Browning Tips.

• Don't overcrowd the pan. My rule of thumb is that the food should cover 90% of the bottom of the saute pan and somewhere between 85% to 90% is okay. All the food should be in contact with the bottom of pan, the heat source, in one single layer. If your pan is too small, cook in batches.


• Heat up the pan without the oil first. The pan is not as delicate as the oil, which has a smoke point and a flash point.


• It is a high heat cooking method so choose the oil accordingly.


• Heat up the pan for about 3 min and make sure there is no liquid before you add the oil. Some people would drop a little water to test if the pan is hot enough. If you do so, make sure the water is all gone. Pour the water out or cook it off before you add the oil.


• Don't add oil into a hot pan with very little liquid because the little droplets of water in hot oil will burst and might splash hot oil onto you. This is also why you should always pat the food dry in high heat dry-cooking with fat method.


• If you overload the pan, the ingredients make the pan's temperature plummet and the foods end up steaming in its juice rather than properly browned. If there is too much juice in the pan, the temperature will remain at 212F boiling point until all the juice is vaporized and before we see any serious browning. All the extra cooking time while waiting for the juice to be gone would have already cooked the food to the ideal doneness internally without yielding the desirable browning and flavors. If you keep cooking to have the browning, the food would most likely end up overcooked, dry, juiceless and grainy.


• When you put the food in a pan, thinking the pan and oil have been heated hot enough, but you see juice coming out of the food and you don't hear the signature "Psssst....." sizzling, pick up the food immediately and let the pan heat up to cook off the liquid. Or place the food aside, and pour off the liquid before you make the second attempt to brown. This way, you won't over cook it. Bottom line, there can't be any liquid in the pan when you want the color and flavor.


• If the food cover less than 80% of the pan, the area without food would overheat and burn the oil. For our one-pot club members, use something that won't release liquid but can add flavors such as ginger, green onions or carrots to keep those areas occupied. Cut them into bigger thicker slices so it's easier to handle because you may have to keep flipping and moving these little helpers to avoid burning them (for this reason, I won't use onions), while you leave the meat undisturbed for 4-5 minutes. If the aromatics brown too fast, pick them up and place them on the meat to cool down.


• When you brown the meat, you need to leave those meat alone for 4-5 minutes on medium to medium-high heat without messing with them. You need to let the heat do its thing if you want the Maillard Reaction to happen. When you hear the sizzling sound quiets down, it means all the liquid in contact with the pan is gone and the temperature is rising fast. That tells you to check more often now, about every 1-2 minutes.


• Pat the meat or fish dry before cooking. Surface moisture creates steam when it hits a hot pan or grill and impeding browning until the liquid is gone.


• Run your knife like a squeegee against the skin of fish or meat to scrape off the water trapped in it and pat dry to be sure.


• To draw more moisture out of the surface, you can sprinkle salt on all sides of the fish, chicken, or meat. Leave it in the refrigerator uncovered. For fish, 30 minutes to a couple of hours will do. For meat or chicken, you can do this overnight to 24 hours ahead. Beside making browning more effective, this method will give you crispy skin when baking or roasting them.


• Yes, that means you can also brown food in the oven. A broiler is the same idea as an inverted grill, a source of concentrated quick-cooking heat. Chicken and meat take about 10-12 minutes to broil at 450F to 500F. You will want to check halfway through, after 5-6 minutes and flip them.

Why Browning...

How to Deglaze!

How to capitalize the delicious fond that is bursting with flavors?

First, remove the food you’ve just cooked from the pan and pour off any liquid or fat. Dump out anything that seems burned because that won’t taste good if you’re making a sauce.

Return the pan to the heat and add liquid to cover the pan by about half an inch. As the liquid heats, use a spatula or spoon to scrape the brown bits off the bottom of the pan until the pan is clean and all the fond bits are dissolved or floating into the liquid.

You can simply add water to deglaze but if you want to jazz up the flavor with the fond, use stock, wine, juice, beer or vinegar to deglaze. If you are using alcohol to deglaze, make sure to remove the pan from the heat when adding the alcohol to prevent flames.

