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We’re off to shop right now, but we have the … IPHONE!!!!! … so if you comment here, we’ll pick it up and reply either then or later.

So, we’ve assembled our shopping list for the KKC shopping trip in about two hours’ time. And it’s, you know, nice and short…

We’re a bit worried about a couple of things. So, rather than do our usual thing of making it up and then having a million people tell us that no, it isn’t a blender, we’re going to get all KKC Live and ask!

1) 1.5 pints of blueberries – how many blueberries is that? This one’s from the French Laundry. I mean, I guess we could take a pint jug along to the supermarket, but I can’t imagine they’ll be too happy with us opening packets of berries up and pouring them in…

2) Chickpea flour looks like it’s going to be a pain in the ass to get. Should we just get some chickpeas, something heavy, and a hairdryer?

—-

160g Table Salt
8 chicken thighs
6 bulbs of garlic
250g olive oil
200g root ginger
100g Coriander seeds
100g cinnamon sticks
75g black peppercorns
25g cloves
20g mace
5 dried bay leaves
450g greek yoghurt
50g whole cashews
1 kg vine-ripened tomatoes
2 large onions
40g tomato puree
Fenugreek
Tumeric
1 tin coconut milk
1 green chilli
750g self-raising flour
20g sugar
6g baking powder
1l whole milk
100g whole eggs
12 more eggs
8 oz all-purpose flour
2 lb fava beans
100g marscapone
Curry powder
8 spring onions
Fresh veg stock
600ml double cream
100ml Creme Fraiche
Unsalted butter
Pack of sugar
Gelatin
300ml yoghurt
Vanilla bean
1 pint raspberries
1 pint strawberries
Mint
3 oz blanched almonds
Cornflour
Small bottle Sav Blanc or similar dry white
1 unwaxed lemon
1.5 pints blueberries

65g green cardamom pods
35g black cardamom pods
130g cumin seeds
200ml ish ghee
25g chickpea flour
10g Kashmiri Chilli powder
20g dried melon seeds
5g coriander seeds

We have the technology! Here are all the streams that we’re going to be using to communicate tonight:

Twitter: Follow kamikazecookery on Twitter. This is going to be our main feed for the entire thing – if you want to know everything that’s going on, check here. We’ll be highlighting our blog posts, our pictures, our vids, our audio and everything else, as well as posting whenever anything interesting happens.

YouTube: Video pieces will be going up on the Kamikaze Cookery YouTube Channel , straight from our exciting new solid-state camera. Don’t expect fine editing, but it’s the best way to get a look at what we’re doing, live (well, almost) and in colour.

UStream: If you want the full-on Big Brother experience, we’ll be attempting to run a live Webcam stream over at Ustream. We understand you can comment live on it and all sorts of other interesting things.

Audioboo: Probably a lot more frequently than the video, we’ll be recording little audio clips of our progress with the stonking new audio-miniblogging device Audioboo. We’ve already started, so go check us out!

Blogging: Whenever we get the chance, we’ll get out of the micro- and into the actual-blogging on this very site.

Pictures: Our Special Mystery Guests will be taking pictures throughout the evening – we’ll be posting them on the Twitter feed via the miracle of Twitpic

This is very much an experiment, so we don’t know quite how it’s going to go or what will happen. But it’ll be fun finding out!

Join us in just over two hours… and counting!

And of course, this is an interactive event – indeed, that’s the interesting part for us. So, please do blog/comment/twitter/pic right back at us, and we’ll respond … in real time.

OK, now I have an idea for a cooking show featuring Jack Bauer.

Yep, we’ve planned our first Kamikaze Cookery Live event, and we’ll be pitting two three-star chef recipes against each other and Alex and I as the normal (ish) people.

We’re going to be attempting to live-cook Cream of Blueberry Soup with Yoghurt Charlotte (from the French Laundry Cookbook) and Perfect Chicken Tikka Marsala (from More Adventures in Search of Perfection) over the 12 hours of our Live adventure. So tune in here or on Twitter tomorrow (continuing Wednesday), as we start what’s sure to be a series of misadventures and mishaps.

We have to build a home-made tandoor, for pity’s sake.

What could possibly go wrong?

UPDATE – We’ve also decided to add another possible dish, just in case there’s not enough going excitingly wrong. So, be sure to watch for the appearance of the Emergency Ravioli (as it has been christened).

If you’re interested in starting cooking sous-vide, and you’re in the UK, you might find this new offer from bargain supermarket Lidl interesting.

It’s a vacuum-sealing device for £19 – a lot less than the £60 or so you can expect to pay even second-hand for a FoodSaver.

No word on the temperature-stability of the bags, sadly – anyone know more?

Thanks to friend-of-the-blog Nojay for that one.

