SAUTEING 101

i'm chef frank this is proto cooks and today is sauteing 101 [Music] chef frank what is sauteing and how do we do it great question sauteing is cooking over medium to high heat in a pan with shallow sloping sides and a small amount of fat and your product is brown at the end other than having shallow sloping sides you have to be concerned about one other thing when it comes to choosing your pants how big of a saute pan are you going to use right and the way that i decide this and it's a general rule when it comes to cooking is how much product you're going to put in or how much food you're going to put in is always going to decide or inform how big the pan you use is right so if i'm using this small saute pan i can fry one egg in here comfortably there's not a lot of area around it and it's the perfect size but if i'm going to fry one egg in this large pan right what's going to happen is is i'm going to have an egg in here it's only going to take up this much space i'm going to have a lot of area around it that's hot and things are going to burn like my oil or my fat is going to burn so it's always going to be how much product you're putting in that's going to decide the size of your pan and on the other side of that if i put too much in the pan right if i overload this pan or i overload this pan i don't get proper browning and when we saute we want to brown right and that's called overcrowding if you overcrowd your pan you don't get brown things steam and there's a lot of moisture that comes out so you don't get that browning that you need so don't overcrowd and don't under crowd your pan underground is that a word next thing we want to consider when we saute is the fat that we use i have an assortment of fats in front of me uh and i'm looking for something with a high smoke point basically the rate at which your oil starts to smoke when your oil starts to smoke it starts to get a little weird in all flavors you want a little bit of smoke but once it gets really smoky it's not going to taste good it's going to taste burnt right in front of me i have some olive oil vegetable oil i have some bacon fat some chicken fat some whole butter and some clarified butter now i choose when i saute to use vegetable oil clarified butter or animal fats i don't really use olive oil it's kind of a low smoke point or whole butter whole butter has a ton of milk solids in there and if you put this in a medium high heat it starts to brown and burns really quickly in order to show you how to saute i'm going to do two different things today i'm going to do a steak new york strip steak which i think is really important to see do a piece of meat or a piece of protein and i'm going to just do some mushrooms so uh we'll saute both of these so you guys can see the methods sauteing proteins this is how it's done i put my pan on and i put the heat on high okay i don't put anything in it yet i want the pan to heat up first i have my piece of steak i'm gonna season this right before i put it in okay a lot of times people will season this ahead and what happens is that moisture comes to the top and moisture is the enemy of browning right when we brown things in a saute pan there's a reaction called the maillard reaction my reaction is the sugars and the amino acids causing that nice kind of roasty brown flavor and we want that mild reaction to happen if there's a lot of moisture that does not happen so i'm going to let the pan get really hot i'm going to season my steak right before i put it in my pan's been heating i'm going to add some vegetable oil and one of the key factors in sauteing is just a small amount of oil what i like to do is just cover the bottom of the pan right so you can see that my pan is it's just covering the bottom of the pan and it's starting to get a little ripply that's good so what i'm going to do is season my meat i season really high and i try and cook my meat really well i get the fatty side too i try and season really well my pan so you can see my oil is kind of getting shimmery and that's what we want you can see a little bit of smoke and the oil is kind of shimmering a little right it slides around the pan really quick i take the piece of meat i drop it in the pan whenever i drop things in a hot pan of hot oil i drop it away from me so when i drop it if there's any oil that splashes it splashes away okay so i have just the right amount of oil in the bottom here i'm gonna just lift this up make sure some oil gets underneath and leave it alone right what i should be hearing now nobody talks about this but as a chef you learn to listen right if i put this in the pan and i hear hissing that all that that means is the pan is not hot enough and my steak is steaming if i put it in the pan i hear snap crackle and pop that means we're sizzling and we got a nice heat some of this smoke is just coming off of the steak that's just not smoke it's really just liquid evaporating and my steak is browning one of the key things here is to leave it alone a lot of people get in there right away and they start moving things around and the steak starts to shred leave it alone let it do its thing right we're going to try and cook this steak to medium rare i'll leave it on one side for about three to four minutes i'm going to clear the smoke out and then i'm going to turn it so at this point you might need to adjust the heat a little if it's too high and it's getting billowing smoke you want to lower it just a little but right now we're doing pretty good right so let me turn it over and look at that nice and brown right nice brown crusty from the salt we have that beautiful mayard reaction it's been on the first side for about three minutes i'm gonna leave it on this side a lot of times when you're sauteing something a little bit bigger like this you might need to put it in the oven for a few minutes i'm going to try and do everything on the on the stovetop but you might have to adjust your heat right that's the big thing here controlling your heat is important if this is getting way too hot you should lower the heat right not to the point where it's so low that it's not cooking and it's kind of boiling away but for the most part you want it to still sizzle like this crackling like that i have a rack with a plate underneath and the