I’ll do the Tandoor post another time – for now, here are some of the pics and videos from Day 2 of KKC Live:

So, Day 2, and the actual cooking.

(If you’re just joining us – we were attempting to cook two horrendously complex dishes from three Michelin star chefs in two days – Heston Blumenthal’s Perfect Chicken Tikka Marsala, and Thomas Keller’s Cream of Blueberry Soup.)

Probably the most pressing question – did the recipes actually work? Can two geeks in a rather bizarrely-equipped kitchen actually manage to cook either of these incredibly complex, three-star meals?

I was pretty confident at first. After all, I’ve cooked several Heston meals before, admittedly with a lot of planning and a very well-equipped kitchen (and mostly with either a fair bit of alteration or some careful choice of recipe). And I’ve cooked one thing from the French Laundry book before, although it didn’t go entirely perfectly.

The first day left me a bit less confident, to be honest. The frog/hemisphere Charlotte mixture worked fine, but some experimentation made it look very unlikely they’d ever leave the mould again. The Dacquoise biscuits just worked by the skin of their collective teeth. On the tikka marsala side, there hadn’t been many major disasters, but I was extremely not confident about the creation of a tandoor oven in our hosts’ back garden on Day 2.

Day 2 did not open well. My attempt to produce the pepper sauce ended up with about twice as much sauce as I’d expected. Alex’s naan dough, meanwhile, spent a considerable portion of the day masquerading as wallpaper paste, mostly stuck to Alex. And then we actually built the Tandoor, which was such a catalogue of, erm, challenges that it deserves, and will get, a seperate post.

My creme anglaise didn’t thicken – at least, I didn’t think it had. When you don’t even know if what you’re producing looks like a finished product, you might well be in trouble. The bottle we’d been using to crush the cashew nuts, after our “blender” (smoothie maker) failed, had proceeded to leak sweet chilli sauce all over them.

Oh, and we had realised that we didn’t have a vital cooking ingredient – the pressure cooker for the Masala sauce. Or a grill at the top of the oven for the naan. Or pizza stones.

But we managed to cobble something together in the end. And what was the end result like?

Stunningly awesome.

We’ll have pictures in the next day or so, so for now you’ll just have to take my word for it, but both recipes came out close to perfect.

Tikka Masala

The tikka masala was one of the best curries I’ve ever had – rich, complex, incredibly creamy. The chicken was just stunning – chicken is one of my favourite meats, and the irregular, charred, moist, earthy flavours, the little crunchy bits and the multiplicity of texture and flavour made all the enormous effort and occasional pain of the tandoor worth it – for all participants. The naan wasn’t browned (because our oven wasn’t hot enough), but it tasted great for all that – thick, rustic, clearly home-made, with a lovely chewy texture. (Phil and Alex were a bit less keen on the naan, but I really liked it).

Our only criticisms were that the sauce could perhaps have been a little more multi-flavoured, and, although I hesitate to correct a three-star chef, there was maybe a bit too much butter (100g) added right at the end.

Overall, Heston Blumenthal’s hideously complex and extremely expensive recipe – does indeed produce a result worthy of it. Fantastic stuff.

Cream of Blueberry Soup

As for the French Laundry – we will add the pictures as soon as possible, but for now, just take my word that the soup came out looking almost exactly as it did in the book’s pictures (except for the frog-shaped Charlottes, which we all agreed rather added to the effect).

The Charlottes I was so dubious about slid neatly out of the moulds when heated, just as Thomas Keller said they would.

And yes, it was staggeringly good. The texture of the soup and the Charlotte blended into one another like nothing else I’ve tasted, except possibly some of the dishes at the Fat Duck. The soup was incredibly complex and utterly, utterly gorgeous, and richer than the guy who told Sergey Brin that sure, he could invest a thousand dollars in this “search engine” thingy. The charlotte was creamy, ultra-smooth, like the best Muller Thick Yoghurt ever created. And the Dacquoises were gorgeously crunchy, nutty and a perfect contrast to the meal.

