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We often get praise for our sarcastic, British attitude to food. Well, sometimes, anyway. OK, that one time.

But we’re not the only sarcastic British people who eat. Indeed, we’re not even the most sarcastic British non-Breatharian people on the Great Intertubes.

I commend to your attention, for example, “Very Good Taste”‘s post on teamaking . The writer, Andrew, has recently moved to Canada, and whilst I understand he’s actually rather enjoying it, like any decent Brit he’s not letting that stand in the way of a good rant. And this is a very good rant.

If you want to hear about some sublimely silly tea-making gadgetry (yes, OK, I did kinda want one), read and enjoy.

Ok, that’s our CAPTCHA upgraded. With any luck it’ll keep the spammers out for a while.

Sorry about that pile o’ spam, and thanks for keeping going with all the great comments and suggestions whilst the Viagra was piling on.

It seems to be a month of running across tips for cooking vegetables in new, interesting and scientific ways.

First up, I finally got around to testing out the New York Times’ “The Minmalist” column on microwaves, in which he alleges that they’re arguably the best way ever to cook vegetables. And, indeed, he’s not lying.

Cooking a bundle of asparagus on a plate with a little water and a cling-film covering, after two minutes they were intensely flavoured, fully cooked, but still incredibly crunchy, as opposed to the slightly droopy asparagus that you’ll often get boiling or steaming. Try it – it works. I’m trying aubergine next.

Secondly, Paul’s blog article on mashed potatoes produced some very useful discussion, including a tip from the Lab Cat -

You can make your potatoes more floury by storing in the fridge before using them. The cold temperature causes the starch to be converted to sugar so they taste sweeter too. This conversion is, as far as I know, reversible.

It’s stuff like this that makes me think that molecular gastronomy still has a long way to go before the plateau of productivity. I never knew that. I know there are interesting reactions that happen with tomatoes in the fridge (don’t put tomatoes in the fridge. It deactivates a lot of flavour compounds). What else hasn’t been widely spread? What other complex chemical reactions in food are we still to discover, that we can use for day-to-day cooking? There’s a lot more than spheres and foams out there.

Finally, the lovely people from Ideas in Food have been experimenting with green vegetables and the cooking therof, with the exciting result that it’s possible (more or less) to cook green veg sous-vide without losing the green colour. Very cool. Check out their experimentation – you don’t even need a water bath.

I hope everyone had a good Burns’ Night. It’s another one of those festivals I’ve never really understood. We don’t have a Shakespeare night or an Orwell night or a Joss Whedon Night. Instead, we celebrate a faintly-mediocre poet who couldn’t spell. A poet whose sole contribution to society was to sell out millennia of rich Scottish history and culture for personal gain, and the direct cause of the fact that the entire planet now thinks that we’re a race of skirt-wearing offal-munchers who can’t talk properly. I hope that, at least, the readers of this blog are aware that there is much more to Scottish culture than just Rabbie Burns.

This week, the demigodlike A A Gill tells us that ``cynicism is the luxury of a gluttonously overindulged society‘’, and that in these belt-tightening times, the world turns en masse to simpler, non-ironic pleasures, such as steak. Cynicism dead? That’s me fucked then. And there’s a subtler implication that gastro-pretension is on the way out too, which raises questions for the future of molecular gastronomy.

Molecular gastronomy is, it has to be said, a very indulgent practice, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but indulgence is going out of style. It’s shortly going to be terribly declassé to flaunt the fact that you have enough money to pay someone to slow-braise an entire pig for eighteen hours so that it’s just right. And when that day comes, I will be waiting with my slow-cooker, my collection of 1970s cookbooks, and a smug grin. They always come back to me in the end.

Perhaps the rot has begun already. I bought a bag of ratte potatoes at the Farmer’s Market this week. Theyr’e a very waxy kind of new potato, brilliant for boiling, but not all that useful for much else. The chap on the stall told me that “the Michelin chefs” (all of them, as a group, apparently) mash them in a 1:1 ratio with butter. I gave him a look and observed that, if I’d wanted mash, I would have bought different potatoes.

Seriously. Fifty per cent butter? That’s expensive. My initial thought wasn’t that it’s nice for them as can afford it, but just that it’s a terrible waste of good butter when you could just use potatoes suitable for mashing instead.

I’m still going to give it a go, of course, but only on a couple of the smaller spuds. It’s going to be an experiment, not a meal.

What does everyone else think? Does the credit crunch sound the death knell for innovative cuisine? Is it such a bad thing if it does? Or is a steak maybe not the harbinger A A Gill thinks it is?

