Horiatiki (Greek Salad)

Salting to draw the water out 41 recipes

• Salted evenly over every surface rather than tipped on in one place and tossed once.
• Laid out so the water has somewhere to go: a colander, a rack, or a sieve over a bowl, never a flat dish where it sits back in what it gave up.
• Given real time, and there is visible liquid to show for it: a pool underneath, a drip, or a wrung handful.
• That liquid is removed. It is squeezed, blotted or poured away, and the food is dry to the touch before it goes anywhere near heat.
• The dish is seasoned knowing salt has already gone on, tasted before any more is added.

Where it goes wrong It went into the dish still wet, and was salted again out of habit. The water it was carrying dilutes and steams whatever it meets, so the result is watery and over-seasoned at once, and those are two faults that cannot be corrected in the same direction.

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.