Aloo Posto

Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes

• It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
• The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
• The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
• The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
• Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.

Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.

Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes

• Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
• The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
• The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
• Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
• They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.

Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.