February 5, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:Ezra Klein has a question
So in a fit of culinary inspiration triggered by Bill Buford's Heat, I decided to give up my cheap non-stick saute pans for some serious, stainless steel cookware. Those were heady, exciting days, imagining the blisteringly quick convection of heat, the perfectly browned food, and the end of carcinogenic teflon flakes. They have not come to pass.It's important to know that I primarily cook tofu, frying it in a tablespoon or two of olive oil till it develops a bit of delicious crust. My expectation was I'd be able to do this on slightly lower heat with the new pans, retaining more moisture in the soy itself. That's, uh, not happened. Instead, the steel cookware simply tears off the crisping, outer layer of the tofu, resulting in a dirty pan and soft, white cubes, rather than the beautifully browned chunks I'd been anticipating. I've tried superheating the oil, but that just makes the whole contraption catch on fire, albeit only for a moment or so (on the other hand, this seems to happen often in restaurants, so maybe it's to be expected)?
What am I doing wrong? How can I brown my tofu in my good pans, or is soy too wimpy and delicate for real cookware? And if so, what's the actual benefit of steel cookware? Better chefs than I seem to favor it, but why?
One of the things most people don't realize is that the primary concern of restaurant kitchens is not some magical qualities of the pans, but cheapness and durability. Really good home quality pans are better than what is used in a restaurant kitchen; chefs can't afford to pay that kind of money for a pan that will take so much abuse. One of the reasons that chefs hate nonstick is that it won't take any rough handling.
That said, I also hate nonstick, because it won't brown or sear properly. I have exactly one nonstick pan, used for cooking eggs, and the dog's dinner. The advantage of stainless is that it will take the highest heat and the most handling, and unlike copper, won't poison you. The disadvantage is that it is the stickiest of the major pot-making materials, which is good for developing something called a fond on your meat, but bad for cooking delicate foods like tofu. Also, it conducts heat too well, so it needs something a little less temperamental, like copper or aluminum, sandwiched between the heat and the cooking surface. Luckily, Ezra seems to have bought some tri-ply pans with an aluminum disc inside.
Personally, I mostly use anodized aluminum. But I'm decent on the stainless, and I like me some good fried tofu. So here's my technique, for what it's worth:
1) Use at least firm tofu. I'm an extra firm girl myself. Silken tofu sure is silky . . . in my smoothies. Not so much good for cooking, unless you want to get into deep frying, in which case you can make a kind of soy-based mozarella stick that isn't bad.
2) Use a lot of oil. One tablespoon is inadequate. Start with four and work it down. Peanut oil is my preferred poison here; it will go to a higher heat without smoking.
3) Use a brush or a paper towel to distribute the oil evenly over the pan. Get a thin layer on the sides.
4) Use high heat. And by high, I mean "turn the dial as far as it will go". Heat the oil thoroughly. A tiny bit of smoke coming off of it is all right.
5) Cube the tofu and drop it into the oil all at once.
6) Keep it moving. Let it rest for fifteen seconds, and then whee! away we go again.
7) Cook it fast. This shouldn't take more than two minutes. I usually stir-fry some vegetables first, for three minutes, drop in the tofu for two, put in a little stir fry sauce to heat through for thirty seconds, and then serve. But I also like it plain, with a sesame-soy-ginger dipping sauce.
Ezra's commenters saying "Stainless steel pans suck, use a wok", are, to put it bluntly, on better drugs than I ever seem to get. As far as I know, real woks are made out of . . . that's right, stainless steel. They're designed, however, to be stuck in a round hole in the oven top, so that the whole surface is bathed in gas flames. On a western stove, which is flat, they're inferior to a decent saute pan.
Any further required explanations will be provided at pub trivia tonight.
Posted by Jane Galt at February 5, 2007 9:06 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"Also, it conducts heat too well, so it needs something a little less temperamental, like copper or aluminum, sandwiched between the heat and the cooking surface."
I hate to contradict the estimable Megan, but steel does not conduct heat nearly as well as copper and aluminum. The only materials with higher heat conductivity (per square inch) than copper are silver, gold, and diamond. Aluminum might be the best of all on a per-pound basis.
I think Megan misunderstood a problem of hot spots as excess conductivity. Any thin metal pan, SS (stainless steel) or otherwise, will conduct the heat from the burner through to the cooking surface pretty fast, and in a single-layer pan this is likely to cause uneven heating and spots where the food burns. The aluminum in a SS-Al-SS pan [1] is there to spread the heat laterally, at an even higher rate than it travels through the thickness of the SS layers. This gives you even heating. Going back to the 60's, they made copper-bottom pans with a layer of copper plated onto the outside of a SS (I think) pan, so the copper spread the heat. The copper is exposed and may turn color with age, but it still works. A heavy aluminum pan provides heat spreading just by the thickness; I think a burner on high would still give you hot spots, but for the low to moderate level of heat you want for tofu or eggs, the whole piece of Al will be nearly the same temperature. The old-fashioned very heavy cast-iron fry pans weren't particularly good at heat spreading, but they were so thick and it took the heat so long to soak through that hot spots were avoidable.
