Trifongo de Plátano y Yuca

Scoring 28 recipes

• Lift one cut open with a fingertip: it parts through the skin and stops in the fat beneath, showing a pale wall at its base. Any cut showing red or fibrous flesh has gone too deep; any that has not reached the fat has left the skin tethered, and it will tighten under heat.
• The lines run parallel at even spacing, roughly a finger's width apart, each carried the full length of the face and stopped the same margin short of the edge. Sight down them: lines that converge, wander or crowd at one end cook at different rates and read as careless on the plate.
• Each line is one clean draw of the blade held at a slant, not a sawn or doubled track, and it leaves a bevelled lip standing slightly proud rather than a vertical slot. The surface should be dry and cold, near 4C (39F), when it is cut; worked warm and slack it drags, and the blade tears where it should part.
• After cooking the cuts have opened and set, each a clear gap with firm browned walls. Lines closed back to faint scratches were cut too shallow or too straight down, and the surface has shrunk over them instead of through them.
• The piece lies flat and true when it is set down, with no cupping through the middle and no lifted, curled edge. A bowed piece means the tightening surface was never released, so it pulled the whole thing up and left the underside pale where it stood off the heat.

Where it goes wrong The blade was pushed rather than drawn, through a surface left warm and slack, so it went past the fat and into the flesh. The cuts bleed as they cook and the juices flood the surface, so it steams instead of crisping: the lines gape into wet ragged trenches, the flesh between them dries into hard ridges, and the skin stays leathery and pale where it should have blistered and set.

Shaping by hand 85 recipes

• The pieces match: weighed, or judged against each other rather than by dividing the mass by eye, so that no piece is half again the size of its neighbour.
• Surfaces are smooth and unbroken with no cracks, tears, or dry patches, and the seams are sealed and sitting underneath.
• The shape is defined and it holds while the tray waits: it has not slumped, spread, or relaxed back out of its form.
• Nothing is trapped that should not be: no air pocket where filling should be, no filling breaking through the surface, and no excess flour greying the outside.
• They finish together in the heat: no piece done while another is still raw, which is the only test that the first mark was met.

Where it goes wrong The dough was worked past its point or shaped without a rest, so it fought back: the pieces spring out of shape on the tray and bake tight, uneven, and torn along the surface.