Tasso Kabrit

Marinating: acid, salt and time 70 recipes

• Contact is total: every surface is wetted, and the pieces are not welded into a clump with dry faces where they pressed together.
• The stated time was kept and kept cold, read against a clock, because this is the one technique where longer is a different result rather than a safer one.
• It worked at the surface and no further: cut a piece and the marinade’s colour stops a few millimetres in. A protein gone opaque and chalky to the centre before any heat reached it has been cooked by the acid.
• The texture is still springy and whole, not mushy, mealy, or fraying at the surface when it is lifted.
• Where the next step browns it, the surface was patted dry first: a wet surface cannot brown, and the marinade’s sugars will scorch before the food colours.

Where it goes wrong It was left well beyond the stated time on the assumption that more is better, so acid and salt worked through the thin edges: those cook to cotton and read grainy while the thick centre tastes of nothing at all.

Draining fried food: a rack, never paper 77 recipes

• The rack was in place before the first thing went into the oil, not fetched afterwards while food waited in a spider over the pot.
• It lands on a rack with air moving underneath it. Anything set down on paper or a flat plate traps its own steam against its base.
• Salted within seconds of landing, while it is still hot enough to take seasoning.
• A minute later the underside is still as crisp as the top: no soft flat patch where it has been sitting.
• Nothing is stacked or piled while hot, however tempting it is to keep it together. A pile steams itself soft from the inside out.

Where it goes wrong It was drained on paper, or piled up to keep warm. Steam leaving the food has nowhere to go but back into the crust, so the underside softens within a minute: the crispness the frying just bought is gone before the plate reaches the table.