I had never heard of “sweating” vegetables until 2004, when I took a cooking class with a Four Seasons chef in Cairo, Egypt. At that point, I thought of myself as a reasonably educated home chef.
I would not go so far as to say his instruction on this matter was a transformative revelation, but it is useful technique, and I was very surprised I’d not encountered it before. Since then, I have judiciously sweated various veggies, and I’m glad I took that class.
So … do you sweat vegetables, and if so, for what purpose? Or are you saying, “Sweat?” WTF? I’m a pretty damn good cook and no, that is not a familiar concept.”
The main reason I know of to sweat veggies is when you’re making a mirepoix as the base of a stew or a sauce. You want your onions, carrots, and celery, along with whatever else you might add (garlic or basil, for example) chopped as finely as possible without turning it into a puree. Food processors are great for this. You cook it on low heat in a bit of olive oil and/or bacon grease for 10-15 minutes, shifting it around constantly, just long enough that you cook off the excess moisture and reduce it to around a third or so of its original weight without caramelizing it.
By the time you’re done cooking the mirepoix will essentially have melted into the sauce, providing a solid base of flavor and aroma to build the recipe around.
I commonly sweat vegetables, depending on the dish. Removing moisture is an important preparatory step if you want the food to be toothsome instead of mushy (I sweat my shallots when I make piccata), or if the subsequent steps don’t sufficiently cook the vegetables to remove the raw edge but you also don’t want the browned flavor in the final dish (like when I make risotto). I’ll also usually sweat my vegetables if I’m putting them in the pressure cooker and I want to be careful about the amount of liquid being used/produced.
Edit to add: I suspect many experienced cooks have learned of the necessity of this step simply through trial and error, without necessarily knowing what it’s called.
Ah HAH. I begin to see where my ignorance originated. When I characterized myself as a “reasonably educated home chef” what I should have said was “almost entirely focused on Asian cooking home chef.”
My knowledge of classical Western cooking techniques is a bit sketchy, damn it. But I can rattle off four different rhizomes, and their names and usages in multiple Asian cultures, without thinking too hard. So there.
Now, tell more more about this world where “mirepoix” matters. (I do know what that is, but I can’t say I use it much. In part because I am not a celery fan, though I do enjoy Louisiana (Creole and Cajun) cooking in its multiple forms.)
Like I said, it’s a base for soups and sauces. It adds aroma and a bit of sweetness at the beginning of a long cook time, which you can build your other flavors on top of. As Beck notes above me, there are variations on it - sub the carrot for bell peppers and you have the Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking. In Germany, leeks often take the place of the onion. In Spain and Italy, garlic and/or basil may be added. Even in Mexican cooking, you could consider the combo of onions, tomato, and dried chili peppers a kind of mirepoix inasmuch as it forms a basis for a lot of broths and salsas and cooking liquids. How finely you chop the veggies depends on how much you want them to be distinct elements in the finished product, as opposed to them disintegrating into the broth.
I’m the opposite. My area of expertise as a home chef is largely based on Italian-American and Tex-Mex, with a little bit of classical French cooking passed down from my mom’s brief stint as a line cook in a fine dining establishment. Stews and sauces and casseroles and braises (anything where one of the steps is “simmer for 2 hours”, basically) tend to be my favorite stuff to cook, and mirepoix is usually one of the fundamental building blocks of any of those.
I’ve attempted Asian cooking a few times. Aside from an absolutely divine batch of lumpia I managed to concoct once (and I’m not even sure that counts, since Filipino cooking is easily the most westernized of any Asian cuisine - they make spaghetti with ketchup and hot dogs, for crying out loud!), it doesn’t tend to turn out well.
Thank you! That was one of my speculative definitions. (The other probably didn’t make sense, scientifically … I was wondering if it had something to do with seasoning the pot more as the veggies cooked.)
All of these combinations of combinations collectively get referred to as “aromatics” right?
