The tablespoon of olive oil is to kickstart the process, after that enough fat will render out of the meat to keep it going.
Agreed on meat, but I consistently see way-too-small amounts of oil suggested for cooking veggies, too. It's like every recipe writer online got together and decided that 1) they must specify oil quantities for those steps, but 2) the quantity must never exceed one tablespoon.
That said, is anyone actually measuring a tablespoon of oil? I just pour a glug of a size proportional to the ingredients and adjust as needed.
If you take a university student who has just left home and never cooked for themselves and tell them "just pour a glug proportional to the ingredients"...that's pretty close to useless for them, especially since they don't yet an intuition for what things you can freehand (and how much you can freehand them) and which things you shouldn't.
After all, you (probably) wouldn't ever say "I just open the Morton's salt and pour a glug in" because getting salt wrong even by relatively small amounts has a big impact on the final dish.
That said, I agree with you that recipe writers usually do a poor job of laying which things fall more on the "suggested amount, you can just eye ball it" end of the spectrum and which ones are "you should really pull out at least a spoon to get close on this one".
Not GP and I wouldn't phrase it quite like that - but I definitely would. You can give a rough indication, but salt should be added to taste.
(Unless we're talking about baking, where for one thing you can't taste until the end anyway. In that case yes of course measure, still to taste, but the feedback loop is longer.)
No, but you do, almost universally, say "salt to taste." Which is a different way to say the same thing.
I can't think of any situation where I would want more than a literal tablespoon of oil for cooking the first veggies thrown in (usually onion). By the time the onions have begun to caramelize there's is enough water that the original tablespoon of oil is no longer significant.
Where did I say it wasn't?
Anyway, about adding water, I respectfully disagree. The oil is necessary and it really is a tablespoon in a shallow and uncrowded pan with the lid off.
EDIT: I'm specifically talking about browning some onions when called for as an initial step in a recipe, not for making a huge batch of them for use as a condiment. Cutting the onion into finer pieces also speeds things up.
The idea is that adding water, raising it to a boil, and covering the pan reduces the amount of time needed to raise the temperature of the onions to the caramelization point, more than offsetting the amount of time needed to remove the water itself. That plus adding some baking soda near the end reduces the overall time considerably.
Slow cook them first for a few hours at a low temperature and then caramelize after. All your onion in a dry pot. Don't add water. Strain them when done and you have... soggy pale onions. Heat up the biggest pan you have and add some butter to do the caramelization (don't crowd the pan like they do in their video). Add some good balsamic vinegar and brown sugar while you're at it. Be sure to make a huge batch so you can freeze some for later. Don't bag and freeze before letting the onions come to room temperature. It's a lot of water in them onions man, but you can use that strained out water for a vegetable stock!
I don't like them like the Americans do but there is lots of to play with it. (I've even started boiling onions whole before I use them in a bunch of other dishes)
Highly recommend it.
I have a few recipes that call for browning onions in a cup (or more!) of ghee.
Works wonderfully. Still takes forever.
There are many ways to brown onions, all of them suck. I tried the "boil in water first" method while back, that works OK ish.
I've helped cook at a camp where 500 people were going to eat the meal. That requires very different thinking from large family cooking where at most 20 people are eating, and a small family is different as well.
Blast them on high heat and you drive off most of them, and polymerize the rest to creosotes.
Some claim that this is a thing when making rice too. I've tried toasting the grains for a few minutes before adding the water to boil, but I can't say I can tell the difference. Maybe that's a time issue like the onions, or maybe it just doesn't do anything...
Quite a few Indian dishes require toasting the rice first, if you don't you will end up with a very different dish. In the right context, it makes a huge difference.
When I was teaching 20 ago I would have given you a 2 for that. I happen to have a PhD in so I am knowledgeable about that matter.
Good for you.
Obviously philosophy isn't that informative a term, so people try to be helpful by adding what field or topic their actual research was about.
Some vocational/applied higher degrees in specific fields do have specific initials to differentiate them from a "generic" PhD (for example, the EngD).
Apologies for ++pedantry :)
> people try to be helpful by adding what field or topic their actual research was about
Right, and a common way to do that is to say 'PhD in blah', or 'on bazzing foobars for blah' as though 'PhD' referred specifically to their thesis.
I'm not any kind of cooking whiz but I always use an instant pot (electric pressure cooker) for stuff like that, so it gets up to 230 or so, I think.
According to America's Test Kitchen, do this: Pat dry. Start cold in nonstick/cast iron — no preheat, no oil. Flip every 2 mins. Start high, after few flips, turn heat down to medium. Keep flipping every 2 mins until done.
