The blog of cooking-ez.com
Fats for cooking
Last modified on: January 23th 2018
Fats for cooking
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.
Lasts posts
The 3 essential knivesYou must have heard a chef or cook say: "There’s no good cooking without good ingredients". This is very true, of course, but for any amateur or beginner it is equipment that really counts to start with. What I mean is that you should not skimp on [Read more...]
Using stretch food film effectivelyMaybe you use food film in your own kitchen. You know, the very thin, clear plastic stuff that you can stretch, often used to cover food and protect it from the air. It’s become so widely used that it’s now an essential item for pros. They even [Read more...]
The mock CAP baker's certificate examThe next instalment in my life as an apprentice baker at the French INBP professional school. I’m now halfway through training and it’s still as exciting as ever, and exhausting – but maybe I’m just getting old, or both… Anyway, a few days [Read more...]
Rosemary in recipesRosemary, as I’m sure you know, is a culinary herb: It is one of the famous French "herbes de Provence", and is very effective in bringing a real taste of the Mediterranean to any dish. The classic way to use it in a recipe is to add a [Read more...]
The Holy Grail of French bakersWhile browsing through the recipes on this site, you may have noticed that while I adore cooking (everything, in fact, to do with eating and drinking), I am particularly drawn to bakery: bread, viennoiseries and all that goes with them – it’s a [Read more...]
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 existential: do the egg yolks in a custard recipe really need to be beaten until pale, or not? You might already have noticed in many recipes [Read more...]
Egg yolks and caster sugarWe often come across recipes where we need to mix egg yolks with caster sugar. This would appear to be a very ordinary and simple thing to do but, be warned, these two ingredients can behave oddly together. Let’s take confectioner's custard [Read more...]
The golden-brown finish on puff pastryLet's take a look at the tricky matter of producing puff pastry with an attractive, golden-brown finish. French pastry chefs call this "dorure" (literally, "gilding"). Behind this quirky term there lurks a real problem (and the solution): when [Read more...]
Post your comment or question
You are welcome, if you wish, to comment on this page: why you like it or not, what you have changed, what results it gave, point out a mistake or omission, etc. You can also ask a question. I answer all questions (in a broken English, sorry) unless someone else does it before me.
Please feel free to say what you think, I'm always very interested in your opinion. Your comment will appear on line with the page, so please write in standard readable English, not SIM or only in CAPITALS, otherwise your comment may be rejected.
Please look at advice for submitting a comment or image (what you should or should not do). By the way, don't type your e-mail address in the comment, otherwise you might be spammed.