Sauteeing them ahead of time can vary between a mild sweat, to browning, to carmelizing, similar in principle to the gradations between a light to a dark roux … or is there more to it?
Yes in general I precook my aromatics in some manner before putting the soup/stew/sauce to cook all together longer. I’ve always thought that sweating them was the most mild variation of that, not cooking all the way down or browning. More often than not I cook to getting mildly caramelized.
Huh, I came in thinking that ‘sweating’ and ‘sautéeing’ were more or less synonymous, no sweat. But I guess I should have been sweating the difference. When I thought I was gently sautéeing my diced vegetables these past many years, I was actually sweating them. And when I thought I was browning and carmelizing them, I was sautéeing them. Sweating is gentle cooking on low heat, and sautéeing is quickly cooking on high heat. Won’t change my cooking techniques any, but I appreciate the correction of my linguistic ignorance on the matter.
Yes, both for the aforementioned European cooking and especially for curries. A proper Cape Malay curry is built on a foundation of onions, peppers, garlic and ginger sweated in tempered spice oil.
Most people on the board won’t know who Delia Smith is, so: she was THE television cook of her generation in the UK, author of a big old shelf of cookbooks etc etc* - a national treasure. She taught me to make marmalade, and lemon curd, and a shedload of other stuff. Here’s one of her soup recipes, which includes a sweating step.
I’s a great recipe, and here’s the thing: you can swap out the leeks and potatoes for other winter vegetables (most recently parsnip). So yeah I sweat vegetables, using variants of this recipe, on a regular basis.
This came up repeatedly on a personal favorite of a cooking show - Good Eats. It ran from 1999-2012, and while there is a later episode largely devoted to sweating veggies, it came up quite a few times during the run. The first was probably (in line with @Smapti’s post) for mirepoix, though possibly a trinity application (a preference, though in the Southwest, it’s normally milder hot capsicums). So I was familiar with it say, a couple years into the run? 2002ish? Though like most in thread, I really considered a sweat to be a “mild” sautee - loose terminology, I know.
But for most of my cooking I want the extra caramelization for flavor, so it’s rare for me to only sweat a veggie. It is really important though for more subtle dishes, where I don’t want it to stand out so much.
I routinely sweat vegetables. I do it because a lot of my recipes call for it. I assumed it was to make sure they cook enough, but reading this thread, i suspect that reducing the moisture content is also important in some of those.
Delia Smith’s recipe exactly what the Four Seasons chef showed us, in terms of technique. I’ve been making soup that way (no recipe, and using whatever root veggies, other veggies, and herbs I happen to have) ever since I took his class.
His other use of sweating was to make a tomato cream sauce for pasta - basically just sweating tomatoes and onions, then blending them with cream. (Plus seasoning of course.)
I don’t really think there’s many recipes I do regularly that don’t begin with some sort of sweating of any of at least an onion and a fat, often with the addition of some other aromatics like celery and/or/carrots, and/or green peppers. Always add a bit of salt to draw out moisture, and sweat it down until onions get translucent and veggies soften. Sometimes, it’s more aggressive and I really cook them down before continuing onward. But it’s among the first things I remember learning about cooking. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my parents not sweat the veggies in the same context. I mean, what do you do if you don’t sweat them? Do you just combine everything raw together?
Interesting. I first came across it in Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, published in 1978. Though I guess variants have been passed down through the generations.
Yeah, most of the dishes I saw growing up didn’t start with caramelized onions. That was, to me, a more advanced technique for certain dishes. Both my mom and dad started their cooking typically with onions and fat (could be oil, could be lard). My dad often also put celery in there. My mom sometimes used leeks, depending on the recipe. They’d wait until the moisture was drawn out and they became translucent, but not until they really gained any appreciable color. And then the dish would be built from there. I think most of the cooking shows I grew up watching (like Jeff Smith as The Frugal Gourmet) would have something like this as the initial step. So sweating vegetables was part of my earliest introduction to cooking.