The Long Way Round · Stage four · Building a plate

Every element on a plate is either doing work or taking up space

Lesson 11 of 20

Stage four is where the recipe goes, and the thing that replaces it is smaller than you would expect. It is a question you ask about every component: what is this doing?

There are not many answers. Fat, acid, crunch, heat, freshness, salt, sweetness, bitterness. A plate works when several of those are present and each one is there for a reason. It fails when three things are all doing the same job — which is the real problem with most home cooking, and it is usually three kinds of soft.

The sauce shortcut

Five sauces cover an enormous amount of ground and they are five ratios, not five recipes.

A vinaigrette is three parts fat to one part acid, and you move that ratio toward the acid when the thing it dresses is rich. An emulsified butter sauce is fat suspended in a small amount of liquid held together by agitation and temperature. A pan sauce is fond, liquid, and a finishing fat. A cream reduction is a reduction. A purée is a solid and a liquid and a decision about how thick.

Learn the ratios and you stop looking anything up, because you are no longer retrieving a sauce. You are choosing a proportion for what is on the plate in front of you.

Two mechanisms that save a lot of disappointment

A marinade gets about three millimeters in. Overnight or four hours, it is a surface treatment on anything thicker than a cutlet. The interior of a marinated chicken breast is unmarinated chicken breast. This is not an argument against marinating — it is an argument for seasoning the inside some other way and for not planning your afternoon around a process that is working on three millimeters.

The best part of the dish is stuck to the pan. Fond is water-soluble, which is the whole reason deglazing works and the whole reason soaking the pan throws away the best thing you made.

Read this week

This is one of twenty. The course sends them twice a week, in order, with four days between a lesson and its test. That pacing is the part that works.