Blog -

Alex talked about pretentious restaurants the other day, and last night, I had the opposite experience.

Out of work at ten pm, and went to meet the girlfriend, who was still slaving over a hot palimpsest in the Archaeology Department, or whatever it is she does in there. Stopped off for a pint. Or two. And a couple of whiskies. Forgot it was Sunday and all the restaurants close early. The only place open was a take-away pizza place that had an adjoining Italian bistro. I’ve had their pizzas before when it’s  am and I’m drunk, but I was more than a little dubious about using them for a sit-down meal.

I needn’t have worried. My pizza con funghi e pollo had deliciously light, fluffy dough, presumably made fresh that day, and the chicken had come off a real bird, probably one that had actually seen a field at some point. Jehane’s pasta came with salmon that had been oak-smoked over whisky-barrel chips. It was proper food, simple and filling and tasting good.

Then there was the complimentary sambuca and biscotti. And it all came to under twenty quid with drinks. I tipped.

We base so many of our shared cultural experiences around food, and then we get hung up on what the food is supposed to look like, or whether it has a French name. We go out for dinner to celebrate birthdays and weddings, and then we spend half the time worrying about napkin etiquette, or whether we’re using the right fork. We make glorious spreads for Christmas and Thanksgiving, which means that one of the family has to miss all the fun because they’re spending four hours fretting in the kitchen. We make food a central component of our lives, and then we forget to enjoy ourselves.

One of the best meals I’ve ever had was a cheap can of stewed steak, with half an Oxo cube crumbled into it, warmed over a Trangia stove outside a tent on the North Yorkshire Moors. It was cold and windy and I’d spent the day trudging pointlessly over moorland in pursuit of some badge or other, and what I wanted was something warm and comforting. Calling it a carbonade wouldn’t have helped.

Proper food is supposed to taste nice and keep you alive until the next meal. The rest is all details.

That said, it can be fun sometimes to experiment with the details, and mess with the twiddly bits. This sort of experimentation should be performed in the spirit of play. If it goes wrong, you laugh, and send for takeaway instead. At the worst you’ll have learned something, and maybe you can make it go better next time.

Okay, at worst you can burn your kitchen down, but I’m not about to let tedious facts get in the way of my carefully constructed argument.

OK, this is a bit of an experiment!

We’ve just posted a mini-episode covering more sous-vide stuff – lamb, chicken, and vegetables, to be precise. It’s info-heavy and quite simple, but hopefully interesting.

We’re really interested to see what you think of this. Would you like to see more mini-episodes? Do you prefer just the high quality of the main episodes? Was it useful? Was it funny?

Let us know.

Here’s the mini-episode again

I’ve been meaning to link to this for a couple of days – over on Reddit, user kynlok took the “Perfect Steak” episode and did some experimentation, with very interesting results .

I have a confession to make, and here is as good a place as any to announce my shame to the world. Here we go. I have never eaten a Findus Crispy Pancake. But I have always wanted to try one.

Which one of those two sentences constitutes the shameful admission depends on what decade you grew up in.

Alex’ post on Thursday got me thinking, as often happens, about ready meals. I like ready meals. I think there’s a case for them, because while I love cooking, I have a job, and sometimes I just want to eat something, soon please, and without generating another sinkload of washing up.

But they have a lot to answer for.

I used to work for Northern Foods, so I feel partly responsible. Horrendous organization; a vast, Kafkaesque bureaucracy full of smug, patronizing businesspeople. They were horrible to me and I’m pretty sure I responded in kind. I worked in Company Secretarial on the corporate side, which is still no excuse for the fact that no one there knew damn-all about food.

As if to prove this, their website smugly brags that they invented the first ready meal, like that’s something to be proud of. They lie, because prepackaged dinners have been around since the 1940s, but since this is something we can blame Northern Foods for, let’s take them at their word for now.

(Bitter? Me? Never.)

When those chillis con carne hit the shelves of M&S, that was the day the rot set in. Slowly at first, but with increasing rapidity throughout the seventies and eighties, people stopped cooking, because they didn’t have to any more. Fast forward thirty years and you have an entire generation for whom the art of making food is a strange and alien pursuit, practiced only by effete wankers on television.

Cooking is easy. You take some ingredients and make them hot. Then they’re cooked, and you’ve turned ingredients into food.