I’m currently thinking out a big post on the difference between enjoying food and enjoying cooking, which will probably arrive next week. In the meantime, though, I’ve been making some revelatory discoveries – convenience foods which are actually good!

The entire thing started when I discovered the Freshly Frozen Company’s boil-in-the-bag lamb shanks, which they claim to have been “slow cooked”, and which arrive vacuum sealed in a temperature-safe bag. Hmm. Cooked slowly in a sealed bag then frozen. Could it be…

Yep, I’m pretty sure that this stuff is basically sous-vide lamb shank, available to buy and eat whether you’ve got a water bath or not. And it’s gorgeous. The meat’s tender but still juicy, falls off the bone, is full of flavour, and the sauce is rich, thick and tasty. I’d prefer a slightly larger shank, and there’s generally too much sauce, but honestly, for zero-hassle food, this is pretty staggering – and you can microwave it in about 16 minutes.

They aren’t full of terrifying additives either – just xanthan gum, a couple of modified starches, and an acidity regulator I don’t recognise but looks to do roughly the same job as Sodium Citrate.

(Buy ’em from Sainsburys in the UK – anyone know a US supplier?)

Second up, a friend of mine recommended porridge as an excellent way to start the day. My historical hatred of the stuff seems to have faded, and I was getting a bit tired of breakfasts consisting of two eggs and whatever cold meat was in the fridge (largely because eating two eggs and a pack of ham every day is expensive), so I ventured out to see what Progress had wrought.

And I discovered one of the best-designed convenience foods ever.

See, Quaker Oats have apparently been moving with the times. And since their product line is pretty simple (In that it’s "oats"), they’ve obviously had time to think about their market. Enter… the oat packet.

Small waxed packet of oats. Tear it open, dump into a bowl, fill the packet with milk (yes, it’s waterproof and designed to be exactly the right size so that you don’t need to find a measuring container), dump that in the bowl too, and microwave for just under 3 minutes.

Hot, filling, tasty breakfast. Incredibly filling, actually – to the point where I’ve nearly forgotten to eat lunch a couple of times since starting eating them. No additives at all apart from soya lecitin, which apparently stops it all boiling over in the microwave (they actually tell you this on the packet – handy tip!). 20 packs for £2.95.

And finally, that old favourite of penniless grad students and film directors – ramen. I became rather familiar with ramen a few years ago when I decided for various complicated reasons to cut wheat out of my diet for a bit. However, not all ramen are created equal.

A knowledgable friend of mine tells me that the quality of ramen can easily be determined by the number of different packets of sauce and flavouring you get with the noodles. One packet – bad. (Mmm, Supernoodles). Two packets – OK. Four packets? Well, that’s Indomie.

Mostly offering Indonesian-style dishes like Nasi Goreng, I was absolutely stunned at the taste of these 30p ramen when I discovered them a month or so ago.

They’re pretty heavy on the MSG, so if you dislike that you’re not going to be a fan, but otherwise they’re incredible. Fry an egg and some vegetables to go with them, and you’ve got a dish that you probably couldn’t tell came from a ramen packet. In five minutes. For a decent lunch. For 30p.

There’s some damn good convenience food out there these days. Anything you’d recommend? Or are there things out there you’d recommend that we avoid at all costs, instead?

Aargh, we seem to be under heavy assault from the viagra spammers. I’m (more or less, technically) on holiday this week, so a decent fix will have to wait a few days, but I’ll keep picking ’em up.

Time for a quick bit of recommendation, I think…

Martin “Khymos” Lersch has been off learning from top chefs at the Flemish Primitives (Weird name, but sounds great). His three posts so far (Post 1 – Nicholas Kurti, general summaries and a book recommendation, Post 2 – weird-ass chocolate and Post 3 – Martin blogs about Heston Blumenthal’s talk and I become extremely jealous) are all fascinating stuff.

There’s a fun new blog just talking about sous-vide over at sousvide.info . They’re discussing recipes, where to source equipment, and more – interesting stuff.

Lab Cat is a great blog I’ve just started following, from a food scientist specialising in shelf-life studies. It’s a mixture of food science and a fair bit of knitting and other stuff, but the food science posts are really worth reading.

Herve This, the author of “Molecular Gastronomy”, has just started blogging! Unfortunately, it’s in French. Still, he’s the man, and Google does a just-about-readable translation

Finally, Spiteful Chef isn’t particularly molecular gastronomy-ey at all, but it IS very entertaining indeed. She’s training to be a professional chef, and her blog mixes food experiments, lovely photography, and lots of extremely honest, funny, and occasionally angry-making discussion of what it’s like to train as a pro at what sounds like a brutally hard school.

