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This moment is familiar to everyone who at least once tried to fry cutlets, pancakes, fish, chops or something else in a pan without a non-stick coating. At first, everything goes according to plan – you heat the pan, add oil, then start frying, and the moment it is time to turn the food to the other side, you realize that it stuck tightly. At best, you still manage to turn your chicken breast, cutlet or whatever you fried there, pretty much spoiling its presentation, at worst, you panic while your failed dinner, stuck to the pan, quickly turns into coals …
Why does it stick …
At the very beginning, you need to make a caveat: not all pans are created equal. Modern non-stick frying pans, for example, have never heard of the sticking problem, because they were invented exactly for this – so that you can fry cutlets, scrambled eggs and fish without thinking about how to peel them off the pan bottom.
Cast iron pans are another matter: they are specially calcined with the addition of oil, which fills the microscopic pores in the metal, forming a smooth coating to which, if everything is done correctly, food no longer sticks. Thus, the main record holders for sticking food are stainless steel pans.
A steel pan is a great thing. It is grippy, not too heavy, its material does not react with acidic foods (as, for example, copper does), it heats up relatively quickly and with the proper skill, absolutely any dish on it will come out perfectly perfect.
A stainless steel frying pan, however, does not always warm up evenly, but this problem has already been solved by making multilayer pans with the addition of various alloys. Thus, its only drawback is excessive stickiness.
So why does food stick to the pan? This is where chemistry comes into play (in the sense of science, not what everyone thought). Perhaps you have not gone through or have completely forgotten what van der Waals forces are, but you are sure to remember that high temperature accelerates all chemical processes taking place around us. The patty might stick to a cold skillet (if both of them lived long enough), but in a hot skillet it happens almost instantly.
Between the molecules on the surfaces of food and a frying pan, fairly strong bonds are formed, up and down – and your cutlet sticks like a glued one! Foods with a high protein content adhere especially firmly to the pan, since proteins form compounds with iron atoms on the surface of the pan, and due to the structural features of the fish in general and its protein structure in particular, it is the fish that sticks to the pan the most strongly.
…and what to do with it?
The easiest and most logical way to avoid sticking food to the pan is to place something between them that can separate them. There is one clever and simple method I use if I want to have crispy fried fish that doesn’t have to be ripped from the bottom of the pan.
Take a sheet of parchment, fold it in half, then again, then fold the paper in two 2-3 times more so that the fold line each time passes through the corner marking the center of the large sheet. Attach this corner to the center of the pan and cut the paper a little earlier than the walls of the pan begin, unfold – and you will end up with a piece of conventionally round parchment with a diameter slightly smaller than the bottom of the pan, which is called “cartouche”.
Put it in a skillet, add oil and fry the fish, pressing it with a spatula to the bottom. Everything ingenious is simple, isn’t it? This trick can be used not only for frying fish, but also in other cases when you are afraid that your food will burn, but the frying should not be too long. But stop! In fact, we always put something between the food and the bottom of the pan that is quite capable of preventing them from sticking. This thing is called oil.
Indeed, the correct use of oil in frying can, if not completely eliminate, then significantly reduce the risk of burning food, and the key to this, again, lies in the selection of the correct temperature. This is because cold oil has a higher viscosity than hot oil.
When heated, it becomes more fluid, which is easily visible even to the naked eye, and penetrates into those microscopic pores at the bottom of the pan, filling them and thereby reducing the contact area of food with metal. But the main trick here is that oil can be heated to a temperature significantly higher than the boiling point of water.
Oil is your friend and helper
What happens to the food – the same cutlet or chunk of chicken – after it is added to the hot oil pan? The high temperature instantly evaporates moisture from its surface, turning it into steam. But since a piece of chicken is in the pan, the steam cannot just escape, and it lifts the food a little – it turns out something like an air cushion that forms a layer between the food and the metal, and prevents them from interacting.
The problem is that both the food itself and this steam have a temperature much lower than the oil, cooling it, and if there was not enough oil (or you did not allow it to heat up properly), its temperature will drop lower than necessary for the water to evaporate. leaving the product – and that’s all, write wasted. Thus, the oil must always be heated properly, almost to the point of smoking, but still not letting it smoke – and the amount of oil must be sufficient to maintain its temperature at the required level. using too much oil?
Rightly afraid – but even here there are tricks, knowing which, you can reduce the amount of oil. Firstly, use a frying pan with a thick bottom – this keeps heat well and will heat the oil that the insidious food is trying to cool. Secondly, whenever possible, fry food in parts – even if it is a little longer, but this way they will not crowd in the pan and fry properly.
Finally, blot food with paper towels before frying to remove moisture from the surface: the less water, the less energy is needed to evaporate it, which means less oil will also be required.
If the food does stick
It is also possible. Yes, I know you did everything exactly as written above, but there are too many variables in the equation, and your eye is not a precision instrument, and you just want to cook dinner without claiming a Nobel Prize in physics (at least not in this moment).
The first step is not to panic. If you fry a steak, chop or a piece of chicken, they will stick at first, but that’s okay. Simply rock the pan back and forth without removing it from the heat to speed up the process, and the meat will fall off the bottom without additional help. Another way to fry meat is to constantly move it along the bottom of the pan with your tongs.
This ensures a faster, more intense and even roast over a higher heat, but you will hardly be able to fry several pieces at the same time. Alas, the omelet, if you don’t regret the oil, most likely will not stick anyway, but to help it, gently lift its edges with a spatula as soon as the bottom layer of eggs is no longer liquid, and then rock the pan as described above. there may be two ways out of cutlets – add quite a bit of water (after all, this is not a steak, and your mother may have taught you to cook cutlets under the lid so that moisture will appear in the pan anyway) or just remove the pan from fire and allow to cool slightly. If we are talking about fish, then this problem, as mentioned above, will be more complicated.
In some, the most unpleasant cases, it can stick to the bottom so that it does not come off even when you remove the pan from the heat, and then all that remains is to carefully tear it off with a spatula, resigning in advance to the fact that its appearance will not be so presentable, or add on a frying pan with a little liquid, if you don’t mind changing the recipe and cooking the fish in the sauce on the fly. That is why and precisely for fish, I recommend using a non-stick frying pan or not being lazy and cutting the cartouche out of parchment every time.
To prevent pancakes from sticking, fry them the way your grandmother did, who did not face this problem – in a properly calcined cast iron pan (see above), smearing it with a thin layer of oil each time using a feather or a silicone brush. , vegetables. All the rules described above apply to frying them in general, but they start to burn much faster than meat, so the contents of the pan should be constantly stirred when frying vegetables (such as eggplant or zucchini).
To reduce the chances of vegetables sticking, use more oil and pay special attention to your choice. It is best to use Extra Virgin Olive Oil, as it will not only not spoil the taste, but it will also improve the taste of vegetable dishes. I told everything I knew, and I will be glad if you share your secrets in the comments!