I have just noticed that if you fail a ReCaptcha challenge, it removes your comment text from the comment box.

That’s extremely unacceptable, and sorry it’s been going on this long. I’ll look into fixing it.

Morning all.

So, today I’ve got a couple of quick but awesome links for you.

First up, the Hacker’s Guide To Tea . Not quite as complete as it would suggest, but nonetheless a darn good read, which a couple of useful titbits that I hadn’t thought of.

For example, did you realise that, basically, the temperature you need to steep tea at goes up linearly the more oxidised it is? Black tea’s more oxidised than green tea, so needs a higher temperature. Interesting.

(I wonder if the same applies to coffee?)

Secondly, courtesy of KKCs’ new backend and linkbuilding writer, Hope Jael Perez (say hi, everyone!) comes a gallery of quite the most bizarre kettles I have ever seen or heard of. Marmite kettles. Typewriter kettles. Kitchen kettles – as in a kettle shaped like a kitchen. Sadly there’s no way to track down where these kettles came from, on the site, but nonetheless, there’s your morning/early afternoon dose of wierd right there.

I ran across an interesting question yesterday, and I figured that if any people in the world knew the answer, the assembled KKC collective probably did.

Is there an easier way to eat noodles?

My girlfriend has some problems with her wrists, and hence finds eating noodles with a fork rather hard work.

And indeed, noodles with a fork are generally a pain in the ass.

I’ve suggested chopsticks, which I personally much prefer for anything noodley, but does anyone have any other/wierder suggestions?

OK, I’ve been meaning to find some time to do more thorough tests of the very, very cool vacuum-like extraction with an ISI creamer technique. However, Life being what it is, haven’t so much gotten time yet. So here’s a quick summary of my preliminary tests.

What is it and why should we care?

Basically, a bunch of Clever People have discovered and been experimenting with a new way to extract flavours into liquids, which you can then use as a sauce, a stock, or whatever else you can come up with.

The technique uses an ISI cream whipper, which normally generates high pressures inside it using nitrogen dioxide capsules to force cream or other substances (like, say, a Xanthan-based solution of orange juice) out through the nozzle as a foam. They’re extremely ace, and I had one already for molecular gastronomy stuff.

Instead of foaming, though, this technique just requires you mix the liquid you want to extract flavours into and the thing you want to extract flavours from, pressurise with a gas canister, leave for two minutes or so (no longer – that’s the mistake I made), then release the pressure as fast as possible. For a variety of not-totally-understood reasons (cavitation of the cells in the thing you’re extracting from plus a bunch of other stuff), this forces the flavours out fast and efficiently.

You can also use the same technique in reverse, kinda, to rapidly marinade meat. Haven’t tried that yet.

So why do you care? Well, previously when I’ve wanted to make garlic-infused oil, say, it’s been a matter of sitting at a stove for an hour with garlic immersed in warm oil. Now I can do it in 2 minutes. That opens up a lot of possibilities for those of us who don’t want to spend all day watching rosemary simmer.

The Tests

I tried 3 tests initially.

First up, I tried rosemary in water. Using dried rosemary, I mixed about a teaspoon with about 100ml of water, charged up the pressure, shook, and left it for two minutes. Annoyingly, my creamer hadn’t been used for a while, and the valve was stuck slightly open making a high-pitched whistling sound, which probably reduced the pressure in the vessel, and definitely made me fear I was about to be rushed to the hospital with bits of exploded creamer stuck in me.

In a shocking turn of events, that didn’t happen. After two minutes, I offgassed (not to be confused with OFGASsing, which is where you refuse to do anything about energy companies blatantly taking the piss until you have no other choice) and sieved the liquid.

Not. Terribly. Impressed. The water had a very, very faint rosemary smell, but that was about it. No colour, and I’m far from sure the smell wasn’t from some tiny bits of rosemary I missed.

Second test: Garlic in oil. A bit of reading had pointed out that water is less than 100% WIN for extractions, so I had higher hopes of this one. Crushed garlic, vegetable oil, and I left this one for about 5 minutes.

The results here were pretty darn impressive, actually. The oil smelt and tasted distinctly garlicky, replicating the hour-long garlic confit effect nicely. I’ll definitely be using this one the next time I do salmon confit in garlic oil.

