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It all started with my early experiments in cooking. I was cooking, say, a curry, and I wouldn’t know what cumin, or paprika tasted. So I’d try it, maybe with a little salt, to test it.

Then one day, I found that I was tasting the seasoning without the need to cook anything, and then the floodgates opened; I became… an eater of seasonings.

I found that just about any combination was at least interesting, but some were particularly special; that old favourite, salt and pepper, maybe salt and chilli powder for a spicy flavour, or dry piri piri for a more complex, garlicy flavour. Then, I started getting more ambitious, I’d mix four, five or six seasonings at a time, producing a kaleidoscope of flavours, both striking and subtle.

I found that it wasn’t just dry seasonings which could be appreciated this way, unadulterated hoi-sin sauce was delicious, and a couple of drops of neat tobasco made a nice little pick-me up. Oh, and a good soy-sauce! That Umami touch on the middle of the tongue… it’s like nothing else.

Now, I know that this sort of behaviour could regarded as uncivilised, but don’t we eat our chips with our fingers these days? Are any of us really that civilised?

Those who eat spices come to know the herbs they eat. They gain a familiarity with each, which it would be hard to get from any full meal, and that knowledge can be tapped to make better food (or just better combinations of raw spices!).

So, I say to you, good people, do not be held back by tradition, or fear of the unknown. Do not be forced by the world around you to sully fine seasonings with lesser foods (such as anything else), but learn to enjoy them in their purest form; alone, unaccompanied and unadulterated!

(I cannot believe Hugh thought this was a good idea for a blog post (he does it too, you know))

It’s getting difficult to ignore the fact that the oil is running out. Most politics is based around the concept. It’s even creeping into popular culture now: a movie came out this week which I shall not spoiler for you, but about which there’s shortly going to be a rant on my personal blog. At the very least, we’re going to have to stop expecting to get cheap stuff packaged for us in Asia. What does this mean for food?

It’s odd how times change. I remember when locally-sourced food was a luxury item. Soon it’s going to be your only option.

Worse, and I’m showing my age now, I remember the organic fad. That was a laugh. They’d give you a tiny, withered, black carrot and charge you four times the price of the regular, healthy-looking, orange carrot right next to it. Somebody in Marketing took home a fat bonus for that idea. Over time, organic production methods improved, I presume. Either that or they just conveniently redefined the word “organic” to encompass “stuff that looks like real food even when you’ve washed the mud off it”. Either way, I like pesticides. Pesticides keep pests off things.

We latched onto locally-sourced food for all the wrong reasons, too. It’s local food for local people. It means we don’t have to give any money to those BLOODY FOREIGNERS. And some misguided bullshit about “Food Miles”, which we’re going to cover in an upcoming episode. It’s little wonder that the local-food movement is so strongly associated with the middle-class, Home Counties, Chelsea tractor-driving mentality that every Englishman I know tries to avoid. It’s parochial and insular: these are not qualities to trumpet, especially not if you live in the Home Counties and drive a Chelsea Tractor.

It’s a bloody good job for somebody that the food turned out to be so damn good. That’s a good enough reason on its own to champion local sourcing, and it means that it’s possible to do it without being a terrible human being. There’s also an argument that one should be proud of products of local origin, whether it’s food, or steel, or ideologies—but the problem, as ever, comes when you go too far and start excluding everything else. Sometimes I see people talking about locally-sourced produce and I wish they’d get off my side, because they’re making me look bad.

But the food is good. There are a lot of things I’m not looking forward to about the upcoming Malthusian catastrophe, but the bacon is going to be fantastic.

So, I’ve been away over the last week or so at a conference, and amongst the topics on discussion was, of course, Web 2.0.

Now, I’ve always been a little dubious – OK, all of the dubious – about the whole Web 2.0 moniker. (For anyone who’s not aware of what I’ve occasionally been known to refer to as “the Web 2.0 bollocks”, I recommend this summary). But one speaker at the conference, Sandeep Bakhshi, came up with the best description of Web 2.0 I’ve heard yet – " A system that gets better as people use it."

Another speaker there was Timo Vorensola, who directed the phenomenally popular and really cool Star Wreck: The Perkinning. It’s a feature film that he created by collaborating with literally thousands of people over the Internet, having them do everything from script suggestions to creating spaceships. (Virtual spaceships, I hasten to add.)

