Erbazzone Reggiano

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.

Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes

• Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
• The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
• The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
• Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
• They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.

Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.