The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Technique

Straining & passing through a sieve

148 dishes across 88 chapters · 0 marked cooked

On the Path of Study: Semester 2: Stocks, Soups & the Simmer, Semester 6: Pastry Fundamentals, Semester 9: Seafood Mastery, Semester 10: The Restaurateur's Capstone

From the Lexicon, Sieves: Chinois, Tamis & Food Mill

Texture's final gatekeepers: the difference between good and restaurant-smooth is usually a pass through mesh. CHINOIS (the conical fine-mesh 'China cap'): sauces, custards, and consommé-adjacent liquids pressed through with a ladle's back, the crème anglaise and silky-soup insurance the pastry wing's custard entries demand. TAMIS (drum sieve): purées pushed across with a scraper: pommes purée's cloud (Robuchon's potatoes are a tamis story), flawless raviolo fillings, sifted dry goods. FOOD MILL: the rustic-smooth middle path. Tomato sauce milled (skins and seeds stay behind, BODY stays in; the sauce wing's Escoffier entry argues this against the blender's foam), mashed potatoes without glue (it cuts, never whips, so starch stays calm), applesauce at volume. The hierarchy by finish: mill = rustic-smooth with body; tamis = refined purée; chinois = liquid silk. Straining is not fussiness; it is the visible difference guests can't name and always notice.

Read it in the Lexicon →

How to tell it is going right

  • Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
  • Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
  • It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
  • The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
  • The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.

Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.

This technique, on camera Search films of straining & passing through a sieve

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