Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

by Samin Nosrat

  When browning, frying, or searing, the first side of a food to be browned will always be the most beautiful, so lay food in a pan or on the grill with its presentation side down. For poultry, that means skin side down, for fish that means skin side up. For meat, use your judgment and put the prettiest side down.

  The purpose of searing isn’t so much to cook as it is to brown meat or seafood in order to get the flavor benefits of the Maillard reaction. The penetrative heat of searing can be sufficient to cook the most tender cuts of meat and fish that are best served rare or barely cooked, such as tuna, scallops, or beef tenderloin. But for everything else, searing is for browning rather than cooking. Sear larger cuts of meat to achieve the flavor hits of Maillard before transferring the meat to braise over a gentle heat. Sear racks of lamb, pork loin roasts, or thick pork chops over direct heat before rendering and cooking them through with gentler heat, whether on the stove or grill, or in the oven.

  Grilling and Broiling

  The number one rule of grilling: never cook directly over the flame. Flames leave soot, unpleasant flavors, and carcinogens on food. Instead, let the flames subside and cook over smoldering coals and embers. Picture toasting the perfect marshmallow for s’mores—you’ve got to patiently perch the coat hanger over the coals, turning the marshmallow for even browning. Get that puppy too close to the flames and it’ll taste gassy and burnt on the outside, while remaining untoasted within. The same thing will happen to any food you grill directly over flames.

  Different fuels—whether fruit woods, hard woods, charcoal, or gas—reach different temperatures on the grill. Hard woods such as oak and almond catch fire quickly and burn slowly, so they’re ideal when you need sustained heat. Fruit woods—including grapevines and fig, apple, and cherry woods—tend to burn hot and fast and are great for quickly reaching browning temperatures. Never grill over soft woods such as pine, spruce, or fir, which can lend pungent, and not altogether pleasant, flavors to food.

  The benefit of charcoal is that it burns more slowly yet hotter than wood. Lump charcoal in particular lends a delicious smoky flavor to food. Though the flavor of food cooked over a live fire will always be superior, the convenience of a gas grill can’t be beat. Use gas grills with an understanding of their limitations—because they do not burn wood, they will not lend smokiness to food. (You can, however, use smoking chips to make up for this, as described.) And because gas doesn’t burn as hot as wood or charcoal, gas grills can’t achieve the blazing-hot temperatures of live fires, so they aren’t able to brown food as quickly or efficiently.

  Leave grilling meat unsupervised and as fat renders and drips into the coals, flare-ups will occur, engulfing food in flames and leaving behind unwelcome flavors. Prevent flare-ups by moving food around a grill and keeping very fatty cuts away from the hottest coals. Before I learned to cook, I always assumed that perfect crosshatched grill marks were the sign of a talented cook. Watching Alice grill piles of quail and sausages in her yard one afternoon, a few years after I started at Chez Panisse, I suddenly realized why the cooks I worked with never bothered with grill marks. As diminutive as a hummingbird, and just as restless, Alice hovered over the grill, moving the birds and sausages as soon as they began to take on color, or just as they began rendering fat and threatening to cause a flare-up. As she flipped the meat, it was obvious that their even golden-brown sheen was the direct consequence of her feverish tending. This way, every single bite would be bestowed with the flavorful molecules resulting from the Maillard reaction, instead of just the spots lucky enough to be marked by crosshatching.

  Whether you’re working with gas or a live fire, create different temperature zones on your grill, like various burners on a stove. Use direct heat over the hottest coal beds for the littlest, most tender foods: thin steaks, little birds such as quail, sliced vegetables and thin toasts, chicken breasts, and burgers you might want to leave rare. Use the suggestion of heat from nearby coals to create cooler spots for cooking meats on the bone, larger cuts, and chickens that need time to cook through. Cooler zones are also ideal for sausages and fatty meats that will cause flare-ups and for keeping foods warm.

  Indirect heat is at work in the kind of slow, gentle grilling known in the south as barbecue, and in smoking meats, such as Sage- and Honey-Smoked Chicken. In both of these methods, the grill is essentially turned into an oven and kept at temperatures between 200°F and 300°F. The key to gentle grilling and smoking is slow, constant heat, which can be a challenge when working with live fire. A digital meat thermometer can be helpful here, letting you know when the temperature of the grill drops or rises too far.

