The secrets of stir-frying, perfecting pasta and always knowing when a roast is cooked - these and other life-changing nuggets of wisdom from one of Good Food’s favourite columnists.
There are many recipe books and websites that tell you what to cook. Not many that teach you how to cook. Put simply, at Good Food we want to help you become better cooks as we bring you delicious recipes from our columnists. The prime example of this? Adam Liaw’s recent series, The 10 dishes you must master. These are a powerful weapon in your cooking arsenal. But nothing short of life-enhancing is the advice that accompanies each. We’ve cherry-picked the best of his wisdom here.
−Ardyn Bernoth, editor Good Food
The golden rules of the wok
Stir-frying technique is all-important and here are a few simple things to bear in mind.
- Don’t crowd the wok. I will most often fry each ingredient separately, removing each from the wok after it’s fried, and then combine them together very quickly at the end. This avoids overloading the wok and turning your stir-fry into a stew.
- When frying the meat you want to get your wok very, very hot, then spread the meat in a single layer so that it browns. It doesn’t need to brown all over, but that initial sear is very important for that “wok hei” (breath of the wok) flavour. Use a little more oil than you think you need for this step. Not using enough oil is a common mistake for wok frying.
- The final step is creating the sauce in the wok. This process is more like creating a pan jus or gravy than it is dolloping on a sauce. Once you’ve recombined everything in the wok, the oils, seasonings and liquid released by the ingredients will give you quite a bit of liquid. Thickening this with a slurry of cornflour will create the “sauce” for your simple stir-fry. Mix a little cornflour with cold water then drizzle in while tossing the ingredients in the wok. Just eyeball it and stop when the sauce is silky and coating the ingredients. Don’t skip this step. It’s absolutely vital for completing a good wok-fried dish.
Perfecting pasta
The Italian word for the process of mixing ingredients for pasta to create an emulsified sauce is mantecatura. I think this is the key to all good pasta dishes, and it’s the reason the delicious pasta you get in most restaurants is mixed together with its sauce, rather than served as a plate of boiled noodles with a sauce dolloped on top.
The three key ingredients for a mantecatura are al dente pasta, a little pasta water and the sauce ingredients. Mixing these three together for a minute or two allows the pasta to absorb the flavour of the sauce, and for the oils to emulsify with the starchy water, giving the dish a richer, creamier texture. I always add a little extra oil (or butter) during this process.
How to pan-fry fish
The process for pan-frying fish is simple. Place a carbon-steel pan over medium heat and wait until the pan is hot. With practice you can judge this by eye, but otherwise you can test your pan’s heat by observing the Leidenfrost effect: drip a tiny amount of water into the pan and if it “squeaks” and forms a bubble that skims across the surface, it’s hot enough. If the water wets the pan, wait a little longer.
When the pan is hot, add the oil. Don’t add oil to the pan before heating, as it will burn and smoke before the pan gets hot enough. Lay the fish into the pan, skin down. The skin of the fish will want to contract and buckle the fillet, so press the fish firmly down with the back of a spatula, base of a pot or cooking weight for about 30 seconds until the fillet relaxes.
You don’t need to cook things in a pan for an equal amount of time on each side. In fact, this often causes overcooking. When cooking fish, I will often cook one side for about 80 per cent of the cooking time, and the second side for just 20 per cent. Squeeze or press the fillet with your fingers to see if it’s cooked. I like to imagine that I’m biting into the fish as I press it. If it feels raw, keep cooking a little longer.
How long to cook a roast?
If you want to be able to figure out once and for all how long to cook a roast, it’s as simple as checking the temperature.
These days a probe thermometer costs less than the price of a single roast, can be used for all cuts and types of meat, and using it will eliminate guesswork and online misinformation around cooking times forever.
I don’t even mess around with oven temperature. I roast most large meat cuts at 180C fan-forced, and start to check the internal temperature with a thermometer after about 20 minutes’ cooking time per 500g. So for a 2kg roast of any kind, that’s about an hour and 20 minutes. Exceptions to this would be tenderloin (which I hardly ever roast anyway) and chicken, which I roast hotter and faster to get maximum browning on the skin.
Remove the roast from the oven when the internal temperature is about 50C and it will be rare, about 55C will be medium-rare, and about 60C will be medium. That’s it.
The keys to curry-making
You can broadly divide a curry into four components: an aromatic base, spices, a main ingredient and liquid.
- The base will usually be a combination of onion, garlic and ginger, either chopped or pureed.
- The spices can vary hugely, and may include things like cumin, turmeric, coriander, mustard seeds, cardamom and cinnamon.
- The main ingredient can be vegetables, pulses, meat or fish, and the cooking time of your curry will vary accordingly.
- The liquid can be a dairy product such as yoghurt or cream, coconut cream, stock, water or even vegetables (such as tomatoes or spinach puree). You can, of course, combine different liquids (in this dish, for example, I’ve used tomatoes, coconut milk and water).
To these four basic components, you could also add two components for further nuance: a souring agent such as citrus juice, green mango powder, tamarind or vinegar to balance the taste of the curry, and an oil (e.g. coconut oil, vegetable oil, mustard oil or ghee, which is very important in Indian cuisines).
