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No, you idiot, you add the chillis to the stir-fry LAST!

From the department of nearly-having-to-evacuate-my-flat-due-to-aerosolised-chilli-oils

We reported recently that the Royal Society has produced what they call the “perfect” Yorkshire Pudding recipe. As an old Yorkshire boy, I had my doubts. Surely no such recipe is “perfect” unless you were taught it by your grandmother. Nonetheless, in the interests of Science, I gave it a go.

I was pleasantly surprised.

I’m on holiday this week, so we’ve got a slightly shorter and odder episode for you. Enjoy!

Next week: Gordon Ramsey.

I’m on holiday this week, and I badly need to be dealing with angry royalty, if you know what I mean, so here’s one from the archives – my first taste-test of the cheapest versus the most pricey…

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So I’ve been curious about how much difference very expensive ingredients make to cooking. Hence, I’m going to try to do a series of taste tests pitting “average” ingredients against the best I can reasonably buy.

The first one: Pasta. In the red corner, famous deli Valvona & Corolla’s La Molisana pasta, price £1.10 for 500g. In the blue corner, Asda/Wal-Mart’s own-brand fusilli, price 34p.

I prepared a very simple dish – pasta al dente, with extra virgin olive oil (the expensive Lidl one) and parmesan (reggiano, again from Lidl).

The differences became obvious pretty much immediately – the ASDA pasta went floppy whilst the V&C was still undercooked. But how would it taste?

The ASDA pasta tastes pretty much like the pasta you’d expect – it just missed al denta, and came out floppy, very smooth-tasting, and turned to paste and disappeared pretty much as soon as you put it in your mouth. Comforting food, but lacking texture in particular, and also any definite taste.

The V&C was definitely nicer. It put up a bit of a fight, for starters, coming apart with a rough floury texture that left you in no doubt very good flour had been used in its creation. It had a definite taste to itself, faint but definitely there, like unleavened bread, and the oil taste worked extremely well with it.

There’s no doubt that for a dish this simple, the V&C pasta is vastly superior- in fact, I’d say it was pretty much essential if you’re going to be doing anything this simple – it adds the extra flavour that’s vital for something this minimal.

However, in any pasta dish with a more definitely flavoured sauce, I’m not so sure. The extra texture of the V&C pasta would definitely enhance the dish, but not as much as other decent ingredients, and the subtle taste that makes the V&C such a winner with olive oil would definitely be lost even under a simple red sauce.

Overall? Buy the V&C, for sure, but keep it for dishes where the pasta and the pasta alone will be the focus of the dish – minimalist lunches like this and perhaps some pasta salads. For everyday eating, whilst it’s nice, other ingredients that are less expensive per dish and have a greater effect on the sauce will provide better value for money.

This whole being-without-an-oven thing, as we call it in the trade, is forcing me to reevaluate my cookery. Normally, I get in from work (late) and stick something ready-made into the cooker. Proper cooking with ingredients is reserved for my days off. There are two main reasons for this: one, it’s late and I’m tired and hungry; and two, cooking properly, with ingredients, is something I actually enjoy doing, so I don’t particularly want to do it when it’s late and I’m tired and hungry.

I have a friend (hi David!) who’s a much better cook than me. It’s a bit embarrassing for both of us. I’m supposed to be the internet-famous cookery show star, and no one’s ever eaten anything I’ve cooked; and he always apologizes every time he produces some fantastic culinary marvel that he suspects might not be entirely perfect. (He’s usually mistaken.). But we both know more-or-less as much as each other about food and what you do with it. So why is he the one who gets to play with quails and fondant tarts, while I can just about stretch to a Sunday roast if you give me a day to do it?

I think the answer is time. I’ve gone off on one already about the Findus Crispy Pancakes generation, but the fact remains that sometimes I want to eat something in order to stave off imminent starvation, without having to go to the effort of putting my creative head on. If I finished work at five and got home by six, with the evening stretching out ahead of me, I might feel differently.

Without an oven, I’m being forced to get creative. (I know there exist microwaveable ready meals, but come on, I have some standards.) For instance, I’ve just reinvented pizza. They all laughed at me when I said I was going to spread toast with tomato puree, then put chicken and cheese on top of it and grill it. (I still have a grill. An oven without a door is a grill.) But I’ll show them, I’ll show them all. And I still have a hob, which means that I’m rediscovering soups.

I’m also making an awful lot of toasted sandwiches. Toasted sandwiches are another way that you can play around with flavours and combinations of ingredients without having to do any real work. I have a sandwich toaster, but I don’t own a health grill, which is a shame, because then I could toast sandwiches and do other stuff as well.

We cover health grills in greater depth, after a fashion, on Wednesday, in the appropriately-named Health Grill Episode. It’s a shorter episode than usual, because it turns out that there’s not a great deal to say about health grills. We hope that we’ve covered all the basics and still managed to be amusing.

In the meantime, does anybody have any other useful tips for coking without an oven?

Those bloody Actual Scientists are getting in on the cooking game, it would seem.

Reader Kris forwards us this piece from UK tech site The Register, in which the Royal Society, one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific institutions in the world, gets into the cooking business with a recipe for the perfect Yorkshire Pudding

Cambridge University chemist and science author John Elmsey wrote the following in response to the Society’s national request for feedback:

“"I have seen many grim results from people who have tried to get their Yorkshires to rise. They frequently made gross errors. After all, cooking is chemistry in the kitchen and one has to have the correct formula, equipment and procedures. To translate the ingredients into chemical terms, these are carbohydrate + H2O + protein + NaCl + lipids.”

Anyone care to try the recipe (in the article above) and tell us what they think?

On the comments on our Nigella episode a couple of weeks ago, Sabrosa questioned our assumptions, and said that “Most normal people I know do know what to do with pastry”.

This interested me, not least because I would have said exactly the opposite – just about all the people I could think of who could handle pastry-making were serious foodies, and not even all of them would be 100% confident. So, I did what anyone with access to a blogging medium did, and ran a poll.

And the results really got me thinking.

It turns out that the proportion of people who could do the pastry thing to those who couldn’t was almost exactly 50/50. But if you divided by sex, an interesting thing became obvious: nearly all of the women who answered my poll could make pastry (80), whilst less than 30 of the men could. And if you adjusted by removing serious foodies from the mix, the figures polarised even more sharply – 20% of men, 77% of women.

What? What’s going on there?

Baking seems to be tremendously female-identified: after all, Nigella’s baking book was even called “How to be a domestic goddess”, a tremendously gender-polarising title which I can’t imagine getting past the publisher unless they were pretty certain the audience was almost entirely female. I’m not at all sure why. Perhaps it’s because baked goods are so comforting, warm, soft, usually sweet, nurturing? Whatever, it’s so powerful as to almost render baking a seperate process from cooking as a whole – several women mentioned that they hardly cooked, but they could bake.

And for that matter, what’s with the male identification with barbecuing? Sure, there’s the fire, wood, metal, charred meat thing, and sure, in general, blokes like large charred chunks of dead animal, but why’s it so extreme? Why do men, even men who don’t normally cook at all, suddenly get all proprietorial as soon as charcoal’s involved? And why is it that women are usually less into that? I mean, you can grill vegetables. And anyway, I know more than a few women who slobber over Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Meat.

…

OK, that was a mental image I didn’t need.

But moving away from Mr Fearlessly Eats-it-all’s wang – what’s up with all this? Why are some types of cooking so gender-identified – not the eating of the result, but the cooking? Any ideas?

If you’re planning on buying the KKC DVD, please comment below. We’re just trying to establish whether, in actual fact, we’d be better concentrating on the series and publicity right now, or whether you’re all gagging for the DVD version…

It seems that the secret cabal that control our supermarkets has been reading my last post. I was in Tesco’s today, and now they advertise that all of their party-themed finger food is designed to be cooked at 190°. So you can mix-and-match different types of party food and put them all in the same oven. This is good.

As long as you’re having a party. If what you’re trying to do instead is cook a meal, then you’re still screwed.

I cover ovens in this week’s episode, with the help of the lovely Jehane, Kamikaze Cookery’s Consultant Archaeologist. Archaeology, I’m reliably informed (by archaeologists, it must be said) is a science, and at Kamikaze Cookery we do cooking with science. So it’s entirely reasonable for a cookery show to have a consultant archaeologist. Also, she was easy to get hold of, if I do say so myself. If anyone knows of someone willing to be the Kamikaze Cookery Consultant Chemist, or Consultant Physicist, or similar, who’ll work for me as cheaply as Jehane does, then feel free to get in touch. Being gorgeous like Jehane would be a bonus.

All of this talk of ovens is largely useless to me at present, since I managed to shatter the glass door of my own oven last night. The entire door assembly has now been taken off and taken to some magical place where landlords look at them and determine if replacements can be found. I’m an hotelier and, occasionally, an actor and/or cookery show presenter: this stuff is beyond me, which is why I pay someone else to do it. In the meantime, I’m currently in possession of a doorless oven which might theoretically serve as a somewhat inefficient method of heating the flat. And I’m eating a lot of takeaways, because any excuse will do.