  A digital meat thermometer came in handy one summer after Eccolo closed, when my journalism teacher and cooking student Michael Pollan accidentally ordered three times as much pork shoulder as he’d thought. Panicked, he called me over. He taught me how to make pork shoulder barbecue and we had an emergency slow-cooking session in his yard—a contradiction in terms, perhaps, but a delicious one involving a lot of thumb-twiddling. He rubbed the meat with salt and sugar in advance, and then cooked it on a gas grill fortified with wood chips for six hours over indirect heat. I suspect that he may have been a southern pitmaster in a past life, for this yielded the smokiest, most fork-tender meat I’d ever tasted. Since there wasn’t much active meat-cooking to do, we also made Simmered Beans, Bright Cabbage Slaw, and Bittersweet Chocolate Pudding in our downtime and threw a pretty sweet Pork 911 Dinner Party that night.

  Don’t own a grill? Live in an apartment? Think of broiling as upside-down, indoor grilling. While most grilling is done outdoors, with the heat source below the food, broiling happens inside the oven, with the heat radiating from above. Broilers can get really, really hot—much hotter than a typical grill, since the food is usually much closer to the heat source. Use a broiler to cook very thin steaks or chops, or to brown foods under careful supervision, since just twenty seconds can mean the difference between delicious and carbonized. Use broilers to melt cheese on cheesy toast, to brown bread crumbs atop mac and cheese, and crisp the skin of leftover Glazed Five-Spice Chicken.

  Whether grilled, broiled, or roasted, allow all tender meats to rest after cooking and before carving. In addition to allowing time for carryover to occur, resting gives the proteins in meat a chance to relax. Rested meat retains water better after carving, yielding a juicier piece of meat. For large cuts, this can take up to an hour, while steaks need only 5 or 10 minutes. For the most tender slices, cut meat against the grain, or the direction in which the muscle fibers run. Let your knife do the hard work of shortening the fibers by cutting right through them. The meat will be much more tender, and chewing it will be a lot more enjoyable.

  Baking

  Oven temperatures fall into four general categories: low (175° to 275°F), medium-low (275° to 350°F), medium-high (350° to 425°F), and high (425°F and above). Within any one of these categories, food will cook in more or less the same way. If you don’t know where to start, start at 350°F, the “middle C” note of baking. Start here if you misplaced your recipe. 350°F is hot enough to encourage browning but gentle enough to allow most food to cook through.

  Low temperatures (175° to 275°F) offer enough heat to leaven and dry out Marshmallowy Meringues but are also gentle enough to prevent browning. One superstitious pastry chef I know will only ever bake meringues in her antique gas oven overnight. Before going to sleep, she preheats the oven to 200°F and then shuts it off as she slips in the cookies. The minimal heat generated by the pilot light slows the cooling of the oven, and by morning, her meringues are always snow-white and crisp, without being overly dry. In other words, they’re perfect.

  Most baked goods prosper with the delicate heat medium-low temperatures (275° to 350°F) offer. Proteins set, doughs and batters dry out—but not too much—and gentle browning ensues. Cakes, cookies, and brownies alike do well at these temperatures, as well as many pies and tender doughs including shortbreads and biscuits. Think of 325°F as
a more forgiving version of 350°F; it’s more likely to yield chewy rather than crisp cookies and golden rather than golden-brown cakes.

  In contrast, higher temperatures swiftly lead to browning. Cook savory dishes through at medium-low temperatures, then crank them up to medium-high (350° to 425°F) to develop the golden-brown tops we love to see on gratins, lasagna, pot pies, and casseroles.

