Hello! You're reading SMALL WINS — glad you're here! Every fortnight, I share one technique or principle that will make you a noticeably better cook. Just the knowledge that actually matters. (Free subscribers, you can browse ten flagship free recipes in the index — or upgrade to access all recipes, including today's. Plus you’ll receive Small Wins: The Fundamentals, a series of single-subject primers with foundational recipes, 6 times a year.)
Some recipes feel more like a small act of faith than active cooking.
Maybe you do a bit of chopping.
Or a little stirring.
And then?
Nothing.
You just sit back and wait, and in this time, subtle yet meaningful transformation takes place.
Jim Lahey’s no-knead pizza dough is one such recipe, and numerous fermentation projects also fall into this category — but perhaps the most magical example is the Korean technique of cheong.
Cheong is an ancient preservation technique where fruits or vegetables are packed with sugar and left to slowly transform at room temperature. No heat, no special equipment, no particular skill — just patience. The result is a syrup that tastes so purely of the fruit that it makes any cooked sugar syrup or coulis feel a bit clumsy in comparison.
-Alexina
Today’s recipe: British strawberry cheong
Lesson » The magic of Korean cheong
I first talked about maceration — the broader technique of drawing liquid out of fruit using sugar — when I wrote this jam deep-dive, right at the beginning of the Small Wins journey. But cheong takes that same principle and extends it significantly, letting the fruit become something new:
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