To transform that liquid into a sauce or gravy for a meal, boil the liquid until it’s reduced and thickened. Add any aromatics such as shallots, garlic, fresh herbs, or whole spices and cooked briefly. Remove from heat, strain off the solids if necessary, whisk in butter or cream to make it velvety, and serve.

Where are those brown bits from?

Love Your Ugly Fond!

Fond (pronounced fahn), the French culinary term for "base" or "foundation", refers to the remaining residue or brown bits that sticks to the pan after browning meat or vegetables, either on the stove top or at the bottom of a roasting pan in the oven. 

These brown bits contains hundreds and thousands of complex and irresistible

flavor compounds unlocked by Maillard Reactions and Caramelization when proteins and sugar are present in cooking.

Fond is used by professional cooks to form the base of many flavorful sauces, while it is mistakened by many home cooks as dirty, nasty burnt bits and simply discard down the drain.

The tasty bits stuck to the pan are largely water soluble - so water, wine, stock, etc., is used to "dissolve" them and this is a technique known as degla

zing.

A fond, which means the same as a base stock, is categorized into 3 main categories: white, brown or vegetable stocks (in French referred to as fond blanc, fond brun and fond de vegetal).  They are at the core of classical cooking and of the five mother sauces, at least three are based on fond by deglazing.

Deglazing is a cooking technique for removing and dissolving browned food residue from a pan to flavor sauces, soups, and gravies by introducing liquid to the pan to loosen and disperse all of those concentrated flavors, aka fond, back into your dish. Flavor the fond with the addition of an aromatic or two -- such as shallots or garlic -- thicken it with flour, tomato, or vegetables, and you have the blueprint for hundreds of sauces and gravies.

To deglaze...

Notes:

Fond is literally translated to mean "the bottom" or "base."

In classical French cooking, the word is also used to mean "stock," another common base for various recipes.

Why Take Time to Brown?

Why do we love grilled meat?

You put a piece of meat with an open fire, with a very, very hot iron to grill. The moment the meat is in contact with the heat, you can almost hear the meat begin to talk to you.

Even if you know nothing about cooking, if you hear the meat spit, splatter and yell at the top of the lungs, "A-A-A-Ouch!", most likely you would immediately smell something wonderful and your mouth starts to water. If you hear nothing but a whimper, "so what", you know something isn't right ...

When you cook your food on high heat and see it turn darker, two miracles happen - caramelization and Maillard reaction (both are forms of non-enzymatic food browning).

To the eyes, both processes appear as the food gets brown and darker. In many contexts, "caramelized" have become a catchall culinary term meaning the food should be cook to darken until it's caramel-brown. However these two processes are not the same.

Caramelization

Caramelization is a process of cooking sugar (carbohydrates) until it melts and darkens. The sugar undergoes chemical changes through different stages as the temperature keeps rising. The sugars break apart and reform hundreds of new compounds. These complex compounds are highly desirable with their rich, buttery, nutty, acidic, slightly bitter and rounder softer sweet notes.

Maillard Reactions 

Baked goods and meat that develop a nutty, slightly sweet richness when browned undergo a process called "Maillard reactions" and it's named after the French chemist who identified the process in the early 1900s.

Maillard reactions is a chemical reaction between an amino acid and a reducing sugar, usually requiring the addition of heat and this process accelerates in an alkaline environment because the amino groups do not neutralize.

Maillard reactions also create caramel-like flavor developing in foods that contain carb (sugar) and protein as they brown on high heat. The reactions are similar to classic sugar caramelizing except they involve a series of complex reactions between proteins and sugars, as opposed to caramelization happens to just sugar. Another thing is that Maillard reactions occur at much lower heat than true sugar caramelization.