  High (425°F and above) oven temperatures lead to rapid, though sometimes uneven, browning. Use high temperatures when achieving structure quickly is important, as it is for cream puffs and flaky crusts. As water vaporizes into steam in a hot oven, it leads to oven spring, which is the initial increase in the volume of a baking dough. This burst of rising steam pushes apart layers of a baking dough, yielding a flaky crust, like Aaron’s Tart Dough. Some baked goods, such as soufflés and popovers, rely entirely on oven spring to rise, while others, such as Lori’s Chocolate Midnight Cake also depend on chemical leaveners. Either way, this initial rise is generally the most substantial in the baking cycle. To achieve the most powerful oven spring, leave the oven door shut for the first 15 to 20 minutes of high-heat baking. After the proteins in the dough have set and the basic structure has formed, you can turn down the heat to prevent burning and ensure that the food cooks through.

  Dehydrating (less than 200°F)

  Think of dehydrating as baking at the lowest possible temperatures. As its name suggests, its aim is to remove water from food, often to preserve it, without reaching browning temperatures. Meat and fish jerky, dried peppers, fruit leather, and tomato paste, dried fruit, and tomatoes are all dehydrated foods. While you can buy special dehydrators to heat food gently, the lowest setting on the oven, or even just leaving food in there overnight with the pilot light on, is generally just right. At Eccolo, during the hottest, dryest days of summer, I’d dry fresh peppers and shelling beans on the roof, spreading them out in a single layer on a wire rack. I quickly learned to move the trays indoors at night to discourage nighttime critters and the morning dew from interfering with my work. Each round took several days and some careful tending, but I was always grateful for my summer diligence, come winter. To make juicy, oven-dried tomatoes, cut small, flavorful tomatoes such as Early Girls in half. Pack them snugly onto a parchment-lined baking sheet, cut side up. Season them with salt and a light sprinkling of sugar, then slide them into an oven set to 200°F (or lower, if possible) for about 12 hours, checking on them once or twice along the way. You’ll know the tomatoes are done when none of them is soupy or wet. Pack into a glass jar and cover with olive oil and refrigerate, or freeze in a resealable plastic bag, for up to 6 months.

  Toasting (350° to 450°F)

  My ideal piece of toast is crisp on the surface, golden brown in color, and rich with all of the flavors produced by the Maillard reaction. Aim for these three qualities whether you’re toasting a bagel, bread crumbs, or shredded coconut. Nuts, too, will only improve with toasting. To avoid doing the sort of euphemistic overtoasting carried out by my young cook at Eccolo, set a timer to remind you to check on toasting foods from time to time. Always toast in a single layer, stir often, and pull bits and pieces as they are done.

  Toast thin slices of bread, to be smeared with chicken liver paste or fava bean purée at medium-low heat (about 350°F) so they don’t burn or dry out, which will result in mouth-damaging shards. Thicker slices of bread, to be topped with poached eggs and greens or tomatoes and ricotta, can be toasted at high heat (up to 450°F), or on a hot grill, so they brown quickly on the surface and remain chewy in the center.

  At 450°F and above, coconut flakes, pine nuts, and bread crumbs will go from perfect to burnt in the time it takes to sneeze. Knock 50 to 75°F off the temperature, and you’ll buy yourself the luxury of time. If a sneezing fit hits, your toasted foods will be safe. And when you deem the toastiness of these delicate foods sufficient, remove them from their hot trays (not doing so may lead to carryover and your perfectly toasted food will blacken while your back is turned).

  Slow-Roasting, Grilling, and Smoking (200° to 300°F)

  Meats and fish that are rich in fat can be cooked slowly in the oven or on the grill at very low temperatures so that their own fats render and moisten them from within. I love to slow-roast salmon, a method that works equally well for a single serving or a whole side. Simply season the fish with salt on both sides and tuck it, skin side down, into a bed of herbs. Drizzle a tiny bit of good olive oil on top and rub it in evenly with your hands, then place the fish in an oven preheated to 225°F. Depending on the size of your portion, it can take anywhere from 10 to 50 minutes to cook, but you’ll know it’s done when the fish begins to flake in the thickest part of the filet when poked with a knife or your finger. Because this method is so gentle on its proteins, the fish will appear translucent even when it’s cooked. Slow-Roasted Salmon is luscious and succulent—perfect for serving warm, at room temperature, or chilled in a salad. (For a more detailed recipe and serving suggestions, turn to page 310.)

