Champ

Mashing & puréeing 114 recipes

• Smooth to the degree the dish asks for, judged on the tongue rather than by eye: no lumps, no fibres, no grit, unless texture is the point.
• No gluey elasticity: a spoonful drops cleanly off the spoon rather than stretching in a rope behind it.
• The consistency holds: it mounds on a spoon and stays there, neither slumping flat nor standing so stiff that a spoon has to cut it.
• Nothing separates on the plate: no water or fat weeping out into a ring within a minute of serving.
• The colour is even throughout, with no streaks of unincorporated fat, liquid, or seasoning at the edges of the bowl.

Where it goes wrong A starchy ingredient met a high-speed blade, so the cells burst and released their starch: what should be light comes out as an elastic glue that lifts off the spoon in one mass.

Steaming: basket, leaf and lid 130 recipes

• Steam was running before the food went in: the water at a rolling boil and vapour coming steadily through the basket, rather than the whole thing warming up together.
• Nothing touches the water at any point: the food sits clear of it throughout, and the level neither drops enough to boil dry nor rises enough to wet it.
• The lid stayed on. Every lift costs the chamber its heat, and the number of lifts should be as close to none as the dish allows.
• Lifted out, the surface is glossy and plump with its colour heightened rather than dulled: greens brighter than they went in, not olive.
• Cooked through with the shape intact: it yields at the centre without having slumped or split, and there is no more than a spoonful of clean condensate beneath it.

Where it goes wrong The lid was loose or dripping and the condensate fell back onto the food, so it arrives waterlogged and pale with its seasoning washed down into the bottom of the dish.