There’s been some talk in the comments about Agas. Louise “louisedennis” Dennis has waxed lyrical about this in the comments on my own blog in the past. I’m disappointed to hear that they’re, apparently, pretty useless. I still want one, but that’s more because I’m old-fashioned.

One thing we’ve been talking about at Kamikaze Cookery Towers is the halogen oven (warning: horrible javascript website). It sits on your countertop and allegedly it can do a whole chicken in thirty minutes. Some of the reviews seem to suggest otherwise, though. Anybody have any experience with one of these?

We’re preparing the Kamikaze Cookery DVD right now, and we just wondered – what would you like to see on the DVD?

So far, we’ve got:

• Commentaries on The Perfect Steak, all the Normal Person Vs episodes, and The Fife Diet (upcoming).
• Deleted footage from Health Grills (upcoming), Normal Person vs Gordon Ramsey (upcoming), and a couple of others.
• An interview with the team on how we made this show on a tiny budget.
• Bloopers reels.
• Footage from an episode that was never completed, entitled “Sealing Meat”.

What else would you like to see? What would you like to know?

Preheating your oven – it’s a total pain in the ass. Or at least, Paul thinks so. We test to see if you need to heat your oven – with Science. Sort of.

Two weeks to the release of the Kamikaze Cookery DVD, by the way!

It may astonish those of you who’ve been watching me doing my best Clarkson impression on KKCook that I’m actually terribly Politically Correct about international cusines. I’m always thinking that each style has huge depth and complexity, that you need to study it for years to really understand it, and so on. I suspect some of that comes from studying martial arts, and some from the fact that I’m just a nice Guardian-reading boy.

And so it was that I was chatting to Alex the other day about noodle soups, and he mentioned that he’d quite like to learn to cook Tom Yum soup. Just one version, mind – but he wanted to know because it was useful to know how a different culture’s food worked.

My first thought was, of course, that you couldn’t possibly do that. That in order to understand Thai cooking, for example, you’ve got to study it for years. Go out there, probably, spend weeks on a course. You’ve got to live the cooking to know it.

But then my mind moved back to martial arts, and I thought over the idea again. In Muay Thai kickboxing, for example, it’s true that to really master the style you’ve got to spend five or ten years. But you can learn some of its useful self-defence moves – some of the best in the world – in an afternoon. I spent one afternoon learning Jujitsu wristlocks six or so years ago, and I still use them today.

And Alex’s idea made me think about the same things you can do with world cooking. Sure, it takes years to really master Italian cooking. But you can learn basics that can change the way you cook dramatically in a single lesson – the soffrito, for example, or the use of pasta shapes depending on the meal you’re cooking. And then you can apply them to infuse a dish with a sense of a region’s style, or to create something new by combining lessons.

So, what are the three top tips you can learn from a few world styles?

Singaporean/Malay/Thai/Vietnamese area

• Chilli, lime, ginger and garlic. The four ingredients behind most of the region’s cooking (OK, Thai would add lemongrass) give a distinctive, immediately recognisable flavour. You can add them to virtually anything, from beef to scallops, to create a fantastic meal.
• Soup is a meal. Ok, this one’s Chinese too. But the Vietnamese, in particular, raise noodle soups to an artform. Get some fine noodles, some stock, some spice and some chooped meat and veg. Mix together whilst boiling for a couple of minutes. Serve. Uber-quick meal.
• You don’t have to be subtle. I attempted to recreate a Singaporean noodle soup the other day, and one thing immediately made itself apparent – the tiny, almost undetectable levels of seasoning in some Western food isn’t the only way to go. It seems that all the tastes of this region operate according to the Meatloaf school of seasoning (the singer, not the food) – “everything louder than everything else”. Eight birdseye chillis, four cloves of garlic, a chunk of ginger the size of my thumb, and about a quarter of a bottle of lime juice – and it tasted awesome.

It’s our creed here at Kamikaze Cookery that cooking isn’t hard to do. We think it’s even easier if you know what you’re doing, which is why what we’re trying to do here is bring the Science. If you can’t be bothered with the Science, though, there are always ready meals.

Except that you still need to know what you’re doing with ready meals.

Last night I had Roast Chicken Bites™ and chips™⁰. They come in packets that you keep in the freezer. Somebody has done all the hard work for me, and all I need to do is make them hot for a bit. After that, they’re cooked. That’s the theory. Only it doesn’t quite work like that.

The Roast Chicken Bites™ helpfully told me on the back of the packet that they required to be heated at 200° for 15 minutes. The chips™ likewise advised me that they requested 230° for 22 minutes. Theoretically, I could put the chips™ in first and go back later to put in the Bites™ for less time, but I still have a problem. My oven, quite reasonably, I think, only has one temperature dial.

Had I wanted vegetables with my meal, I would have had to cook them for 20 minutes at 180°. If I’d decided to roast my own, I would have needed 240°.

How many ovens do these people think we have?

You can’t just fudge it, either. Trying to work out a reasonable interim temperature between the two, and revised cooking times for different products at that temperature, is going to require a degree in calculus. And you’re still going to end up with soggy chips.

The only reliable guideline I’ve ever come across for frozen food is this: no matter what it says about the time on the packet, if the food product is or may ever have come into contact with a potato, add fifty per cent. If you’re hungry in my flat, and you want to eat something quickly, you might be better off cooking real food from scratch.

If I’m missing some obvious trick that people Just Know, I’d be delighted to hear of it.

Ovens are weird. We talk about them in this week’s episode, coming on Wednesday to an internet near you, pajh-fans. The episode also features the lovely Jehane, Kamikaze Cookery’s Consultant Archaeologist. We used her oven, which is slightly less stupid than mine, but it still has only one temperature dial.

⁰ That’s ‘fries’ if you’re American. Except that they were baked, not fried, so they can’t be called fries. Do you have oven chips in America? And do you call them “oven fries”? Crazy.

It all started with my early experiments in cooking. I was cooking, say, a curry, and I wouldn’t know what cumin, or paprika tasted. So I’d try it, maybe with a little salt, to test it.

Then one day, I found that I was tasting the seasoning without the need to cook anything, and then the floodgates opened; I became… an eater of seasonings.

I found that just about any combination was at least interesting, but some were particularly special; that old favourite, salt and pepper, maybe salt and chilli powder for a spicy flavour, or dry piri piri for a more complex, garlicy flavour. Then, I started getting more ambitious, I’d mix four, five or six seasonings at a time, producing a kaleidoscope of flavours, both striking and subtle.

I found that it wasn’t just dry seasonings which could be appreciated this way, unadulterated hoi-sin sauce was delicious, and a couple of drops of neat tobasco made a nice little pick-me up. Oh, and a good soy-sauce! That Umami touch on the middle of the tongue… it’s like nothing else.

Now, I know that this sort of behaviour could regarded as uncivilised, but don’t we eat our chips with our fingers these days? Are any of us really that civilised?

Those who eat spices come to know the herbs they eat. They gain a familiarity with each, which it would be hard to get from any full meal, and that knowledge can be tapped to make better food (or just better combinations of raw spices!).

So, I say to you, good people, do not be held back by tradition, or fear of the unknown. Do not be forced by the world around you to sully fine seasonings with lesser foods (such as anything else), but learn to enjoy them in their purest form; alone, unaccompanied and unadulterated!

(I cannot believe Hugh thought this was a good idea for a blog post (he does it too, you know))

It’s getting difficult to ignore the fact that the oil is running out. Most politics is based around the concept. It’s even creeping into popular culture now: a movie came out this week which I shall not spoiler for you, but about which there’s shortly going to be a rant on my personal blog. At the very least, we’re going to have to stop expecting to get cheap stuff packaged for us in Asia. What does this mean for food?

It’s odd how times change. I remember when locally-sourced food was a luxury item. Soon it’s going to be your only option.

Worse, and I’m showing my age now, I remember the organic fad. That was a laugh. They’d give you a tiny, withered, black carrot and charge you four times the price of the regular, healthy-looking, orange carrot right next to it. Somebody in Marketing took home a fat bonus for that idea. Over time, organic production methods improved, I presume. Either that or they just conveniently redefined the word “organic” to encompass “stuff that looks like real food even when you’ve washed the mud off it”. Either way, I like pesticides. Pesticides keep pests off things.

We latched onto locally-sourced food for all the wrong reasons, too. It’s local food for local people. It means we don’t have to give any money to those BLOODY FOREIGNERS. And some misguided bullshit about “Food Miles”, which we’re going to cover in an upcoming episode. It’s little wonder that the local-food movement is so strongly associated with the middle-class, Home Counties, Chelsea tractor-driving mentality that every Englishman I know tries to avoid. It’s parochial and insular: these are not qualities to trumpet, especially not if you live in the Home Counties and drive a Chelsea Tractor.

