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1.5: The Cooking Techniques - Sauté

  • Page ID
    22000
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    Sauté

    Sauté is a French term, translated it means, “to jump”. It is a dry method of cooking that uses a relatively small amount of oil or fat in a shallow pan over relatively high heat. Various sauté methods exist, and sauté pans are a specific type of pan designed for sautéing. Ingredients for sautéing are usually cut into pieces or thinly sliced to facilitate fast cooking. The primary mode of heat transfer during sautéing is conduction between the pan and the food being cooked. Food that is sautéed is browned while preserving its texture, moisture, and flavor. If meat, chicken, or fish is sautéed, the sauté is often finished by deglazing the pan's residue (fond) to make a sauce. Sautéing differs from searing in that searing only browns the surface of the food. Certain oils should not be used to sauté due to their low smoke point. Clarified butter, rapeseed oil and sunflower oil are commonly used for sautéing;[8] whatever the fat, it must have a smoke point high enough to allow cooking on medium-high heat, the temperature at which sautéing is done. For example, though regular butter would produce more flavor, it would burn at a lower temperature and more quickly than other fats due to the presence of milk solids. Clarified butter is more fit for this use. In a sauté, all the ingredients are heated at once, and cooked quickly. To facilitate this, the ingredients are rapidly moved around in the pan, either by the use of a utensil, or by repeatedly jerking the pan itself. A sauté pan must be large enough to hold all of the food in one layer, so steam can escape, which keeps the ingredients from stewing, and promotes the development of fond.

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    Sautéed Leeks. The Sauté Toss. Wikipedia. Commons


    This page titled 1.5: The Cooking Techniques - Sauté is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by William R. Thibodeaux & Randy Cheramie via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.