So, that longer post I mentioned on the Current Plan for KKC, and KKC Season 1.

Obviously, we’re slowing up blogging a bit at the moment – I’d expect us to be blogging about twice a week for the forseeable future.

I’m currently working out how I’m going to balance Kamikaze Cookery against my other work. Last year was a year off from animation for me, hence the fact I was working full-time on KKCook for about 3 months, but this year I’ve got to balance the two.

We’re also discussing what we’re going to do with KKC in terms of format (a few people have suggested that shorter episodes might work well), alternative events (we’re planning to do some live stuff, and some very Web 2.0 blogging/twittering/Flickring/YouTubing stuff, which you might see in the next month or so), and of course what episodes we’ll shoot. (I’ll be asking about episode ideas in the next couple of weeks).

We’ll also be doing tech tests – we want to bring our game up a lot on any episodes we shoot, so that means fixing the wobblycam, improving the lighting and sound a lot, practising our presenting, and so on. We’ll post any tests we think might be interesting!

Obviously, we’ll also bring out the second half of Season 0 as a DVD at some point soon – stay tuned!

So, basically – we’re planning right now. I would think that Season 1 will be a while in the making – I wouldn’t expect to see anything in the way of a new season from us for a few months yet. However, whenever it arrives, I’m pretty sure it’ll be awesome – partially thanks to everyone’s help and feedback.

Thanks, guys. Keep watching the skies.

They do tricks.

I love PETA. They’re less fond of me, obviously, because I keep eating things that they believe should run wild and free as a part of the natural, beautiful cycle of life, dying only of starvation, horrible diseases, or being chased down and having their throat and hamstrings ripped out by predators. But, nonetheless, they’re wonderful, wonderful people, partially because for a long time you could annoy them by “accidentally” linking to their acronym-sharing cousins People Eating Tasty Animals instead, but also because they rival The Onion for the best satire on the planet.

Most recently, they’re campaigning to rename something. Well, many somethings, actually. Fish.

According to their hilarious website, “People don’t seem to like fish. When your name can also be used as a verb that means driving a hook through your head, it’s time for a serious image makeover. And who could possibly want to put a hook through a”…

Wait for it.

“Sea Kitten?”

No, really. They’re serious about this . They have a campaign website and everything. (They even have a storybook which I recommend as one of the greatest works of literary genius of the century.)

I heartily applaud their efforts, and would like to encourage them to continue attempting to rename sea-dwelling non-mammal, non-crustaceans for as long as possible, because I like a good laugh.

Therefore, in support of their work, I present a brief guide to cooking and eating the many delicious types of kitten that can be found in the waters of the world.

Basics of cooking kitten

Personally, I cook most kittens around 57 (134 F-ish) degrees, sous-vide, often for quite a short time. Some dense-fleshed kittens, particularly tuna-kitten and salmokitten, are absolutely gorgeous when cooked a lot lower than that – about 42-46 (Approx. 110 F, I think) degrees Centigrade, depending on who you ask. Heston Blumenthal has had kitten on the tasting menu at the Fat Duck for years cooked around this temperature. I’ve tried his confit kitten wrapped in licorice, and it was stunning – a texture almost like raw kitten, but with a cooked taste and softness, reminding me a lot of the texture of well-smoked kitten.

The science behind all this – kitten flesh has a slightly different and more delicate protein base than other meats. Kitten flesh has less collagen and more heat-sensitive proteins, meaning that it starts to shrink at 50 degrees as the proteins coagulate and starts seriously drying out at 60 degrees.

Cooking techniques

Most famously, kitten is fried or poached, but it responds well to a wide variety of techniques. Fried kitten will develop browned sides from the Maillard reactions, giving it the lovely meaty crunchy tastes – I’ve been frying kitten fillets by turning them every minute or so, which ensures that the kitten flesh is much more evenly cooked, and avoids drying anything out.

I absolutely adore poached kitten – hold the water at 45-ish (110-ish) or 55-ish (130-ish) depending on your tastes and the breed of kitten you’re cooking, and you’ll get a tremendously soft, flakey texture. Whilst it technically shouldn’t work, I’ve had amazing sole-kitten cooked around 49 degrees (119 F-ish). Flavouring the water can work wonders – whilst a court-bouillion isn’t as vital as if you’re cooking low-quality puppy¹, you can still infuse the flesh with amazing aromas.

Confit kitten also works stunningly well – it’s the technique Heston Blumenthal uses for his licorice-wrapped kitten. Hold oil – he uses olive oil, but you can use sunflower oil too, you just won’t get the delicate flavouring – at the appropriate temperature, immerse the kitten fully in the oil, and cook slowly for an hour or so. I’ve cooked salmon-kitten at 45 for about an hour in oil, and the results were astonishing – meltingly soft and intensely flavoured.