It’s a bloody good job for somebody that the food turned out to be so damn good. That’s a good enough reason on its own to champion local sourcing, and it means that it’s possible to do it without being a terrible human being. There’s also an argument that one should be proud of products of local origin, whether it’s food, or steel, or ideologies—but the problem, as ever, comes when you go too far and start excluding everything else. Sometimes I see people talking about locally-sourced produce and I wish they’d get off my side, because they’re making me look bad.

But the food is good. There are a lot of things I’m not looking forward to about the upcoming Malthusian catastrophe, but the bacon is going to be fantastic.

So, I’ve been away over the last week or so at a conference, and amongst the topics on discussion was, of course, Web 2.0.

Now, I’ve always been a little dubious – OK, all of the dubious – about the whole Web 2.0 moniker. (For anyone who’s not aware of what I’ve occasionally been known to refer to as “the Web 2.0 bollocks”, I recommend this summary). But one speaker at the conference, Sandeep Bakhshi, came up with the best description of Web 2.0 I’ve heard yet – " A system that gets better as people use it."

Another speaker there was Timo Vorensola, who directed the phenomenally popular and really cool Star Wreck: The Perkinning. It’s a feature film that he created by collaborating with literally thousands of people over the Internet, having them do everything from script suggestions to creating spaceships. (Virtual spaceships, I hasten to add.)

And all this got me thinking. What can things like that – massive collaboration, improvement through intelligent use of data and user feedback, The Interwebs – add to cooking?

I’ve already seen a little of what we could do from things like the TGWT competitions, in which a number of people work to develop dishes using ingredients that theoretically share aromatics and flavour compounds in common (and if you think that sounds wacky, I should point out that the Strawberry and Coriander foam that I won’t shut up about came from it), and from my experiment writing up the course of cooking a tasting menu, where the menu substantially changed as a result of suggestions from the people reading the writeup. But I’m sure there’s much more.

What about Open-Sourcing a menu, for example? Either a restaurant or an individual could take the Star Wreck approach, form a community or work within an existing one to develop an Open-Source tasting menu, or indeed entire restaurant menu. It’s not (quite) as insane as it sounds – after all, the Fat Duck has just published the recipes for its entire tasting menu of years past, so perhaps there’s less to fear from not keeping recipes secret than one might think. Have a forum, have people take tasks, small or large, whether that be sourcing the right place to get crockery, conducting controlled experiments to determine the perfect spice mix, or coming up with ideas for others to try. Then, just keep developing.

Or what about a Wikified recipe site? There are dozens of recipe sites on the Internet, but as far as I know none of them offer Wiki-like capability to edit and add tips for recipes. As a result, if you try a recipe, come up with a new tweak that improves it, and want to share that, it’s very hard to do so. Why not Wikify a recipe book?

Or what about live collaborative cooking? Forget Gordon Ramsay telling you what to do, why not set a time for a whole bunch of people to set up and cook the same thing, whilst running webcams, Twitter feeds, forums, whatever? Let people Flickr their progress, ask for advice, help out others if something’s gone wrong – a truly collaborative cooking experience. And then you can record the results so that the intelligence of the whole system remains available to anyone who wants to cook that dish in the future.

Cooking and technology still have a very uneasy relationship. Whilst most people think of Molecular Gastronomy as really cutting-edge, all it’s really doing is taking scientific principles and knowledge that’s 30, 50 or more years old, and applying it to cooking. What can we do if we seriously apply the lessons of the Internet age to cooking? How can we use the tastebuds of the whole system?

OK, the RSS feeds shouldn’t duplicate and should work now (I’ve corrected the not-working error). Comment below if there are any more problems!

And whilst I’m here, I’ll also mention that if you want to subscribe to KKCook, but don’t have an RSS reader, you can also subscribe to the Kamikaze Cookery Facebook group. Go, be all social media and stuff.

Just a quick note – as you’ll see, I’ve enabled preroll ads (ads before the videos) for a while, just to test how people find them.

We’re not exactly expecting to be able to retire and give up this life of crime on the proceeds from them, so if they annoy you, let us know, and they’ll probably disappear as if by magic.

It’s that time – the time when we have… another episode!

This time, we’re back to testing celebrity chefs! Will Nigella take the same kind of kicking as Jamie?

I must admit, I’ve tried cooking Nigella before, notably her creme brulee, and some of her recipes seem to Just Be Wrong. On the other hand, I know that Helen and Dougal, two of our regular commenters here, have been cooking Nigella daily for a while, and they’re really impressed.

Obviously, I’m not going to give the ending of this episode away here, but … what do you think? Nigella – awesome or awful?

One of the great things about the KKC team is that we’ve got very different tastes and approaches to cooking. For example, Alex, as you may have picked up, likes his chilli. In fact, he really likes it. It’s not a huge exaggeration to say that there’s very little food of any kind he wouldn’t put chilli with.

I’m considerably more moderate in my chilli usage. Sure, I’ll use it in some things – I love me a good noodle soup, a great chilli con carne or some seriously Szechuan stuff – but it’s always had rather a specific place for me.

And that goes for hot food as a whole. Curry? Sure. It’s a sauce and you stick bits of meat in it, then serve it with rice or naan. Cayenne pepper? Let me go get my gumbo pot.

In fact, hot food has been a bit of a blind spot for me – I didn’t even realise my thinking was as restricted as it was. Until last week, and my trip to Singapore, which totally destroyed and rebuilt my notion of “hot”.

Singaporeans are obsessed with food. Absolutely bloody obsessed. There are more restaurants, food stalls, vendors, snack bars, and other sellers of stuff wot is edible in the average Singaporean mall than in many British towns. And believe me, they have a whole shitload of malls. Twenty of them on one street, for starters. They don’t say “how are you?” to greet each other. They say “have you eaten?”. Obsessed.

And they put something laden with capaiscin in just about everything.

Take omelette, for example. A fairly standard chicken omelette, maybe a bit more like a frittata. Except that the Singaporeans serve it with a bowl of curry sauce. Cut up omelette, dip in curry sauce, eat.

Or lobster. A delicate, almost ethereal taste, so expensive and understated that it has to be treated with immense care? Balls to that. Smother it in chilli. Seriously, just pile that shit on there.

Or fresh crab. They call it “Singaporean pepper crab” for a very good reason – it’s about 50% crab and 50% pepper.

And here’s the thing: it’s all absolutely bloody gorgeous. The omelette and curry sauce goes together so well you’re amazed that you’ve not thought of it before – peps up the egg flavour, adds another thick, warm, piquant, deep layer to the otherwise slightly thin frittata. You don’t even realise you need it until you try it, and feel the sauce lubricate the dryness of the cooked egg. Lobster? The lobster flavour still comes through loud and clear past the chilli – they don’t fight at all – but now you’ve got this incredible fresh, sweet, delicate lobster flesh (and I’d met mine alive and wriggling 5 minutes before I ate it), with the lobster taste complimented by a light, high, hard fire, blasting into your mouth and giving the rather subdued lobster a “fuck you, I’m fucking chillied” attitude. This isn’t lobster you’re all up yourself about in a French restaurant, this lobster’s down with the kids on the street, and suddenly it’s the most natural thing in the world to be sitting there on the dockfront with lobster tail in one hand, beer in the other, arguing about filmmaking and how hot the girls on the waterfront are. It’s still delicate and complex, but now it stands up, too.

The crab is just stunning. Like the lobster, but with more body, less fire but more peppery, smoky oomph, again not competing with the robust, sweet, sea taste of the crab, and the delicious hands-on thing of tearing your food apart before chowing down on its delicate flesh.

And now I’m just totally rethinking my entire approach to hot stuff. I’ve always thought that care and attention were key, that you had to pair heat with strong, meaty tastes – even seafood gumbo’s pretty flavourful in a hundred ways. But now I’m thinking about delicate flavours – what about chilli scallops? We already know chilli prawns work. What about lemon sole, or plaice? Rather than delicately poaching the sole, why not hack it up into pieces, then stir-fry it for seconds with a bunch of pepper? What about roast potatoes served with a curry dip, or liberally coated with as many chillis as I can find in the cupboard? What about chilli stocks? Chilli and pea veloute?

I’m on a chilli mission.

Have you had any experiences like this? Ever suddenly had your culinary world taken apart and put back together again in a different order?

Ok, I’ve been looking into the duplicate-post RSS feed problem, and it looks like I’m going to require more data to track the issue down.

If you see any duplicate posts in your KKCook RSS feed, it’d really help us if you could check:

• Is the URL exactly identical for each post?
• Is the date identical for each post?
• What RSS reader are you using? If you view the RSS as a raw feed, does it contain duplicates?
• What entries were duplicated?

Comment below, and we’ll try to get this sorted!

You may have noticed that the RSS feed has spat out the last fifteen posts again. Sorry about that, everyone.

I’m not entirely sure what the problem is, and Hugh’s somewhere in Asia, and the root password for the server is in Hugh’s head. We’ll get this sorted as soon as he’s back.

