Blog

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?