(Try it, it’s gorgeous).

Finally, I tried something a bit bizarre. I’d read that vodka was the perfect fluid to extract into, but didn’t have any around. However, I did have a nearly-finished bottle of Glenmorangie sitting on the countertop, and let’s face it, if there was ever a single malt you wanted to use for cooking, Blandmorangie’s probably it. (Unless you have some 10-year Glenfiddich around, obviously. It’s like FAIL in a bottle.).

I ground up some of the Continental (read: “over-roasted”) coffee beans I had lying around to about a cafetiere grind, mixed ’em up, pressurised, and left it for 20 minutes.

(Yes, that’s far too long, I know. I was using the tried-and-tested KKCook technique of “read fast, understand about half, try it, Do It Wrong, then read up and go "D’oh!”.")

The results were… well, they were definitely coffee-flavoured. However, it was very hard to say if that was because the whiskey had come out tasting of coffee, or just because repeated filterings still couldn’t get the ultra-fine coffee grinds that had somehow gotten in there out again.

(Note to self – next time, get rid of the fines before extraction)

It was bitter and pretty horrible, but it has to be said, it definitely tasted of coffee.

More?

Well, it’s definitely got promise. It’s a major pain that you have to use fat or alcohol rather than water for the extraction, since I don’t really want to eat every meal with vodka. However, with some experimentation I suspect that milk, cream or even melted butter would work well as a medium for capturing the flavours.

I’m very interested in the marinading technique, and I’ll be trying that next – tomorrow, hopefully. And I want to do some more testing to see what other flavours I can extract into my oils – maybe even try some of the more “out there” flavour ideas from vacuum filtration, like charcoal, wood, or forest soil.

Also, I’ve been hearing some very interesting things about cold-brewed coffee made this way.

Have you tried these new extraction techniques out, and do they work for you?

I see BoingBoing’s picked up on the exciting stuff you can do with pressure, extraction, marinades and so on.

(For a summary, check the Khymos post of a few weeks ago).

Of course, KKC ain’t far behind! I’ve been doing some tests with extraction, and will be doing some marinade tests as soon as I have some chicken or other marinadable meat to hand. Expect a post soon.

(Initial results: garlic-infused oil WIN. Coffee-infused Glenmorangie FAIL. Other results in need of more testing.)

So I’ve been writing some long-tail content for KKC recently, aiming to cover various topics around some of our longer blog posts.

Now, these are all little snippets, and I was originally intending to just stick them on the blog quietly and not tell anyone about them until Google found them.

But the more I’ve been writing them, the more they’ve been rather fun. And so I thought you guys might enjoy some of them too!

Kettles

• So you want a pink electric kettle?
• How to find quiet electric kettles
• Choosing a quiet electric kettle (read this one, it’s better)
• The Hunt For A Yellow Kettle

Cafetieres

• Why, yes, you can buy a gold cafetiere (now with 100% more sarcasm)
• Making coffee in a small cafetiere (focussed on good coffee at work)
• How a double walled cafetiere can insulate your way to great coffee (Dodgy title but interesting test result)
• Why a cafetiere cover will make your coffee better – with SCIENCE! (Fairly basic stuff)
• What’s the best steel cafetiere? (I was surprised).

These aren’t full-on KKC madness, so they’re quite short and often quite basic, but hopefully you’ll get some amusement from them anyway!

As you may have noticed, I’ve been having a bit of an “appreciate the simple tools” time in my kitchen recently (hence my pean on the electric kettle). In fact, the most recent gadget I bought was a set of digital food scales, accurate to +-1g, for about £8, from Sainsburys – and I really can’t believe I went so long using crappy analogue scales.

They’re the universal solvent of cooking – they make my coffee better, they make my experiments easier, and they make my cruddy measuring jug less necessary.

Give it up for the scales.

Beverages

I bought the scales for coffeemaking, and they haven’t disappointed. As I mentioned in the article on cafetières, accurate scales are absolutely vital for good coffee using a cafetiere or, I suspect, a filter, whether manual or automatic.