Worse yet, we get towns like Rotherham, which, I’m told, is populated entirely by fat working-class people who live entirely on kebabs. Worse even than that, it takes the Mockney Prat to go to Rotherham and show them that cooking is easy. Thus do we perpetuate the stereotype that cooking is practiced only by effete wankers on television.

More even worser that that, it gives Jamie the impression that he’s some sort of messiah. “I’m just that geezer who keeps doing these worthy things around the country”, says he, apparently without a trace of irony. Perhaps the intention is for him to swell his head to such an extent that his tongue finally fits in it.

Who’d have thought that I could work a reference to Jamie Oliver in there? I don’t have issues, not really, but he’s such an easy target. I promise that subsequent blog entries will attack a broader range of villains.

However, we do have an episode all about Jamie coming up next week, so I might have to talk about him a bit more yet.

A couple of people have asked for a text-format explanation of the techniques that we showed in The Perfect Steak . So, here we go…

The Theory

Sous-vide is a technique for cooking almost anything, which developed from the knowledge that cooked items, particularly meat, develop different characteristics depending on the internal temperature they reach. A steak cooked to 55 degrees will be perfectly medium-rare. A steak with internal temperature of 80 degrees will be bone-dry boot leather. And so on. There’s a table on Wikipedia with a quick summary of the various stages steak will go through, although if you really want to know more you can’t do better than buying On Food And Cooking by Harold McGee

So, we attempt to ensure our meat, veg, or whatever hits this temperature exactly by immersing whatever we want to cook in a water bath held at that temperature – either by electronics, as a restaurant would do it, or in our case by a bored Yorkshireman with a thermometer and a hand on the controls. Then, all we have to do is to wait until the meat has been in the water bath long enough to reach thermal equilibrium – which is comparatively quick because of water’s density and high specific heat capacity.

However, we’re still missing one aspect of cooking steak in a pan – that being the searing that the outside of the meat gets. There are two reasons we want to sear the steak – firstly, to kill bacteria, which assuming you have a healthy piece of meat should only be present on the outside of the meat, and secondly, to stimulate the incredibly tasty Maillard reactions, which are responsible for the “browned” flavours of the meat.

Hence, blowtorch.

Getting up to temperature

Because of the aforementioned high specific heat capacity, getting your water up to temperature tends to take absolutely bloody ages. One excellent suggestion in the comments was to start with a mix 50/50 of cold and boiling water, and also to use as large a pan as you can reasonably find. The former substantially reduces your heating time, whilst the latter ensures that the water bath will take longer to change temperature once you’ve hit the temperature you want, which, as the episode shows, can sometimes be a problem!

Obviously, you’ll need some sort of thermometer to check you’re at the right temperature. A digital probe is probably the best way to go, as it’ll update quickly and accurately.

55 degrees is pretty much the lowest you should consider going. Much lower and you’re risking promoting bacterial growth. Anywhere between 55 and 60 degrees should produce nice medium-rareish steak. By the same token, if you’re going to mess up your cooking temperature, you’re probably best to mess up hotter rather than cooler!

Once you’ve got your water bath up to temperature, keep stirring and checking the temperature every couple of minutes. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to juggle your hob settings to keep a steady temperature – it’s worth trying this if you’re going to cook sous-vide in this way semi-frequently.

Sealing the steak

We need to seal the steak away from the water, or you’ll end up poaching it, which is an entirely different and in this case not nearly so useful technique. We also want to seal it away from the air, because air’s a terribly efficient insulator, and if you have any air pockets in your bag, they’ll insulate sections of your meat away from the water. I’ve had that happen to me with a chicken leg – it’s no fun having half your chicken perfectly cooked and the other half basically raw. To do that, we’re sticking it in a ziploc bag – it’s possible to get bags that are designed for cooking in from most supermarkets, although to be honest at this low temperature and short time I believe most ziploc plastic bags will be OK.

We suck the air out of the bag with a vacuum cleaner for two reasons – one, it minimises the chances of getting steak juices in your mouth (and since raw steak can often carry e. coli amongst other things, that’s something to bear in mind), and two, it looks funny. Provided you’re careful, sucking the air out with a straw or even just using your mouth should be fine.

