I experienced this loveliness again, searing salmon, heating the pan to 380 degrees Fahrenheit, then cooking it skin-side down and not touching it for eight minutes until it was brown and crispy. No peeking to make sure it’s too hot or too cool, just “nunza-touch” till it’s done, something that’s a lot easier when you know you’re at the perfect temperature. Somebody’s done all the worrying and fussing for you!
On another day, I used a thermometer to take the temperature of a pan on a gas stove—not on the Control Freak Home—but I borrowed ChefSteps’ recipe for searing scallops on a 385-degree pan. It featured a brown-butter sauce and, even though I was ballparking a bit, the bivalves were exceptional.
Speaking of brown butter, I used the Control Freak Home to perform one of my favorite temperature-controlled parlor tricks, something I did with the Hestan Smart Induction Cooktop which you could call “walkaway clarified butter.” For it, you attach the Freak’s temperature probe to the lip of the pan, allowing it to monitor the temperature of the food inside the pan. In this case, it held the melted butter right at 230 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning you just set a timer, walk away, and come back in about 12 minutes to clarified butter. You’re not standing there wondering if you’ve got the right temperature, you’re not stirring hot butter while trying to read a handheld thermometer and hoping it doesn’t splatter on you. It’s also a fun recipe to follow, because you essentially go up in stages of darkness, starting at clarified, working up to ghee (a little darker), then getting to brown (darker still), cranking up the heat a little bit between each stage.
Similarly, you can fry food in a Dutch oven, with the probe tip in the oil. As soon as you drop food in, it will sense the temperature drop and work to bring the temperature back up. For special-occasion fryers like myself, not having to figure this out while you’re busy dropping batter-coated food into a vat of hot oil is a blessing.
I really enjoy cooking like this. People use the word “precision,” which is accurate but off-putting. Whatever you call it, once someone has figured out that this food with that technique does best at a certain temperature, it frees up your mind. Instead of hovering and worrying that the temperature is right, you can pay attention to a different aspect of the dish, prep something else, or simply walk away.
To do all that, however, you need a specific recipe for the dish you want to make, and those can be a little scarce. ChefSteps and Breville’s recipes and videos are excellent, but a bit spotty. They have a chart to help you figure things out, but it leaves out specifics like “ribeye” or “onions” or “burgers” that would be fantastic starting points for someone new to to-the-degree cooking, which is to say almost all of us. A more detailed chart could also help us adapt existing recipes for use on the Freak. Cooking nerds would love to be able to dial in the perfect temperature for seasoning their cast-iron and carbon-steel pans.
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