My reticence towards what I saw as unnecessary gadgetry and gimcrackery in the epsiode was real, and I’ve just worked out why. My day job is vaguely related to the catering trade, and in catering, thermometers are things that the Council forces you to have so that you can fill in reams of useless paperwork when you’ve got fourteen tables howling for bacon an’ eggs. The food’s cold by the time it’s got to the customer, but at least they can rest assured that it was thoroughly tested at some point, and that whether or not it tastes any good, it fulfils some bureaucrat’s narrow-minded, tickyboxed concept of what food is supposed to be like.

Readers of my regular non-food blog will probably know that I’m embroiled in a long-running, undeclared cold war with the local council. Part of the reason for this is that they have tried to kill me at least once (it’s a long story). Another part is that, every year, some twit with a clipboard shows up at work and tries to tell me how to cook sausages. After twenty minutes when I manage to get a word in I point out that I don’t work in the kitchen, and then I fetch the people who cook the sausages. They’ve been cooking sausages for twenty-odd years longer than the clipboard-toting officious wee besom has been alive, most of that in a professional context for a string of high-profile customers who have never once, to my knowledge, died as a result. And then she tries to tell them how to cook sausages.

And the overwrought battles over Council Tax and multiple-occupancy licensing. And the frivolous small-claims court summonseses. And the flagrant breaches of the Data Protection Act. And their horrendous website. But now I’m digressing.

Oh, yes: and they cancelled the Farmer’s Market this week. That bit’s even relevant to a food blog.

Thermometers, it would seem, are a tool of The Man, used to keep us down. We know how to cook food, right? Thermometers are only any use if you need to fill in forms to keep your job.

Not… exactly.

I’m a recent convert to thermometry. Being in the episode certainly helped, and in a later episode you’ll see the results of my half-assed attempt to buy a cheap one (spoiler: it didn’t work). I actually got around to buying a proper one just this week. It was five quid from Ikea. Predictably, just as I buy one Hugh buggers off to Singapore for a week, so I’ve been having to get by on my own without the use of his built-in temperature encyclopaedia.

Thus far, given the weather and the fact that I seem to have spent the last few weeks lying in cold mud being filmed for another project, I’ve been using it mainly to produce my newly-developed cure for the common cold. This involves raising a bunch of things to 83°C, but no higher, and holding them there for a while. Once Hugh gets back I’m going to borrow his copy of On Food and Cooking to make sure I’m doing the right things with volatiles and flavonoids and whatnot. In the meantime, it tastes nice, and it actually seems to work at curing colds.

My thermometer does everything Hugh’s does, is cheaper, has a nicer form factor, and comes in black (which is important). It’s also not melted along one side. Admittedly, when Hugh’s thermometer goes beep it plays the Archangel Network tune, whereas mine just goes beep, but this is something I can live with.

I still don’t think they’re necessary, but they certainly make some tasks a lot easier. One thing I’ve noticed is that instead of watching the pan constantly while you cook, you can leave it unattended while you slip off and do something else, as long as you remain within earshot. That’s worth a fiver all by itself.

I’ve yet to road-test the thing with a full Sunday roast, because the Farmer’s Market was cancelled this week. And once again we see the insidious Council conspiring to ruin my quality of life.

Anybody know anything else that thermometers are useful for?

I heard a rumour a while back, that a pint of Guinness is a meal in a glass. I’ve been wondering whether there’s any truth in this and so decided, for the sake of Science to look into it. Now, I needed something to compare it to, so I chose (I think reasonably enough) a can of baked beans.

Initially, it looks like a pint of Guinness does feed you up. 500g of Baked Beans (a pretty large meal) has a mighty 470 calories, but Guinness comes in at a respectable 160 calories per pint. Given that calories are meant to make you fat, surely this means that two pints of Guinness would provide a decent meal?

Then I noticed something. There’s only 7.7g of carbohydrate (about half a rice-cake’s worth) and no fat at all in a pint of Guinness. This compares to a mighty 105g of carbs, and 1.5g of fat in the beans. Now I know fat and carbohydrates are where the body gets energy from in food, so where’s the rest of the energy come from?

Well, I did a bit of research on this. The calorie content of food is determined simply by removing the water, burning the rest, then measuring the heat that comes off. What this means is that in alcoholic drinks, most of the calories come from burning the ethanol (Science term for drinkin’ alcohol) in them.

Fair enough, so you drink the Guinness, your body turns the alcohol into energy, then can use the energy as it would anything else in a meal (such as letting you run, or making you fat). The Guinness lunch is on.

Nope.

Thing is, your body isn’t a furnace, and the calories from alcohol don’t go to weight anywhere near as easily as normal calories.

So all these websites (and believe me, as I found out today, there are many) which harp on about the terrible calorie dangers of beer and wine, are being misleading. Alcohol, on its own, doesn’t actually provide much food value.

So, Guinness, meal in a glass? Well, it may provide a little energy, but it won’t really feed you, so no.

PS If anyone’s got the hard scientific facts (I don’t honestly care what dieting websites say) on the efficiency of alcohol absorption, I’d be fascinated to see them. It’s chaos out on the internet.

Occasionally we get comments so great we decide to repost them. And this is one (indeed, the first) of those occasions.

For those who didn’t know, Gordon Ramsey recently did a live show on Channel 4 in the UK entitled Cookalong with Gordon Ramsey. Apparently, you were supposed to be able to follow along cooking with the great chef as he cooked a gourmet meal – and at the end, you’d have done it too!

Viewer Amanda wasn’t impressed…

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I’m very much looking forward to the KKC ‘normal person’ against Gordon Ramsey segment, having watched the car-crash that was Gordon Ramsey’s Cookalong Live’ last week. (Friday Night, Channel 4)

It was absolutely awful television. For a man that protests to hate ‘celeb chefs’, he’s currently wearing the crown of ‘Most annoying’ of their kind. The format is supposed to be simple – check the Radio Times listing magazine or the web site for the ingredients, somehow manoeuvre your tv into your kitchen, and cook a three course meal live alongside Ramsey. During the course of the hour, he’ll cut to ordinary people cooking via the wonder of web cams, and sprinkle through some segments criticising other celeb chefs along the way.

And of course, to prove that anyone can do it, a celeb of the week will be cooking alongside him in the kitchen.

In reality, he failed to give anything approximating proper instruction, he insulted or ignored his celeb (Patsy Kensit) to the point that she just looked upset and angry, and she totally failed to be able to cook the dishes. And that’s when she’s standing next to Ramsey! I actively found it unpleasant to watch, while his studio audience were reduced to nervous giggles.

When he did, infrequently, cut to his ‘people at home’ cooking along, most of them were cocking it up too.

What instructions there were, were delivered at break-neck pace with little hope of anyone with a fear of cookery being able to keep up. Things like scoring the pastry on the main course were completed, and then followed up with instructions on how not to do it. Each section finished with a useful summary of how to make the recipe, something that would have been much better placed at the beginning of each course to give a vague hope of following proceedings.

‘Gordon proves that everyone across the nation can prepare and enjoy a three course home-made meal’, proclaims the website. Bollocks. I can’t see anything more designed to turn people off cooking than being made to feel like a useless idiot.

His segments criticising other celeb chefs – this week, St Delia of Smith – were also pretty patronising. So, he crashes her cookery school in a (rubbish) disguise, which comedian John Thomson in tow. He didn’t actually critique her course – it was just a cheap shot.

For a man with as many television shows and franchises as he has, (and with a wife who’s a cash in cookery book queen) he should think a little more before casting stones at others!

There’s another five weeks of this kitchen nightmare ahead. Jamie Oliver might be a mockney prat, but at least he seems to be interested in the people he’s helping to cook. I know which one I’d rather have try to teach me anyway…
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Now may be a good time to mention that we’re testing a Gordon Ramsey recipe in a few weeks – and we won’t be going easy on him…

Did you see the Cookalong? What did you think?

Yep, the Digital Thermometers episode now has its very own Episode page.

Thanks to the guys at Bytemark who helped make that happen after I landed 5,000 miles away from home without my password!

It’s episode time! This week, I attempt to convert the other two to the Joy of Digital Thermometers.

Note – the video won’t appear on the Index page or the Episodes page immediately. That’s because I’m currently in Singapore and there’s a minor issue with access to the server that I’m sorting out. Expect to see it there later in the day.

We mention in the video that we’ll be listing some temperatures that you can use to cook with. Well, here we go…

(I’ve added Fahrenheit temperatures by popular request.)

Beef and Lamb (lean) – 53C/128F for rare, if you’re confident of your source (do sear them on the outside). 57C/135F for medium-rare. 62C/144F degrees for medium-well done. Above that for shoe leather. Remember to let your meat rest before serving!

Chicken and Turkey – Realistically, above 70C/158F degrees if you’re not cooking sous-vide. No, that won’t dry them out too much. I find that chicken thighs are perfect about 75C/167F, and if I’m cooking them bone-in, I’ll take them to 80C/176F just to be sure I didn’t miss a cool spot.

