Bacalao al Pil Pil

Building an emulsion 40 recipes

• It visibly thickens as the fat goes in, heavier and more opaque than either part was alone, which is the emulsion announcing itself.
• At no point is there a pool of free fat sitting ahead of the work: fat went in no faster than it disappeared into the body.
• Glossy and homogeneous, with no slick floating on top and no visible droplets standing apart in it.
• It clings: coating what it is put on and holding a line, rather than running off and splitting into a puddle at the plate’s edge.
• It survives standing: minutes later there is no ring of weeping liquid underneath and no film of fat breaking out on the surface.

Where it goes wrong The fat went in faster than the shear could break it up, or the temperature drifted out of the range the method needs: it breaks into grease over a thin liquid, and whisking the broken thing harder does nothing. The rescue is a fresh base, with the broken sauce worked into it slowly, as if it were the fat.

The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes

• The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
• It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
• The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
• Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
• The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.

Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.