Ohn No Khao Swe

Reducing a sauce 95 recipes

• A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
• Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
• The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
• Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
• Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.

Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.

Salted water & the float test 188 recipes

• The water was salted before anything went in, and tasting it confirms it: seasoned on the tongue, with the salt dissolved rather than sitting on the pot floor.
• There is enough water, hot enough, that the pot returns to its boil quickly after the food goes in and never stops moving.
• Where the dish uses the float as its signal, the signal is obeyed: the pieces rise and they come out then, not several minutes later once something else was finished.
• Nothing is stuck to the bottom of the pot or welded to itself, and the water has not thickened into a cloudy sludge.
• Drained on a bite rather than on the clock: resistance at the centre, with no chalky raw core.

Where it goes wrong The pot was too small and the water unsalted, so it never recovered its boil: the food sat in slack water, went gummy at the surface, and comes out bland in a way that no sauce afterwards can fix.