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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.

Heya! As promised, albeit some time ago, here’s our new videoblog, featuring Chantilly Chocolate Orange (a trick to make a mousse using nothing but chocolate and orange juice) and some discussion of the future of KKC. Let us hear your comments!

The camera’s cables vanished. The camera spontaneously discharged. The supermarket was out of ice. And my computer got its first virus in years, which took most of a day to kill. Gah.

So, expect a KKC shortie update first thing on Monday! In it, I’ll be demonstrating a Neat Trick mixing liquid chocolate with orange juice to create a whipped cream of chocolate (you may know it already as a varient on Herve This’ Chantilly Chocolate), and talking about the future of KKC, and why you haven’t seen a new series yet.

UPDATE – On the upside, in the last hour I’ve come up with 4 ideas for new episodes/live shows. So you’ll probably be seeing more soon.

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

So, Day 2, and the actual cooking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stunningly awesome.

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

Tikka Masala

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

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

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

Cream of Blueberry Soup

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

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

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

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

So…

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

We, apparently, was wrong.

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

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

So go give it a go.

And let us know how you do.

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

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

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

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

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

See you tonight!

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

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

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

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

I am The Cunning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“First, peel all the fava beans.”

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

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

Oh, cock.

(part 3)

Meanwhile, Alex had started his garlic roasting, peeled a million garlic cloves, and started work on the garam marsala. All was going well.

I had now started on the next stage of the blueberry soup – the Dacquoise. First problem: We had NO CLUE what the hell a Dacquoise was when it was at home.

kamikazecookery Anyone know what a “Dacquoise” is?

http://twitter.com/kamikazecookery/status/2008533013

Our viewers soon put us right with the aid of Wikipedia – but unfortunately the description was a bit, erm, confusing (“A dacquoise is a dessert cake made with layers of nut meringue and whipped cream or buttercream” – but we didn’t have any whipped cream!), and we didn’t have time to look at the pictures. Nuts to it, said I, and plowed boldly onward.

Next, we needed to blend some almonds, sugar, and various other things. The only problem? You guessed it – no blender. However, we DID have a smoothie maker…

Amazingly, 100% success.

The same could not be said, sadly, for Alex and the Garam Marala, through no fault of his own. We’d simply underestimated the massive, massive quantities of spices Heston needed for the spice mix – 75 grams of pepper turned out to be about two jar’s worth, whilst 120 grams of Coriander Seeds would have cost about as much as an entire meal out. We were in serious trouble.

And then, Alex noticed the comment that we would have a bit of Garam Masala left over at the end of the recipe. Maybe we had hope. And a little while later, flicking through in a panic, he realised just how much “a bit” would actually be…

Meanwhile, I’d started whipping some eggs and adding in sugar. It may be noted that amongst the things I direly suck at, whipping eggs is high on the list, not helped by the subtlty of the tools I had to work with:

However, we knew that this wasn’t true of our viewers, so we started on a bold new experiment: egg whipping, directed by Internet.

I whipped. I stopped. I held up to the camera. From next door, our host/assistant Tina shouted through that there was a massive delay on the video, and I appeared to still be whipping. Eventually, the collective intelligence of the Internet came to a conclusion on the whippiness of my egg. I whipped a bit more. Repeat.

Remember, many eyes make eggs frothy.

(Part 2)

We’d gotten back, and we had ingredients. A LOT of ingredients.

Job #1 for Alex was to brine the chicken, a task basically consisting of making some salt water, then putting the chicken thighs in it. What could go wrong?

kamikazecookery http://twitpic.com/6hkvb – As Alex put it, “It’s an Archimedean problem. Chicken go in, water go out.”

http://twitter.com/kamikazecookery/status/2008363342

Meanwhile, all I had to do was heat some cream and mix some sugar in. Of course, Thomas Keller lists all ingredients in cups, which those of us in the Old World don’t use, but a bit of ingenuity plus a hundred-million-dollar emergent artificial intelligence solved that problem.

At the same time, I realised that I’d been cooking on induction for so long that the concept of using actual flames in cooking gave me the Fear.

