Expert boosts grill skills

ADAM Perry Lang is one of the world’s brightest minds in meat.

His pedigree reads like a who’s who of the great modern American cuisine, and now he runs his APL restaurant in Hollywood.

What makes Lang such an avatar of culinary achievement is his freewheeling ability to cast out old tropes about technique and re-imagine process from the ground up. And when it comes to getting hardcore protein on the grill, he has some extraordinary new concepts to share.

Perhaps most influential in his panoply of skills is his commitment to mastering the bark of his meats.

The bark, for the uninitiated, is the caramelised crust on the outer edge. As you will all appreciate (vegetarians excepted), that deeply browned surface of your steak, cutlet or chop is the very best part of the dish.

This is all due to the Maillard reaction, a process by which the proteins and sugars found in many foods (including meats) change their chemical structure when cooked and convert into captivating new flavours and aromas.

In order to maximise that caramelisation, Lang came to a conclusion that in hindsight seems so terribly obvious. If you have more surface area, you can get more delicious browning. And so he invented scuffing. Before seasoning, oiling or grilling, his steaks and chops undergo a simple process of being lightly scored in fine parallel lines on all sides. When cooked, these millimetre-deep incisions become invisible to the eye, but the effect is transformative. Twice the surface area literally means twice the flavour.

Best of all, you can apply this technique to almost everything you grill, from beef and lamb, to pork, chicken and even seafood.

Smart cookie, that boy!

Ingredients 80ml cup) extra-virgin olive oil 1 large brown onion, finely chopped 1 large carrot, peeled, finely chopped 1 large celery stick, finely chopped 1 garlic clove, crushed 40g cup) plain flour 1.6kg gravy beef, trimmed, cut into 3cm pieces 440ml Guinness stout 375ml (1 cups) chicken-style liquid stock 3 sprigs fresh thyme 2 fresh bay leaves 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce 2 tsp brown sugar 2 small beetroot (about 180g trimmed), peeled, coarsely grated 1 sheet frozen puff pastry, partially thawed 1 egg, lightly whisked Salad, to serve