Mentally separating a curry into its four key components drastically simplifies the cooking process: Fry the aromatic base in oil, add spices, add the main ingredient and liquid, then braise until cooked.
Then, by moving the components around, you see how easily you can create an incredible variety of “curries”. Change the aromatics, the spices, the main ingredient or the liquid, and you can make thousands upon thousands of distinctive dishes.
The science of sugar
The magic of heating sugar gives us some of the most impressive sweet creations possible. The chemistry of what happens at each stage is all-important.
Mix sugar with a little water and apply heat. As it heats, it will move through the following stages:
- Thread (110-112C, for jams and syrups),
- Soft ball (112-116C, for fudge, soft sweets),
- Firm ball (116-121C, for fondant, soft caramels),
- Hard ball (121-130C, for Italian meringue, marshmallow),
- Soft crack (131-143C, for taffy and firm butterscotch),
- Hard crack (145-154C, for nut brittles, hard candies).
As the sugar cooks through these stages, it loses water – from about 20 per cent water at the thread stage, to about 1 per cent water at the hard-crack stage. The difference in water content determines how the sugar behaves in each of the sweets mentioned.
Baking basics
You can categorise almost all cakes into two broad categories – fat and foam.
Fat cakes use fats such as butter or oil to give them richness. In the case of butter, it can also be used to lighten the cake. If a recipe starts with “creaming” butter and sugar together, this is a vital step. Whipping the butter incorporates air, which will make your cake light and fluffy.
Foam cakes, on the other hand, use air and liquid trapped within the foam of whipped eggs to give it lightness and moisture. Foam cakes such as angel food cakes, Victoria sponge and chiffon cake often use less oil than fat cakes and can sometimes be dry if too much flour is used or if it’s overcooked.
Whether you’re making a fat, foam or hybrid cake, combining dry ingredients with the wet is one of the most important skills in baking.
When combining flour into a fat or butter cake, overworking the flour is one of the most common errors. Too much mixing develops the gluten in the flour, which will make your cake tough and dense. Whip butter at high speed to incorporate air, but incorporate flour at low speed so that you don’t develop too much gluten.
For a cake that starts with a foam base, good folding is vital. Mix too much and you’ll squeeze the air out of the foam and your cake will fall flat. When folding, don’t pussyfoot around. Use long and deliberate strokes with a spatula to mix dry ingredients with the wet and go straight to the oven when you’re done so the foam doesn’t have time to deflate.
Brown food beats all
A simple rule of cooking is that brown tastes good. The chemical reactions between sugars and proteins that turn food brown are known as Maillard reactions. They produce a bunch of flavour compounds we find tasty.
These browning reactions happen at nearly any temperature, but they occur most quickly at high heat. That’s why we fry meats to turn them brown before stewing. If we didn’t brown the meat before stewing, it would still brown a little through the stewing process, but not as much as if it was fried first.
To brown meat effectively, fry it in small batches over medium heat, not high. High heat may cause meat to burn in places, producing burnt flavours before you get good browning. Medium heat gives you more even browning, and also helps keep the “fond” from burning. The fond is the brown bits on the base of the pot that gets scraped up into the liquid through the process of deglazing (adding liquid and scraping up the fond).
How to cook eggs
The most important thing you need to know about cooking eggs – a principle that is true for scrambled eggs, omelettes, frittatas, chawanmushi and anything else that is mainly eggs – is that eggs cook at a lower temperature than the heat from our stoves and ovens, and that they conduct heat very, very well.
When we talk about “cooking” in relation to eggs, it’s about the coagulation of protein. In eggs, the different proteins that are distributed between the whites and yolks will coagulate between about 61C and 84C. The temperature of boiling water is 100C, the surface heat of a frying pan is usually between 150C and 260C depending on how you’re heating it, and most ovens max out at about 240C.
This is important because the temperature you’re trying to get your eggs to is well below the things we use to cook them. Of course, this is true for lots of foods.
With eggs, though, they conduct heat very well and very quickly, so when your eggs are nearly set – as in, not quite set enough for you to eat – you want to stop cooking them and allow the residual heat to continue to cook the eggs to the right level of doneness. This is sometimes known as carry-over cooking, and it applies to fillets of fish, steaks and lamb roasts as well as eggs, but with eggs it’s far more noticeable because it happens so quickly and efficiently.
Why resting rules
Resting is important for just about anything you might cook, or not. I rest stews, omelettes, even salad dressings – and of course, steaks. Resting allows the juices that have collected in the centre of the meat to redistribute throughout the meat a little, but mainly lets the juices cool slightly and thicken with the natural gelatine so they cling to the meat rather than running out onto your plate.
I rest my steaks in a warm place, on a warm plate free from draughts. One of the easiest ways to do this is to microwave a porcelain plate for about 30 seconds until it’s slightly warm, then rest the steak on it in the microwave without the microwave on, but with the door closed.
If you’re worried about the steak going “cold”, just know that the centre of the steak won’t change in temperature too much over the five to 10 minutes that you rest it, so I often flash the outside of the steak for a few seconds each side in a hot pan after resting to bring back the freshly seared exterior.
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How to cook steak, fish, curry, roast and more: Adam Liaw's essential kitchen tips and advice for home cooks - Sydney Morning Herald
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