But my colleagues coaxed me out from under the sink, persuaded me to stop gibbering about the blue dancing burning fairies, and I got to work – until I hit an unusual snag with live-on-the-Internet cookery.

I was so busy Twittering I forgot about the cream, and it boiled over.

Leap, grab, cool. Aargh, aargh, aargh. But I seemed to have saved it – provided I could whisk the cream and get it into the mixture, fast.

I turned around to our host, Phil, and asked where the whisk was. He, to my abiding horror, pointed me to a hand whisk.

Toy game soldiers of to that nuts. It was time to unleash… our secret weapon.

Some say that he can maintain a 58 degree water bath – with the power of his mind. All we know is…

The cream was perfectly whipped – of course. We listened for the sound of the Not-Stig roaring away on his way to another cooking emergency, then mixed in the whipped cream, and poured the result into hemispherical moulds. well, the closest to hemispherical we had, which turned out to be cute little frog moulds. Less yoghurt Charlottes, more yoghurt McCartneys.

(Part 1)

So, about 6pm, we fired up the live stream, got a’twittering, fired up the TwitPic, and … promptly went shopping.

kamikazecookery Got to the supermarket. Realized we didn’t have a pen with which to cross off our million purchases. Job 1 : buy pen.

http://twitter.com/kamikazecookery/status/2006656847

Meanwhile, our charming viewers, bereft of our presence on the live chat, started a lively discussion as to which of our many ingredients we’d forget on our return. We scoffed, and headed deeper into the cyclopean expanse of the local 24-hour Tesco.

A sudden win – half-price blueberries – was followed by a loss – Tesco being out of all other soft fruit. Warning: Out Of Fruit Error. But everything else fell before the swathe of our mighty shopping prowess – until we hit the Fava Beans.

First question: WTF is a Fava Bean when it’s at home?

We assumed it was something terribly sophisticated, and possibly found in the “To Eat With Human Flesh” aisle. Our viewers quickly put us right.

marcmagus @kamikazecookery wikipedia says: Broad Bean, Fava Bean, Faba Bean, Field Bean, Bell Bean or Tic Bean

http://twitter.com/marcmagus/status/2006966296

We’d found ghee. We’d found chickpea flour (tip – also called “Gram Flour”, found in the speciality baking aisle). How hard could a feckin’ broad bean be?

Well, we checked the canned beans. No juice. More surprisingly, also no broad beans. We checked the dried beans. We checked the fresh beans. How many goddamn bean sections does this supermarket have? We checked the OTHER dried bean section. We asked a member of staff. She asked another member of staff.

And then Alex shouted “AHA!”, and it was indeed a mighty “AHA!”. See, it turns out…

Broad beans are in fact peas. According to Tesco.

So, one day down, and where have we got to on our live cooking extravaganza?

For those of you just tuning in: for our first live streamed event, we’ve decided to attempt to make not one but two massive three-Michelin-star style recipes, in a normal kitchen, using the full power of Alex and my Mad Cookery Skillz. AND we’ve decided to do the entire thing live on the Internet – for all of the ways you can watch the second half tonight, see our earlier post.

The US contender for our recipe is Cream of Blueberry Soup with Yoghurt Charlottes", from Thomas “I was the cooking consultant on Ratotuille, you know” Keller, maestro of the French Laundry, regularly rated as one of the best restaurants in the world. We’re cooking from his "French Laundry Cookbook.

Meanwhile, in the blue corner, the plucky contender is Perfect Chicken Tikka Masala" from Heston “I once cooked an entire pig sous-vide” Blumenthal, ex-repo man and proprietor of the "Fat Duck, which is not only another contender for the best restaurant in the world but also more or less the reason Kamikaze Cookery exists. This recipe isn’t from his restaurant, but from his book Further Adventures In Search Of Perfection.

As a backup, in case we found both recipes too easy, we also had the “Emergency Ravioli”, aka the “Fava Bean Angolotti with Curry Emulsion” from Thomas Keller’s book. We were going to leave it up to our noble viewers to decide if we needed to undertake that additional challenge. Guess what they chose, the bastards?