Temperature of Pan for Searing after cooking Meat Sous Vide

Hello. I was wondering what temperature folks let their pan get up to for searing meat. Say you have a piece of steak cooked sous vide and you want to do the final sear to get the maillard reaction.

In this YouTube Video Harold McGee has an infrared thermometer showing that his pan is up to 484 F / 251 C. In his book Keys to Good Cooking he lists the following two temperature ranges:

"Pan for frying, sauteing 350-400 F / 175-205 C

Wok for stir-frying 450 F / 230 C and up"

Also what do most folks use for their stove top pan, cast iron? Favorite type of oil to coat the pan with?

Thank you so much to anyone who is able to share their thoughts on this topic.

http://youtu.be/Pt2iNwuTKHM

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Comments

Brendan_Lee_56950

I don't usually temp the pan but I guess I could do that in the future to get a baseline. I normally use a heavy bottomed cast iron pan with a layer of canola or veg oil because that's what I usually keep on hand and let the pan heat on high for 5-8 minutes, basically until I can't touch the handle without a cloth.

Johan_Edstrom_5586

If I do a pan, I do about the same, I tend to use a mapp torch much more though, in the same cast iron skillet, flipping

frequently and getting a solid sear that way.

com-chefsteps

In my early cooking days, I spent a couple of years temping my pans with an IR thermometer. My biggest lessons were:

pans work with about the same temperature range as ovens: 250°F-300°F is a "slow" pan or oven; 450°F-500°F is a "hot" pan/oven. This seems obvious in retrospect, but at the time, knowing this helped me develop a much more accurate mental model for heat transfer in my head, because it limited a variable. Now I know it's all the same temperature range in my head, so I can spend much more time thinking about how fast I want heat to penetrate food.
it takes a good pan a lot longer to reach searing temperature than I thought. I use a battleship-heavy ScanPan (aluminum core, titanium wrapping) or an All-Clad for most of my searing, and the ScanPan takes a no-kidding five full minutes to really get hot enough. Cast iron won't be much different.

I use canola for searing because I don't want to break it, and I don't want to spend shelf-space on a unitasking oil.