OK, the Kamikaze Cookery Live Event is coming to an Intertube near you, soon!

Yep, a week today, Alex and I will start on our first live test event. We’ll be taking a semi-Normal Person Vs format, as we attempt to cook a recipe from either Heston Blumenthal’s In Search Of Perfection series, or something from the French Laundry cookbook, and we’ll video, Twitter, blog, live stream, and Flickr our way through the entire thing.

More details soon! So, join us next week, on the evenings of the 2nd and 3rd as we boldly venture into new territory of ambitious-but-rubbish cookery – LIVE! Any questions or suggestions, ask ’em below!

KKC Live #1 – Tuesday 2nd of June and Wednesday 3rd of June from 7pm BST (1pm EST, 10am PST) until about 2am BST (8pm EST, 5pm PST). Be there!

Ok, we know what we’re going to do next. And it’s a bit different!

We’re going to take a project that we’d normally cover in the show – probably a Normal Person vs, perhaps the long-awaited Us Vs Heston Blumenthal – but rather than do it, shoot it, edit it, and let you see the results some months later, we’re going to try something a bit scary.

We’re going to show it to you live.

Yep, Kamikaze Cookery will be going live some time this month. We’ll let you know when it’s going to be – probably, if we’re doing something Hestonalicious, it’ll be over a couple of weekday evenings.

What we’ll do is:

• Twitter. We’ve just set up a Twitter feed, and as we cook, we’ll Twitter everything that goes wrong – erm, I mean “on”. Goes on.
• Flickr. We’ll have a cameraperson there and we’ll be firing cool images up – of food, of FAIL, of frantic cooking – as we have them.
• Video. Yep, you won’t be able to escape our ugly mugs. Expect to hear from us pretty regularly, talking about the science, arguing about the task, and possibly running screaming from a flaming kitchen. We might even have some animation for you…
• Blogs. We’ll blog how it’s going as we have the time.
• Webcam. For the hardcore, we’ll also set up a webcam, so you can watch the entire thing as we cook.

So – how does that sound? We’re really excited about it – it means we can have a lot more interaction with people, we can tackle longer or harder subjects, we can do Proper Testing™, and we can argue about the difference between a blender and a food processor . It’s also going to mean less months of post-processing, which means more Kamikaze Cookery, faster.

Also – any ideas for what we should do? We’re definitely thinking Kamikaze Cookery vs the most complicated Heston Blumenthal (or maybe Thomas Keller) we can find, but we’re not fixed on that yet…

So, what’s going on with Kamikaze Cookery, then?

We’ve gone a bit quieter lately, as you’ve probably noticed. That’s a) because I’m on holiday, and b) because we’re starting to ramp up for the next KKC release.

The next KKC release(es) won’t be another series, but a special feature, somewhere between one to three parts. We’re aiming to shoot it in May or early June, and it should be with you pretty soon after.

We’ve also been looking into prettiness – I’ve got a new camera, the rather wonderful HF-10 from Canon, which will bring our shooting technology into the 21st century from the late ‘90s where our last camera left us, and we’ve got an agreement to borrow some lighting kit, so everything should look a lot prettier.

As far as format goes, we’re looking at making each episode shorter, which should reduce the workload, and also increase our viewership. The big problem with KKC at the moment is that it’s basically a full-time job for about 4 months to produce the scale of series we did for Season 0, and whilst our viewers are all, without exception, lovely, they’re also not numerous enough to support that financially! We’d need about 10-20 times more viewers to support that level of production.

In addition, we’ve all got other projects (which has been the reason for the quiet patch, too). Notably, I’m (as the editor and director) engaged in developing a bunch of different technology for the day job at the moment, and we’re intending to start on a new series there soon, so once again, that cuts into KKC time.

So we’re not entirely sure what’s going to happen series-wise. Our current plan is to make a “special” in May and see how it goes! Hopefully the additional quality will get us a whole bunch of new viewers, and we can see what happens from there.

(In other news, we’ll also be releasing the second DVD from Season One at the same time, with the usual commentary and extra material).

So, that’s what’s up! If we blog infrequently in the next while, it’s because time that could have been blogging time is going into production – we’ll try and get you some stills, some concept stuff, some ideas of what we’re working on, as soon as possible!

Let us know if you have any ideas for increasing our audience or making the series faster – we’d like to make more!

I’m on holiday right now, hence the paucity of posts, but I had to share this one with you.

Longtime readers may be aware that I’m somewhat obsessed with finding the perfect way to cook a soft-boiled egg. I’ve had one virtually every day for breakfast for years, so there’s something of a payoff for me there.