Venison – Nothing above 57C/135F for lean meat. Again, remember to sear.

Fish – VERY much a matter of taste. 44-49C/111-120F will taste gorgeous for many fish, although there’s a small danger of nasties in there – if you’re cooking something that’s likely to be parasite-tastic, like swordfish, go to more like 60C/140F degrees. In general, white fish can easily be taken to about 60C/140F, red fish to much lower. There’s a lot of argument over the perfect temperature for tuna, but everyone agrees it’s somewhere in the 44-49C/111-120F range.

Sausages and hamburgers – ground meat means high chance of bacteria, so don’t fuck around here unless you’re really, really confident of your source. There’s a reason e. coli came to be known as the “hamburger bug”. Take ‘em to 70c/158F at least. I tend to take grilled sausages to 80C/176F, as otherwise I find they’re a bit watery.

Pork – As we indicate in the episode, if you’re certain of your source (UK or US), you can and should cook pork rare-ish for the best taste. 58-62C/137-144F ish should do it.

Anything you think I missed? Or do you like cooking to a different temperature?

Side-by-side, this week, I’ve been reading Heston Blumenthal’s amazing “Big Fat Duck Cookbook” (which is more of a treatise on food, and possibly a weight-training device, than just a cookbook – absolutely inspirational, and I’ll be writing more about it soon) and the various reviews of said big, fat cookbook.

Food critics have been plumbing new depths of silliness and prejudice with this one, with the honourable exception of the Telegraph, who actually tried cooking from the book and found, shockingly, that the recipes produced really nice food.

Whilst I reserve a certain place in my heat for the Guardian critic who complained that Heston wanted us to use such inaccessible equipment as a “cartouche” ( a circle of greaseproof paper), pride of place must go to the Observer critic Laura Potter. Making a heroically half-arsed effort to follow one of the recipes, she discovered it needed maltodextrin, couldn’t find that in Tesco, and so used rice pudding instead, then complained that the recipe didn’t work.

Apparently it’s an “elusive ingredient”. I’ll let you judge that for yourself .

So, in this spirit, here are a couple of other dreadfully inaccessible-sounding ingredients or equipment (I’m avoiding calling them “molecular gastronomy ingredients” here, because I now understand a bit more about Dr Blumenthal’s objection to the term, and am still mulling it over) that are actually cheap, easy to aquire, and make great food:

Xanthan Gum

You can find this in pretty much any health food/organic food/general hippie store. It’s used for baking gluten-free bread and so on, but we’re more interested in its uses as a hydrocolloid.

Xanthan works to thicken fluids, and apparently is not only used in foods, but also the oil industry. Who knew? I’ve mostly used it to create thick, lucious foams – anyone interested in foams in cookery at all needs to try Martin Lersch’s Strawberry and Coriander foam, made with Xanthan, which is absolutely stunning – an incredible combination of tastes that you’d never have thought of together, but combines to give a stunningly intense, fruity hit of flavour.

Agar

Another ingredient that pops up all over the place, you can find agar in any Chinese supermarket. Derived from seaweed, it’s used for all manner of things, from growing bacteria to traditional Japanese cookery.

Most interestingly for cooks, it’s soluble in heated liquids, but quickly solidifies to a jelly when cool, taking whatever it’s dissolved in to a jelly state too. It’s possible to make all sorts of solid preparations this way – gelling stocks, for example, making terrines of things you can’t normally, erm, terrineiffy, or creating thick mousses.

My favourite use for it is as a rather more user-friendly ‘sferification’ substance than the alginates that El Bulli uses. ‘Sferification’, a term coined by Ferran Adria of El Bulli in Spain, is the process of forming liquids into ‘caviars’ or ‘ravioli’ – here’s a blog post going into a bit more detail.

Mixing Agar with hot, diluted Ribena, say (about 1% agar to Ribena, so 2g of Agar for 200ml of Ribena) then dripping the solution into a bath of cold oil will produce a pile of tiny blackcurrant spheres. You can then add these to champagne to a “Kir Molecular” – something half-way between a drink and a lava lamp, where the blackcurrant flavours occur in tiny bursts in between the champagne, when you chew on a pearl.

(You’re not using Creme De Cassis in this recipe because the alcohol, as I discovered 45 minutes before a dinner party, messes up the agar reaction. Oops.)

You can also use Agar in the same way as gelatin in a lot of recipes – notably, you can use it like gelatin to clarify stock, rendering out a beautifully limpid clear liquid with an intense, often unexpected flavour. The most fascinating use of this I’ve heard of so far (from Harold McGee’s article) is clarified barbeque sauce.

More

There are dozens of other relatively easily accessible chemicals and pieces of equipment out there – we’ll be talking more about digital thermometers tomorrow, for example, and Martin Lersch recently discussed improvising a separation funnel from a plastic bag. Lecithin and, yes, Maltodextrin are both easily available from health food shops, and with a couple of calls and a bit of bluffing it’s possible to get a much wider range of substances, from “meat glue” Activa to alginates for El Bulli recipes.

And if you’re interested in the wonderful world of hydrocolloids, like Agar, Xanthan, Lecithin and Maltodextrin, there’s even a free cookbook out there, as I’ve mentioned before – Khymos’s Texture , containing info and recipes for all sorts of things.

Tried any of this yourself? Got any tips for aquiring harder-to-aquire chemicals (I’m particularly interested to hear about aquiring liquid nitrogen)?

(No blog from me today, because I managed to contract a mild-to-moderate case of hypothermia (self-induced, while filming). Instead, have this post from the dim and distant past:)

Happy pigs make the best bacon, it’s true, but I’m with A A Gill on chickens. Not only because he’s disagreeing with the Mockney Prat, but because I really hate chickens.

Jamie’s got himself some good press recently, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. Right now he’s campaigning about the living standards of chickens, and chickens are scrawny little bags of evil covered in fluff, worthwhile only as an accompaniment to bacon. I have looked into the eyes of a chicken, and it was then that I knew true hatred. (Admittedly, I did proceed directly to eating its unborn offspring, who were delicious.)

You can’t cuddle a chicken or train it to fetch your paper. Cows, sheep, and pigs could be considered cute and/or fluffy. Even fish have personalities, and I’m in favour of farms that include playparks and whatnot for fish. Chickens, on the other hand, are drumsticks with a beak attached, held together by pure rage. It’s a bloody good job for them that they’re so damn tasty. If it wasn’t for the existence of garlic, I firmly believe that we would have eradicated chickens long ago, like we did to wolves and snakes.

Before that, Jamie gained notoriety by championing the concept of nutritious school dinners. Nice try, but I don’t care about children either. Children should shut up and eat their gruel, or whatever it is they have nowadays, thus leaving more of the good food for me. (Such as those free-range chickens that take up acres of farmland.) I had to suffer when I was their age. We called it ‘character-building’.

The right ideas, the wrong targets. Despite some mellowing in his old age, he still has some way to go before I’ll admit to agreeing with him about anything. And besides, in my head he will always be the Naked Chef, and as a result deserves eviscerating with a blunt whisk.

I am in favour of free range, organic, slow-reared, locally-produced food not because of ethics and certainly not because “it’s got more effics innit, geeza”. I give neither a hoot nor a fig for my Carbon Footprints or my Food Miles. I am in favour of free-range, slow reared, locally-produced food because it tastes better.

This week has been Blenders Week at Kamikaze Cookery Towers, so I thought I’d share a couple of tips that didn’t make it into the episode.

The two blenders we tested at first were horrendous, but that doesn’t mean that all cheap blenders are crap. I use a £15 one from the godlike Grays of George Street, which has never caused me any problems. So if you don’t want to drop ninety quid on an all-performing ultrablender, or a hundred quid on one with Gordon Ramsay grinning at you from the box, you’ve still got options.

We discussed in the episode that more power is not necessarily better. Blending was traditionally done by hand. You want something that will automate that process and save your carpal tunnels, not something that can reduce everysing in zer vorld to pulp. It’s not a contest. Be gentle.

Next, the beaker. Most blenders come with a dinky wee plastic container that you can blend things in, or so they claim. In my opinion these are best shunned, ignored, spurned, and thrown away. The whole point of having a stick blender is that you can stick it into things and blend them (which is another reason why they’re called “stick blenders”). Use the biggest pot you have available, which will help reduce spatter, or whichever pot your ingredients are already in, which will help to reduce washing-up. Use the provided beaker only if you’re having a party and you’ve run out of proper glasses.

Then there’s technique. Things are going to splash if you work at the top of the liquid, so don’t do that unless you have to. If you’re making a soup out of large chunks of vegetables, you might have to come down from the top a few times at first to break them up. After that, leave the business end of the blender on the base of the pot.

If you’re making a foam or a froth, you’re trying to get air into the mixture, and for that you need to be near the surface of the liquid, near where the air is. The proper name for the technique used to do this is “drawing up”, or, as it’s described at Kamikaze Cookery Towers, “you’ve gotta wank it”⁰. Hold the blender upright at the bottom of the container, start it blending, then gently pull it upwards towards the top of the liquid. Stop when it’s getting too close to the rim of the container. Repeat.

