Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
This event was on
Tuesday, January 27, 2026 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:
What is the best way to effectively sauté with broth or water--particularly onions and garlic? What type of pan is best to use sauté with broth or water? Thank you.
— Clarissa Bowie
Answer:
You know, I think best results, uh, are going to probably be a stainless steel pan. Um, a stainless steel pan is actually, you can really get it to the right, uh, temperature really easy. Um, and it's easy to clean up. It's much harder to do this in like a cast iron. You could do it in a nonstick as well, but stainless steel definitely steams to be the gold standard, no pun intended. Um, we do offer a complete lesson. Um, in fact, we offer a free one as well that you can, uh, learn how to do the no oil saute, um, and also do the garlic in it as well too. But basically what you wanna do is, uh, turn the pan to like a medium heat, um, and then either take your water or your vegetable broth and put a couple drops of water into it. And if that starts to kind of beat up like mercury on your pan, your pan is perfect. If it, um, bubbles out into a bunch of different ones, um, it's probably a little too, uh, you know, too cool. Or if it's, it just you put it on there and it just evaporates right away, it's definitely too hot. So you're looking for just that right temperature and once you get it to that, you can add your onions to that. Um, and then you wanna stir your onions, make sure they're not sticking to the bottom and then deglaze the bottom of the pan with either your water or your vegetable stock. So, um, that's definitely the easiest intro way to do that. Now when it comes to garlic, I would definitely add those a little bit later because you don't wanna burn your garlic. Garlic can burn a lot quicker. It takes a lot less time to be able to heat up. So adding your garlic to the pan a little bit after, uh, your onions have been a little translucent, a cook down is definitely the best bet, but definitely check out our free lesson, um, on the, uh, how to saute onions, um, in no, no oil, just using water. Um, it's also part of a couple classes as well, um, including our plant-based pro class, um, and a few others.