Now Martin “Khymos” Lersch has written a huge and fascinating post on the subject. I’m going to be spending some time testing next week, I think…

• Every so often, Ideas In Food come up with a really cracking concept. Here’s their latest one – curing meat and fish using roasted coffee beans . I HAVE to try this.

• Fresh meat with a shelf-life of 3 months? 100% microbacterial destruction at room temperature? I may get around to writing an entire article on the implications of high pressure pasturisation , but for now, marvel at the concept!

• Do copper bowls actually help when whisking eggs? Yup! The copper helps the sulphur bonds tighten – and apparently is perfectly safe due to only being incorporated into the egg in tiny amounts. (Which makes sense – otherwise well-used copper bowls would end up with a hole in the bottom). Apparently a tiny pinch of a health-food copper supplement will do the same trick.

• Please do realise that when following suggestions from Kamikaze Cookery, you’re often following advice from this man:

Photography by Erin Hardee, who has also done some rather wonderful lightbox food photography

At work yesterday, in my Undisclosed Hotel, we had a three-course lunch served in the Lavish Victorian Dining Room. We don’t usually do lunches and everything was a bit hectic. I stayed out of the kitchen, for once, and concentrated on doing front-of-house things. Mostly this involved wandering around with a bottle of wine in each hand: flashbacks of the previous night.

When it came to the dessert course, I was asked by a nice old gentleman what these things were. I told him they were crème brûlées. Then I was asked what a crème brûlée was.

I happen to know quite a bit about crème brûlées, and, since I was in customer-service mode, instantly launched into “Well, invented at Trinity College Cambridge in the eighteenth century…”

I didn’t get asked any more questions that day.

Today, randomly, I was asked what the raspberry-growing season was in Scotland. I knew that one because of the Fife Diet, which took place at about this time last year. It’s surprising what you pick up.

As you may have noticed, we’re running a bit low on things we urgently want to blog about over here. So, in the spirit of the Web being a conversation, we thought we’d ask you:

What’s interesting that’s going on in science, food and cooking right now? What should we be learning about, experimenting with, looking into? What’s inspired you lately?

I love my sous-vide cooking. You may have figured this out by now. For reasons why I love cooking stuff sealed in vacuum at precise temperatures, check out my previous article and the video. We’ll not go back over that stuff.

No, here I have one simple aim – to give you 10 quick tips to make your sous-vide better.

Let’s go.

Universal Tips

• Use kettle water to get to the right temperature This tip applies to all sous-vide, and it’s awesome. Don’t, whatever you do, start your sous-vide device from cold – instead, mix cold water with hot water from a kettle until you’re at about the right temperature. It’s the easiest way to get stovepot/oven sous-vide right to start with, and it cuts half an hour minimum off even the most pro SV setup.
• Seasoning for the win Particularly for red meat, I often just use salt and pepper as a seasoning. Season both sides of your steak, for example, with salt and pepper, then vacuum-seal it. The results are just stunning – far nicer than unseasoned meat, and insanely simple. More complex seasonings will really come out in sous-vide, and are very much worth doing – although it’s sometimes a bit random what will be absorbed and what won’t be. Garlic doesn’t seem to get particularly strongly absorbed into most meats, whilst I’m told fresh thyme can easily become overpowering. Butter works great with everything. Experiment.
• Cheat’s chamber sealer You might think that you can’t use liquid seasonings unless you freeze them or invest in a vacuum sealer. Actually, that’s not quite true. For starters, you can use the water seal technique below. You can also just brush meat with liquid, preferably reduced – whilst lots of liquid will get sucked out of a cheap vacuum sealer, liquid brushed onto a piece of meat seems not to be such a problem.
• Cook chicken legs at 75 Yes, I know that everyone else says you should cook a chicken leg at 62C-ish. They lie. Deboned, flattened chicken thigh can be quite nice at 63, as recommended by Thomas Keller, but if you’re cooking a bone-in or rolled leg, just cook the darn thing at 75 degrees (167 Fahrenheit). It’ll be less greasy, it’ll still be very tender, and it won’t have the worrying bloody-looking bits. Since chicken legs are pretty darn cheap, this is a Really Useful Tip. In general, after reading the science you’ll be tempted to cook at as low a temperature as possible. This is not always a good idea!
• Sear for longer than you think you need to This one’s a Thomas Keller tip. I used to have trouble getting a decent sear – despite a really hot pan, I just couldn’t get a good brown sear on my meat in what I thought was the maximum time of 30 seconds or so. Then I read Thomas Keller’s “Under Pressure”, where he advises in a lot of recipes to sear the sous-vided meat for two minutes on each side. Seems like far too long? Well, it seems to work pretty damn well for most things. Give it a go and see what you think!