[1] I think that there are also thin layers of nickel, etc., in between to help the SS and Al stick together, but these are too thin to significantly affect heat flow.
Okay -- but every time I heat the oil that hot, when I drop the tofu in, flames shoot up. Is that...normal?
Jane and Ezra should look at the fine explanation here.
I leave frying tofu to experts, and buy it shrink-wrapped in Asian groceries.
Peanut vs. olive oil is the key, the latter also won't taste good with tofu.
IIRC, real woks are plain (high-carbon) steel, not stainless. Meaning that they have to be seasoned like cast iron is.
What is this, a VFW hall ca. 1978? Tofu's an ingredient. And fried it's a *great* ingredient. The crispy/creamy combo is hard to beat. Dip it in some good Thai peanut sauce and mmmmmm....
My two cents, Cast Iron is great. I don't know if it would be ideal for tofu but it is great for a steak, good sear. Also quite easy to clean, the sticking quotient is very low.
Chris Anderson is right: a proper wok is carbon steel. I have a much-treasured, 15-year old wok with a beautiful seasoned black spot on the bottom, and it does crispy seared tofu well every time.
If I were using a Western pan for this kind of food, I'd use the Western equivalent: a seasoned cast-iron pan.
Mike, Mike, Mike.
Tofu is a sin against nature.
Remember, when someone eats tofu - Baby Jesus cries.
Ezra,
Dorks aside, the problem is the oil. Olive oil is great, but has an extremely low flash point - at high temperatures it burns easily. The key to cooking in oil with high heat is to use an oil that has a higher flash point. Peanut will work, but I prefer grapeseed.
-Donut, who likes steak and tofu, both in moderation, and not together.
The real benifit of non-stick in my cooking is cleanup. Non-stick means you don't have to break out the Bon Ami to get off the crust.
But 90% of what I cook -- meat, non-meat, stovetop, oven, everything -- is done in cast iron. It can get nice and hot and once it's hot it *stays* hot. No dickering with the knob to keep things steady. And much less sticky than the few stainless steel pans I have.
So here's another vote for a well-seasoned cast iron pan.
What about cast iron? (as I see other commenters have pointed out as well) Properly seasoned cast iron is better than any non-stick pan I've ever used, plus it can go from range to oven and back. The only drawback is that you can't put it in the dishwasher, but I love my cast iron pans so much I actually enjoy washing them. Even when stuff is baked on, it still comes off with a little scrubbing, which cannot be said for my stainless steel pans. I won't use those for anything boiling pasta anymore.
If you already have stainless, you can just season it as if it were cast iron, and it should work nigh as well in terms of sticking. (It won't hold and diffuse heat like heavy cast iron, but...)
FWIW, Alton Brown of 'Godds Eats' advocates using woks on barbecure grills because non-commercial stoves just don't have the BTUs to properly heat a Wok, and America's Test Kitchen just uses a 12" skillet with sloped side (flat bottom ban for flat stove...)
I would think a cast iron skillet would have been better for slighly sticky food (I'm unsure where tofu resides on the sticky scale of Egg to Bacon, though. If it is close enough to Egg, perhaps non-stick is a good as you get can get). I find that chicken and fish do release well from cast iron if the pan is properly seasoned, heated and oiled (yes, it is more problematic than others, but my goodness the fond in a cast iron pan can be really good). And for steaks, it is stunning.
I haven't personally tried the enamel coated cast iron (Le Creuset, et al.), but they also may be good choiced for low maintence, good browning, limited stick surfaces. Not cheap, but probably in the same range as an All Clad pan...
Really good home quality pans are better than what is used in a restaurant kitchen; chefs can't afford to pay that kind of money for a pan that will take so much abuse.
Actually, an expensive pan in most restaurant kitchens wouldn't take much of any abuse. It would be stolen before the week was out, into some nice busboy/dishwasher/produce-truck-driver's kitchen, or more likely eBay.
My personal choice for pans for the last year has been these: http://www.amazon.com/Swiss-Diamond-6428-Nonstick-Cast-Aluminum/dp/B0006DWIEM/sr=8-1/qid=1170706617/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-7386398-7611300?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden . Non-stick, very durable, extremely high thermal conductivity because of the diamonds, and great
at browning and crisping. Produces an excellent fond, and deglazes by doing not much more than looking at it funny.
I also recommend peanut oil for tofu, if you must. Olive and grapeseed are too mild, and grapeseed
way too expensive
I third the cast iron rec. In fact I submit it's basically the only way to do what Klein wants to do, well. I fact I submit further that Ms. McArdle really, really wants some practice with good cast iron. Cheap, durable, pretty much nonstick, and the closest you can get indoors to grilling.