Now’s the time to insert any flavourings or marinades, too. Acid will tenderise the meat and also inhibit the growth of any bacteria if you’re feeling paranoid, so a little balsamic vinegar will work. I always add salt and pepper to my steak before sealing it, and sometimes some grated garlic too. All sorts of things will work well here – experiment.

Once you’ve stuck it in the bath, set your timer for 90 minutes. Why 90 minutes? Well, to be perfectly honest, that’s a total approximation that we chose because it’ll get most thicknesses of steak up to temperature. If you’ve got a thinner steak, you can take less time, because the temperature gradient will be steeper. There’s more detail on that over at the practical guide to sous-vide . A 1.5cm thick steak, for example, will only require 18 minutes (plus about 5-10 minutes’ “fudge factor”). If you’re attempting to cook half a cow, it’ll take longer – a 5 cm thick steak will take 3 hours. You shouldn’t try to cook anything much thicker than that, because you’re getting into dangerously long cooking times – see below.

Brown the steak and serve it as soon as you take it out of the water bath. Letting the steak cool whilst in a vacuum pack is a Bad Plan, because botulism can grow under those circumstances, and that’s something you really, really don’t want to risk, because having your lungs paralysed is no fun at parties. You can keep the steak in the water bath for a couple of hours if you need to, though – just make sure it doesn’t dip below 55 degrees.

Searing the meat

Once you’ve taken the meat out of the water bath, you still need to sear the meat. Basically, here you want to get all the surface of the meat to above 140 centigrade, to cause the Maillard reactions to happen, which will give the steak all its “crunchy brown” flavours. As an added bonus, the searing should kill absolutely everything dangerous on the surface of the steak.

You can sear using a blowtorch or in a pan. If you’re using a blowtorch, you want a serious plumber’s blowtorch – we’ll investigate the uses of cooks’ blowtorches later on in the series, but right now, just take my word for it they won’t do the job. If you can, you want a more expensive single-gas blowtorch – mixed-gas blowtorches can sometimes impart a flavour to the meat. Yes, it has a flavr.

If you’re using a pan, you want to use an oil with a super-high smoke point. Peanut/Groundnut oil is ideal. Get the pan REALLY DAMN HOT, then add the oil (not the other way around, because you’ll burn the oil) and add the steak. Heston Blumenthal always uses an absolute ton of oil in his recipes when browning, which I think is to get a more even brown, but you can just use a little if you like – just make sure to brown all surfaces of the steak.

Is one better than the other? Glad you asked. We’ll be talking about that later in the series.

In any case, once you’ve got a steak that’s evenly browned all over, congratulations – you have a Perfect Steak.

What about other meats/veg/etc?

Yep, you can cook all kinds of things this way. I’ll be talking more about that on Monday.

Not surprisingly, the three of us disagreed over how to cook the Perfect Steak. If you watch us for long enough, you’ll notice that this is likely to be a running theme.

As mentioned in the programme, Heston Blumenthal (or Dr B, as he’s known) does it differently in his book In Search Of Perfection. There are good reasons for all of the steps he takes, but his version takes about 48 hours to cook. We settled on our version because it can reasonably be made in a domestic kitchen by someone who has a job to go to.

You don’t need an atomic crockpot that auto-regulates the temperature⁰. You don’t really need to use a vacuum cleaner—-you can create a pretty good vacuum seal with your mouth if you don’t mind a face full of raw beef juice. You don’t even need a blowtorch, as we discovered, and then instantly fell out about.

We made two steaks over the course of filming. The one you see in the episode is the one that was sous-vided and blowtorched. The other one was sous-vided in the same way, and then I browned it on the outside the conventional way, by frying it in a pan. Both were marvellous, but opinion was divided on which one was more marvellous. My opinion was that the blowtorched steak had a faint whiff of propane to it, which is not necessarily what you want in a steak. Mine tasted more meaty and steaklike.

The important points you need to get right are: heat the entire steak to 55°C but no higher, which is the perfect temperature for medium rare; and then, heat the outside to (well) over 140° to get the Maillard reactions going¹. How you go about doing that is up to you.

Personally, I find that frying in oil not only develops the Maillard reactions in the meat, but it contributes to the flavour, too. My preference is for peanut oil, which goes really well with the beefy taste of the beef. You still have to be careful not to heat up the inside of the steak too much, so fry it quickly, on a high heat.