If you don’t have fancy kit

If you don’t have your very own circulator or even a controlled crockpot, these tips might well help:

• Stick the pot in the oven This one doesn’t apply if you’ve got an induction hob, or if you’re really good with your gas hob. Otherwise, the best temperature hold device you’ve got in your kitchen is almost certainly your oven, and it’s also the best-insulated, meaning that temperature changes will be really gradual. Get the biggest pot you can, get it to approximately the right temperature, and stick it in the oven with a probe thermometer in it and the oven on a really low setting. Then check it every 10 minutes and put the oven up a bit (a SMALL bit) or down a bit appropriately.
• Water is an excellent vacuum sealer Thanks to Martin for this idea – if you’re having trouble sealing your bags, or you don’t want to suck on chicken juice, stick your seasoned meat in a freezer bag, then push the meat and bag into the water, keeping the opening above the water. The pressure of the water will neatly push all the air out of the bag, and you can carefully seal it.
• Simple stuff Stuff that works really well cooked sous-vide in a pot and doesn’t take too long includes salmon (make sure it’s uber-fresh) and tuna, steak (gorgeous), chicken legs (see my tip above about cooking temperature) and theoretically pork steak, although I’ve not tried that.

If you’re thinking of investing some cash or already have

• Foodsaver and crockpot works perfectly well Nutters like me might buy proper water baths, but over a year of cooking tells me that something like a Sous-Vide Magic box plus a rice cooker or crockpot(aka a slow cooker, British people) and a FoodSaver works perfectly well to cook Sous-Vide.
• Remember, you can cook from frozen If you’re considering whether to spend money, this one might tip you over the edge. You may not have considered just how handy it would be to just be able to pick a piece of meat from the freezer and cook it straight off – if you’re like me, you never get around to defrosting meat as you’re meant to over a 24-hour period. Having a sous-vide cooker almost turns any frozen meat into a ready meal – it’s fantastic. You can also cook-chill, of course, which really does turn anything you cook into a home-made ready meal.
• Uncirculated baths appear to be a LOT quieter This one comes from discussion on the comments thread last post – comparing Martin’s water circulator with my unstirred bath, it appears that a major unheralded advantage of an unstirred bath is that it’s much, much quieter. Also, a bath that comes with a proper lid loses a lot less water. Both points to consider!
• Long-term cooking for the win Now that you’ve got an automated bath, you can play with the most fun elements of sous-vide – fun, and convenient too. Stick the bath on just before you go to bed, and put in some beef shin, some mutton, a duck leg, some pork belly. Leave for 20 hours and you’ll have a totally unique cooked meat sensation waiting for you. And it’ll be really cheap to boot. And you can just keep the meat frozen and cook it whenever you like, because with that cooking time, the defrost won’t be a problem.

UPDATE

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I’ve not done a sous vide post for a while, as you may have noticed. Now, you might have thought that was because I’d abandoned this silly cooking things in plastic fad.

You’d be wrong. In fact, these days I’m using sous vide at home almost daily.

Let’s back up a bit. What’s sous vide? Well, we explain it in our first ever episode, in fact – basically, it’s cooking using a water bath whose temperature is very precisely controlled to ensure that the reactions – and only the reactions – that you want to happen in your food actually take place. You don’t want all the water to be squeezed out of your steak, so you cook at a temperature where that won’t happen. But you do want the bacteria to die and the meat to be tenderised by the proteins breaking down, so you cook it hot enough for that to happen.

There’s lots of science and practical stuff, and it’s all very fascinating, and I recommend Douglas “I’ve been interviewed on Khymos now” Baldwin’s superb guide to the topic if you want to know more.

Most professional cooks using sous-vide will use laboratory water baths, but they cost a lot of money, so home cooks tend to either use a big pot of water and a thermometer or an improvised/cheaper sous vide water bath made with temperature controllers or an Arduino and rice cookers. And that’s the way I’d been doing sous-vide, on and off, for a year or so. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass, though – you can cook that way, but the slow cooker I was using took about 3 hours to reach the right temperature, so I didn’t exactly use it daily.

However, in December, I finally got fed up. I wanted to use sous-vide more, and I wanted to cook stuff without worrying I’d hit the wrong temperature. So,(Puts Clarkson voice on) I found this on the Internet:

That’s a full-on commercial dual waterbath. It’s not cheap, for £1000-ish (post-haggling) orders of not cheap. But it has finally allowed me to incorporate sous-vide, more or less, into my daily routine.

Is it worth it? Is sous-vide actually usable enough day-to-day that it’s worth spending that much money? Well…

“why use high-quality ingredients and corrupt them with chemistry?”

- Johnathan Benno, Per Se

So, I guess you’ll only be serving raw food from now on, Mr Benno? Without salt?

(Longer blog post about sous-vide in day-to-day life coming soon – I’m on deadline on another project, which is delaying things.)