Fats for cooking

If you need to fry or sear anything a frying pan or saucepan, the temperature is likely to be high.
In particular, I have cooking red meat in mind. In this case, what should fat should we use? And at what temperature?

For our red meat, let's imagine we want to fry a tournedos (let's go straight for something top-of-the-range). The same goes for this as for all other fried or seared red meat, and there's no secret: really, really hot; the meat should be seared or flash fried.

So much for the temperature, but what about the fat? For simplicity's sake, let's narrow this down to two possibilities: butter or oil.

Oil: No problem with this; the oil will take being heated to a high temperature. There's a trick to knowing when it is hot enough => it will begin to give off a light smoke. Look out for this and as soon as it happens, put your meat in the pan. Do be careful, though; you need to react quickly and not let it burn and smoke too much.

Butter: This presents more of a problem. Butter will not take high temperatures. To start with, it melts and foams, so we might go ahead and add the meat at that point. But as the temperature continues to rise, the butter will end up burning and give a very unpleasant, bitter flavour.

So, as you can see, if you want to cook at a very high temperature, it is better to use oil, as butter is unsuitable.

That's all very well, but oil doesn't taste the same as butter and doesn't give the same flavour to the meat; generally, butter makes it taste better (yes, taste also matters). So, is there really no way to fry meat in butter?

As it happens, there is – but not with normal butter. We need to use clarified butter, which is butter that has been separated off from the white milk solids, which you can see as the little bits in the photo above. These would end up burning and turning brown during frying. It is fairly simple to make and keeps very well.

There is a third way, using a mixture of the two: a little oil in the bottom and then butter added. This allows the temperature to be raised higher than for ordinary butter alone, but clarified butter is still the better option by far.

To sum up: When cooking red meat, always fry it at high temperature, and for the fat, use oil or clarified butter.

Back to top of page

Lasts posts

• 

  The 3 essential knives

  You must have heard a chef or cook say: "There’s no good cooking without good ingredients". This ...

• 

  Using stretch food film effectively

  Maybe you use food film in your own kitchen. You know, the very thin, clear plastic stuff that you ...

• 

  The mock CAP baker's certificate exam

  The next instalment in my life as an apprentice baker at the French INBP professional school. I’m ...

• 

  Rosemary in recipes

  Rosemary, as I’m sure you know, is a culinary herb: It is one of the famous French "herbes de ...

• 

  The Holy Grail of French bakers

  While browsing through the recipes on this site, you may have noticed that while I adore cooking ...

• 

  Is it really necessary to cream egg yolks?

  Let’s try and answer a question that crops up in cookery and patisserie, even if it verges on the ...

• 

  Egg yolks and caster sugar

  We often come across recipes where we need to mix egg yolks with caster sugar. This would appear to ...

• 

  The golden-brown finish on puff pastry

  Let's take a look at the tricky matter of producing puff pastry with an attractive, golden-brown ...

• Other articles

• See all posts
• Random post
• RSS feed