Sweatin Weather

I am supposed to ‘sweat’ some onions. Huh, how, to what purpose?

If stir-frying is 11 on the amp that is cooking, then sweating is about 2 ½ - Total Greg Brown action.

Sautéing is a little closer to my domain, in the middle of the road. My brother Carl previously defined sauté here as a jump-leaping action. If sautéing is to fry food purposefully in a fat, sweating takes a more desultory approach to the task at hand. Italian cookery employs the soffritto where aromatics – celery, onion, garlic, parsley are slowly heated together with olive oil to concentrate and intermingle the flavors. This flavor becomes the foundation for sauce, soup, rice or a braise. In Spanish, both the language and country, the term is Sofrito and the technique is the same although ingredients will vary region to region. In Portugal it the same variation of Iberian ingredients cooked slowly is called refogado. In Puerto Rico it is sofrito even though salt pork and peppers are items being sweated together.

Mentioned maybe once, possibly twice, on this very blog, high heat is the # 1 impediment facing home cooks in the States. The ability to get your stovetop hot enough to forge brass is cool and all, but it doesn’t really help prepare meals faster, only in a very particular style – one that caramelizes food. The resulting flavor is a rich, dark caramel flavor we gravitate towards in the States (coffee, cola, etc.) but it is the antithesis of sweating.

Sweating takes place a temperature low enough to prevent browning but high enough to extract moisture from the ingredients in the pan. If this action were taking place in a pot of water, it would be akin to a low simmer, about 150 -160 degrees. It is so much more difficult to measure the temperature at the bottom of a frying pan and say this happens at X temp. Instead you need to keep your cooking all low and slow.

If you tool around the kitchen at all, you have sweated onions whether you have called it that or not. Cookbooks instruct cooks to heat the onions until translucent, sometimes even a recipe will flat out state to sweat the onions. Sweating is exactly how a person would want to cook onions and garlic for the base of a tomato sauce, which is the way you will find me using the sweating technique in the Saucykitchen. Although that could change, last week I read towards the end of his life, Picasso was fond of the uber-Catalan dish (or the Catalan language equivalent of uber) consisting of haricot beans, garlic and aged chorizo sweated together. Apparently, bread and wine goes real nicely with that, I will find out soon enough.

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