When is it a sauté; when is it a sear?

[Manley]

Hi Folks,

I'm new here. In fact, this is my very first post. So, I figured I'd dive right in with my latest cooking quandary.

Like a lot of people, I live in an apartment and am stuck with an ancient and terrible electric stove. There's no getting around it so I am trying to make peace with it.

While the oven works very well, especially with a big pizza stone in it, the stove top is something of an enigma to me. It seems that it is always too hot or not hot enough. Using that as a perfectly good excuse to go out and buy something, I went out and got one of those silly infrared thermometers. Now I can measure the exact temperature of my fine cookware on this abomination of a stove (note to self: measure the temp before putting the oil in the pan!).

The trouble is, I don't know what the target temperature ranges are for sauté and sear. I guess I missed that season of Good Eats. Is there such a thing as a temperature range for these techniques?

I bet someone here knows -- at least I'm hoping so.

Thanks, in advance, for your gentle advice.

Manley <alas, with no clever signature as of yet>

[snowangel]

I've always associated a saute with stuff jumping around in the pan (hot pan, spatula), sort of like stir-frying. But, I associate a sear with a hunk of meat that you put in the hot pan and when it releases itself, you flip it over and repeat.

Sort of the idea that with a saute it's all about moving the stuff around in the pan, but with a sear the reverse is true.

[Toliver]

Susan is correct. They're two different animals.

And welcome, Manley!

[Marky Marc]

I don't associate searing and sauteing with temperatures but cooking techniques. If you're searing something, though, you're going to want high heat for the most part. Sauteing can be done at any degree of heat, really.

[SheenaGreena]

saute is french for jump - basically when you are sauteeing, things are constantly moving and "jumping" around

searing is when you leave something in the pan, on high heat, to acheive some sort of color

both cooking methods can use the same temp, but its a matter of leaving the things in the pan to acheive more color, or moving things arond to incorporate air- therefore cooling the dish down

[slkinsey]

"Searing" is not a very precise cooking term, unfortunately. It is almost exclusively, and best used to describe the process of aggressively browning the outer surface of a large piece of meat (usually by frying, but sometimes by sautéing) without meaningfully cooking the interior. A good dictionary definition not confined to culinary use would be: "to scorch the surface of something with a hot instrument."

Sauté is more complicated, and one of my pet peeves in the culinary world.

The French word sauté is the past participle of the verb sauter, meaning "to jump." Thus, something that is sauté is "jumped." Where is it jumped? Around in the pan. So, for example, if you have poulet sauté, you have "jumped chicken" ("sautéed chicken," in restaurant-speak). Other languages, such as Italian, take this one step further and will often say saltato in padella, meaning "jumped around in the pan." This means that when we sauté (the French past participle having turned into an English verb), the food items are regularly agitated ("jumped") around in a large, flat pan so that all sides are browned.

Some people will suggest that one can sauté without moving the food around in the pan, and that the "jumped" part means that the pan is "so hot the food will jump up" when it touches the pan. This doesn't withstand too much scrutiny. First of all, the typical preparation that most of these people would call "sautéed fillet of snapper" or whatever isn't done over particularly high heat. Second, a sauté pan is not particularly useful for this kind of cooking. A sauté pan is, however, very useful when you would like to shake the pan back and forth over the burner and bounce the food around in the pan.

No, this other thing where you let the food sit in the pan, is frying, not sautéing. Otherwise, it would be a "sautéed egg" instead of a "fried egg." Nevertheless, it is true that in English usage, "sautéed" is commonly used as a stand-in for "fried" -- even among the kitchen staff. This is for a lot of reasons. . . Primarily I believe it is because "sautéed" sounds lighter, more healthful and more desirable than "fried," which is often incorrectly believed to imply cooking food that is partially or entirely sumberged in hot fat (this would have been called "boiling in oil" back in the old days). And also perhaps because some professional kitchens operating under a brigade system call the position in charge of most stovetop cooking the "sauté station" -- despite the fact that this station does more frying than sautéing. This is likely because this station is often considered the highest station under the sous-chef, which "rank" was previously occupied by the saucier (who was in charge of making sauces and stews as well as... you guessed it, sautéing food to order). In any event, it is a fact that "sautéed fillet of snapper" would have meaning to most professional cooks, despite not actually being correct usage. Notwithstanding the foregoing, however, it is correctly called a "fried fillet of snapper."

Yet another complication is that there are often dishes called "a sauté of mushrooms" or whatever. These dishes typically involve sautéing as one step of the preparation process, but most often include other techniques. For example, mushrooms might be briefly sautéed in hot fat, then some rich stock is added to the pan and the mushrooms are then braised for a while in the stock, after which time some butter and herbs might be added to create a sauce from the remaining liquid, and the whole thing called a "sauté of mushrooms" or "mushroom sauté."

So... to get to your question (finally! I know): both searing and sautéing are typically done over high heat. However, it's possible that most of the things you want to do that you think of as sautéing, are actually variations on frying, where the food is left to sit in one place for most of the time. This is a much more temperature-sensitive operation. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone can give you a set temperature for frying. Different things like to be fried at different temperatures, and the temperature setting you use will vary depending on the size and thickness of the food item as well as the effect you would like to produce. If your stovetop is particularly recalcitrant as to temperature adjustments, I'd suggest you experiment with finishing foods in the oven: just sear the food by frying or sautéing as appropriate, and then transfer the pan to a medium oven to finish cooking.

[Manley]

You guys and gals rock my world. Here, I was thinking it was a temperature thing.

I think my confusion started when I read a Pam Anderson cookbook (no, not the Baywatch Pam Anderson!). In the book, she seems to imply that searing is simply a higher heat version of sautéeing. Perhaps for the purposes of the book, this was so (it's still a terrific book). But nothing she says about either technique is inconsistent with what you all said.

Conclusion: I'm going to relax about this. I will find a temp that seems to yield the results I want. And I will try finishing in the oven. My wife made some killer pork chops that way last week.

Thanks, all!

[Hest88]

In the book, she seems to imply that searing is simply a higher heat version of sautéeing.  Perhaps for the purposes of the book, this was so (it's still a terrific book).

I dunno. Sounds like a book I'm going to have to avoid!