Carbonnade Flamande

Braising 39 recipes

• The pieces went into the liquid already deep brown on their faces, and the pot floor gave up its fond to that liquid rather than keeping it.
• The liquid comes partway up the pieces and stays there for the whole cook (not submerged, not run dry), and it never boils: the surface trembles and no more.
• It went long enough for the collagen to convert: a fork twists in it with almost no resistance, and the piece still lifts out whole rather than falling into shreds.
• The liquid has become a sauce: it has body, it coats the back of a spoon, and it tastes concentrated rather than thin and washed out.
• The meat is moist and seasoned through to its centre, not dry fibres sitting inside a good sauce.

Where it goes wrong The oven or the burner ran too hot and the liquid boiled, so the fibres tightened and squeezed their moisture out: it shreds dry into a thin greasy liquid, and more time makes it worse rather than better.

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.