Sautéed Spinach with Garlic
A few weeks back an acquaintance remarked to me how difficult she found it to sauté spinach and garlic. Her hope was to prepare boiling hot spinach in the garlic and olive oil served right out onto the table but was continually burning or browning the garlic along with resulting unevenly cooked spinach, does this ever happen to you?
Sometimes the simplest items in food preparation present difficulty to the home cook but this is not an indicator of skill only one of learning technique and adjusting the process to fit your own needs.
I can think of few skills more misunderstood than cooking. People take for granted that everyone should know how to cook, even naturally. While there are many folks who have a natural ability in creative food preparation even among these, they have also had to learn correct processes as well as adjusted techniques to fit varying situations from professional to home equipment.
It is important to cook spinach at a medium- high temperature so that it cooks quickly but does not stew in its own juice particularly since spinach contains such high water content.
To make things a bit easier when cooking spinach at home is after washing your spinach, dry it, but leave the slightest amount of moisture clinging to the leaves that will assist you in preventing burning your garlic.
Heat your sauté pan to medium- hot before adding in the olive oil and rapidly swirling the olive oil to cover all parts of the pan, add in your garlic and reduce the temperature for about fifteen seconds before raising the temperature back and immediately adding the spinach to the pan. Use tongs or shake your pan flipping the spinach so it cooks evenly and very rapidly with the garlic. Add a pinch of kosher salt if desired and transfer your boiling hot spinach with garlic to a platter serving immediately.
Sautéed Spinach with Garlic.
Sautéed Spinach with Garlic
Ingredients
- 3 cloves garlic, chopped
- 10 ounces fresh spinach, cleaned, dried with the slightest amount of moisture clinging to leaves
- 3 Tablespoons olive oil
- couple pinches coarse kosher salt
Instructions
- Heat large round nonstick sauté pan, add in the olive oil, swirl to coat pan. Add in chopped garlic then reduce heat for about ten seconds while shaking the pan to keep garlic moving, return burner to high temperature, tumble in fresh spinach, use tongs or shake well rapidly moving spinach and garlic about the pan to wilt and cook quickly and to prevent spinach from stewing in its own liquid. Sprinkle in kosher salt immediately transfer spinach to a bowl and serve
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