Stewlike Meat Sautés

While a sauté can be made to look like a stew, stewing and sautéing are fundamentally different. Stews are cooked for at least 1 or 2 hours so that the relatively tough cuts of meat that enter into them have time to become tender. Sautéing is designed primarily to create a brown and savory crust on the outside of meats. While the meat used in many stews is sautéed before liquid is added, sautéing does little to tenderize the meat. For this reason, meats that are only being sautéed (without subsequent stewing) must be tender to begin with. In classic French cooking, sauté-type dishes are surrounded with a sauce, usually based on the contents of the deglazed pan. Most of these sauces may be based on finely chopped aromatic vegetables (often as simple as a little chopped shallot) added to the hot pan before liquids, such as wine, are added for the deglazing proper. In restaurant cooking, demi-glace (glace de viande) is added to the pan to give the sauce body (in old-fashioned French home cooking a little broth from the pot-au-feu would fill this role) and a garniture, such as sautéed mushrooms (sauce chasseur), olives, green or root vegetables, and so on, may be added to the sauce at the end. Enrichers, such as cream or butter, may also be added to give the sauce a velvety texture and a suave, more complex flavor.