Geeze, ya' can't cook at very high temperatures with olive oil; I'm surprised that anyone tries it more than once. It really is hard to beat thick cast iron.
Frankly, proper wok-style cooking is hard to achieve in a residential kitchen; two foot flames shooting up can be a little intimidating.
Geeze, ya' can't cook at very high temperatures with olive oil; I'm surprised that anyone tries it more than once.
Not real olive oil, but that extra light stuff has its uses. Even so, I couldn't fry an egg in my apartment without setting off the smoke detector, until I taped up the whole thing.
It's definitely the amount of oil. Well, I think it's the amount of oil. I like tofu sandwiches and I use extra firm tofu, slice it, not cube it, into a long, firm piece, like slicing a piece of bread off of a bread loaf, and then lay it down into a oil which has coated the bottom of the pan. The extra firm tofu doesn't absorb that much oil, and I use middling heat, actually, and let the thing sizzle away. I don't touch it. If you play with the tofu a lot it will break. I flip it exactly once.
Anyway, I think you have to practice the technique a lot to get it to work.
oh, and I haven't had a problem with olive oil and tofu and Mom makes a wicked tofu curry starting with olive oil). She has modified a lot of the Indian dishes we grew up eating to me more Indiany-Americany.
Aaargh, ignore the last comment. Apparently I am better at cooking tofu than typing.
Yep, I can vouch for the seasoned cast-iron making a nice crisp crust on tofu.
I was careful (lucky?) enough to marry into a cast-iron cookware family. My wife regularly churns out excellent, crusty tofu in her cast-iron. I have no ideas on technique, though; I'm just a stomach when it comes to most tofu recipes. We don't have any peanut oil, so that can't be involved.
I don't eat tofu, being allergic to soy. But has anyone tried clarified butter for high temp cooking?
Prove the pan. If you haven't done that, then your pan will be sticky. (Also known as "seasoning" in some dialects).
yeah, clarified butter ain't going to work for high temp frying. I use it sometimes but cut it with corn or peanut oil.
And, no, peanut oil is _not_ the "right" oil to use for the tofu --- sesame oil, cut into peanut or corn oil about 1:4 (or else it'll be overpowering) is.
Ms. McArdle has seen too much cheap kitchen crud: my Mom's wok _is_ cast iron. And about forty years old, too....
Stainless pans are not really hard to clean. You just have to remember that they are nearly indestructable. I keep a sandpaper sponge used in furniture refinishing for when my stainless pans get nasty.
FWIW, Alton Brown of 'Godds Eats' advocates using woks on barbecure grills because non-commercial stoves just don't have the BTUs to properly heat a Wok, and America's Test Kitchen just uses a 12" skillet with sloped side (flat bottom ban for flat stove...)
This sounds more like a ruse to get the wok out of the kitchen and onto the deck, a desire I can sympathize with. If the weather is hospitable and I have an extra 15 minutes for setup, I regularly spread a couple stainless cookie sheets on the patio table for a foodsafe work surface, and then run the electric frying pan over to the nearby weatherproof outlet.
The result is that you can hose down the patio after 10 or 15 such sessions, rather than blowing away an entire Saturday degreasing the kitchen and deodorizing all household textiles.
I use cast iron for most of my cooking, but for tofu I'd go with nonstick. The key to nonstick is to buy the cheap, ugly, but heavy-bottomed aluminum pans in the restaurant supply houses and throw them out when they start to deteriorate - usually a year or two for me. It's just obvious physics. If you make a substance that's really slippery it won't stick to metal very well. The cheap pretty pans are slippery, but they don't conduct heat well and only last a year. The manufacturers of "good" pans give you the worst of all worlds - pans that aren't all that slippery and still deteriorate after four or five years - and cost a mint. Just buy the inexpensive ugly pans and count on a finite lifetime.
Real woks are iron or non-stainless steel. They're very dependent on being seasoned correctly before use. Rubbing them with pork fat when they're just shy of glowing red is a good start. Then never wash them with soap, water only.
The rule is hot pan, cold oil. Bring the wok to a temperature high enough to have water drops dancing on it, then add lots of peanut oil. Tofu won't stick if you've done all the above.
In the real world, most of us don't have the burner capacity to cook large quantities in a thin steel wok without cooling the wok excessively. If you're stuck with mere 15,000 to 17,000 BTU burners and are cooking for six, use a heavy cast iron pan or wok, or one of thick anodized aluminum. The heat capacity of the thick-walled pan wil be appreciated, helping to make up for the wimpy burners.
rashomon
It strikes me that the very quality of stainlessness means that stainless steel won't absorb fat and season properly...
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