Technique
Vegetables soften because pectin dissolves, and acid slows it down
Why potatoes stay hard in a tomato sauce and why some vegetables never soften is one piece of chemistry, not a series of accidents.
Technique
Heat, salt, timing and the handful of skills everything else rests on.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 2 of 2
Technique
Poaching is cooking below the boil, and the bubbles tell you where you are
A gentle liquid cooks delicate things that a rolling boil would tear apart. The whole technique is reading the surface of the water.
Technique
Steaming is not boiling with the water moved
Steam cooks at a different temperature to a hot pan and treats food far more gently than water does. It also keeps flavour in the…
Technique
Sweating, sauteing and frying are three temperatures with three aims
Recipes use these words as though they were synonyms for putting something in a pan. They describe different heat levels and…
Technique
Thickening a sauce four ways, and how each one fails
Starch, reduction, emulsion and puree all make a sauce thicker, and they do it by different mechanisms. Choosing the wrong one is…
Technique
Layer a flavour by adding the same thing three times
A single addition of an ingredient gives one note. The same ingredient added at three points, in three forms, is what makes a dish…
Technique
Smoke point is a property of refining, not of price
Which oil to cook with is usually explained badly. What matters is how the oil was processed, what is left in it, and how hot you…
Technique
How you cut it is a cooking time instruction
Knife work is usually taught as tidiness. The real reason a recipe specifies a size is that it is telling you how fast the heat…
Technique
Tasting is a skill, and most people do it once
Tasting at the end tells you what went wrong. Tasting throughout tells you what to do next, and it is the difference between…