Obviously, sous-vide works exceptionally well with kitten too – particularly so if you marinade or otherwise season your kitten. Most recently, I cooked a monkkitten tail at 57 degrees (135 F) with kaffir lime leaves and lemongrass, and it came out succulent, juicy, delicately flavoured, and distinctly reminiscent of freshly-killed Easter Bunny².

Finally, you can serve kitten raw, of course. If you’ve not tried making sushi, I highly recommend a sushi party – just get yourself some avocado, some cucumber, some rolling mats, make up some sushi rice, and buy a selection of kitten meat. Red kittens tend to work better in sushi than white ones, and I must say that I find eating very oily white kitten meat raw is just horrible. But it’s a great idea for a party – entertaining, tasty, and a great way to do something together with your friends, particularly if they love kittens too.

Cuts

I must admit, I don’t know too much about the individual cuts available on kittens – can anyone enlighten me?

I should mention, however, that kitten cheeks have long been considered a delicacy. Cod-kitten and monkkitten in particular have succulent cheeks. Unfortunately, they’re very expensive.

Kitten safety

Contrary to popular belief, kittens can carry a bunch of fairly unpleasant bacteria – particularly botulinus, which means that you should be super-careful if you’re canning or pickling your kitten (sous-vide cooking times won’t be long enough to carry a significant risk, to the best of my knowledge). The USDA does list kitten as one of the foods that it’s allowable to serve below pasturisation temperatures, however, provided you’re not serving to old people, very young people, or otherwise immune-compromised people, so you’re not in instant-vomiting territory if you decide to venture into lower-temperature or uncooked kitten. However, eat it as fresh as possible, and refrigerate well – tuna-kitten, mackkitten, herringkitten and sardineokitten, in particular, can accumulate an otherwise harmless bacterium which can cause reactions similar to allergies.

Kittens also tend to accumulate mercury and other heavy metals. These aren’t eliminated by cooking, and so it’s best not to eat kittens that aren’t farmed or from the open ocean in relatively small amounts.

Any other kitten tips?

And that’s it for this quick guide! If you love eating kitten flesh, and you’ve got any tips on how best to prepare or serve kitten after you’ve killed it, comment below!

¹ By which I mean chicken.

² Known in less enlightened times as lobster

Here’s hoping everyone had a fantastic break over the festive season. For me, the New Year feels like the Old Year already. It’s time to get back to work.

One of the presents I got for Giftmas—actually, now I come to think about it, the only one—was a kitchen gadget I never knew I needed. My thoughts on the Mockney Prat are on record, so I can’t help wondering if this was a joke present. Jamie Oliver’s face gurned out at me from the box accompanied only by the words “Flavour Shaker” and a vaguely suggestive glimpse of a strange egg-shaped plastic thing while I tried to work out what, exactly, it was I was saying thank you for.

It turns out that the Flava Shaka is for crushing, grinding and mixing spices and other ancillary ingredients. The humble mortar and pestle is, it would seem, insufficient for Jamie’s needs. You put the stuff you want to be mixed into the plastic bauble along with a heavy ceramic ball, screw it closed, and then shake it all up—making a horrendous rattling noise in the process, terrifying one’s unsuspecting partner when she’s trying to do the dishes. (Experiences with the Flava Shaka may vary.)

It’s actually rather clever. The plastic bauble has a fat end and a narrower one, so you can pound things coarsely by holding it one way up and then turn it over to get a finer grain. This at least is the theory, although it seems to me that since you shake it with an up-and-down motion, the ball is going to be impacting against stuff at both ends of the bauble whichever way up you hold it. I confess that I haven’t made any detailed studies of the relative velocities of partially-ground spices and heavy ceramic spheres in an agitated environment. Perhaps Jamie has.

Recommended in the booklet—and in many other recipes on the Flava Shaka website—are various rubs and marinades. Since it’s not only the festive season, it’s cold-and-flu season as well, I’ve been using it mostly to grind cloves and peppercorns to add zing to the gallons of chicken soup I’ve been drinking over the last few weeks. I did also make a fantastic maple-honey-mustard gravy for an impromptu late-Giftmas dinner. It’s encouraged me to buy mustard seeds, and a few other things, which can only be a good thing.

Technically speaking, the Flava Shaka doesn’t do anything that a mortar and pestle doesn’t already do. But it’s nice and neat and tidy, it makes just the right amount of stuff with no mess, and I calculate that it’s about 138% more fun than a mortar and pestle. It’s also about 300 per cent noisier, so it’s not suitable for late-night fryups when your flatmate is asleep. Caveat emptor.