It’s not just coffee they’re great for. As we should all know, measuring ground solids by volume is a fairly crappy way to go about things, particularly if the individual grains are large and uneven. You’ll need a microgram scale to get the best results with measuring tea, but if you get one, you can start optimising toward the perfect brew (I really need to do that “A/B testing for food” article soon – sound interesting?). Unfortunately there’s very little info available on exactly how much tea you’ll need per pot, but Wikipedia recommends 2.25g per 180ml for black tea, which means that you can use even a normal scale for a pot of tea for three or more (assuming about 275ml in a mug, you’re looking at 825ml for three people, so make a litre to avoid the dregs, using 12.5 of tea).

Hot chocolate, squash, citron presse, all of these things are vastly variable on volume, and bloody difficult to reliably reproduce using just the regular teaspoon. Did 17g of Green and Blacks’ hot chocolate with 450ml of hot milk produce the Best Chocolate Evar? Now you’ll know.

Which leads me on to…

Repeatability

We’re all geeks here, right? I mean, I’m actually sitting typing this wearing an XKCD Science: it works, bitches T-shirt. So we should know by now the value of being able to reproduce our results.

You needs you a good set of scales to do that. And once you’ve got them, you can actually embark on an entirely different sort of cooking, which you may find more or less fun depending on your personal preferences – actually setting up multiple different variations on a dish and seeing what works best. Many cooks might find that unutterably boring, I know, but it has one great advantage that you can actually start adding to the Great Cook’s Canon this way: rather than following along with other cooks and chefs, having vague discussions, you can not only optimise your own dishes, you can tell other people EXACTLY how to produce your results.

Retire the measuring jug

I have a bit of a thing about my measuring jug – I can’t stand it. It’s crappy plastic, it’s hard to read, I have to bend over, squint and guess even to get readings to within 100ml of where I’m aiming.

And then, I realised that an awful lot of the time, what I’m measuring is either water, or so close to water as to make no difference. Beer has a density of 1010 g/l. Milk’s about 1030 g/l. Wine’s around 970 g/l. If you assume everything in your kitchen that’s substantially composed of water has a density identical to water, you’ll get volume measurements at least as accurate as you’d get out of a measuring jug. (And if you need to measure other stuff, there’s a good chart of densities of common liquids available online).

Advantages? Numerous. Make up stock from a stock cube by pouring hot water onto the cube in a jug on the scales. Get a precise 3/1 or 4/1 ratio for vinaigrette (and then test, and reproduce, as above!). Only heat as much water as you need to.

Diets and portion sizes

I’ll be honest – I hadn’t thought of this one until I did a bit of Googling. But it makes perfect sense. Want to control your portion sizes for weightloss, muscle-building, or just making sure you and your friends get the same amount of the roast beef you’ve just cooked? Enter the scales.

Again, you could do this using volume, or marked supermarket weights and some guesswork, but scales make it easier – and make it possible to accurately predict how many calories you’ll get out of that portion of pasta (which you ain’t volume measuring without getting Archimedian on its ass) or that hand-cut slice of bread.

Baking.

It’s science for hungry people.

Anything I’ve forgotten? Any other reasons to love the humble scale?

I really like the idea of coffee pods. For those of you who haven’t run across the things, they’re basically an attempt to make coffee as easy as humanly possible – they produce something between expresso and filter coffee on a mug-by-mug basis in about 15 seconds, using closed, easy-to-dispose “pods” with coffee inside.

Particularly for social situations, the ability to knock out cups of varying types, strengths and flavours of coffee, and even tea, quickly and easily sounds damn good. And let’s face it, producing good coffee’s a bit of a hassle – I’d estimate my morning mug of coffee takes 10 minutes, between preheating, grinding, boiling, waiting, measuring and steeping.

Now, that’s not a problem for me, because I’m extremely sensitive to stimulants, and more than one cup of coffee inside six hours puts me straight into a gibbering twitching government drugs-are-bad-mkay American Psycho state. So I have my little ritual in the morning and my damn fine cup of coffee. On the other hand, if I was running an office on six cups a day, and making for the rest of the office every time, that really wouldn’t be sustainable.

So, as I say, enter the pods.