And all this got me thinking. What can things like that – massive collaboration, improvement through intelligent use of data and user feedback, The Interwebs – add to cooking?

I’ve already seen a little of what we could do from things like the TGWT competitions, in which a number of people work to develop dishes using ingredients that theoretically share aromatics and flavour compounds in common (and if you think that sounds wacky, I should point out that the Strawberry and Coriander foam that I won’t shut up about came from it), and from my experiment writing up the course of cooking a tasting menu, where the menu substantially changed as a result of suggestions from the people reading the writeup. But I’m sure there’s much more.

What about Open-Sourcing a menu, for example? Either a restaurant or an individual could take the Star Wreck approach, form a community or work within an existing one to develop an Open-Source tasting menu, or indeed entire restaurant menu. It’s not (quite) as insane as it sounds – after all, the Fat Duck has just published the recipes for its entire tasting menu of years past, so perhaps there’s less to fear from not keeping recipes secret than one might think. Have a forum, have people take tasks, small or large, whether that be sourcing the right place to get crockery, conducting controlled experiments to determine the perfect spice mix, or coming up with ideas for others to try. Then, just keep developing.

Or what about a Wikified recipe site? There are dozens of recipe sites on the Internet, but as far as I know none of them offer Wiki-like capability to edit and add tips for recipes. As a result, if you try a recipe, come up with a new tweak that improves it, and want to share that, it’s very hard to do so. Why not Wikify a recipe book?

Or what about live collaborative cooking? Forget Gordon Ramsay telling you what to do, why not set a time for a whole bunch of people to set up and cook the same thing, whilst running webcams, Twitter feeds, forums, whatever? Let people Flickr their progress, ask for advice, help out others if something’s gone wrong – a truly collaborative cooking experience. And then you can record the results so that the intelligence of the whole system remains available to anyone who wants to cook that dish in the future.

Cooking and technology still have a very uneasy relationship. Whilst most people think of Molecular Gastronomy as really cutting-edge, all it’s really doing is taking scientific principles and knowledge that’s 30, 50 or more years old, and applying it to cooking. What can we do if we seriously apply the lessons of the Internet age to cooking? How can we use the tastebuds of the whole system?

OK, the RSS feeds shouldn’t duplicate and should work now (I’ve corrected the not-working error). Comment below if there are any more problems!

And whilst I’m here, I’ll also mention that if you want to subscribe to KKCook, but don’t have an RSS reader, you can also subscribe to the Kamikaze Cookery Facebook group. Go, be all social media and stuff.

Just a quick note – as you’ll see, I’ve enabled preroll ads (ads before the videos) for a while, just to test how people find them.

We’re not exactly expecting to be able to retire and give up this life of crime on the proceeds from them, so if they annoy you, let us know, and they’ll probably disappear as if by magic.

It’s that time – the time when we have… another episode!

This time, we’re back to testing celebrity chefs! Will Nigella take the same kind of kicking as Jamie?

I must admit, I’ve tried cooking Nigella before, notably her creme brulee, and some of her recipes seem to Just Be Wrong. On the other hand, I know that Helen and Dougal, two of our regular commenters here, have been cooking Nigella daily for a while, and they’re really impressed.

Obviously, I’m not going to give the ending of this episode away here, but … what do you think? Nigella – awesome or awful?

One of the great things about the KKC team is that we’ve got very different tastes and approaches to cooking. For example, Alex, as you may have picked up, likes his chilli. In fact, he really likes it. It’s not a huge exaggeration to say that there’s very little food of any kind he wouldn’t put chilli with.

I’m considerably more moderate in my chilli usage. Sure, I’ll use it in some things – I love me a good noodle soup, a great chilli con carne or some seriously Szechuan stuff – but it’s always had rather a specific place for me.

And that goes for hot food as a whole. Curry? Sure. It’s a sauce and you stick bits of meat in it, then serve it with rice or naan. Cayenne pepper? Let me go get my gumbo pot.

In fact, hot food has been a bit of a blind spot for me – I didn’t even realise my thinking was as restricted as it was. Until last week, and my trip to Singapore, which totally destroyed and rebuilt my notion of “hot”.

Singaporeans are obsessed with food. Absolutely bloody obsessed. There are more restaurants, food stalls, vendors, snack bars, and other sellers of stuff wot is edible in the average Singaporean mall than in many British towns. And believe me, they have a whole shitload of malls. Twenty of them on one street, for starters. They don’t say “how are you?” to greet each other. They say “have you eaten?”. Obsessed.