Then there’s sauces. Disagreements abound here as well. I’m quite fond of a nice peppercorn sauce, but my flatmate insists that the only possible adulteration for steak is a small pile of salt on one side. He’s right in a way, except for the bit about the salt.

Then there’s the cut. We used fillet and it was amazing. Fillet isn’t generally considered an everyday cut of meat, though, unless your name happens to be Rockefeller. Sirloin is popular, but it’s overrated—-it lacks the fatty chunk that you get in the middle of rump steak, but as a result, it’s drier,less tender, and less flavoursome.

Above all, though, the important thing is this: if you’re going to spend ninety minutes watching a water bath to ensure your steak is perfectly cooked, make sure you buy a good chunk of meat in the first place. This is easy to do if you know how. Support your local butcher. He spends all day chopping up dead animals and watching people pass by his window, then returning from the local supermarket with something unidentifiable wrapped in plastic. It breaks his heart. If those people would stop in to see him instead, he could provide them with a well-aged hunk of deliciousness specially selected from a happy, grass-fed cow.

Once you’ve got hold of a chunk of quality meat, the rest is easy.

⁰ Hugh has one, and it makes it a lot easier. Once we find out how to mass-produce them, you’ll find them in the Shop.

¹ We’ll have more information about Maillard reactions in an upcoming episode. Here’s a short summary for the impatient: Maillard reactions are awesome, and you want to have more of them.

Just over 24 hours since KKCook hit the web, and we’re already getting all sorts of links and mentions around the place! It’s really lovely, and some of the comments have been fantastic – thanks, guys!

Links

• We hit the Grauniad – er – Guardian! Yep, Jemima Kiss wrote up a great piece on our launch entitled Come in Heston Blumenthal, Your Time Is Up .
• We also got a very positive mention – and I’m dead chuffed by this too – over at Khymos.org, which is pretty much the site of record for molecular gastronomy on the web. Woo!
• We’ve been popping up all over Livejournal, del.icio.us, and various other fun places. Thanks, everyone – the links really do help!

Comments

“I was skeptical, but this is classic.”
“Love it – and I’m a vegetarian.”
“Sweet!”
And loads more – again, thanks, guys. Your praise and feedback really makes all the effort worth it.

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. Hence, student cooking.

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.

Do

Fry things on medium setting. Everything fries on medium setting. Other settings are for advanced users.

Cook things for as long as they say. There are lots of corners you can cut – like most of the ingredients – but you’ll just get ill if you undercook stuff.

The washing up. Washing up is a pain. You’ll never feel like doing it, but then, nor will anyone else. However, if no-one does the washing up there won’t be any plates to eat on. If you really neglect this, one of your flatmates might end hating you, or worse, drawing up a washing up rota. This should be avoided at all costs, as it makes you feel like you’re living in a facility.

Make sure you’ve got basic cookery supplies. These include salt, pepper, sugar, cooking oil, washing up liquid, and dishcloths. These all last ages.

Take out the bins. Seriously, it’s not hard. From the horrors I’ve seen, it’s really worth the effort, even if no-one else is doing it.

Don’t

Set fire to stuff you’re cooking. If you’re forgetful (as I am) use a mobile phone alarm or something to make sure you don’t cook it for too long. I seem to mainly burn vegetables, but even these leave your flat reeking of smoke for weeks.

Let the flat have too many pans, plates and cups. I can’t stress this enough. If you’ve got lots of pans, plates and cups, nobody washes up, and the task becomes a 2 hour epic. I once had a friend bring our flat a “gift” of 90 shiny new glasses. Before the month was out, every bloody surface was covered in unwashed glasses.

Leave stuff cooking and go out. This is a recipe for disaster, as you’re pretty likely to end up in the pub and forget about it.

Only eat takeaways. These are probably better than what you’ll normally be eating, but cost a fortune, and tend to make you fat. You don’t actually need to be able to cook to eat hot food.

Steal your flatmates’ stuff if you don’t absolutely know they’re fine with it. Depending on the flatmate, they’ll either hate you forever, move out without telling you, attempt to kill you, or a combination of the three.