Too Long, Didn’t Read: the Coffee Pod Summary

• They’re very convenient indeed, and work particularly well brought into the workplace to replace shitty office coffee.
• The taste is somewhere between “foul” and “pretty good”, heavily affected by whether you buy the “official” pods (shonky) or ones from third-party suppliers (links below).
• The Nestle Nespresso is generally considered to produce average to half-decent coffee (much better than the average office dispenser) but is very expensive and ties you to Nestle.
• If convenience is very important or quality isn’t, they’re the win. Particularly good for an office setting.
• Otherwise, get a cafetière /cafetières instead.

What’s Out There?

There are a whole bunch of different pod systems and sizes out there, and they’d take more than the length of this article to go into. Thankfully, there are also several excellent dedicated sites focussing on pod machines – if you;re looking at getting one of these machines, I’d recommend a trip to http://www.singleservecoffee.com/ and their forums at http://www.singleservecoffeeforums.com/.

The question of what the best machine is seems to be nearly impossible to answer. Singleserve coffee.com have rounded up their reviews and some of their recommendations, but even that recommends 4 different machines.

Of course, the range of beans is one of the make-or-break factors. The general rule, from Coffeegeek.com and elsewhere on the ‘net, seems to be that the brand-name beans from the machine manufacturers vary between average and awful, but that third-party suppliers (a number of posters mentioned http://www.bettercoffee.com ) produce coffee that, whilst it doesn’t hit the heights of really well-prepared fresh-ground coffee, is pretty damn good. One poster on CoffeeGeek said “Nobody’s going to mistake this for fine French press coffee, granted, but after the Senseo and Yuban attempts, it’s a revelation”.

The Nespresso system belongs slightly in a category of its own. It uses a different pod technology to the other systems, aggressively guarded by patents (indeed, according to Wikipedia, they’re suing one manufacturer of compatible cartridges right now . The pods are very expensive (about 50p each) but are generally considered to be of reasonably decent quality (see below).

Do pod coffee machines produce good coffee?

Depends on what you mean by good coffee. One poster on Metafilter, talking about the Nespresso machines, said "Honestly, they probably produce better espresso than a many people with home espresso machines that don’t clean them properly or don’t have a decent burr grinder, and the patience to dial it in. "

In general, if your coffee palate’s particularly refined, they’re not going to perfectly satisfy. However, many of the awful reviews given to pod machines on sites like CoffeeGeek seem to have been using the default manufacturer’s coffee pods – Senseo pods came in for a particularly thorough kicking, both for lack of quality and lack of range. By contrast, third-party pods offer much more of the range serious coffee afficionados would expect – BetterCoffee offers a few hundred options compared to the dozen or so offered by most machine manufacturers.

Overall, the answer seems to be “satisfactory”, but very much dependant on individual preferences. See the range of reviews for the Phillips Senseo , for example, which vary from “If you’re desperate enought to call this swill coffee, you’d better switch to another beverage.”, through cautious optimism (I’d recommend this review) in particular for a balanced overview) to “Great price, great coffee”.

The Nespresso, again, appears to be a special case. All of the serious coffee connosieur reviews seem to converge on “pretty good, but not as good as an espresso pulled by someone who knows what they’re doing”. Given the relative levels of effort involved, that’s pretty high praise.

Any hacks we should know about?

As you’d expect from a rather cool and complex system exposed to the Internet, there’s a lot of discussion about hacking and improving the darn things.

Most notably:

• You can make your own pods for the machines half a dozen different ways, the most convenient of which seems to be the Perfect Pod Machine . Potentially useful, again, for an office setting.


• The pods also make very convenient storage mechanisms for coffee for the Aeropress – as one CoffeeGeek user reports.


• There are a fair number of minor optimisations it’s possible to make to the coffee-making process with a pod – with most pods, one of the most important tips seems to be to pre-wet the pod with hot water before inserting it into the machine.

Any experience?

All of this is from my research, of course. I’ve not used one of the things extensively myself.

Have you? If so, what did you think?

I’ve been on a bit of a coffee mission in the last few months, ever since discovering the wonders of Has Bean Coffee subscription coffee plan. One single-estate coffee through your door every week, what’s not to like?

And as a result, I’ve been working out how to make that coffee taste as awesome as humanly possible. Now, I’m a bit old-fashioned, and grew up with a heavy francophile influence, so my preferred way of making coffee is the cafetière (“French press” for the USAians amongst us, although I’m sure there are states where it’s now officially referred to as the “Freedom Press”).

cafetières are awesome, actually. Baristas seem to reckon they’re one of the best ways of making coffee, period, and certainly one of the top ways that doesn’t cost hundreds or thousands of pounds. They produce coffee similar to that from a filter, but less burned-tasting than filter machines often produce, and with a real complexity of flavour depending on how you brew.

