Dublin Coddle

Blanching & shocking 76 recipes

• A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
• Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
• The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
• It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
• Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.

Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.

The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes

• The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
• It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
• The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
• Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
• The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.

Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.