This reaction is the basis of the flavouring industry, since the type of amino acid determines the resulting flavour. In the process, hundreds of different flavour compounds are created. These compounds in turn break down to form yet more new flavour compounds, and so on. Each type of food has a very distinctive set of flavour compounds that are formed during the Maillard reaction. It is these same compounds that flavour scientists have used over the years to create artificial flavours.

Wait, don't throw away those brown bits!

How to brown tips!

Notes:

• Browning of foods can be either non-enzymatic (caramelization or maillard reaction) or enzymatic.
• Enzymatic browning in fruits and vegetables is usually not desirable but it is essential in developing flavors in tea.
• Different sugar types have different temperatures for caramelization to happen. In general, it starts above 160°C (320°F).
• Maillard Reaction can happen as low as 100°C (212°F) but it happens very slowly. It progresses at a faster pace at higher temperature, such as at 150°C (300°F) it can cause noticeable browning within minutes. However, above 180°C (355°F), a different set of reactions occur to char foods and too much of that would cause foods to burn and taste bitter.
• Pat meat and fish dry before browning to speed up the Maillard reaction process since the presence of water will keep the temperature at the boiling point until it's all vaporized. (More...)

Four Cooking Techniques!

In all of cookery, there are only four cooking techniques: dry-heat cooking with fat, dry-heat cooking without fat, moist-heat cooking, and combination cooking.

1. Dry-heat cooking with fat embraces saute-ing, deep-frying, pan-frying and stir-frying.
2. Dry-heat cooking without fat includes grilling, broiling, roasting, and baking.
3. Moist-heat cooking involves poaching, steaming, simmering, and boiling.
4. Combination cooking is using a combination of more than one techniques above, such as braising and stewing.

If you understanding the basic four cooking techniques, every time you practice a new recipe, you can categorize it and understanding it in the context of these four methods. That way, you don't have to start from scratch and be confused with the long breaking down steps to follow.

You can also understand it in terms of its cooking temperature range:

1. Dry-heat cooking with fat - temperature is usually between 300-450F, depending on the smoke point of the oil.
2. Dry-heat cooking without fat - temperature can go lower or higher depending on the food.
3. Moist-heat cooking - temperature is limited by the water's boiling point - 212F.
4. Combination - usually employs high temperature cooking with or without fat/oil, usually for the purpose of browning, and then add water to cook low and slow.

I'd often like to share three simple steps that's easy to remember with friends when they are confused about what goes in first, second, or last.

All cooking process are alike in the following steps:

Step 1: Build the flavor base or foundation.

Step 2: Add sauce and seasonings.

Step 3: Combine all ingredients and make sure they are ALL cooked to the desired doneness for the rest of cooking process. (Key is "ALL")

Of course the god is in the details but equipped with these basic know-hows, you will find common places for every recipe you will encounter.

How to Make Clarified Butter.

Clarified butter is a butter that has been melted and separated into butter fat, butter milk, and milk solids. The buttermilk and milk solids burn more easily and are removed to produce the remaining clear butter fat that can tolerate higher heat.

It could take a few hours to make clarified butter, just letting it simmer very gently on the stove. A few hours later, it will be separated into clear fat with the white foam on the top and the butter milk at the bottom.

Directions:

1. Cut the butter into cubes and place them in the saucepan.
2. Melt the butter over a very low flame. It will foam, bubble, and it will start to separate into its components, with the milk solids floating on the top and the butter milk on the bottom.
3. Once the butter starts to separate, you can skim the milk solids off of the top and continue to cook it over a very slow, gentle low heat. As it continues to cook, it will separate even more.
4. Ultimately the butter will be almost clear and it is pure fat.
5. You can use the clarified butter for stir-fry or as a topping.

Note:

• Do not replace regular butter with clarified butter in your recipes unless it calls for it specifically. Since regular butter contains 16-17% water that has been removed from clarified butter, it's going to throw the proportions of your baking recipes off. 
• Ghee is not the same as clarified butter. It's often used in Indian dishes and is heated just a wee bit more on medium heat, until the milk solids are browned, giving the resulting fat a nutty flavor, richer aroma and a very high smoke point.