And there’s the rub. Making coffee with a cafetiere might look simple, but there’s a LOT of optimisation you can do…

Optimise your grind

Hardcore types will already know that blade grinders, the cheapest type of coffee grinder, are fantastic for chopping chilli but sodding useless for coffee (although, IMO, if you have to use one a cafetiere brew is one of the less-horrible ways to do it). Pre-ground coffee is only of much use if you drink it within a day or so of grinding, and even then it’s nowhere near as aromatic as fresh-ground. So, one of the first stops on the coffee pilgrimage tends to be the burr grinder, with variable grind size. But here’s the rub – even burr grinders aren’t created anywhere near equal, and a bad burr grinder is particularly bad for cafetiere grinds, which need to be large and even. It turns out, you see, that cheap burr grinders can set a maximum grind size, but will randomly produce lots of finer-ground particles of coffee smaller than that grind size too, and that equals sludged-up cafetière and overbrewed coffee thanks to excessive surface area.

After screaming at the price of top-end grinders, I’ve settled for now on a Hario Skerton hand grinder. It’s a pain to figure out how to use it initially (I’ll write a guide on here at some point), and it’s certainly some fairly hard work to grind 50 grams or so of beans for four people, but it produces a very, very nice, smooth grind, and the smell when you first open it up after grinding is worth the price of admission on its own. Plus, I’ll probably study Brazilian Ju-Jitsu at some point, so the increased grip strength from using it every day ain’t going to waste…

A/B testing cafetières’ brews

OK, let’s start simple. Get a set of scales with a 1 gram sensitivity. Better than that would be great, but they need to be able to handle a maximum weight of 2 kg or so, and most microgram scales can’t cut that, at least not on a non-lab budget. (Please do tell me if I’m missing a brand here – I’d love to get a set of microgram scales with a wide weight range).

Why do you need scales? Because the single biggest optimisation I’ve been able to make to my cafetière coffee has been precise weight measurement, both of the beans and the water. Measuring by volume works very, very badly for coffee – the ground beans froth varying amounts, the volume can be widely different dependant on the grind size, there are all the usual problems of volume compared to reasonably large eliptical objects. Get a set of scales in play and you can get granular on the problem. So to speak.

Now, there are four variables in the process. People who design websites, ads, software or Toyota cars for a living will be starting to make a matrix in their head already.

1. Temperature. Coffee is brewed somewhere in the 88-93 degree centigrade ( 190F to 200F ) range, but there’s not a lot of agreement beyond that as to what the ideal temperature is. (Yeah, I know I said 93 in the electric kettle article. But, as usual, it’s more complicated than that.)
2. Brew time. Artisan Coffee in Edinburgh say 3 minutes, Square Mile Coffee say 4 minutes. My experience is that 3 minutes produces a more fruity, acidic brew, and 4 minutes produces a richer, heavier, and more caffinated brew.
3. Amount of coffee. Again, not a lot of agreement here. Somewhere between 5 grams and 8 grams per 100ml works well, with 8 grams working for heavier, smoother beans, and 5 grams working well for the lighter and fruitier, although it can sometimes produce a smooth brew too.
4. The bean. Different beans respond different ways to different approaches. A Kenyan Gethumbwhini will work well with a 4 min/7g/l combination, wheras the El Salvador Finca Argentina (a fantastic bean from this week’s subscription) seems to respond better to 5g/l / 4min.

So what do you do? Well, there’s a variety of approaches you could take. At the hardcore end, I’d recommend half a dozen small cafetieres, a big pile of ground beans, a matrix table, and some serious tasting. (I keep meaning to organise this in Edinburgh). You might want to Google “A/B testing”. At the lighter end, just vary your brew between the extremes every time you make a morning cuppa, and keep notes (that’s what I’m doing normally).

(Anyone got a systematised way for optimal testing of this sort of thing? My maths ain’t up to it.)