Most cuts worth eating have some fat on them (filet mignons might not but they are very dry anyway -- to me they're not worth it). This fat is enough to brown and cook the steak on. It's completely unnecessary to add oil.
I find the pan-sear delivers almost the same results in much less time (of course, you won't get the uniform insides of a reverse sear, but close enough since you're flipping so much). I'm also at a stage of life when I can afford better cuts of meat.
But I think ATK or someone else debunked this as the best practice. Flipping more than once gets you more even internal cooking.
In my oven, 230deg is just about maximum temperature; cooking anything that hot for 30 minutes will result in cinders. I take it your oven is calibrated in Fahrenheit?
i have not had weevils in a number of years but I have recently had red flour beetles or confused flour beetles
they suck
what proportions do you use
For anything long term I pour the flour out onto long trays, let it reach 0°F/-18°C in my freezer and keeping it there for 3 days, then storing it in food safe 5-gallon buckets with bay leaves and oxygen absorbers, though some also use dry ice. [2]
weevils/beetles all absolutely suck.
[0] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/096708797229040?...
[1] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/096708799227950
[2] - https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
i'd be nervous about putting dry ice in a hermetically sealed container like a bucket
a thing i've noticed with storing food in plastic (pet) coke bottles is that they never seem to get beetles and that they tend to collapse a bit over the first year or so; i suspect that, even without a fe/nacl oxygen absorber, the food oxidizes enough to consume the oxygen initially present, which reduces the gas volume about 20 percent and kills any beetles initially present
my older notes on the topic are at https://dercuano.github.io/notes/food-storage.html
I only sift flour if I'm making scones, it seems to make a difference. I'm not a cakey person, I don't bake cakes. It's cake bakers that tend to care about sifting.
if you don't put in a bit of oil, then you're searing one side in a dry pan, and the second side in an oiled pan. and if you're only putting a bit of oil in and it's all in contact with the meat there's really no reason to worry about smoke point, use whatever oil is handy.
Canola oil has a high burning point so is a better choice, but if you really want to avoid it, sunflower oil is a good choice as well.
There is absolutely no reason you can't sear meat with olive oil. You just have to use the light/refined stuff, and not the virgin/extra virgin (which have smoke points closer to 410°F.
Worth noting that canola oil, in the best case scenario, has a smoke point of 450°F.
> Light/refined olive oil has a smoke point of up to 470°F.
Where did you get that number? Any source I found gives olive oil a burning point of at most 410F. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...
Also seriouseats puts it at 465°F https://www.seriouseats.com/cooking-fats-101-whats-a-smoke-p...
Also see https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...
One of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, Noma in Copenhagen, is closing soon. Their menu costs about $800 per person, but even at that price the business barely turns a profit and runs largely on unpaid interns who put in the endless hours of manual labor so they could have the famous restaurant on their CV:
https://www.ft.com/content/6377b292-d825-4b3a-8527-04d147551...
I love watching cooking videos where they say “a tablespoon of olive oil” and proceed to pour in half the bottle
Searing your meat only goes at temperatures that are high enough to immediately evaporate any escaping liquid.
But at low heat it will not. Or well, eventually your meat will brown, but first your steak will have boiled for a while so you'll never be able to serve your steak rare or medium rare.
The idea is that salt on the outside of the steak initially draws moisture out of the steak, making it dry. But given enough time, the salt penetrates deeper into the steak, and holds the moisture in.
Yet, "sifting flour" was a thing years back... not the one bought in the store but the one stored in large sacks, and ground in the local mill. The amount of lumps sifted out was non-trivial.
Whether you dry-roast or toast in oil depends on what you're trying to achieve; if you want flavoured oil for something like a tadka, then you use oil. Dry roasting to season e.g. a curry produces different flavours. It's also harder; different spices burn at different speeds, so for example add cumin first and turmeric last. burnt turmeric is very bitter.
until you read Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and start watching the epicurious yt channel.
the "4 levels" and "pro chef vs home cook" epicurious playlists are amazing eye openers, where they exactly highlight the actual difference in skills and knowledge.
but sure, anyone can cook well, even a rat.
Take some szechuan peppercorns and boil them in a soup and see if you feel the ma numbing sensation. Then saute them in oil for a few minutes and then add the soup, and notice the difference.
It's the same with lots of spices.
Sautéing spices “to release the flavor” and then adding them to stew where they’ll simmer for an hour or more.
Pretending “restaurant quality” is anything besides twice as much butter and salt as you’d dare use at home.
“One tablespoon of olive oil” to brown absurd amounts of meat at high heat.
Once you start recognizing recipe BS, you see it everywhere.