When and How to Strain Dishes
Straining can play an important role in food preparation. Velvety, lump-free custard is a dreamy experience, crystal-clear consommé is gorgeous and flavorful, and smooth gravies and creamy sauces can brighten or ruin a meal. But there is a difference between stress and economy . The first is a real culinary technique; the last, culinary Hail Mary.
Straining ingredients that have completed their work
Straining is generally the process of separating the thinner, looser ingredient from the lumpy or larger solid ingredients in a recipe. An exaggerated version of this is tossing pasta into a colander. Hot water flows out of the holes, but the pasta stays inside. The refined version usually uses a sieve, gauze or other cloth. You can strain everything from herbs to small pieces of meat using a sieve. Straining is technically the correct way to achieve perfection in some recipes, and is usually explicitly listed as a step in the procedure.
For consommé , strain the soup through a thin cloth to remove any remaining egg white particles. In some recipes for lemon and lime cottage cheese, the custard is made with small pieces of fruit zest. You can leave the zest inside, but if you want a continuous, silky curd, you can pass it through a fine mesh sieve before cooling. The same can be said for the cereal in the milk flake pie . In all these cases, the removed material has already done its job. The egg white curdled around the unwanted spots in the consommé, the lime zest added oils, the flavor of the flakes shifted from chunky to milky. They’re out, take them out.
Strain out a few lumps
Anything beyond that and tension starts to become a safety net. It’s okay, there are lumps. But when “Oh, there are pieces of cornstarch in my gravy” or “Oh no, I stirred the pudding from time to time , not all the time,” it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to start over. Sometimes even our tried and tested recipes show up with the occasional drop, even though we’ve worked very hard to make everything perfect. During these times, it is perfectly normal to strain a few bumps. Small pieces of egg coagulum are even expected in some recipes such as English cream . However, that doesn’t mean you have to treat custard and thick sauces with a careless attitude.
Straining Won’t Fix Running Custard
I was taught in culinary school that custards don’t need to be strained. The reason (besides bloating the ego when you do it well) is that the thickeners you add to custard, soups, and sauces need to stay in the mix. Unlike the perfectly strained examples of zest and herbs I mentioned earlier, egg yolks, cornstarch, flour, and other thickeners are specially measured ingredients because every gram of them must be part of the finished product.
If you’re worried about having a few small grains of egg yolk in your pastry cream, it’s perfectly fine to pass it through a sieve as a guarantee that the final product will be flawless. However, if you left your cream of english on the stove during a laundry change and came back to find the mixture stuck together at the bottom, you won’t be able to strain it down. Essentially, you will be straining the egg you added as a thickening and enriching agent, removing a vital ingredient from your custard. At this point, you must start over. I know it’s hard to hear. I’m so guilty
How to prevent lumps
The best way to prevent lumps is to follow the recipe carefully . Most recipe writers are very deliberate in their wording. Everything related to tempering eggs involves constant stirring over low heat. Eggs are cooked at 144°F so you don’t have to stir for long. If the sauce for your béchamel sauce says to use a whisk, take the whisk; don’t beat it with a spoon. Read recipes ahead of time to see if a strainer is needed. Strain the ingredients that have finished contributing, but do your best to keep the thickeners as part of the solution.