We live in a caramelised age. Increasingly everything in western cooking must be fried hard. Maillard reaction is prized over succulency. I have been mulling this over in my mind for a while but it was brought to focus last night when I went to a Wellington Malaysian restaurant and ordered Hainanese chicken on rice. This Chinese via South East Asia dish of poached chicken on rice with broth and a fragrant chili sauce is a joy. The woman taking my order clearly expected me to want the dish in a fried variant .

“Fried? ….. or boiled?”

I’m sure most customers of my demographic enthusiastically opt for fried, and by doing so miss out on the juicy succulent joy of the dish.

Our food scene has been successfully conquered by burgers and recently those burgers have been conquered by the smash technique. A smash burger is a burger which has been smashed or flattened into the grill. The method produces highly caramelised thin burgers. Proponents of the method will tell you it makes the burgers juicier. They base that on the thoroughly disproven belief that browning meat ‘locks in the juices’. It doesn’t but it does caramelise sugars on the surface of the meat. Smash burgers are a way of maximising the flavour of the grilling process while minimising the flavour of the meat. For me they take a good thing to far. The ‘if its worth doing its worth overdoing’ maxim in practice.

Some years ago we put on a beer dinner. The main course was to be mini steak suet puddings. This dish of succulent slow cooked beef stew encased in rich suet puddings and then steamed to perfection is a joy, but it’s soft luscious nature is also seriously out of favour in this current age. The chefs were into it but they couldn’t resist popping the puddings into the oven after the steaming to brown the outsides of the puddings like a pie crust. Straight steamed puddings was a heresy too far.

Like all food trends this too will pass. One day we will look back on the charred remains of burgers glued together with processed cheese, the insistence that dumplings be fried and the abhorrence of poaching or boiling like we do at encasing everything in aspic. Predictably I quite like a bit of aspic…