Either way, the important thing to remember is that each bean responds totally differently. So don’t assume a brew method for one bean will result in a good brew with another – I’ve had one bean which actually tasted plastic if given a long, high-density brew, but was fantastic at a much lighter brew.

All cafetières are not created equal

For starters, there’s the temperature drop-off through the side – whilst the classic cafetiere is made of glass, that means that it’ll lose heat really quickly, meaning that the optimal extraction temperature drops off. (Hmm, we should really do some taste testing on this – watch this space.). There are a couple of ways to mitigate that – remember to pre-heat the cafetiere, for starters, as it really does make a difference. Wrap the cafetiere in something insulating, like a towel or some foam. And if you really want to get hard-core, you could immerse the cafetiere in hot water, or even water heated to exactly the right temperature in a water bath. (Again, must try that.)

Your best option for convenience and quality is probably to buy a double-walled cafetiere, though. Sadly Square Mile seem to have stopped selling their excellent-looking silver ones, but Amazon have a fair selection. They’ll hold heat like a thermos flask, meaning you get a much, much better brew.

The other variable, of course, is shape. As Mathias pointed out in the kettle article, the shape and material of a brewing vessel has a hell of an effect on the brew. In general, bigger, wider vessels should ensure greater extraction in less time, and they’ll also lose less heat to boot (volume and hence heat energy goes up as a cube whilst surface area only goes up as a square.). Having said that, the press will also work better the higher up the cafetière the coffee starts, so balance is important.

And that’s about it. Any other cafetiere tips out there?

We’ve had a particularly heavy load of spam today, and one of the comments on the kettle post was deleted. Sorry, I suck. Will be putting stuff in place to avoid that.

Preparing more content here, and looking at more ways of doing it, and I need a bit of help from you guys.

What I could really do with is the answer to this question:

What would you most like to know about cooking right now?

What’s really kicking your arse? What problem would it be infinitely better if it was solved?

What’s the thing you most want a solution to, food-wise?

Chicken doesn’t have a great reputation as a meat. People call it bland. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

During my time off from Kamikaze Cookery, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking, and learning a lot of new stuff. Some of it isn’t directly applicable to everyday living, like knowing the national dish of Laos (larb, a minced meat salad – nicer than it sounds). Other bits, though, really are – notably having had time to thoroughly go through many of my neglected recipe books.

I’ll be sharing a fair bit of this stuff over the next months, but right now I want to talk about what might be my favourite dish of all from a year’s testing – grilled chicken.

By “grilled” here, I mean grilled on a grill pan, a solid chunk of metal with ridges that you put on a stove, or potentially a barbeque. (Personally I’m using a seriously battered Le Creuset cast iron model) Top-down grills, which the Americans amongst us would call “broilers”, have rather seriously different cooking qualities (although they’re ace for sausages). But a ridged grill cooks fast and delivers lots of gorgeous searing on the meat, meaning Maillard reactions are a go, for that amazing caramelised crunchiness contrasting with the hot, fresh, tasty meat.

Thigh FILLETS are the win.

Chicken breasts don’t have a great reputation amongst the cookerati, which I think is slightly unfair. However, for a simple grill, you really want the flavourful, mixed dark and light, slightly fatty meat of a thigh. Grilled chicken breast is not only more expensive but also less tasty.

But there’s a problem with that – a whole thigh takes forever to grill, and is a bit of a dicy proposition even if you’re using a thermometer. My one undercooked-chicken FAIL of the last year was courtesy of some stovetop-grilled chicken thighs – you’ve got to watch hot and cold spots, which even induction cookers and cast iron can produce, you’ve got to watch cooking all the way through the meat, and you’ve got to watch the wierd thermal dynamics around the bone. In short, whole chicken thighs are great for all-over cooking in stews or ovens, but suck donkey balls for grilling.

However, most UK supermarkets at least now stock thigh fillets. They’re damn good value (about four pounds for 500g of free-range high-quality thighs from Sainsburys in the UK), they taste gorgeous, and they’re thin, so they cook extremely fast on a grill. Most of them are skinless, but the grilling process gives so much flavour it doesn’t matter.

You could fillet your own thighs, of course. I could peel tomatoes for ragu too, but I can’t usually be arsed to do either. They’re about comparable levels of pain in the ass.

