When Burning Your Food Is a Good Thing

Browning your food properly is a great way to add flavor.

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How would you like to be able to coax more flavor from your daily cooking with only minimal effort? It's possible, and you don't need to go to culinary school, buy a new stove, or hire a personal chef to do it. All you need to do is learn how to properly brown your food.

Great flavor begins with good-quality ingredients, of course, but things start to get really interesting when you add heat to the equation. Under the right conditions, heat leads to browning, which produces loads of new flavor. (Professional cooks call this amazing transformation caramelization; we call it just plain good flavor.) In fact, encouraging your food to brown is perhaps the single most effective way to improve your sautéing, roasting, grilling, and frying.

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Tricks of the Cooking Trade

So, whether you're following someone else's recipe or improvising your own creation, look for the best ways to develop that deep golden crust on your beef, chicken, fish, and vegetables — even your baked goods can benefit. These five tips will help ensure good results.

1. Dry your ingredients. Surface moisture will turn to steam in the hot pan, and that will inhibit browning. Just use a sheet or two of paper towel to pat dry your shrimp, chicken, beef, and even cut-up vegetables, if needed, before you toss them in the pan.

2. Don't overload the pan. It might be tempting to fill the skillet or roasting pan to capacity, but try to keep from doing so. When food is crowded together, internal moisture that's trying to get released becomes trapped, and the food steams rather than browns. Instead of crowding the pan, use two roasting pans, or sauté in batches to let the food breathe; a bit of space around each item allows steam to escape.

3. Crank up the heat. It seems like many home cooks are afraid of high temperatures, but it's hard to get decent browning without it. So be brave and try roasting vegetables or chicken at 425 degrees F or even higher. When you're sautéing, crank up the burner to high (and turn on the exhaust fan) — this is especially key for mushrooms, zucchini, and other high-moisture foods. You can always turn it down if the food starts to burn, but more likely you'll just get nice searing action and better flavor.

4. Don't fiddle with the food. Most browning is a result of direct contact with the hot pan or grill, and if you flip or toss the food too soon, you'll slow down the process. Let your burgers and chops sit undisturbed for a spell to cultivate that sear, and don't turn your roasted vegetables until the bottom is golden. You'll also have fewer sticking problems this way, since foods often naturally release from the pan once they've begun to caramelize.

5. When baking sweets, go for the gold. With some exceptions, most cookies, tarts, pies, and pastries taste better when they're baked to a deep bronze color rather than a pale blond. Golden color indicates that the sugars have caramelized, and that brings out more sweet, nutty goodness in your desserts. Glass pie pans are helpful for gauging the color of pie crusts. When checking tarts, lift up the crust with a big spatula to get a view all the way to the center.


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