Tossing food in a skillet is an efficient way to mix and move food.

Credits: serious eats

How to flip food in a pan? Tossing food.

In our eyes, there are two ways to do things in life: you can do it well or you can do it well and with great style! Let’s take the World Cup as an example: You can do it well, like the technical skills of Germany, or you can do it well and with great style, like Brazil, who not only play the game, but do it beautifully with many feats.

We assume that none of us strives to do things badly or half-heartedly.

It’s not that one way is automatically better than the other – on any given day, each of these teams has a chance of beating the other. They’re simply two different ways of approaching a task, one purely technical, the other with a bit of style and flair.

Learning how to flip and toss food in a sauté pan or skillet is a similar matter. In most cases, it’s not an essential cooking skill, as there’s always an equally good – if less spectacular – way to do it (like stirring or using your spatula). And honestly, even in practiced hands, tossing food in a skillet can still result in a bit of a mess. It’s like juggling – you can get really good at it, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never drop a ball.

“It's an incredibly fast and efficient way to mix and work food in the pan, with just a few quick tosses having the same effect as a long stir.”

What can you flip?

Before we get into the how, the first question is what food to flip. I know a lot of people love to flip pancakes, frittatas, and omelets in a skillet. Such flips—done successfully—are pretty impressive. But we don’t recommend it. First, it’s far too easy to flip them too hard or too soft, causing them to collapse on themselves in sad, broken heaps. Second, because each of these foods is large relative to the size of the pan, they’re much more likely to miss their target entirely or partially on the way down (imagine doing somersaults on a giant trampoline; then imagine doing the same somersaults on a tiny trampoline—which would you consider safer?). Third, even if you do flip and land successfully, they land hard on their wet side, which all too often means a big old splashy belly flop.

Instead, we recommend gently flipping pancakes with a spatula; turning frittatas onto an upturned plate and then sliding them back into the pan; and as for omelettes, they should, at least according to the classic French technique, not be turned at all, but rolled up in the pan while the top is still moist, and then carefully turned onto the plate.

So what do you toss in the air? Personally, I like to toss small mixed ingredients when stir-frying and sautéing, so they quickly combine and move around the pan. I also like to toss foods like pasta in sauce, and starchy dishes like risotto, although this can sometimes be a messier affair, so try it carefully (and with an apron…).

How to Flip?

The first thing you need to know is that the base has to be good, a frying pan with sloping sides. And absolutely no flat ones like often with cast iron pans. If you want to throw something in the air, it has to be with a nice sloping jump upwards, and not like a car with full throttle against a guardrail…

Let's use the example of ski jumping, the starting position is when the food is in the pan. The food is the ski jumper, the flat sides are the jump itself.

Credits: serious eats

The first thing the ski jumper needs to do is charge down the slope. That’s what you need to do with the food. But first, it’s always a good idea to give the food a quick stir with a spoon, spatula, or tongs to make sure it slides into the pan and isn’t stuck (kind of like when the skier slides back and forth a few times before jumping). Once you’re sure the food is clear to jump, give it a downward push toward the far side of the pan.

Credits: serious eats

Now our ski jump analogy breaks down, because if we were to stick with it, you would be shooting the food out of the pan and it would end up as far out of the pan as possible, and we don’t want that. Instead, just as the food starts to shoot out of the pan, you should lift the front of the pan and pull back a little to redirect the path of the food so that it shoots vertically upward, or better yet, backward and a little bit toward you. This should be a smooth, fluid motion.

Credits: serious eats

With the food in the air and (hopefully) still above the pan, you then need to bring the frying pan up so that you can catch any falling food.

Credits: serious eats

Perform it correctly and all the food will end up where it started, and not on the ground. Once you have mastered this movement, you can reverse it so that the forward motion in this final step of catching the food also functions as the forward (and downward) motion of the next launch.

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