Boudin Noir aux Pommes

Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes

• Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
• Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
• It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
• The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
• The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.

Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.

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.