Pan-seared salmon, ready for the microwave
You almost never hear the words “microwave” and “slow food” in the same sentence unless someone’s casting the two as opposites with an easy sneer. The one and only time I’ve read anything about microwaving by a Real Restaurant Chef was Tony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential when he mentioned something about hitting a plate gone cold with some “Radar Love” before sending it out. He meant it as a dirty back kitchen secret.
Gourmet cookbooks (other than Barbara Kafka’s Microwave Gourmet, a scarily extensive tome from 1987) never call for microwaving anything more exciting than butter or chocolate chips, and none of the Food Network shows do either. It’s a shame. Can you see Giada De Laurentiis microwaving? Mario Batali? No–it would probably zap the studio camera or melt Mario’s clogs or something. And it would ruin the vicarious glamor of slow cooking. But it would be fun while it lasted, wouldn’t it?
Some things, let’s face it, don’t do incredibly well in a microwave–deep fat frying (Kafka claims you can in small quantity, but I’m scared of sloshing hot oil around a small box), birthday cakes (though Kafka has found a reasonable way to do cake layers and her recipes get good reviews), an entire raw turkey (stuffed or un-)…. And fish? That may be the trickiest of all, since fish goes from almost cooked to shoe leather in 20 seconds if you’re not careful, and it still won’t brown nicely.
For example, take the lowly, farm-raised salmon fillet. Now I know it’s not wild, I know it’s not King or Sockeye, it’s not elegantly 2″ thick–but it’s also not $17.99/lb and up. And it can still be pretty good, especially grilled.
Only it’s summer in L.A., and the last thing I want to do in my townhouse with a distinct lack of outdoor grilling facilities is heat up the house or cook the salmon long enough under a broiler for the edge fat to start sending acrid smoke up the stairway.
But combine the microwave’s ability to cook things through with a quick browning technique like pan-searing, and suddenly you have a strategy for some nice main dishes that taste better than they should in a lot less time, and don’t heat up the house. Incidentally Kafka mentioned this method in passing while discussing the fact that microwaves don’t brown food. She then proceeded to ignore it completely, don’t ask me why.
Most restaurant chefs insist they can’t get a good sear on anything with a nonstick pan, but that’s not entirely true (plus I hate washing dishes any more than I have to, and I’m really determined, so nonstick it is). I’m borrowing from Martin Yan on this one–it’s a technique I saw him do for a stir-fried shrimp recipe on PBS, sometime way, way back in the 1980s, and it works surprisingly well here. Continue reading
Filed under: cooking, Microwave tricks | Tagged: Anthony Bourdain, Barbara Kafka, indoor grilling, low sodium, low-salt cooking, Martin Yan, microwave cooking, Microwave Gourmet, pan grilling, salmon | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: Indoor Grilling When the Heat’s On
Slow Food Fast 