Chakhokhbili

Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes

• It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
• The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
• What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
• There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
• Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.

Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.

Reducing a sauce 95 recipes

• A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
• Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
• The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
• Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
• Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.

Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.