Seattle Dog

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.

Grilling over live coals 77 recipes

• The fire was ready before the food was: coals evenly covered in grey ash with no flames licking through and no raw smoke coming off, and a hot zone and a cooler one both available.
• The grate was hot and clean when the food landed, and the food released cleanly from it when the time came to turn rather than tearing away.
• Marks are browned, not burnt: deep colour where the metal touched, with no carbon flaking off and no soot transferred onto the food.
• The interior reaches its target with a thin gradient, not charred outside and cold within, and not driven through by a flare-up.
• What comes off the fire smells of fire and food only: no raw wood smoke, no fuel, nothing acrid at the back of the nose.

Where it goes wrong It went on over live flames instead of settled coals, so the outside charred bitter in the flare-ups while the middle stayed cold, and everything on the plate tastes of soot.