Be too aggro to a new flatmate if they don’t do as much washing up as you do. Try to be reasonable, and if they still don’t do it – move out, they never will. I had a friend who fell foul of this one. He got so fed up with his flatmate not doing the washing up that he put the washing up in the flatmate’s bed when he was out. Upon returning from a party that night, he found all of the plates and cups smashed into pieces on his own bed, and a message reading: “if you ever do this again, I will fuck you up” stuck into his door with a knife. Suffice it to say, my friend moved out that week.

Well, that’s all I could think of for basic living. I’ll be back next week with some advice on how to cook meat with minimal effort and stave off scurvy.

Yes, it’s finally here! The first episode of Kamikaze Cookery is now available

In “The Perfect Steak”, we investigate the science of meat cookery, jury-rig equipment for restaurant-style sous-vide with a vacuum cleaner and a blowtorch, and introduce Petunia, our very own smug celebrity chef…

Let us know what you think!

(Once again – watch it here)

We know, we suck. Sorry.

At 11:20, just as we were uploading the last version of KKCook’s first episode, we checked through the episode one last time and discovered… that something hadn’t rendered. At all.

Turns out that something was wrong with the video source.

We’re re-rendering and uploading as fast as we can – expect an ETA of about 13:00 – 13:30 ish.

Update – Sigh. Make that 14:00 ish.

Update 2 – 68% complete rendering.

I’m a huge fan of “molecular gastronomy”, the new school of cooking that studies the chemistry and physics of food to improve its flavour (described as “the scientific study of deliciousness”). It’s the “mad scientist” thing that has made people like Heston Blumenthal famous – but it’s always been pitched as something that only Expert Chefs can do.

Which is total rubbish.

For example, most non-skilled cooks I’ve met are distinctly scared of cooking chicken – they know that it can give you all sorts of nasty food poisoning, and they know that you have to cook it well enough to stop that – but how do you know how well is well? How do you tell if the insides are done? How do you avoid overcooking it whilst at the same time avoiding poisoning people? Traditionally, there are all sorts of tricks that experienced cooks use to figure out if their chicken is done, but a lot of it boils down to experience. With no guidelines, cooking chicken is a bit of a scary experience for a newbie cook.

Unless, that is, you happen to know a couple of scientific facts. You know, say, that all the bacteria in the chicken will be dead, dead, dead if the interior has hit 65 degrees C for a couple of minutes. You know that, the meat won’t get seriously overcooked until it hits 75-80 degrees or so. There’s no judgement or experience required here – they’re just facts.

But you’ve still got the problem of the interior. How do you tell if the meat’s done in the middle? Do you prod and try and guess from the texture? Do you trust to experience?

No, you use a fuckin’ thermometer. You stick it into the middle of the chicken, and then you, you know, read the dial. Or LCD. Or whatever.

And then you, erm, actually KNOW when the chicken’s ready to go. Rather than, effectively, having to make an informed guess. No wonder so many people find conventional cooking so terrifying.

That’s why science helps. Because rather than cookery based on experience, guesswork, half-understood theories and inflexible lists of “things that worked before”, you can actually use reasoning to make your food. And, in my experience, it makes damn good stuff.

And there’s more. Knowing about the science allows you to extend the ways in which you cook, based on the theoretical properties of your food, rather than having to rely on blind trial-and-error. For example, knowing about the way that meat dries up and becomes unpalatable led several chefs, notably Heston Blumenthal, to investigate low-temperature cookery – which home cooks can use, in turn, to avoid problems with roast chicken, for example. Because of the physics of the chicken’s water content, the speed temperature transmits, and the oven it’s placed in, low-temperature roast chicken nearly solves the “dry chicken” problem of a roast that cooks have struggled with for centuries.

Want to know more about Molecular Gastronomy? I’d recommend, most of all, “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee (get it from our shop, which is the one-stop shop for all things food sciencey. A lighter read is “Don’t Sweat The Aubergine” (also in the shop), which uses scientific approaches and testing based on works from people like McGee. In the blogosphere, Martin `Khymos` Lersch is the man when it comes to chemistry in the kitchen. And, of course, we’ll be throwing out the science all the time on KKCook, in between the explosions and Top Gear impressions.

Jamie Oliver is back in the news again, only this time, I have to confess to feeling conflicted.

He got a lot of flak the last time around for attempting to improve the heath of our nation’s children. Personally, I couldn’t give a stuff about our nation’s children, except inasmuch as they keep bloody quiet and provide a pension for me when I’m old. Nonetheless I am advised that children are our future, and that it is a Good Thing for us to safeguard that future by improving the quality of school meals.

