The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Technique

Steaming: basket, leaf and lid

130 dishes across 84 chapters · 0 marked cooked

On the Path of Study: Semester 5: Bread & Fermentation, Semester 9: Seafood Mastery

From the Lexicon, Steaming & En Papillote

Cooking in vapor at 100°C: gentler than boiling (no agitation, no flavor leached into water) and the technique of choice where the ingredient IS the dish: Cantonese fish, dim sum, couscous, tamales, Christmas pudding. EN PAPILLOTE seals food in parchment so it steams in its own moisture plus wine and butter, a self-saucing micro-oven with tableside theater. Steam burns worse than boiling water (it releases latent heat on contact); open lids and packets away from yourself, always, and never let the pot run dry: the smell of scorched steamer is a lesson learned once.

Read it in the Lexicon →

How to tell it is going right

  • Steam was running before the food went in: the water at a rolling boil and vapour coming steadily through the basket, rather than the whole thing warming up together.
  • Nothing touches the water at any point: the food sits clear of it throughout, and the level neither drops enough to boil dry nor rises enough to wet it.
  • The lid stayed on. Every lift costs the chamber its heat, and the number of lifts should be as close to none as the dish allows.
  • Lifted out, the surface is glossy and plump with its colour heightened rather than dulled: greens brighter than they went in, not olive.
  • Cooked through with the shape intact: it yields at the centre without having slumped or split, and there is no more than a spoonful of clean condensate beneath it.

Where it goes wrong The lid was loose or dripping and the condensate fell back onto the food, so it arrives waterlogged and pale with its seasoning washed down into the bottom of the dish.

A chosen film How to Kill, Clean, and Steam a Whole Fish in the Chinese Style (清蒸鱼) Chinese Cooking Demystified Watch for: The fish goes into a covered basket over hard-boiling water and comes out at the exact moment the flesh parts from the bone: watch how short the time is, and how the steaming liquid is poured off rather than served, because it is the leached-out fishiness the technique is designed to shed.

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