Pan Roasting

Pan roasting is a wonderful technique for preparing thicker cuts of meat in a relatively short amount of time. It is a combination of pan searing on the stove top and roasting in the oven—both done at very high heat¹. By distributing your cooking between a very hot pan and a very hot oven you can serve up thick chops, steaks or pieces of chicken with a crisp brown crust and tender just past rare inside, plus a rich pan sauce. Because we're talking about individual pieces of meat rather than whole roasts, you can create a satisfying meal for yourself, you and a friend, or a whole family in under an hour from refrigerator to table. Oh, and you're only left with one pan to clean up after dinner. That's Honest Cuisine.

Regular pan frying is perfect for a flattened chicken breast, veal cutlet or filet of fish. But, with meats more than an inch and a half thick, pan frying alone leaves the outside of the meat dried out and tough (if not burned) by the time the interior cooks. On the other hand, when roasting any meat less than a couple of inches thick it's nearly impossible to develop a nice brown crust without ending up with a thoroughly dried out slab of protein². Roasting is no big deal when you're dealing with a 10 pound standing rib roast for a Saturday dinner that you want to spend an afternoon on, but a bit too much trouble for chicken on a Wednesday night. With Pan roasting you create the brown crust through a relatively quick sear, and cook the meat through with a roast in the oven. It works well with cut up poultry, rabbit, lamb, thick chops and small meat roasts such as Chateaubriand or pork tenderloin.

For lean “white” meats such as chicken, rabbit, pork and veal, brining the meat first is a good idea. Brining enhances the subtle flavors of lean meats, adds juiciness, and provides some fairly reliable protection against overcooking. In fact, brining makes pan roasting a perfect way to prepare steakier fishes such as tuna or swordfish for those who like their fish cooked fully through, allowing you to serve wonderfully moist steaks to the most ardent well–done fanatic. The only hitch with brining is that it adds a bit more preparation time—the brining time itself plus time to let the surface of the meat dry out³ before cooking.

I first encountered pan roasting (though it wasn't called that) in a recipe for Rack of Lamb in the 1997 New Joy of Cooking⁴. But, pan roasting is actually an age old chefs cheat for quickly creating roast dishes. My guess is that it's not found in most cookbooks because, until the past few years, most people didn't have pans that could go from both cooktop to oven. Growing up, and through college, everyone I knew had variations on the classic Revereware - lightweight thin copper clad stainless steel pans with plastic handles. It wasn't until the Calphalon and All–Clad craze began in the late 1980s/early 1990s that ovenproof handles became de rigeur in cookware. Of course, at a price comparable to that of cheap pans with plastic handles, one of the best pieces of cookware for pan roasting is also one of the oldest types of cookware: cast iron. And, if you don't have any kind of sauté pan or skillet with oven proof handles, you can easily pan roast with a heavy bottomed roasting pan (if you can put a skillet in the oven, there's no reason why you can't put a roasting pan on the stovetop).

The key to pan roasting is a very hot pan and very hot oven. Unless you have a commercial grade cooktop (if you do have a commercial grade range or cooktop you know it, so, if you're not sure, you have a regular old range or cooktop like the rest of us), you'll need to preheat your pan for at least five minutes over high heat⁵. You'll also want to bring whatever you plan to cook to room temperature before adding it to the pan. When you add the meat to the pan, the pan will cool down rapidly. If the pan cools down too much (and your stove doesn't have the BTUs to bring the heat back up just as rapidly) the meat will stew more than it sears as juices squeezed out of the meat by the rapidly cooking surface proteins simmer on the bottom of the pan rather than quickly boil away. This is where cast iron has an advantage for this technique. Cast iron will keep it's heat better while other pans will cool significantly. With most consumer stoves it can take anywhere from one to five minutes for the heat of the pan to come back up to searing temperatures. For similar reasons, it's important not to crowd the pan with whatever you are pan roasting. The more meat in the pan, the longer the pan will take to come back to searing temperature, plus a crowded pan leaves less room for steam to escape.

Actual cooking time will vary dramatically depending on the type of meat you are cooking, it's thickness and the heating capabilities of both your cooktop and oven. As a rule of thumb, you want to sear the first side over high heat for 3 to 5 minutes, flip the meat, and roast it in a 500° oven for anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes. A two inch thick piece of swordfish would need only a 3 minute sear and 5 minute roast, while a 2–1/2 inch beef tenderloin would require a good 5 minute sear and 10 minutes, or even a little more, of roasting. All totaled, pan roasting shouldn't take much more than 15 minutes of actual cooking time, leaving plenty of time to make a quick pan sauce and serve up some truly Honest Cuisine in less than half an hour.

1. Some call cooking thick cuts of meat on the stove top “pan roasting.” Whether well intentioned or not, that use of the term “roasting” just doesn't make any sense. Roasting simply means oven baking. Some say roasting implies high oven heat. That distinction's fine with me, but you can't call a cooking technique where the food never sees the inside of the oven roasting.
2. In I'm Just Here for the Food Alton Brown claims that you do not need to sear the traditional roast on the stove to get a nice brown crust. Finishing the roast in a very hot oven (450°) oven will do the trick. He's right, when you're talking about a large piece of meat and a couple of hours to cook it at a low temperature first. But we're talking about smaller hunks of meat, not whole roasts.
3. Brine means moisture and moist surfaces won't form a decent lasting crust.
4. Yep, the devoid of personality (though still very useful) edition of Joy of Cooking where some full of herself New York editor felt the book should be authoritative rather than just comprehensive and engaging like all of the earlier editions that have been loved and revered for decades. Fortunately it looks like the Joy will be getting back a little bit of it's personality in the next edition due around the time of the book's 75th anniversary in 2006.
5. Just for safety reasons, don't even think of trying this with anything but heavy duty cookware. Your basic thin department store pans could literally melt or, worse, whatever you toss in them could catch on fire. Also, don't use non–stick pans, regardless of quality, as such prolonged high heat could ruin the non–stick coating and kill any birds you may have in your home.