Sofregit de Ceba i Tomàquet

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.

Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes

• It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
• The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
• The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
• The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
• Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.

Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.