rack is basically going to let me rest my meat whenever you're sauteing a piece of meat especially steak lamb or pork or even a chicken breast you want to let it rest before you slice it because if you don't let it rest all the juices kind of just pour out right what happens you cook a piece of meat it tenses up all the juices kind of like go to the middle of the piece of meat and uh if you don't let it rest and let those juices equalize you have a pool of juice that comes out right so let's see again some nice brown there and when it comes to new york strip i always try and get the fat side i put it on its side and let the fat saute a little because i want to get that fat nice and crisp so just gonna leave it there let the fat side saute a little too all in all this steak should take about maybe seven to eight minutes it shouldn't take all that long but you can see that my fat isn't breaking down um nothing's really getting burnt at this point it's getting a little hot so i'm going to lower my heat i'm going to stand it up on this side to make sure that i get brown on all sides and now it's done uh i'm going to let it sit on a rack right you never want to let this sit on a flat plate if you put it on a flat plate uh it's still going to give off some juice and all that brown stuff is going to kind of wash off so you want to put this on a rack or maybe put it on an overturned plate so the juices can run off and we're going to let it rest before we slice it while it rests we'll do the mushrooms next thing we're going to saute is the mushrooms now the mushrooms that do a little bit different than the steak we season the steak ahead before we put it in the pan but with mushrooms i like to start to get them brown before i add seasoning um mushrooms are full of water so it takes a little more technique to do mushrooms properly i try and get my pan as high as possible i'm going to use clarified butter for this so i'm going to throw the clarified butter in the pan and let it melt we'll have a video on how to do clarified butter eventually but right now uh it's just a way to add good butter flavor without getting uh burnt really quickly okay uh and i add a fair amount because i want to cover the bottom of this pan so let me give another big chunk mushrooms also soak up a lot of fat uh which isn't a bad thing but if you're going to use uh fat with mushrooms use something that you like the flavor of so for the butter for the mushrooms i like to use butter or clarified butter even though we take most of the solids out there's still a lot of flavor in there right i think that's enough let me take this little chunk out okay and then i'm going to add a nice layer of mushrooms i'm going to try not to overcrowd the pan right i want this to be a single layer on the pan and i'm going to leave them alone just going to let them bake i'm going to add a little salt now after i put it in this will help draw out some moisture but it'll also flavor our mushrooms but i'm not going to move it around let it be i want the one side of the mushrooms to get brown i'm going to leave the heat as high as possible at this point so these been cooking for a few minutes uh and look at that i got some really nice caramelization on some brown on them and that's what i want for my mushrooms i'm gonna leave them at high heat uh for as long as i can i want them to dry out a little kind of like reduce a little so that mushroom flavor is a little reduced i've had this on high heat for like three or four minutes and look at that my mushrooms are getting a really nice caramelization uh they're getting nice and brown if you want you can turn them over flip them but i really want them to get a nice brown like that mushrooms are really great when you get them a little brown and that's it that's how you saute mushrooms so sauteing is a very simple method things you got to watch out for moisture moisture is the enemy of getting a good saute going your pan isn't hot enough enemy of getting your thing sauteed you definitely want some brownie okay if you can do vegetables other than mushrooms you're going to follow the same method get your pan nice and hot add your fat and toss like the whole idea of the saute pan is that we can do that little toss or flip uh that side lets us do that the mushrooms are done let's slice our steaks yeah we did i got the plate here you can see i got some juice that came out i'm going to save that juice i'm just going to slice on a little bit of angle i think it's a little on the rare side could have gone just a little more but luckily we got meat eaters in my family i don't mind having it rare beautiful crust you can hear it we've got a beautiful crust from the salt i'm going to throw this on the plate steaks on the plate i'm going to take some of my sauteed mushrooms look at they got a beautifully brown color now granted this is not a full meal and i understand that but it was two things that i thought were a good example on how to correctly saute okay let's taste first i'm going to taste the mushroom and look at that beautiful kind of brown color on that mushrooms are so much better when you brown them they just have a deeper richer flavor okay let's taste the steak you can see the color on this is great i got a nice crust a nice brown sear and my mouth is watering because this makes people's mouth water that beautiful my art reaction or that browning has a salty crunch to it the great thing about it is that uh the interior has this beautiful meaty flavor the exterior has that salty crunch and that's what you get when you properly saute i hope you enjoyed this if you did give us a thumbs up like subscribe hit the little bell to get notifications when we have new videos out uh we have merch need salt t-shirts i control the salt t-shirts check it out down below i'd like to thank all my patrons on patreon we appreciate your support we also have a p.o box all the info is down below for that i hope you enjoyed this video sauteing 101 with me chef frank on proto cooks have a good [Music] one you

Channel: ProtoCooks with Chef Frank

Views: 32,840

Keywords: #saute, #sauteing, #cookingfundimentals, #technique, #cookingtechnique, #needssalt, #cheffrank, #cheffrankproto, #basicskills

Id: liPGv6M--9M

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020