(Finally, one neat tip if you cook sous-vide. Grilled chicken breast is a two-minute job if you cook the breast at low temperature – and by “low” we mean 60 degrees centigrade, a la Douglas Baldwin’s guide. ONce they’re done, simply slap them on the grill for a minute each side – the only way to get really tasty grilled breast. Make up a really good caesar dressing, grab some anchovies and some crispy lettuce, and you’ve got the basis of a world-beating grilled chicken salad. )

“Smoky” is the name of the game in grilled chicken recipes.

Solo, grilled chicken thighs aren’t bad. But the heat and the fat means that they take up appropriate flavours like you wouldn’t believe.

My vote for best meal I’ve made all year goes to Nigel Slater’s chicken thighs with thyme leaves. Just rub the thigh fillets with good olive oil and fresh thyme – don’t even bother stripping it from its branches, just stick sprigs of it on there – then grill. The smell is incredible – one of the few meals that works much better if you’re eating it where you’re cooking.

He also recommends balsamic vinegar, onions, or French mustard as tastes to go with grilled chicken. I’d also suggest lemon or lime – grilled lemon chicken is a classic, of course – to cut through the smoke and bring out high notes to the taste, or maybe even white wine – you could try just heating the pan hot then almost basting the chicken with it every couple of minutes. Barbeque sauce, provided it’s good stuff, or Moroccan tastes like cumin also work a treat.

Fat, fat, fat.

It’s all about the fat in recipes for grilled chicken. Chicken thighs already have quite a bit, of course, and this is a good reason to keep the skin on if you can get the skin-on fillets. (The other reason, of course, is that chicken skin is gorgeous).

Otherwise, you’ll be wanting to add some serious fat content in there. Olive oil rubbed into the chicken tastes fantastic in an “oh my god, I’m in an Italian tourism advert” sort of way. Butter, either rubbed on, plonked on after, or both, gives it a rich, expensive feel. And cream or creme fraiche makes a great base for a sauce, contrasting nicely with the spare feel of the grilled chicken and picking up all the grilled, charred flavours.

Any other tips for grilled chicken?

It’s a source of amazement to me that when I visit the US, in particular, I don’t see electric kettles.

Of all my household gadgets, the humble electric kettle is certainly the most frequently used. More frequently than my sous-vide water bath, my Bamix mixer, even my (wonderful, wonderful) induction hob, the £10 kettle from Tesco is what gets me through the day.

And as a result of this, and of being, as we all know, an enormous geek, I’ve managed to run across a fair amount of useful information on the subject of water, heating of. So here it is, my ode to the humble but awesomely useful kettle.

Only a Tea Kettle should boil!

You don’t actually want to use boiling water straight out of the kettle most of the time. Instead, each type of beverage has its own preferred brewing temperature.

Black tea SHOULD be made with boiling water, yes. Indeed, if you don’t make it with just-boiled, 100 degree water, the extraction doesn’t work properly and it tastes like crap. Herbal teas – effective, ineffective, or just tasty – appear to mostly go the same way.

Green tea shouldn’t be let within a mile of boiling water, or you’ll overextract the tannin in the tea, of which there’s a lot more than in black tea. Green tea brewing times are complicated, complicated stuff, but the TL:DR summary for supermarket-quality tea is about 80 degrees Centigrade (180F – ish), for about 2 minutes.

If you pour boiling water straight out of your kettle onto your coffee, Steve from Has Bean Coffees will bury your house in used coffee grounds. Well, OK, he won’t. But you’ll make crap coffee. The temperature for coffee extraction is one of those frightningly complicated problems that causes any argument to end in graphs. However, for a French Press, which is probably what you’re using if you want water from an electric kettle, various sources specify anything between 89 and 93 degrees centigrade.

For both tea and coffee, remember that the temperature of the water changes when it hits a cold teapot or coffee pot! Preheat for, as the kids say, The Win.

Deoxygenation – the myth and the tests

Most coffee connosuiers would say that you shouldn’t leave water in the kettle once it’s boiled, if you want the best quality tea or coffee. Boiling the water drives off the dissolved oxygen, and that oxygen is important both for tea making and coffee. Allegedly.

