The pan needs to be hotter than you think

There is a sound a good pan makes when food meets it.

Not a scream. Not a panic.

A confident hiss.

The sound of surface moisture meeting heat, oil doing its job and dinner beginning properly.

If a mushroom lands in the pan and absolutely nothing happens, something is wrong.

Very often, the pan just wasn't hot enough.

This is one of the least glamorous cooking lessons and one of the most useful.

It requires no new ingredients and no particular talent.

Just a little patience before the food goes in.

Almost hot is not hot

The home cook's pan spends a surprising amount of time in a state of politeness.

Warm enough to soften things.

Not hot enough to colour them.

This is understandable.

Heat is noisy. Oil spits. Things can burn. Anyone who has taken garlic from raw to completely ruined in approximately seven seconds learns caution fairly quickly.

But too little heat creates different problems.

Mushrooms release water and sit in it.

Meat greys rather than browns.

Vegetables soften before they colour.

Potatoes drink oil while stubbornly refusing to crisp.

Then you stir.

And stir.

And add something else.

And wonder why dinner doesn't taste like it does when somebody else cooks it.

Sometimes the answer is remarkably boring.

More heat.

Colour tastes good

Browning isn't there to make dinner photograph better.

It changes flavour.

When food browns, a collection of chemical reactions take place between amino acids and sugars. This is generally called the Maillard reaction and it creates hundreds of new flavour and aroma compounds.

You don't need to remember any of that.

You just need to remember that brown food tastes different from pale food.

A deeply golden potato edge.

The dark side of a mushroom.

A properly seared piece of meat.

Bread fried until the edges catch.

A tomato blistered in hot oil.

That colour is doing something.

If everything you're cooking is beige in the least interesting sense of the word, the answer might not be another ingredient.

It might be heat.

The pan loses heat when the food goes in

This is the bit that's easy to forget.

Your pan might feel hot while it is empty.

Then you put a large handful of cold mushrooms into it.

The temperature drops.

Add another handful and it drops again.

Then the mushrooms start releasing water.

Now instead of browning them, you're halfway to boiling them.

Starting with enough heat gives the pan a better chance of recovering.

So does not overcrowding it.

If everything is piled on top of everything else, all that moisture has nowhere to go.

Use a bigger pan.

Cook in batches.

Or accept that you're making something soft rather than something browned.

All three are legitimate decisions.

Just know which one you're making.

Oil is doing a job

Then there is the oil.

Oil isn't just there to stop food sticking.

It helps transfer heat from the surface of the pan into the food, filling the tiny gaps between the two and helping create more even contact.

Which is one reason being excessively cautious with it can work against you.

For a lot of everyday frying and sautéing, you want enough oil to coat the cooking surface properly.

With Kitchen in the pan, watch what happens as it heats.

It becomes looser.

It moves around the pan more easily.

You may see it begin to shimmer.

You don't need to wait until the kitchen fills with smoke. That is not the objective.

You want the oil hot enough to get to work.

Then add the food.

Listen.

Stop touching it

This may be harder than getting the pan hot.

Put something in a pan and there is an overwhelming urge to immediately move it around.

Stirring feels like cooking.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes you're just preventing dinner from developing any colour.

Browning requires contact.

If you put mushrooms cut side down, leave them there for a bit.

If you're trying to sear something, give the surface time to sear.

If a piece of food initially catches slightly, it may release more readily once a crust has developed.

Obviously, if you can smell burning, intervene.

We aren't advocating neglect.

Just give the pan a chance to do the thing you heated it for.

Different food needs different heat

“The pan needs to be hotter” does not mean “turn every hob to maximum”.

Garlic is not a potato.

Butter behaves differently from olive oil.

A thick piece of fish needs enough heat to colour without burning outside before the middle cooks.

Eggs can be soft and delicate or crisp edged and furious depending on what you're trying to make.

This is where cooking gets more useful than simply following instructions.

A recipe can tell you “medium high heat”.

It cannot see your hob.

Or your pan.

Or the enormous pile of fridge cold courgettes you've just put into it.

The pan can.

Pay attention to what is actually happening.

Nothing happening?

You may need more heat.

Food colouring much faster than it can cook?

Turn it down.

Pan suddenly full of liquid?

You may have overcrowded it.

Oil smoking aggressively?

Definitely intervene.

Cooking gives you quite a lot of information if you stop waiting for the recipe to tell you what happens next.

Try it tonight

You don't need to practise this on anything expensive.

Use mushrooms.

Courgettes.

Greens.

Potatoes.

Tomatoes.

Bread.

Heat your pan.

Add enough Kitchen.

Let the oil get hot.

Then put the food in and listen.

Give everything enough room.

Leave it alone long enough to develop some colour.

Taste it.

The difference between food that has been heated and food that has actually been cooked can be surprisingly large.

No new recipe required.

The pan just needed to be hotter.