Make judicious use of the pulse button.

Finally, don’t over-blend. Once you’ve reached the consistency you’re looking for, stop blending. It’s a simple suggestion, but it’s an easy one to overlook. Over-blending things is the best way to turn food into glue.

Also finally, do not use the blender as a massage device. Although there’s probably an appropriate attachment you can buy for the Bamix uberblender. That damn thing does everything.

⁰ An allusion to the Wankel Rotary Engine, which is reminiscent of the rotary action of the blender blade, and also to the piston-like action used in the drawing up technique. Why? What did you think we meant?

Damn them, the guys over at Ideas In Food have done it again.

Steamed Brioches – what a wonderful idea.

Right… Goes off to dig out a Brioche recipe

So, Spud asked for a piece on eggs – and since we’ve not got any episodes coming up featuring ovoids (unless you count the Gordon Ramsey souffle episode coming in a few weeks), I thought I’d share some info on boiled eggs.

First up, a question that I’ve looked into a couple of times – are soft-boiled eggs really likely to give you salmonella?

How many eggs are infected?

Quite what the likely salmonella incidence in eggs is is a complicated question. An FSA study in 2007 showed a .38% incidence of salmonella – however, that was in cooked eggs served in restaurants and other catering places. (The same study warns that it’s best to be careful with egg product from Chinese takeaways and restaurants, which showed a very high tendancy to store eggs at ambient temperatures and pool eggs). It’s very hard to find out what the incidence of salmonella in UK eggs is – there aren’t any figures on the FSA site.

However, Andrew Wadge, Chief Scientist of the FSA, at one point refers to the UK’s having 10 times less salmonella in eggs than they found in foreign egg samples, implying an infection rate of about 1 in 300 boxes. However, the foreign egg survey also showed that 157 of the cases they found were salmonella on the outside of the egg only, with only 10 being salmonella inside the egg – and no details on how deep inside.

Given that salmonella on the shell will be killed immediately in a boiled egg, you’re talking about a 0.02% chance per box of eggs that there’s salmonella, rather than Intel, inside one of them (assuming you’re using a UK egg).

In the US, the Department of Agriculture did a survey in 2002 that showed there was an incidence of salmonella in 1 in 30,000 eggs produced in the US. That’s, erm, not very many (and almost exactly the same as my estimated UK incidence).

Harold McGee says that there’s basically no difference in infection rates between battery farmed eggs and free-range.

What precautions can you take?

The FSA and various other places advise that soft-boiled eggs aren’t safe – but the risk factor appears to be pretty darn low. Added to all the information above, whether or not the salmonella survives cooking depends on where it lies in the egg – because there’s a steep temperature gradient in boiled eggs, with the surface, obviously, getting pretty near boiling, the salmonella needs to be pretty deep into the egg to not boil alive, even if you’re cooking a soft-boiled egg.

On a practical note, I’ve been eating soft-boiled eggs for quite a few years now, with, touch wood, no salmonella so far.

Of course, you should still store eggs in a refrigerator – there’s no downside to doing that, and it prevents the growth of any salmonella that might be there. And as Heston Blumenthal and various other people point out, you should always wash your hands after handling raw eggs in their shells, because there’s actually far more likely to be salmonella on the shell than inside.

If you really want to be 100% sure, and you’re either fairly patient or have a sous-vide setup, you can pasturise eggs. Just stick them in a water bath at 57 degrees centigrade for 75 minutes for a large egg (thanks Douglas) – you can find out more in the Practical Guide to Sous-Vide. That’ll kill everything in there without coagulating the protein – although it may alter the taste and texture a bit. McGee mentions that you can also buy pre-pasturised eggs, although I’ve not seen them in the UK.

Of course, if you’ve got a sous-vide setup, you can also just cook your boiled eggs using it. Bruno Goussault, who more or less invented sous-vide, says that the perfect temperature to cook eggs is 64.5 degrees Centigrade. I must admit, I’ve tried cooking eggs sous-vide a couple of times, and the results have been a bit disappointing – but that’s a topic for another post. One thing that’s certain is that an egg held at 64.5 degrees for a few minutes will definitely be bacteria free.

So…

No, it’s not very likely that you’ll get salmonella from a soft-boiled egg, although it’s not impossible. It’s a non-zero chance, so if you’re feeding eggs to young children, adults with weakened immune systems, or anyone else who might die of salmonella infection, it might be best to be cautious.

But for a healthy adult, given the infection rates I’ve mentioned above, you’d have to eat a soft-boiled egg every day for a little under 100 years to even have an odds-on chance of encountering one contaminated with salmonella. And even then, there’s a good chance that the bacteria would die in the cooking process, or you’d just fight off the infection.

Hurrah. Back to the egg-n-soldiers for me.

Various Kamikaze Cookery bits…

We have a Facebook group! Yes, join us in our, erm, booking of faces .

The weekly Egullet conversation – this week, it turns out that we accidentally managed to buy the Rolls Royce of blenders.

And if you were wondering whether the Bamix does just as well in a crappy plastic beaker – I tested this morning.

Fruit

Fruit tastes okay, and many don’t produce any washing up. Remember that you need to eat fruit to avoid scurvy. The downside is that they’re sometimes difficult to get into, and normally produce some sort of litter (apple cores, skins etc.).

If you’re really lazy you can get the vitamin C you need to live from Fruit Juice drinks They’re quite cheap at the lower value end, especially value orange juice. However, you probably miss some sort of goodness from doing this, so if you’re really lazy just stick to apples, pears and tangerines, they’re easy enough to eat, and don’t cost that much.

Staples

Staple foods bulk out your meals. They normally don’t taste that good, but they’re okay. Here’s some advice on the common ones:

Rice
Rice is cheap, and generally tastes okay, but it really goes best with a meal with sauce. It can take a bit of effort to get the cooking time right as well; It’ll be crunchy and not quite edible if you leave it too short, and watery and unpleasant if you cook it for too long. Finally cooking rice involves a sieve and a pan, both of which will be covered in a tough, glue like substance if you don’t wash them straight away. Not the win.

Pasta
I’ve never liked this as much as rice, it’s bland as hell, and also really needs a sauce to make it taste half decent. However, it’s cheap and easy to cook, and doesn’t gum your stuff up anywhere near as badly as rice.

Potatoes – an old enemy.
Potatoes can be baked, roast, boiled, or fried. Especially baked and with butter and cheese they can actually taste quite nice. They’re also extremely cheap when bought in large quantities. You may wish to be careful how much you buy though.

At one point during lean times, Hugh persuaded me to buy 10 kilograms of potatoes at a tiny price, to make sure I was fed. After about 3 weeks of eating nothing but potatoes, I was thoroughly sick of them. I left the remaining 9 kilos in the cupboard thinking I’d want to eat them later. Now, potatoes, if left in a warm dark place, surrounded by organic matter (such as other potatoes) have a habit of growing. By 1 month in, our entire flat stank of potatoes, and a sizable potato plant had taken hold of the cupboard. Man, that was a pain in the arse to get rid of!

Bread
Bread is the student’s friend. It’s already cooked, you can put paté or cheese on it, or use it to hold the meat you’ve just fried. It’s pricey, and goes off quick, but it’s by far the easiest staple to use.

Various people have suggested it might be useful to have Alex’s Being A Student guide all together in one place, so here it is!

If you can think of someone or somewhere that might benefit from his studenty wisdom, please do let them know!

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It’s at around this time of year that loads of people will be moving away from home for the first time to take up university studies. Now I remember when I started my university life, I didn’t know the first thing about cookery, and frankly didn’t care to learn (that came about 3 years later). I was, however, required to somehow keep myself alive during this period, on not much money.

There were lots of student cookbooks, (my parents duly bought me one), but all of these seemed to want you to do things like use more than one ingredient, use herbs, measure things properly, and other such annoying time consuming stuff.

So over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be explaining some of the dos and don’ts of minimalist student cookery. The aim of this endeavour is to eat in a survivable way, very cheaply, with minimal effort, and without everything tasting minging.

1: Cooking, Washing up, and Student culinary life in general.

Yep, it’s that time of the week – the latest Kamikaze Cookery episode is available, and this time, we’re taking on… blenders.

Watch it over on the episode page or right here:

It must be a nightmare being a kitchen technology company. By and large, cooks are really pretty closed to the idea of new tech – even someone like me buys a new piece of kitchen technology incredibly rarely, and would far rather spend money on a cookbook the size of Belgium than, say, an exciting new blender.

The Bamix blender (£89.99 or therabouts) we feature in the episode really is the mutt’s nuts – it’s astonishingly good. But I’d have never bought one if we hadn’t wanted to test it for the episode. And it’s reminding me how much other cool kitchen tech there is out there that I’ve just not touched.

For example, the Tefal Actifry – apparently it’s an astonishingly good alternative to deep-frying that uses a tiny amount of fat. I’ve heard various people raving about them, but have I even seriously considered buying one? Hell, no.

