Pan-Roasting: Impress Your Guests

On Thursday mornings, The Early Show is sending you to cooking school.

Every other Thursday, you will be introduced to a new technique or unusual ingredient, sure to improve your kitchen skills and boost your recipe repertoire.

The Early Show once again teams with specialty home furnishings retailer Williams-Sonoma as it brings you this series, called "Five-Minute Cooking School."

Segments originate at Williams-Sonoma's flagship store at Columbus Circle in New York City.

To kick it off, chef Tori Ritchie offers a lesson on pan-roasting.

Ritchie is a San Francisco-based food writer and cooking teacher, and host of the long-running "Ultimate Kitchens" on the Food Network. Her latest cookbook is "Party Appetizers: Small Bites, Big Flavors" (Chronicle Books, Fall 2004).

Pan-roasting is a hybrid cooking method professional chefs often use, but it is also great for home cooking because it gives impressive results with relatively little effort. The idea is to sear a piece of meat, fish or poultry in a saute pan on top of the stove and then transfer it to the oven to finish cooking. It also lets the cook do something else while the food cooks.

When To Pan-Roast
Pan-roasting is best for chops, steaks, lamb racks, and other relatively small cuts of meat; poultry such as chicken breasts and turkey cutlets; and fish fillets and steaks. If these cuts were roasted without an initial searing, they would dry out in the oven before developing a delicious browned surface. Instead, they cook evenly and stay juicy by finishing them in the oven.

Equipment
A heavy-gauge, oven-proof frying pan is a must for pan-roasting. Flimsy pans will scorch and pans with plastic handles will melt in the oven. Good-quality pans absorb and retain heat and encourage deep browning of the pan juices for great sauces.

Pan-Roasting Steps: Season, Sear, Roast, Sauce, Serve

• Season food (salmon)
• Sear in heavy frying pan over high heat to give the outer surface a flavorful browning
  (salmon and lamb)
• Roast until finished by placing pan in a moderate-to-hot oven
• Many pan-roasting recipes call for deglazing the pan to make a quick flavorful sauce (turkey).
• Another way to pan-roast is to transfer the seared meat to the oven in a roasting pan with other ingredients that have already been partially cooked (pork loin).
• Serve any pan-roasted entree with an easy side dish, like peas cooked in butter with chopped fresh mint stirred in at the end, or serve with potatoes also roasted in the oven, or with salad and bread.