Celebrity
Chef Jamie Oliver Shares A
Favorite Cooking Technique
Prepared by
Caroline
North
amie Oliver, Food Network star
and best-selling cookbook author, is on a mission to make cooking
at home easy and fun for everyone. He
bills his new book, "Jamie’s Kitchen",
as a "cooking course for everyone."
Armed with this cookbook and his new line of pots and pans from
T-FAL, The Jamie
Oliver Professional Series, there is no technique a new cook
can’t master.
Jamie Oliver offers the following
tips for one of his favorite and most healthy cooking techniques, sauteing, or
what he calls "pan-frying":
"The single biggest mistake that new cooks make is cooking in a cold pan," Oliver
explains. "You must heat the
pan before you start cooking. If you start to cook before the pan is hot enough,
the food steams instead of caramelizing and frying. You
want the heat of the pan to sear in the juices, making the food taste better."
Oliver has just worked with T-FAL to design his own
line of stainless steel cookware, the Jamie Oliver Professional Series, which
comes with either pure stainless or non-stick coated sauté
pans. Oliver says he often uses nonstick at home, because some dishes are simply
easier to cook on a non-stick surface. The new Jamie
Oliver Professional Series nonstick sauté pans feature T-FAL’s Thermo-Spot heat
indicator that helps home cooks tell when the pan is
ready. It turns bright red when the pan is ready to go. "My wife loves my new
nonstick pans because they’re easy to clean and the cool little
red Thermo-Spot lets her know when it’s ready to go. Her cooking has already
improved," he says.
"When it comes to frying pans, size matters! If your pan is too small, the
ingredients
will crowd each other, and they’ll end up steaming
instead of sauteing. But if the pan’s too big, all those great pan juices will
end up evaporating too fast and you may burn what you’re
cooking," Oliver points out. "So be sure to use the right size pan
for
the amount
of ingredients you have. Also, look for some key features in
the pan such as a good heavy bottom that distributes the heat evenly, shallow
with rounded sides to make food easy to toss, and an
easy-to-hold handle - long enough to be comfortable to grasp, not slippery, and
cool to the touch even when the pan is hot."
| The single biggest
mistake that new cooks make is cooking in a cold pan. You must heat the
pan before you start cooking. You want the heat of the pan to sear in the
juices, making the food taste better. |
"Using nonstick pans lets you use less oil or butter, which means healthy cooking.
To get
great flavor, what you really need is a good sear. And a good sear doesn’t necessarily
require lots of fat in the pan," notes Oliver. "When you
do this properly, not only do you end up with glorious, flavorful food, but you
also seal the juices and the nutrients right in with the flavor and
you’re cooking healthy food as well."
"You don’t have to go crazy
buying equipment, all you need to cook well is a good set of pots and pans (I’m
partial to my own!), a couple of good knives, including an
eight-inch chopper, a heavy mortar and pestle, a set of tongs, and a speed peeler,"
says
Oliver.
"This is the fun part - planning what goes into the pan. Think seasonally
and
try to shop for organic products if you can when you’re
at the market," Oliver urges. "Be intuitive; pan-frying is a fast cooking
method,
so you want things that are thinly sliced and cook quickly
(unless you are finishing in the oven). You can also score thicker cuts of meat
and fish to speed up the cooking time and add more surface
area to the food. What gets me going? Chicken marinated in some fresh herbs and
garlic that you've pounded in a mortar and pestle.
Steaks that have been liberally seasoned with salt and freshly cracked pepper.
Or, my fantastic Pan
Roast
Salmon dish (see Shoppe
Recipes in the Resource Box below). "Go
ahead guys. Get stuck in!"
For more information on the Jamie Oliver Professional
Series by T-FAL, visit the T-FAL
Web site at www.t-falusa.com.
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