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Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
This event was on
Tuesday, July 02, 2024 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern
Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.
Question:
![Nancy C](https://d1c8xu194km6ge.cloudfront.net/avatars/1509138/1723749211-IMG_5040_thumbnail.jpeg)
Can you share any tips on browning without oil?
— Nancy Calkins
Answer:
Yeah, so I do this quite often as well too. Um, and the, it's, you're basically talking about the, the myeloid reaction, right? So, um, we do that in the forks of our eyes course, we show that off as well too, where you basically just wanna get your pan to a heat point where if you drop, uh, water in it, it'll basically kind of float around like a mercury ball. And once you get that into it, you can add your product to it and it will start to cook and uh, it'll eventually start to brown at the same time. Now I typically, when I'm getting it to that brown point, I'll add a little bit of water to it to deglaze the pan. Um, it could be vegetable stock as well too, to deglaze the pan and lift the product off the bottom of the pan easier. Um, and then flip it over and you'll see that you have that browning having on one side of the product. Um, now that is kind of different depending on what you're cooking with, right? So onions are one thing, but mushrooms another like a block of tofu, a completely different one with that as well too. So I think that the biggest tip that I can give in general is to be able to watch your heat, um, you know, uh, make the product thin enough so you can actually brown both sides pretty evenly. And you're not gonna have like, like if it's a tofu block, you don't wanna have the big white right in the center in both sides of the block of tofu brown. Um, so just consider that as well. Um, also think about outside the pan in particular, right? So like broiling is a great method or uh, you know, just baking in particular is a great way to be able to get brown on the outside of your product as well. The vegetables. Um, so there are a lot of different ways to be able to do it. So it's basically looking at your heat options, how to make sure that you can keep the product moist the same time and get the most flavor out of those.
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