  Roasting (350°F to 450°F)

  The difference between roasting and toasting is simple: toasting implies browning the surface of a food, while roasting also cooks food through. Originally, roasting referred to cooking meat on a spit above or beside a fire. What we think of as roasting today—cooking meat in a dry, hot oven—was known as baking until about two hundred years ago.

  While the chickens—and everything else I so came to love roasting on that spit at Eccolo—invariably emerged with evenly cooked meat as a result of their constant rotation, the birds I roast at home brown differently due to the different forms of heat at work in the oven. The radiant heat emitted from the heating element dries out exposed foods as it cooks them, leading to crisp, dry skin on a chicken, or wrinkly, leathery skin on little potatoes. In a convection oven, one or two fans consistently circulate hot air, so food browns, dries out, and cooks more quickly than in a conventional oven. When using convection, reduce the temperature by approximately 25°F or monitor foods with extra vigilance.

  On the other hand, the surface of any food touching hot metal will brown via conduction, the principle at work in stovetop frying: the burner heats the pan, which heats the fat in the pan, which heats the food. It’s the same in the oven: the oven heats the pan, which heats the fat, which heats the food. Lay oiled slices of sweet potatoes on a pan and slide it into a hot oven. Though both sides of each slice will brown, they’ll cook differently due to the various modes of heat transfer at work. The tops will be slightly dry and leathery, while the bottoms will be golden and moist, as if they’d been pan-fried. Any roasting food will suffer from this sort of uneven browning—unless it’s cooking on a wire rack and air can circulate beneath it. Flip, rotate, and move roasting foods around in the oven as they cook. Oven browning gains momentum, so start food that must brown quickly at high temperatures and then turn the oven down as browning begins, to prevent overcooking.

  Thin foods, or foods that can’t risk being overcooked before they brown, can benefit from a head start: preheat the baking sheet in the oven before adding oiled and salted zucchini slices, or heat up a cast iron pan on the stove before tossing in shrimp dressed in Harissa and sliding it into a hot oven. Use slightly milder temperatures for foods you expect to leave in the oven for long periods of time. Taste food as it cooks. Touch it. Smell it. Listen to it.

  If you sense browning is happening too quickly, turn down the temperature, loosely cover the dish with a piece of parchment paper or foil, and move the rack away from the heating element. If you sense browning is happening too slowly, crank up the temperature, push food back into your oven’s hot spots, which are typically the back corners, and move it closer to the heating element.

  To further encourage steam to escape and browning to commence, use a shallow pan for roasting. Most of the time, a baking sheet with a lip or a cast iron pan is the way to go. If the meat you’re roasting has lots of fat to render (goose, duck, rib roast, or pork loin, for example), consider using a wire r
ack so that your roast doesn’t end up frying on the bottom as a pool of fat collects in the pan.

  Vegetables

  Timely salting, combined with the Maillard reaction, leads to perfect roast vegetables that are brown and sweet on the outside, tender and delicious on the inside (refer to the Salting Calendar for a refresher on when to salt). Make 400°F your default temperature for roasting vegetables, but know that it will change based on the size of the vegetables, their density and molecular makeup, as well as the depth and material of your roasting pan and the amount of food on the tray or in the oven.

  I once horribly miscalculated how much zucchini I had to roast at Chez Panisse. There was only enough room in the oven for two trays, and I was running short on time. I figured I’d just squeeze all of the zucchini onto two trays to get the task done. Like puzzle pieces, I packed the first tray so tightly that each piece seemed to hold all the others in place. I slipped the tray into the oven and set about doing the same with the rest of the summer squash. It never occurred to me to wonder why I’d never seen any other cooks pack so many vegetables onto a single tray—I was just doing what I needed to do to get the work done!

  When I piled the remaining zucchini onto the second tray, though, it was clear I’d made a mistake. There was barely enough squash to fill a second tray, leaving ample room between the pieces. With the first tray already heating up in the oven and a long list of other tasks to get done, I couldn’t bring myself to take the extra step and even out the two trays of zucchini, so I just slid the second tray into the hot oven.