Is this true? Well, there appears to be some truth in it, but it ain’t proven by any means. However, some testing over at CoffeeGeek seems to show that oxygenated water may change, and perhaps clarify, the taste of coffee. in addition, some hardcore coffee geeks are experimenting with post-brewing aeration of coffee, just as it’s done with wine. Interesting stuff, and look for a test on it here soon.

The coffee and tea extraction processes is terrifyingly complex, hence the uncertainty, involving at least 800 flavour compounds, according to Harold McGee. His book “On Food And Cooking” has nothing to say about freshly-brewed or otherwise water, but does mention that many waters aren’t ideal for tea or coffee – he recommends using Volvic mineral water.

Beware the “Water Heater”

Tefal’s Quick Cup electric kettle promises “Hot water in 3 seconds”, by heating water as it’s pumped rather than in a chamber like a kettle. It’s a neat idea, and only heating the water you need makes sense.

However, according to all reports, the darn thing doesn’t produce boiling water, just hot water, around 88 – 92 degrees centigrade. That’s arguably a little cool for coffee, great for green tea, and totally useless for black tea – and indeed, the Amazon review page is full of unhappy tea drinkers .

Caveat teadrinkor.

Rival hot water gadget the Eco-Kettle, by contrast, actually offers three temperature settings – 80 degrees, 90 degrees, and 100 degrees. That’s actually a damn fine idea, and might persuade me to buy one. Anyone know how accurate they are?

PID for Tea

This one’s more of an idea than a tip. There’s no reason you couldn’t take a PID temperature controller such as the one I originally used to build an improvised sous vide bath, and connect it to a cheap electric kettle. (Let’s face it, when you’re playing with the electricity supply, you don’t want to risk melting your sixty quid Dualit kettle.)

Why? Well, one of the major pains in the neck when brewing french-press coffee, in particular, is timing the grinding of the coffee to the heating of the water. The water, of course, hits 100 degrees, and then starts cooling down, and we want to catch it at about 94-95 degrees C (202F) in order to achieve optimum brewing temperature. However, we might well also be using a hand-grinding coffee grinder for the best grind, we don’t want to leave our coffee ground because the aromatics escape, and timing a hand-grind of 50 grams of coffee to 30 seconds after your kettle boils is… tricky.

(Oh, and the temperature drop is obviously dependent on the volume of liquid in the kettle. Basically we’re talking thermometers at dawn here.)

However, with a PID, there’s really no reason you couldn’t hold the temperature at 94 degrees Centigrade indefinitely, or at least for the 3 minutes it takes to frantically grind. Worth A Try. Another KKC test coming up, I think.

P.S. – did you realise it’s possible to buy a, wait for it, electric pink kettle ? Indeed, you can get a range of the damn things. Praise capitalism.

No it isn’t.

However, it is on extended hiatus. Basically, my intention was to pick up KKC again last year, figure out a format that meant we could produce it in a reasonable time and, as the orcs of today say, GOOOOG!

Then Death Knight Love Story://www.deathknightlovestory.com happened.

For those of you who don’t know, my day job is as an animation director. During the first year of KKC, I’d been taking a sabbatical to work with Real Film – hence, KKC. However, in 2009 I got back to work, and decided to write a script for a short film to get started making motion capture projects.

I showed it to a few people. Rather famous people. And they showed it to some even more famous people, like Joanna Lumley, Jack Davenport, Anna Chancellor and Brian Blessed. Unexpectedly, they thought it was fantastic, and agreed to come work on it for a pittance.

At that point, all other projects got shoved off the table.

However, one day soon DKLS (as it is known) will be done, and I’ll have some free time. And at that point I intend to do more stuff with KKC. NOt sure WHAT more stuff – a full series might be unlikely, but we might find a way to do it – but more stuff.

So, apologies for the wait. We ain’tn’t dead. We have no idea what we’re doing, but we’re still intending to do something.

Martin “Khymos” Lersch is, as usual, the man. Not the scary I-take-all-your-tax-and-oppress-hippies-and-rockstars man, but the cool, sorted, knowledgeable man. Probably with a very narrow black tie and a sharp suit.

Today he’s got a complete round-up of all the molecular gastronomy books coming out this year and damn, that’s an exciting list. All the El Bulli recipes! Ferran Adria’s A-Z of food! Herve This on ovens!

Damn you, Lersch, you just made my local Amazon branch rather richer.