Very handy, and it’s good for encouraging oneself to mix together things one might otherwise not get around to mixing—which is what cookery is all about.

You can buy the Flava Shaka here.

I’m working on my postmortem on Series 0 today, preparing for figuring out our next steps.

As such, I wonder if you guys could give me a bit of help?

1) What were your favourite two episodes?
2) What were your least favourite two episodes?
3) What would you say was our biggest weakness in the series (feel free to list more than one)?
4) What are our biggest strengths, do you think?

Please do comment, and thanks in advance!

In celebration of the fact that we’re now slightly further into the Future than we were a while ago, I’ve decided to write a short series about Foodie Developments Of The Future. Part 1 – Cloned Meat.

Sooner or later, it would seem very likely that we’ll develop the technology to clone meat from cells, rather than hacking it from the corpses of dead animals. (That lovely image brought to you by…). But what are the implications of that?

Well, first of all, you’ve got the likely source of the cloning technology. The people furthest down this particular road right now aren’t foodies, they’re medics – cloned organs will be huge business if they’re possible. Medical trials have already been completed on, erm, bladders – according to Wikipedia," In April 2006, scientists reported a successful trial of seven bladders grown in-vitro and given to humans "

So the first meat that we can clone in the lab is likely to be human. But it won’t have come from a human – it’ll be entirely artificial. And if vegans would be prepared to eat vat-grown bacon, why can’t everyone dine on a nice bit of well-cooked long pig?

The vegan issue is going to be another huge can of worms, of course. Is vat-grown meat vegetarian-friendly? We’ll see another splitting of the veggie movements, as those who don’t eat meat for religious reasons or because they just don’t like it are split by the test-tube from those who won’t eat meat from killed animals, but are perfectly happy to eat the stuff that’s had exactly as much conciousness as tofu.

In high-end restaurants, tuning the meat will be the concern. Initially, there’ll be a lot of resistance to totally even-textured, flat, boring meat. But as we start to learn how to tune the process, we’ll be able to dial up exactly the elements we want in a steak – a little bit of marbling, say, but not too much, and about .5% connective tissue…

Food poisoning concerns will be another massive change. There’s no reason why vat-grown beef should ever have e. coli, or chicken be filled with salmonella. Chicken sashimi, anyone?

All of which will have nothing on the results of the first lengthy conversation that someone like Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adria has with a cloning scientist.

After all, if we can tweak the meat and reproduce it, there’s no reason that we have to stick with meats that already exist. How about something with the texture of salmon but the deep meaty taste of venison? Something about half-way between crocodile and horse? Quail breast if the quail had been sixteen feet tall?

We’ll need names for these new meats, of course. Handily, there are some obvious ones readily available, and I’m sure someone with a fairytale sensibility like Dr Blumenthal will come up with the idea fairly quickly.

“New on the Fat Duck tasting menu 2021: Confit Unicorn rump steak with a cockatrice jus, served on a bed of…”

(Thanks to Charlie Stross for brainstorming up a lot of the ideas in this post)

A happy new year to all of you from everyone at KKC! Looking forward to lots of cool banter/cooking/science/bad plans in the new year!

(And yes, those will include “better spam filtering”)

It’s nearly time for the annual drinking and falling over fest here in Scotland, after which we’ll all attempt to remember a) the number of the year, and b) our names, addresses, and the reason we’re wearing a policeman’s helmet.

And that means it’s time for us at KKCook to think about future plans.

First, we want to think about the website and the way we deliver KKC. What would you like to see on here? We’ve already heard a few people mention a forum, so we’re looking into that. What else? Photo feeds? More Facebook stuff? Better spam filtering (actually, we’re definitely getting that anyway)? Other cool ideas to make us world-famous and popular?

Fire ’em off!

I’m actually on holiday with my folks here and not technically meant to be blogging, but I had to share this one with you all (although it’ll be of most use to our UK readers).

Sainsburys are currently selling a brilliant little double whisk thingy. It’s not a balloon whisk, but one of the old double interlocking whisk style. It’s great – electric, of course, five speeds, and I’ve used it tonight for a dinner party to whisk up eggs for a souffle (successful, I might add – thanks, Cooking for Engineers) and foam from lecithin.

It’s from Sainsbury’s Basics range.

Oh, and it costs £3.97.

Including VAT.

That’s less than the eggs I used it to whisk.

Need a whisk? Might as well get one, considering it costs about the same as a pint and a half of decent beer.

Isn’t that fantastic? Any similar bargains? Anything Stateside our US readers should know about?