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Recipes, cooking lessons, tips, tricks, food blog, and more.
Recipes, cooking lessons, tips, tricks, food blog, and more.
How do you avoid burning the flour used in recipes when you brown meat for stews?
3 June 2010
"I've been bitten yet again by something which plagues me when I make many recipes. Typically, some of the things I like to make start by saying: "toss the cubes of beef in flour, then brown them in a small amount of olive oil". This *always* burns unless I use about a gallon of oil. The flour soaks up the oil and catches on the pan. The only way to prevent this is to keep adding oil until I've put a really large quantity in. Sometimes I end up cleaning my pan halfway through just to get rid of the crap, when it should be full of beefy goodness for later. Is there some way round this? Like ignoring the flour?" - Colin
The problem is with the recipe, not with the cook. Typically, you would flour beef the way you described to thicken the eventual sauce that will be made with the dish. If you only want to colour the beef, without needing a thickening agent, don't bother flouring the meat. Put a bit of the meat in the pan, not too much otherwise the pan will cool down and the juices will be released, boiling the meat instead of frying & colouring it. You may need to do this in several batches. This will give you a nice amount of caramelised beef juice at the bottom of the pan, which you can later deglaze to get the beefy goodness out :)
Should you need the flour to thicken the sauce, sprinkle it on the beef AFTER it's been coloured. The remnant of fat on and around the beef will make the flour stick and it'll all nice. You may even wish to keep the heat under the flour to brown that as well a bit before adding liquid, but I don't usualy bother, as it's so difficult to brown it evenly without actually burning the darn thing.
So, if you wish to thicken a sauce, add the flour after. If there's no need for a thickening agent, just skip the flour entirely.
Also, don't use OLIVE oil to brown meat or do panfrying at high heat. Olive oil has a low smoke point (160C), almost as low as butter (140C). This means that you can't get the heat you need to colour your beef properly without a) changing the oil's flavour and b) increasing the carcinogenic nature of the burned oil. Use canola oil, or peanut oil, or any other oil that has a high smoke point (200C - 220C)
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