Griddle & plancha work

How to tell it is going right

• 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.