Or the various halogen ovens (couldn’t find a useful link for these). Again, I’ve heard rave reviews. Apparently they’re pretty close to being a new way of cooking – we’re talking roast chicken in 15 minutes, plus pretty lights on your countertop. Have I bought one? Have I bollocks.

I’m a huge coffee fan. But have I bought myself a vacuum coffee maker, despite the fact that they supposedly make the best damn cup of coffee in all creation? Not so much.

And to that, add the fact that kitchen gadgeteers have to compete with lab equipment manufacturers and even hardware stores getting some of our hard-spent food money – it must be a pretty tough life.

No wonder some of them have started coming up with pretty unconventional tactics to sell their product.

Any kitchen gadgets you’ve been thinking of buying, but just haven’t gotten around to? Anything exciting that you think everyone should aquire?

This is a piece from the archives a while ago – I thought it might be interesting in light of this week’s bolognaiseness…

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So, just before Christmas I aquired a copy of Heston Blumenthal’s In Search of Perfection , where the genius chef behind The Fat Duck explores 8 different classic British dishes and attempts to come up with a recipe for them that gets as close as possible to his idea of perfection.

(I’m not going there. He knows perfection’s not possible. You want more, read the book.)

Several reviewers have described his recipes as being far too complex for anyone to actually cook. I then proceeded to describe their reviews as “bollocks”. And to prove it, over Christmas, my mother and grandparents agreed to act as guinea-pigs for a try-out of Heston’s recipe for Spaghetti Bolognaise.

His recipe is reasonably traditional, but complex, boiling down over a kilo of onions and another kilo of tomatoes, plus a list of about 20 ingredients, over three distinct stages of preparation and about 10 hours. Given that I’d probably say that I can cook a Bolognaise better than any other dish, and my version’s evolved from one that my mum taught me – one that can be cooked in about an hour – "Perfection"’s recipe was up for a challenge.

The credit crunch is everywhere these days. You can’t open a newspaper without being beset by “Ten ways to maintain your beauty regime using only household chemicals” or “Holiday destinations for the destitute”. Myself, I’ve got no money so I’ve got nothing to lose: the only effect the global financial crisis has had on me is that last week, when I went into the bank, the cashier called me “sir” and asked me if I’d like a candy. I asked if he could give me a better interest rate instead of wasting money on sweets, then I took the proffered Werther’s Original and completed the transaction in the resultant stony silence.

Only now the financial crisis has reached the food press as well. The demigodlike A A Gill devotes two thirds of his column to advice for restauranteurs during a global downturn. The Observer‘s Food Monthly supplement devotes five pages to the mystery of egg price rises. The Times has a two-page article on how overpriced organic food is doomed, or maybe it isn’t. No one seems to really know one way or the other.

On the one hand, it’s probably time for all of us to cut out the expensive dinners and the overpriced panini. On the other hand, we still have to eat two or three times a day, and one of the best ways to feel better during a depression—economic or mental—is a nice steak pie or a hearty stew. So maybe the quality of the food is going to become more important than the price.

What does everyone else think? Is it back to leftovers and lobscouse for us all, or will trendy eateries become even more of a status symbol than they already are?

You can now buy yourself a fine Kamikaze Cookery apron from the shop ! So, if you want to prevent your front being covered in hot, wet or caustic things, now you can do it in Kamikaze Cookery style!

(Plus, we’ve still got mugs, T-Shirts, bags, and all that stuff too.)

So. Jamie Oliver. What have we learned?

In the episode, we discovered the following things:

• He’s a mockney prat.
• Despite being one of the famous-est chefs on the planet, he doesn’t actually tell you anything interesting that you can use to make ragu with.
• The recipe was bland and basic, and it still took four hours to make.
• Recipe books, it would seem, are only any good if you already know how to cook.
• Did I mention he was a mockney prat?

I stand by my ad hominem remarks. They add colour and—I hope—humour to an article that would, otherwise, be a long whinge about celebrity culture. They act like the seasoning that was woefully lacking in Jamie’s ragu. And they’re valid—-even if Jamie taught you how to cook like Ferran Adrià, he’s still got one of those faces you just want to hit. (Apparently Channel 4 viewers agree with me.)

Any normal person trying to find out about cooking would have sweated away in a hot kitchen for some hours, and at the end would have been rewarded only by that (not insignificant) warm glow you get when you’ve actually finished making something all by yourself. The food itself was certainly nothing to shout about: the sauce tasted like sauce from a jar, and the pasta was slightly less impressive than you’d get out of a packet. Any member of the Findus Crispy Pancakes generation would have wondered what all the fuss was about. Having said that, after four hours we were hungry.

I’ve since experimented a bit with the recipe, and found that it benefits from a couple of tweaks: for instance, I add nutmeg. Hugh has an excellent list of things you should do to ragu, which includes a few other things I’m going to try.

Maybe it’s not all celebrity chefs, though. Maybe it’s just Jamie, and some of the others are quite good. Fear not, for the science is not finished yet. Armed with the qualitative data from our Jamie test, we’re next going to see how he compares to other celebrity chefs. Coming up later in the series we’ve got all-new Normal People set against Nigella Lawson and Gordon Ramsay.

Also, there’s been some discussion to the effect that the recipes in Jamie’s Italy come from stuff he’s stolen from the Italians, and aren’t actually Jamie’s recipes at all. Does anyone think we should offer him a rematch?

Right. Ragu, aka Bolognaise Sauce.

Having ragged on Jamie’s gu (ooer), I feel I should throw my own hat into the red, bubbling, aromatic ring. So – what do I think should be done to improve Jamie’s ragu?

The short answer would be “I think it should be Heston Blumenthal’s ragu”. I’ll post a piece from the archives on cooking Heston’s Spag Bol on Tuesday. Despite the 8 hours it takes to cook, and the considerable cost of ingredients, Heston’s “Perfect” Spag Bol is indeed the finest example of the breed I’ve ever tasted, and ranks as one of the nicest-tasting meals I’ve ever cooked anywhere.

However, assuming that you don’t have 8 hours? Then here are five tips to spice up Jamie’s bland ragu:

Brown the damn meat . Jamie just chucks the meat in with the sauce. This is like putting up a sign saying “I don’t like flavour. Please make my ragu blander than Gordon Brown’s sex life.”. (I’m assuming here.) As you’re probably all sick of me saying by now, browning your meat stimulates the Maillard reactions, which cause an immensely complex cascade of flavour-producing reactions. I have no idea whatsoever why Jamie doesn’t do this – it’s just insane not to.

Add celery and carrot . The soffrito, the standard Italian package of vegetables added at the start of the meal, normally contains more than just onion and garlic. Exactly what’s in there is the subject of much debate and a certain number of Medieval city-state wars, but two of the most common ingredients are carrot and celery. There’s a reason for that – it’s that they make the taste of the ragu much richer and more complex. Both are, interestingly, from the same family of plants, and according to Harold McGee, add a “warm, woody” note to dishes, which is seriously lacking from Jamie’s effort. I also find the slight astringency of the celery adds something. By the way, if you hate celery and are going “eew” right now – most people don’t use celery right. Don’t use it as a vegetable. Use it as a herb.

Add milk Yes, milk. I normally add a bit in with the meat, after the onion and garlic are softened. Heston Blumenthal says that the proteins and sugars in the milk react to give the ragu extra body, and I could believe that. It also adds a bit of fat, which is something that’s definitely needed (see below). It’s also classic Italian, so it makes it doubly surprising that Jamie doesn’t include it. I first heard about this on “America’s Test Kitchen”, where they concluded that it made the best pasta sauce.

Add something sweet, something salt, something acid, and something fishy In Heston’s case, he adds Thai fish sauce, which is very fishy indeed, and sherry vinegar for the sweetness. I’ve tried that, but I find if you’re cooking just for one person, it’s very easy to get his flavourings out of whack. Instead, I tend to add a dollop of Oyster Sauce and a little bit of red wine vinegar – this one I’ve not seen anywhere, and it’s certainly not classical Italian, but it’s very nice, and gives a similar effect. Certainly, you should always add something slightly sweet to tomatoes – Harold McGee verifies that flavour chemists have tested and found both sugar and acidity intensify the flavour of tomatoes.

Add fat Heston’s Spag Bol uses about a ton of butter. I’d like to live past 35, so I tend to stir in a bunch of olive oil just before serving. This is an adaption of the technique Heston’s using, which is the French Monte Au Buerre, meaning “lift with butter”. Frankly, I prefer my approach for general use – Heston’s produces a very rich, heavy, filling sauce, wheras the olive oil is lighter and adds a fresh note to the proceedings.

There are dozens of other tips – add tomato leaves right at the end (intensifies flavour, again). Add stock. Serve with parmesan (really works). But, basically, if you can’t do better than Jamie’s ultra-basic ragu, you’re not trying hard enough.

