Why Put Flour on Beef for Beef Stew

Flouring Meat Before Browning - What Does It Exercise?

Just the other day, I decided to braise some lamb shanks. Well-nigh recipes that I meet call for the meat to be dredged in flour before browning, so I began to wonder why. Is it actually necessary at all?

As with most cooking questions, in that location is a lot of alien information, both in cookbooks and out on the Internet. I am non certain why this is, only I imagine that most cookbook authors and chefs learned from people who just used dissimilar techniques.

Mayhap in ane culinary tradition, flouring the meat before browning is standard operating procedure whereas in other traditions, information technology might exist unheard of.

Thickening The Sauce

Nearly resource that I found agreed that flouring the meat earlier browning helps to thicken the eventual sauce. This stands to reason, equally a very common method of thickening is through the use of a roux.

A roux is a mixture of equal parts flour and fat which is and so cooked to reach a certain colour and complexity of season. When we flour meat and and so chocolate-brown it in oil, we are essentially making a roux""the flour on the meat mixes with the fatty in the pan and cooks, providing thickening power when additional liquid is added.

Flavorful Chaff

Aside from its thickening power, flouring meat, particularly with seasoned flour, can provide both a flavorful crust and insulate the meat from the loftier heat in the pan. Whenever a recipe calls for flouring, it pays to look at the balance of the ingredient list to come across if you can add together any additional flavoring to the flour""flavors that volition complement the dish.

For case, if you are making a Cajun-inspired meal that calls for flouring meat, y'all might consider adding some cayenne pepper and some Cajun seasoning to the flour before dredging the meat in it. Since flour contains both proteins and sugar, the browning is the upshot of Maillard reactions, just like when y'all dark-brown meat.

The difference is that, during cooking, the starches in the flour mix with meat juices and gelatinize, or swell up. The gelatinized starch provides a viscous blanket that serves as an insulating layer between the meat and the hot pan.

This can be specially useful in the pan searing of fragile foods, specially fish. The fish cooks nicely without drying out and ends up with a thin but crisp and flavorful coating.

When you flour meat, the meat itself gets cooked, but since it is insulated, it doesn't necessarily brownish. The flavors produced from the Maillard reactions in the flour will be slightly different than the flavors produced from browning unfloured meat, but in that location will still be complication.

I imagine that, when having to choose between browning floured meat and not browning the meat at all before cooking, the dish with the floured and browned meat would take a more than circuitous season.

Other Options

There has besides been some discussion almost using floured meat as a thickener. Many chefs consider browning in flour kind of a cheat and think that thickening and enriching should exist done through reduction""slowly simmering a sauce to reduce the h2o content, thereby thickening it and intensifying the flavor.

At the end of the day, the choice is yours: dredge your meat in flour before browning so add liquid to provide some torso and thickening, or reducing the sauce subsequently cooking to produce a slightly thickened silky sauce.

In the case of thickening, there are a couple of other options available. While some professional chefs might consider it cheating, y'all can thicken a sauce by adding a slurry of flour (or corn starch, arrowroot, potato starch, etc) and common cold water (or broth) to the sauce and and then humid for a few seconds.

The boiling cooks off the "raw starch" flavor and helps the starches to bully upwardly, thickening your sauce.

Another selection is to knead equal amounts of butter and flour together into a paste and add this to the sauce equally information technology simmers. This is called a beurre manie and will enrich as well every bit thicken a sauce.

As far as I'm concerned, if my goal is to get a meal on the table on a weeknight, I will not experience bad about "cheating" with ane of these thickening options.

Question For You - Do You Flour Your Meat, Chicken, Fish or Vegetables Earlier Browning & Why?

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Source: https://www.reluctantgourmet.com/flouring-meat/