is a lot of sizzling and popping when you put the food in the pan that doesn't necessarily mean that you overheated your pan what it actually means is that the water in your food is converting to steam that's why it's good to see a very dry food it will brown faster and will produce less splatter another thing to realize about smoke is that not all fat is created equal some fats smoke at a lower temperature like extra virgin olive oil and some smoke at a higher temperature like any refined oil it could be a refined olive oil also known as light olive oil but it could also be canola or grapeseed or sunflower which oil is red for you has nothing to do with what you plan to set your knob to for example it's totally fine to use extra virgin olive oil while your burner is set to high heat if you plan to add a big pile of onions or potatoes to it to caramelize the water in those vegetables will cool your pan right off but i wouldn't use extra virgin olive oil when you want to sear a steak or fish a chicken in a single layer because some parts of the oil will not be covered by the food and will start to smoke okay let's finish our little smoke detour and get back to preheating the pans is it always a good idea to preheat a pan with oil not necessarily if we put the oil into a cast iron pan as it's preheating the oil might start to smoke because some parts of the pan are hot even though other parts of the pan are not ready yet so for cast iron pans you might want to preheat empty since i cook with cast iron pretty rarely i like to use a timer when i preheat it and i found this time by trial and error it takes me about six minutes to get a more or less even heat from a cast iron that's a much longer preheat than the usual two minutes i give my stainless with teflon also keep in mind that cast iron doesn't drop the temperature as much as stainless or teflon once you add the food this means that i need to set my burners to way lower heat whenever i would use a high heat with my stainless steel pan i use a medium heat with cast iron sprinkling some water on the cast iron pan to see how it's doing before adding the oil is not a bad idea but you might want to try multiple spots to make sure your pan is evenly preheated if one spot makes the water hover but another spot makes it fizz and evaporate you might want to wait longer so far we've been talking about oil in this video but what about butter is it a good idea to have butter sitting in the pan as it's preheating i don't think so but it contains water and that water likes to explode as the body heats up what's completely counterintuitive is that the lower the heat you set your burner to the more explosive your body gets for example here is a piece of butter heating up in a pan on only medium heat i had to film this one from far away to protect my camera you see all that splatter if you want to sear something in butter you might want to use ghee or clarified butter that has all the water and milk salads removed if you're making brown butter you need those milk solids of course so here's a way to deal with the explosions you can either use a splatter screen or whisk the butter constantly as it's heating up to release the steam once the butter stops foaming all the steam will be out and you can leave it alone if you're toasting bread in butter you probably don't need to worry about the splatter too much since the butter amount is pretty small just swoosh it around the pan a little as it's preheating and add your bread the moral of this story is that there is more than one way to pre-heat the pan and don't worry about all those rules worry about getting to know your pan your fat and your stove if your food is browning steadily and evenly that's all that matters if it's not hopefully this video gives you some ideas of what you can do to improve the situation here are more thought-provoking culinary videos for you to check out and if you are ever in the boston area maybe i'll see you in one of my classes [Music]

Channel: Helen Rennie

Views: 435,655

Keywords: how to preheat a pan, cast iron pans, stainless steel pans, pan types, skillet types, teflon pans, which pans cook most evenly, cookware, skillets, frying pans

Id: YLfsq7GRE9w

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021