Water Sautéing: Sear Meat without Fat

A ketard's manual for cooking low-fat food

browned meat with rice (not bad, AI!)

I am currently on day 21 of a 30-day high-carb, low-fat, low-protein experiment.

I’m mostly eating rice like on ex_rice, but adding 150g of bison every day and the occasional fruit / sweet rice cake.

If you’re a high-fat dieter and have ever tried cooking lean meat or low-fat food in general, you’ll have noticed that it comes out terrible - if you just cook it like you would high-fat meat.

The first few meals, I tried just frying up the ground bison in a pan at high heat, like I would my high-fat meat. But without the butter or tallow or even the fat seeping out of the heated meat, my lean bison would just stick to the pan and heat extremely unevenly. The bottom was burned while the top was still raw. Since the meat stuck to the pan, you couldn’t really flip it over, either.

Of course, people who eat low-fat solved this long ago and there’s a technique. Thanks to the HCLFLP users in r/SaturatedFat for passing it on!

Physics HATES low-fat food

Water sautéing doesn’t work quite the same as oil/fat sautéing, obviously. The problem with cooking low-fat foods with a high-fat technique like sautéing is that you’re losing the medium of heat transfer. Fat can get incredibly hot before smoking or burning, and it transfers that heat to the meat and other foods you’re cooking.

Water infamously evaporates before it gets anywhere close to those temperatures. That’s why boiled foods are usually flavorless and not generally considered delicious unless you add spices or broth.

We clearly can’t just add a bunch of water to the pan and then expect it to sear beef to a golden, crusty, crunchy consistency and texture.

The trick with water sautéing is that steam can get hotter than water.

Careful: steam can get EXTREMELY hot. Just like with hot fat, you can definitely hurt yourself with steam. You can probably burn your kitchen down.

Of course we can’t fill our pan with steam and let it cook, because steam rises and dissipates immediately. If we set up a pot with water boiling and steam passing through our food-to-cook, the steam will always be just above boiling temperature and our food will be just as flavorless as we’d expect steamed food to be.

The solution is sort of mental.

Add very little water to a crazy hot pan

The trick is using very high heat. I use the highest heat on my stove. When you pour a tiny bit of water, only a splash really, onto an extremely hot pan, it instantly vaporizes into extremely hot steam.

Again, CAREFUL. Extremely hot steam is extremely hot.

The extremely hot steam will both sear your meat upon contact, and also loosen it from being stuck to the bottom of the pan. This adds a nice sear and gives you the ability to flip it over and have another go.

I usually pre-heat my pan for a couple of minutes. Then I drop my ground bison in. It’ll immediately stick and quickly begin to burn. Let it burn for a little bit!

You want some of that heat transferred from the metal of the pan to your meat. Then, give the pan a splash of water. I’m talking a couple of tablespoons of water only.

If you pour in a splash of water and it doesn’t immediately explode in a cloud of steam, you didn’t let the pan heat up enough. Your goal is not to slowly heat up a little bit of water at the bottom of the pan, it’s to catch those very high temperatures that only exist briefly when a small amount of water hits an extremely hot pan.

After you give the steam explosion a few seconds to settle down (so you don’t burn yourself!), go in with your spatula and mix the ground bison up a little bit. Then let the water evaporate, the meat dry out, and have another go at it. You want to hear the meat sizzling before you splash in more water.

You’ll quickly develop an intuition for this. After doing it for about 2 weeks now, I can usually get my bison pretty brown & seared after only 2-3 splashes of water. The first one would probably be enough, but I like my meat quite seared.

Another effect you’ll notice: the bottom of your pan will be be brown with juices after the water evaporates out. When you splash in a bit more water, the steam explosion will clean that brown crust off and your pan will look shiny again as long as there’s water in there.

Any foods you add now will be covered in nice brown, flavorful meat juice concentrate.

Typically, I will add a bit more water after the meat is seared enough, and saute my vegetables in half an inch of boiling meat juices. This will impart more flavor on them too.

Brown Goulash, not Crispy Fried Gold

Can you get your meat & other foods to be just as golden crispy as when you shallow-fry them in half an inch of beef tallow? Of course not.

The texture is a little softer, the color is more dark brown than golden. And it certainly is a lot more effort to micro-manage the temperature, splash water, let it dry out again, over and over.

It goes particularly well with tomato based sauces, because the acidity from the tomatoes helps dissolve the burned/stuck pieces of meat at the bottom of the pan, incorporating their flavors into the whole meal. Maybe vinegar or other acidic foods would work, too. Obviously, add the sauce after you’re done sauteing - once you’ve got the sauce in there, you won’t get the pan to high temps again without burning the sauce.

Other foods that lend themselves to this are mushrooms and onions. Mushrooms, like meat, are easy & painless. They brown up very nicely, barely stick, and scrape off/loosen with the steam.

Onions are a bit trickier; while they do brown nicely and have great flavor when caramelized, they tend to stick & burn much faster and you have to do more micro-managing to get them just right. That’s why I usually just stick to my ground bison, some mushrooms, and mixed vegetables.

Who says low-fat food can’t taste decent?

I would give it a 8/10 in terms of flavor. It doesn’t quite have that nice crispy crunch, and it’s a lot more work than just tossing some beef into a pan of tallow and coming back 5 minutes later.

But it beats the heck out of flavorless boiled meat.

Brief experiment update

How is ex150hclflp treating me?

Honestly, not that great lol. The first week I combined fruit, honey, & rice. It was pretty bad in terms of both satiety and hyperphagia and I gained a bunch of weight that week. I was easily eating 4,500-5,500kcal/day and wasn’t particularly satiated.

I then cut back to basically just ex_rice + 150g bison, which was better in terms of satiety. But I’m still slowly gaining weight on that and am now nearly 240lbs again. Not all of that is fat, but I suspect that half of it is (10lbs) while 5lbs might be muscle glycogen/creatine and 5lbs digestive matter/bloat.

I’m hoping the reduction in adipose linoleic acid is worth it. But after this, I’ll probably go back on ex150 for a while and hopefully get back down to the 220lbs I was walking around at most of last year.