Basbousa

Scoring 28 recipes

• Lift one cut open with a fingertip: it parts through the skin and stops in the fat beneath, showing a pale wall at its base. Any cut showing red or fibrous flesh has gone too deep; any that has not reached the fat has left the skin tethered, and it will tighten under heat.
• The lines run parallel at even spacing, roughly a finger's width apart, each carried the full length of the face and stopped the same margin short of the edge. Sight down them: lines that converge, wander or crowd at one end cook at different rates and read as careless on the plate.
• Each line is one clean draw of the blade held at a slant, not a sawn or doubled track, and it leaves a bevelled lip standing slightly proud rather than a vertical slot. The surface should be dry and cold, near 4C (39F), when it is cut; worked warm and slack it drags, and the blade tears where it should part.
• After cooking the cuts have opened and set, each a clear gap with firm browned walls. Lines closed back to faint scratches were cut too shallow or too straight down, and the surface has shrunk over them instead of through them.
• The piece lies flat and true when it is set down, with no cupping through the middle and no lifted, curled edge. A bowed piece means the tightening surface was never released, so it pulled the whole thing up and left the underside pale where it stood off the heat.

Where it goes wrong The blade was pushed rather than drawn, through a surface left warm and slack, so it went past the fat and into the flesh. The cuts bleed as they cook and the juices flood the surface, so it steams instead of crisping: the lines gape into wet ragged trenches, the flesh between them dries into hard ridges, and the skin stays leathery and pale where it should have blistered and set.

Blanching & shocking 76 recipes

• A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
• Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
• The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
• It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
• Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.

Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.