Mostly I’m advised this by Hugh. Sometimes I wonder about him.

I’m fairly sure there’s a way to improve school meals without being completely arrogant, obnoxious, and nanny-statish about it, though. I’m not at all surprised that Tony Blair got involved with the campaign: it must have fit right in to his preconceived notions about the right of people everywhere to be told what to like by a telegenic authority figure. Also it drew some attention away from that morass of illegal wars he’d started, but now I’m straying off topic.

Other people felt the same way as I do. A hundred years from now, those images of disgruntled mothers handing cheeseburgers through the school fence will be trumpeted as the first blow of the common man⁰ against the tyranny of other people knowing what’s best.

And now Jamie has responded, and he’s responded by going on the offensive and taking the piss out of Rotherham, which is a tactic that I can at least respect.

Personally, I think that cooking is a fun thing to do, and if you show people that, they’ll develop a taste for it. It stops being fun if you start by showing them all the things they’re doing wrong, and then move on to passive-aggressively make fun of their lifestyles.

I also think that there’s nothing wrong with cheeseburgers every so often. I believe in everything in moderation, including excess.

In an upcoming episode we attempt to cook one of Jamie’s recipes, and in doing so we find out just how much cop he is as a chef. Due to the running time of the episode, I didn’t get to say much about what I think of his attitude. Fortunately, that’s what blogs are for.

I fully expect to have plenty more to say about Jamie as time goes on. Even if he single-handedly saves the nation from obesity, he’s still an irritating little man, and he must be stopped.

⁰ The word “man” is used here in its original Anglo-Saxon sense. Don’t get me started.

Want to subscribe to KKC and get all our goodness delivered straight to you? Well, there are a variety of ways…

Facebook

To get information every time we release a new episode, plus all the usual fun Facebook social stuff, join our Facebook group at

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=93461755857

RSS/Feedreader

If you’d like to get all of our blogging and episodic mayhem in one place, and you use a feedreader of some kind, you can subscribe to the entire blog at

http://www.kamikazecookery.com/blogs.rss

Alternatively, if you’d just like the videos, the easiest way is to subscribe to our Blip.tv channel at

http://kamikazecookery.blip.tv/rss

YouTube

If you’d like to subscribe to our videos on YouTube, you can do so at

http://www.youtube.com/kamikazecookery

So there are a lot of bits and pieces of mad scientist cookery we get up to this series. We use sous-vide cookery, we mess around with foams, and in a couple of weeks I’m off to pour liquid oxygen on a barbeque. But cookery science is advancing really fast right now, and here are a few things that I’m really excited about that I haven’t gotten a chance to try out yet:

1) Meat Powders. Everyone knows about liquid nitrogen and food, of course, but most people think of it either as a stunt, a la the Fat Duck’s frozen mousse balls, or a great way of making icecream. But in fact, there’s a whole lot of research going into other interesting applications of Very Cold Stuff right now. One of the most interesting ideas came out of the blog Ideas In Food, who’ve been experimenting with freezing then powdering meats and seafood. The applications are fascinating – meat as seasoning. A light sprinkling of 24-day aged steak on that cream, sir?

2) Meat Glue. Once again, this one’s from Ideas In Food, and so far I’ve failed to persuade anyone else I know that it’s a great idea. Which is a pity, because it’s fantastic.

Short version: There’s a thing called “Activa”, which, rather than being an overhyped bio-active yoghurt, is a substance that can bond pieces of meat together seamlessly. The potential for cooking fascinating new cuts is incredible – seamlessly combining lamb belly with pork ribs, say, or perhaps a multi-layered steak. I was particularly taken by the idea of shrimp balls seamlessly wrapped in chicken skin – sounds gorgeous.

3) Local vertical farming. Whilst I’m skeptical about “organic”, I’m very interested in sustainable and traceable farming. And, of course, the ultimate in traceable farming is to grow it yourself.

Now, if you’re in the country, that’s all fine and well. But in a city, how can you grow enough food? Well, what if you consider “vertical farming”, where farms work indoors, using tuned light? LEDs can target precisely the wavelengths that react with clorophyll, meaning that you can provide light using tremendously low-power installations. And a lot of food actually doesn’t need that much space to grow. Could you grow a year’s supply of food in a properly-outfitted shipping container?

