Jian Bing

Low & slow smoking 12 recipes

• The smoke coming off is thin and blue, not white and rolling. White smoke is unburnt fuel and it deposits soot and acrid phenols; a fire drawing enough air to burn its own smoke is what perfumes rather than tars.
• The chamber held its temperature within a narrow band for the whole cook, adjusted with the air intake rather than by adding fuel in armfuls. A pit swinging fifty degrees cooks the outside twice and the middle once.
• The stall was expected and waited out or wrapped through deliberately, not chased with heat. A brisket that sits at 70C (158F) for three hours is losing exactly as much water as it needs to; the cook who turns the fire up renders it dry.
• Doneness was judged by feel and by probe, never by the clock: the probe slides in with no resistance anywhere, and the number that matters is the one where the collagen has gone, not a time per kilo.
• It rested long and warm, an hour or more, wrapped and out of any draught. Cut straight off the pit and the juice runs onto the board instead of staying in the slice.

Where it goes wrong The fire was fed for temperature rather than for combustion, so it smouldered: white smoke, a bitter deposit on the surface, and a swing in the chamber every time more fuel went on. Then the stall was read as a stall in progress rather than evaporation doing its work, the heat went up, and the meat finished dry with a hard grey band under the bark.

Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes

• Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
• Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
• The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
• The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
• Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.

Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.