Reheated rivalry: why I’m the champion of leftovers
There is nothing lovelier than seeing a cook do their thing.By “doing their thing”, I do not mean just going about kitchen work – that is often excruciating to watch (why are they cutting onions like that?) I mean doing their thing: their culinary equivalent of a Mastermind subject, that one dish or process that they do so well, and with such evident pride, that the most crotchety backseat cook is forced to shut up.Take my partner’s method for making fish-finger sandwiches, which involves frying the fish fingers in butter, then creating an in-pan sweatbox to melt artisanal cheese on to them and custom blending condiments.It creates, on average, as much washing up as a full cooked dinner.Others have a special pancake hack or carrot cake recipe, and people tend not to let these things go unnoticed – it’s always my salad dressing, possessive, but we forgive their hubris, because each of us has “A Thing” of our own.
My thing, if you can call it that, is reheating stuff.This is not the high-impact flex that a cook hopes for; after the theatrics of cooking, reheating seems like drudge work – the job you give to the person in your household who you wouldn’t even trust with the washing-up.Just get the leftovers to a germ-proof 74C.But is this really where we’ve set the bar? With a bad reheater at the reins, carbs get waterlogged when they should be crisp, or crunchy where they should be tender, while stew is blasted in the microwave until borderline radioactive.We’d never settle for this in any other cooking sub-niche – that it’s enough that the food doesn’t kill you.
You have to treat leftovers like a necromancer.In the happy event of leftover pasta, I fry it with a touch of olive oil in a hot, wide pan.I want the starches to blister and crisp, and the tomato to caramelise just slightly.I want to summon, in miniature, the taste-textural symphony of a pasta bake.After a couple of minutes, I add a few tablespoons of water – it should instantly sizzle.
On goes the lid, down goes the flame, and I let the steam bring the dish back to life.You can do something similar with pizza, by the way.The cheese has already browned, the sauce has sunk down into the base, the last thing it needs is the dry heat of the oven or the air fryer.Instead, I crisp the base aggressively in a hot, dry pan, then give a benedictory sprinkle of water, turn the heat down and put on a lid until the cheese is molten soft.To each element of a dish according to its needs.
A stew of meat and potatoes might seem like a no-brainer, but what happens when you start stirring and the already fragile potatoes start breaking into mush? The sauce will become gluey, and the starches will catch on the bottom of the pan,Better to add some more water, cover it with foil and let a low oven do the work,Getting things hot is easy; it’s the control of moisture, and therefore of texture, that is the difficult part,Sometimes you need to break things down,A piece of meat – leftover roast chicken thighs, say – cannot just be put in the oven.
The tough parts become tougher, and the drier they get the harder it is for the heat to penetrate to the bone.Carve them up and warm the meat gently in stock.Accept that things must change.Lasagne ascends to a higher plane if, instead of reheating a slab of it whole, you do the unthinkable and separate it into layers and then do the hard-pan-fry-and-steam combo.I dare you.
Your microwave could never.And while we’re on the topic: the microwave has sloppy reheaters thinking they can resurrect a whole plate of food perfectly, without altering the position of a single pea.This is make believe.I am not a microwave-sceptic – this is military grade engineering; I hear that scientists once used them to revive cryogenically frozen hamsters (seriously).But you do need to use them with a certain technical nous, and not like a kid’s party magician pulling things out of a hat.
How many roast dinners have we lost to poor microwave technique?This is what we get wrong about reheating: we think that it is just about warming cooked things up, when it is, in fact, about cooking cooked things anew.You’re starting from a completely different point, with ingredients that chemically, have been irreversibly transformed by the first cook.But lean into this and you have the chance to exercise that same workaday ingenuity as an uncle making spice racks from old floorboards.This work can be creative and meticulous.It can be fun.
A kitchen can do without a pastry whiz, but – and let me have this moment – a home needs a reheater.You need a person who is willing to step back while the glory cooking happens, and make unglamorous, weeknight dinner-saving leftovers their thing.
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