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In this age of fast and easy cooking, “leave overnight” can feel like an obnoxious phrase. Even worse are those recipes that tell you something you should have done “the previous day” when today is already the morning after.
Yet one of the most searched-for recipes on the internet is “overnight oats” — those cute jam jars of grains and seeds left in the fridge before bed, so go figure. When you have the time, there is a charm in leaving something to do its thing in the kitchen while you sleep. “Infuse them for a night in a close vessel,” reads a 19th-century recipe for a syrup of orange or lemon peel. It’s like a love poem.
What does “overnight” actually mean in culinary terms? The original rationale was one of temperature as much as time. As Isabella Beeton explained in 1861, overnight was the time when the oven was not lit but still held residual heat. She recommended leaving tomatoes for tomato sauce to bake in an overnight oven until tender — a kind of Victorian sun-dried tomatoes. There are still at least three good reasons for overnight food prep.
To add flavour
An overnight marinade of herbs, oil and lemon can transform dull chicken breasts to something richly flavoured and tender. Bread dough given a slow, cold overnight rise has a deeper, more fermented taste.
To improve texture
Soaking dried beans overnight makes them swell from small unyielding pebbles to plump fruits. Pre-salting meat, as Samin Nosrat advises, makes it juicier. Chinese cooks sometimes soak tofu in water overnight to make it spongier: all the better to absorb seasonings.
To remove salt
Leaving salt cod in a water bath in the fridge before you go to bed gets you halfway to brandade.
How long is “overnight”? With ingredients, as with humans, it depends. In his excellent Bocca: Cookbook, chef Jacob Kenedy stipulates that a particular cake dough should be risen for six hours in the fridge “while you’re at work or overnight”. Chefs clearly don’t sleep much, but we knew that already. Having consulted multiple cookbooks, “overnight” can mean anywhere between six and 12 hours, although sometimes (with chickpeas, for example) an “overnight” soak is better extended to a full 24 hours.
For the impatient, it’s worth knowing that overnight isn’t usually essential. The main workaround is using heat to speed things up. I never soak the dried fruit for my Christmas cake overnight, preferring to bring the raisins, currants and so on up to simmering point in the rum or brandy and leaving them to cool. They are easily as juicy and delicious as long-soaked fruit. By the same token, if you don’t want to soak an uncooked ham overnight, just bring it to simmering point in a pan of cold water, then discard the water and proceed.
Even dried beans don’t have to be soaked overnight. When pressed for time, boiling unsoaked beans fairly vigorously for 10 minutes before simmering for about an hour longer than usual works fine. But you may enjoy the ritual and calm of an overnight bean-soak, apart from the fact that it seems to make the beans more digestible. In The Latin American Cookbook, Virgilio Martínez observes that many Latin American cooks are old school in their devotion to soaking beans the night before. “It’s a practice,” he writes, “that connects us to thousands of years of everyday life in this part of the world.”
Bee Wilson is the author of ‘The Secret of Cooking’
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