Colorado Lamb Chops

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.

Searing: the hard crust 141 recipes

• The pan keeps a hard, steady sizzle from the moment the food lands and does not fall quiet; silence within the first half minute means the pan lost its heat and the surface is now steaming rather than browning.
• It releases itself when tested: slide a thin edge under and it lifts without tearing. Anything that grips the pan has not formed a crust yet and is not ready to be moved.
• Deep even brown across the whole face, edge to edge, when it is turned under the light: no pale ring left around a browned centre, and no black patches that taste bitter on their own.
• The pan floor carries a dry browned layer that dissolves and lifts the moment liquid hits it: not a wet grey film, and not black flecks that stay put and stay bitter.
• Cut into it: the browned band is thin, a few millimetres at most, sitting straight on top of correctly cooked interior; a thick grey collar under the crust means the heat was too low for too long.

Where it goes wrong The pan was not hot enough, or too much went in at once, so the food released its water and sat in it: the surface goes grey and steams, it sticks when moved, and the crust that eventually forms arrives over an interior already cooked through.