Chicken Souvlaki

The broiler: heat from above 22 recipes

• The element is fully lit and the compartment is hot before anything goes under it. A broiler switched on with the food already in place browns nothing for several minutes and then burns it in one.
• The distance was set before the dish went in, not adjusted afterwards with a hot dish in one hand: how close it sits is the only heat control this method has.
• Somebody stayed with it for the whole time. The window between pale and bitter is tens of seconds, and nothing under a broiler is ever safe to walk away from.
• The surface has coloured evenly right across, having been turned at least once; every grill has a hot corner and none of them say where it is.
• What is underneath is no further cooked than when it went in. Top heat is there to finish a surface, and anything that came out hotter all the way through was reheated rather than glazed.

Where it goes wrong It was treated as an oven setting: food in, timer set, cook walks away. Radiant heat from above has no gentle phase, so the surface goes from pale to bitter inside a minute while the inside is untouched, and there is no stage in between to catch.

Marinating: acid, salt and time 70 recipes

• Contact is total: every surface is wetted, and the pieces are not welded into a clump with dry faces where they pressed together.
• The stated time was kept and kept cold, read against a clock, because this is the one technique where longer is a different result rather than a safer one.
• It worked at the surface and no further: cut a piece and the marinade’s colour stops a few millimetres in. A protein gone opaque and chalky to the centre before any heat reached it has been cooked by the acid.
• The texture is still springy and whole, not mushy, mealy, or fraying at the surface when it is lifted.
• Where the next step browns it, the surface was patted dry first: a wet surface cannot brown, and the marinade’s sugars will scorch before the food colours.

Where it goes wrong It was left well beyond the stated time on the assumption that more is better, so acid and salt worked through the thin edges: those cook to cotton and read grainy while the thick centre tastes of nothing at all.