There’s some interesting discussion of Normal Person vs Jamie going on elsewhere on the Web, so I thought I’d link to it.

Notably, egullet have (of course) a very interesting and learned discussion going on with a load of recommendations for celeb chefs I’ve not heard of, and at least one name that made me accidentally Google a porn star.

There’s also some interesting chat going on in my LJ entry

Both worth a read if you’re interested.

So, I’m curious – has anyone mentioned this on the official Jamie Oliver forums yet? If not, does anyone want to?

In this part, I’ll talk a bit about what to eat, and how to stay alive on little money and even less effort.

Meat

Meat doesn’t actually need any sauce or complex accompaniment to taste half decent. This is one of its major advantages for student cooking. It also normally only takes up one pan or oven, and can be cooked quickly (frying or grilling) or without too much supervision (roasting).

Okay, so some readers won’t eat meat at all, but frankly I’ve always been a carnivore and probably always will be. So here’s some of the things I learned about meat as a student:

Season meat – it makes it taste better. To season meat, cover it completely in as much seasoning as seems appropriate (easy to learn, after the first few tries) then cook it however you were going to anyway. Salt and Pepper is pretty much the easiest, cheapest seasoning available, but you can get specialised steak or chicken seasoning from supermarkets. Be warned, as these aren’t always an improvement on salt and pepper. Alternatively, you could experiment with a wide variety of different things¹.

Frying steak, pork chops and chicken legs and thighs are your friend.All of these are pretty cheap, half decent bits of meat which cook quite easily. Pork Chops will normally fry or grill, and Chicken Legs and Thighs will oven cook. A lot of my friends just bought chicken fillets, but these actually kinda cost a fortune, and probably don’t taste any better.

Watch out for turkey season. Now, this was always a (dubious) treat when I was in uni. From time to time, Turkey producers would have far too much turkey, and sell massive 1.5kg joints for about £4. This is a hell of a lot of food, is not unpleasant (at least, not until you’ve just consumed 1kg of it), and will keep you in turkey dinners, sandwiches, and if you’re feeling energetic² soup.

Gravy If you’re not a confident cook, do not attempt to make your own gravy; this is an advanced skill. However, if you put in some vegetables with meat you’re roasting, the juices can make them taste better.

Vegetables

It’s a time honoured tradition for students (especially male ones) to try to avoid eating any of these. I was no exception. However, about once a month I would get sudden cravings or feel ill and strange. At these times, I reasoned that perhaps my complete avoidance of vegetables was to blame. Here’s some of the ways you can get round the whole problem of eating vegetables:

Gorge on spinach. I’m ashamed to say it, but this was my first solution to the veg problem. About once a fortnight, I’d buy a large can of spinach, heat the contents in a saucepan then just eat the lot. This would be done independent of meals (I didn’t want to sully the meat).

Peas. Peas taste okay, require just a bit of boiling in a pan (which is then very easy to wash), and can accompany just about anything. They’re also cheap and come frozen in large amounts.

Can’t someone else do it? Let’s face it, vegetables with no effort applied don’t taste as good as meat does. However, they’re a lot cheaper. One way round the problem of cooking inability here is to just buy a salad or vegetarian dish from someone who knows how to make one (salad bars, supermarket, café’s etc.). It’s much cheaper than buying prepared meat.

Roast them with meat. Ah, now, this is actually a good solution. Vegetables don’t taste great, and involve extra effort, however, carrots, parsnips, onions and small potatoes take a similar time to roast as meat does. What this means is that for minimum extra effort you get to eat a bit more healthily. You do normally need to wash vegetables, but when roasting them you can normally leave most of the skin on. This occasionally produces a slightly bitter “rustic” taste, but you can grow to like it.

Alternative solutions. I heard of one guy with a porter’s job at a hospital taking to eating slightly out of date coma patient food. Once again, I wouldn’t advise it.

Next week I’ll talk about fruit and general staples, including the Potatoes of Doom story.

¹ I used to go with: Steak and Mustard (quite good), Chicken and Mixed herbs ³ (good), everything with Tobasco Sauce (results vary), Chicken with Irn-Bru (less good).
²,(which you won’t be if you’ve eaten nothing but turkey for the last 2 days)
³ They come in a box labelled “Mixed Herbs”

From Icanhascheezeburger

Yep, it’s that time – time for another episode!

This week, as he mentions below, Paul is rigorously testing Jamie Oliver’s cookbook-writing skills, though the medium of a guy called Steve, and a whole lot of pasta dough.

Watch it now!

If you like the episode, or any episode, if you fancied telling your friends/your social networking site of choice/the world about it we’d be really, really grateful. You can embed any of our episodes using the third button from the right on the Flash player. As I’ve mentioned before, our publicity budget wouldn’t buy a large pizza and fries, let alone a marketing campaign…

We love celebrity chefs here at Kamikaze Cookery. No, really, we do. I’m a particular fan of Nigella Lawson, although not, admittedly, for any reason relating to her food. All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, have a (sometimes grudging) respect for Heston Blumental. Naturally, Hugh is the only one crazy enough to have actually tried to cook one of his recipes. (I believe it took seventeen hours start to finish. Maybe he’ll tell you about it some time.)

And therein lies the rub. Heston tells you to take twenty kilos of tomatoes and peel them. This is easy for him. He’s got a laboratory and a team of highly trained staff to do the peeling for him, so he can swan in at the last minute, do something magical with an ultrasound gun, and take all the credit. An average person, we feel, would have given up on about tomato #3 and sent out for pizza instead.

It might be easier if the books told you how to peel tomatoes (soak them in hot water so that the skins swell, then they’re much easier to take off), but they don’t do that, either. You’re supposed to guess.

And then there’s the language used in the recipes themselves. What does it mean when it tells you to sweat the carrots? Isn’t `sweat’ an intransitive verb? Why doesn’t anybody tell us this stuff?

(I have a mental image now of a novice cook reading a book and then trying to force carrots out through his own pores. It’s not pretty.)

Most celebrity chefs started off as chefs. They’ve had years of training and they’ve forgotten what it’s like to walk into a kitchen and wonder which one of these things is the fishknife, or which end of the peeler you hold, or whether it’s a five-second or a ten-second rule for dropping things on the floor. Since cooking is easy for them, it must be easy for us, so they don’t bother to explain things.

I had the same problems with my maths lecturers at university, but that’s a subject for a whole different blog.

And everyone secretly knows this. We buy these glossy recipe books, ooh and aah over the luscious pictures for a few minutes, and then display them proudly on our bookshelves unused. They’re like that copy of A Brief history of Time or the complete works of Shakespeare: certificates displaying membership of the petit-bourgeoisie, not practical documents.

At Kamikaze Cookery, we like to cook stuff. We feel that recipe books are no help.

Such a bold assertion desires proof! Fortunately, we have a science-based cookery show. Now we have an observational hypothesis and it’s time to test it.

In this week’s episode, surprising almost exactly no one, we take on Jamie Oliver. As I discussed recently, Jamie’s back in the news of late, and while he’s being slightly cooler than he used to be, he’s still an arrogant little mockney prat. It has to be said, though, that he makes some good food and he wants to share it with the nation’s children. A noble goal, perhaps, but I’m fairly sure there are better ways to go about it than a reality television show.

We took a normal person, the sort who might buy one of these sleb-chef cookbooks or get one as a present from a well-meaning relative, and set out to discover whether it was possible to extract the food from the equation while leaving behind the rampaging irritance that Jamie smears over everything he does.

Along the way we read anecdotes about Jamie’s “housekeeper”, discovered interesting alternate spellings of simple words, and learned about the science behind pasta dough, which we cover in the episode. We’ve got more about dough coming up in a later video, when we cover a different celebrity chef. We found out which ingredients you can buy in a shop and which ones you have to travel to Italy for. We improvised kitchen implements and learned why pasta comes in packets.

And at the end, we sat down and had dinner, and after all that, it was quite nice. Isn’t that the point?

I’ve made more than a few mentions of some other wonderful food blogs out there, but I’ve failed to actually give a list at any point.

So, for those of you who might be interested in reading more than just KKC (shame on you!) here are a few favourites.

After a bit of writing, I came to the conclusion that if I was to write all my favourite food blogs up, it’d be the Longest Blog Post Evar. So, here’s the first list, focussing on Molecular Gastronomy-ish blogs.

Khymos

Fantastic, in-depth, well-researched articles on a variety of fascinating topics, from new ideas in cherry jam (and the science therof to detailed overviews of the science of the senses . Martin Lersch, who runs Khymos, is a seriously trained scientist and also a frankly brilliant cook – his foamed strawberries with coriander , for example, is world-class. And he also provides some stunning resources, from the enormous free hydrocolloid cookbook (which I’m amazed hasn’t been published yet – for the record, if you’re reading this, Martin, I’d cheerfully pay for a hardcover copy) to the ongoing They Go Really Well Together contest. Must-read.

Ideas In Food

OK, if you want seriously hardcore cutting-edge molecular gastronomy, this is the place to go. Aki