Perhaps I would have liked it a bit less sweet, but if I’d been served that dish in a top restaurant, I wouldn’t have been complaining.

So…

Again – neither of us are expert chefs. I’m pretty good at savoury courses, but I mostly cooked the sweet, which I was near-totally ignorant about. And the kitchen we had certainly wasn’t restaurant-standard, nice though it is. And of the tasks presented to us, we reckoned we’d screwed at least three quarters of them up.

We, apparently, was wrong.

Particularly when contrasting to our other Normal Person vs experiences, I’d have to say – skip the easy stuff, go straight to “this is how we cook it in the restaurant” books.

So – if you’ve always wanted to try some massively ambitious recipe from a top chef, but are afraid you don’t have the cooking skill, the equipment, the talent – odds are, you can do it. Even if it looks like it’s gone horribly wrong half-way through.

So go give it a go.

And let us know how you do.

We’re live on Day 2 of the KKC Live experience – watch at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/kamikaze-cookery-live, or follow along on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kamikazecookery

And if you’re just joining us and want to know what the hell’s going on, we now actually have something resembling an explanation:

So that’s about where we are so far. I’ve skipped lightly over the epic struggle to remove the Dacquoise circles from the greaseproof paper (hint – greaseproof is NOT non-stick unless greased first. Oops.), and sidestepped the mild anticlimax that was the chilli (heat. heat. heat. Cough a bit. Done.), but, basically, we’re now up to date with the KKC Live experience.

So what do we have to do tonight? Well, we’ve got to build a tandoor, of course, out of a bunch of bricks and Tina’s Dad’s barbeque. We’ve got to cook the masala sauce, which we haven’t looked at too thoroughly, but boy it’s a long section. We’ve got to cook creme anglaise, we’ve got to finish shelling and cooking the fava beans, and we’ve got to roll out the pasta dough sans pasta machine. And we’ve got to make up and cook naan breads in the oven, using our pizza stones. Why, no, we don’t have any pizza stones.

Tune in tonight at 7pm BST, or perhaps a little before, as we get started. It’s emerging that most of the action will be on the live ustream feed, and the associated chat channel – now, hopefully, with a better angle and slightly less clattering on the keyboard (we’re upgrading the mic). We’ll also be Twittering regularly, and we’ll have pictures and audio updates going up there regularly. And of course we’ll round the entire thing up with a Great Big Blog Post and more video on Thursday.

See you tonight!

A few more videos and pictures that typify the entire experience:

I’d combined the meringue and the almond mix, spread the result on greaseproof paper, which I assumed was the same thing as baking parchment, (nope, it’s not). Meanwhile, Alex had combined about 1/5 of the original intended quantity of Garam Masala, and stuck it in the oven. We were sitting pretty.

Which was, of course, when our evil viewers decided that we should commence the Emergency Ravioli.

We were terrified of the ravioli recipe. However, I’d cunningly stolen a march on the entire thing by agreeing with Alex that I would, later on, fry the chilli, a process almost guaranteed to result in my choking my lungs out on capiascin fumes. In exchange, he’d agreed to undertake the – apparently less lethal – pasta making.

I am The Cunning.

See, the pasta-making recipe isn’t your regular pasta. This is super-pasta. Uber-pasta. Holy-crap-that’s-going-to-take-a-while pasta.

Whilst Alex continued to very slowly move his hand in a circle, I got back to my Dacquoises, which had by now nicely cooked.

I cut out little circles, stuck ’em back in the oven, and read some Twitter replies. Alex continued to move his hand in a circle.

I ate a kit-kat, captured some video, looked through the rest of the recipe.

Alex continued to move his hand in – yes, you’ve guessed it – a circle.

Feeling rather smug, I decided to start on the agliotti sauce. I’d had a quick look over the thing, and it mostly seemed to be a rather relaxed process of heating and blending a mixture of marscapone and beans.

And then I realised I’d failed to read one key line.

“First, peel all the fava beans.”

kamikazecookery http://twitpic.com/6i165 – Sisyphus had it easy

http://twitter.com/kamikazecookery/status/2010379340

Oh, cock.