Sautéing involves lightly frying a food.
Sautéing is a culinary technique that consists of lightly frying a food to ensure that it absorbs the seasonings used and the fat. For example: “Before adding it to the preparation, you should sauté the onion in butter” , “If you want to prepare a good accompaniment for the meat, I suggest you sauté different mushrooms in olive oil and add pepper and crushed chili” , “The next “The next step is to sauté the chopped garlic and then add it to the stew.”
Sautéing, in short, is a cooking method. It is usually applied to foods that will then be cooked longer as part of a sauce or a stew. Sautéing is carried out with small amounts of oil , lard ( butter ) or other fatty substance .
Saute objective
The idea is that the food is lubricated and impregnated with fat and seasonings . For this, the fat must be at a high temperature and the ingredients must move constantly, ensuring that the heat is distributed evenly and preventing the food from burning.
The first step to sauté food is to heat the pot or pan that will be used. Once this is done, the fat must be added and, when it has reached the desired temperature , the ingredients to be sautéed are added.
Foods that are usually sautéed include onion , garlic , leek , fennel and celery . When the ingredients have already been sautéed and added to a stew , sauce or soup, the fat used will also include the juices that the food secreted.
It is common to sauté onion and garlic.
The technique in preparing sauces and pizzas
Sautéing vegetables is usually the first step in many different dishes, since it can be carried out in several ways, to obtain different results. For example, if we want to prepare a tomato sauce with ingredients such as pepper, onion and garlic, the ideal is to cut them into very small pieces , all of similar dimensions, and cook them over very low heat , to ensure that their consistency becomes pasty and that absorb the oil or butter.
A sauce with undercooked or overly large pieces of vegetables is neither very attractive nor very tasty, although this is a matter of taste, which is why it would also be perfectly acceptable if this were the desired objective from the beginning of the preparation.
When making a pizza , on the other hand, although there are more recipes than we can imagine, one of the options for the ingredients that are placed on top of the dough is sautéed vegetables; In this case, unlike a sauce to accompany pasta, it is more common to cut the peppers and onion, among others, into medium pieces, generally in strips, and not to cook them to the point of softening them much, but simply to ensure that they are impregnated with the other flavors .
Tips for sautéing
Although the action of sautéing may seem very simple compared to other procedures in the world of cooking , it is quite demanding in terms of the attention that must be paid to the preparation to achieve the desired result; If the heat is too high, the ingredients may burn or not be very tasty, and the same can happen if the mixture is not stirred frequently.
The order in which the ingredients are added is also important and can make a difference in the final result. Eggplant, for example, absorbs oil more easily than the rest of the vegetables commonly used when sautéing, so it is best to add it last, to prevent it from absorbing all the fat . Mushrooms, on the other hand, give off a lot of liquid and can cause the oil to leak if the heat is at a high temperature.