There’s been a lot of research into this area for things like the Biosphere 2 project – worth looking into.

4) Retuned microwaves. I was talking to a friend who works in radar technology recently, and he happened to casually mention that it’s possible to retune a microwave to cause other molecules than water to vibrate. Now, we haven’t done any testing on this yet, but the potential’s fascinating. A microwave oven that only heats fat molecules? That only heats salt? That targets the cellulose in plants? Wow.

5) Cooking without heat – alkalis, acids, and more. Martin Lersch’s recent blog post on the Maillard reactions and how they can be fairly dramatically affected was a real eye-opener: he demonstrated that you can speed up the browning process in onions severalfold by increasing the pH of the onions using baking soda.

The potential of cooking without heat is remarkable. We’ve already heard of Heston Blumenthal using ultrasound to make mayonaisse, for example, but did you know that you can also use it to age wine incredibly rapidly? What else can we do? There’s a lot of historical use of techniques like this – softening meat with pineapple or yoghurt, for example, or “cooking” fish in acid – but what else can we find by considering the chemical reactions of cooking? Would it be possible to strengthen the cell membranes in meat, for example, meaning that we could cook chicken at a higher temperature without losing too much fluid, or perhaps find a way to preserve haemoglobin against heat, meaning pink-yet-well-done meat becomes a possibility?

The science of cooking is fascinating, and there’s so much still to explore.

I remember back when I was a teenager, nouvelle cuisine was almost a laughing stock. These tiny plates of food, arranged in some sort of pattern, almost invariably involving cubes or squares. It was considered as a big con, to make you pay lots of money for almost no food, just because the chef had the presence of mind to arrange it to look like a box. Well, times have moved on, if not progressed.

Consider current popular food culture, e.g. Professional Masterchef¹, and that restaurant show (I forget the name, possibly “The restaurant”). “True” restaurant food has all gotta be tiny portions and geometric shapes or it just doesn’t fit the bill. Well, honestly, I’ve been to a couple of these places, normally on Hugh’s bidding, and I’m yet to be truly impressed.

Particularly dreadful was a certain supposedly fine-dining restaurant located in Edinburgh’s largest museum. Now this was bloody shameful, we order a meal like, 4 weeks in advance, (they say they’ll charge us extra (beyond the deposit) if anyone doesn’t show). When we get there, they make every effort to make us feel we’re not good enough for the place, sell us cold soup², a bland and stingy (if terribly neatly arranged) main of chicken, and some thoroughly forgettable dessert. They also blithely charge us £8 per glass of wine.

Compare this with a nice local restaurant: for between one tenth and half the price, you get much more food, some of which is actually hot; the staff are friendly; you can have a glass of wine for less than the price of a mortgage and you leave the place full, satisfied, and able to pay your rent that month.

Now, I’m not saying that all “fine dining” restaurants are as bad as the one I’ve mentioned above, I’ve been to a few where I’ve thought, “that was quite nice”, or “scallops are edible, I never knew!”. The thing is that I’m not really seeing this tremendous difference in quality of the food which should go along with the price. Expensive, so called fine-dining restaurants regard themselves as being on a completely different scale to your average pub or chinese restaurant³, they seem to reckon that just by making food in this style, they’re automatically better than others, regardless of whether they actually bother to put any effort into making their food is cooked correctly, or actually tastes good.

Well, it’s a matter of perception, and I’m not fooled, good food tastes good, whether it looks good or not. Bad food doesn’t, and I’m not going to go on about how good it is just ’cos it was presented well and I paid far too much for it.

…

¹ Or as I liked to call it, “Bad-skin Challenge”. Every episode – Who do you want to win: the one with pale skin with ominous brown scars; the one with good old fashioned acne; or the one who looks like he hasn’t slept in the last 3 years?

² I don’t give a flying rat’s arse if it’s called Compote; if it looks and tastes like you’ve emptied a bag of Morrisons value fine-chopped frozen mixed vegetables, then covered it in lukewarm salty water, you’re doing it wrong.

³ The best meal I ever had was in a chinese restaurant in Leeds, yeah, it wasn’t very subtle, but it tasted great, looked good, there was tons of it and they’d got just the right green tea to go with the meal.