Dimlama

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.

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.