And they put something laden with capaiscin in just about everything.

Take omelette, for example. A fairly standard chicken omelette, maybe a bit more like a frittata. Except that the Singaporeans serve it with a bowl of curry sauce. Cut up omelette, dip in curry sauce, eat.

Or lobster. A delicate, almost ethereal taste, so expensive and understated that it has to be treated with immense care? Balls to that. Smother it in chilli. Seriously, just pile that shit on there.

Or fresh crab. They call it “Singaporean pepper crab” for a very good reason – it’s about 50% crab and 50% pepper.

And here’s the thing: it’s all absolutely bloody gorgeous. The omelette and curry sauce goes together so well you’re amazed that you’ve not thought of it before – peps up the egg flavour, adds another thick, warm, piquant, deep layer to the otherwise slightly thin frittata. You don’t even realise you need it until you try it, and feel the sauce lubricate the dryness of the cooked egg. Lobster? The lobster flavour still comes through loud and clear past the chilli – they don’t fight at all – but now you’ve got this incredible fresh, sweet, delicate lobster flesh (and I’d met mine alive and wriggling 5 minutes before I ate it), with the lobster taste complimented by a light, high, hard fire, blasting into your mouth and giving the rather subdued lobster a “fuck you, I’m fucking chillied” attitude. This isn’t lobster you’re all up yourself about in a French restaurant, this lobster’s down with the kids on the street, and suddenly it’s the most natural thing in the world to be sitting there on the dockfront with lobster tail in one hand, beer in the other, arguing about filmmaking and how hot the girls on the waterfront are. It’s still delicate and complex, but now it stands up, too.

The crab is just stunning. Like the lobster, but with more body, less fire but more peppery, smoky oomph, again not competing with the robust, sweet, sea taste of the crab, and the delicious hands-on thing of tearing your food apart before chowing down on its delicate flesh.

And now I’m just totally rethinking my entire approach to hot stuff. I’ve always thought that care and attention were key, that you had to pair heat with strong, meaty tastes – even seafood gumbo’s pretty flavourful in a hundred ways. But now I’m thinking about delicate flavours – what about chilli scallops? We already know chilli prawns work. What about lemon sole, or plaice? Rather than delicately poaching the sole, why not hack it up into pieces, then stir-fry it for seconds with a bunch of pepper? What about roast potatoes served with a curry dip, or liberally coated with as many chillis as I can find in the cupboard? What about chilli stocks? Chilli and pea veloute?

I’m on a chilli mission.

Have you had any experiences like this? Ever suddenly had your culinary world taken apart and put back together again in a different order?

Ok, I’ve been looking into the duplicate-post RSS feed problem, and it looks like I’m going to require more data to track the issue down.

If you see any duplicate posts in your KKCook RSS feed, it’d really help us if you could check:

• Is the URL exactly identical for each post?
• Is the date identical for each post?
• What RSS reader are you using? If you view the RSS as a raw feed, does it contain duplicates?
• What entries were duplicated?

Comment below, and we’ll try to get this sorted!

You may have noticed that the RSS feed has spat out the last fifteen posts again. Sorry about that, everyone.

I’m not entirely sure what the problem is, and Hugh’s somewhere in Asia, and the root password for the server is in Hugh’s head. We’ll get this sorted as soon as he’s back.

My reticence towards what I saw as unnecessary gadgetry and gimcrackery in the epsiode was real, and I’ve just worked out why. My day job is vaguely related to the catering trade, and in catering, thermometers are things that the Council forces you to have so that you can fill in reams of useless paperwork when you’ve got fourteen tables howling for bacon an’ eggs. The food’s cold by the time it’s got to the customer, but at least they can rest assured that it was thoroughly tested at some point, and that whether or not it tastes any good, it fulfils some bureaucrat’s narrow-minded, tickyboxed concept of what food is supposed to be like.

Readers of my regular non-food blog will probably know that I’m embroiled in a long-running, undeclared cold war with the local council. Part of the reason for this is that they have tried to kill me at least once (it’s a long story). Another part is that, every year, some twit with a clipboard shows up at work and tries to tell me how to cook sausages. After twenty minutes when I manage to get a word in I point out that I don’t work in the kitchen, and then I fetch the people who cook the sausages. They’ve been cooking sausages for twenty-odd years longer than the clipboard-toting officious wee besom has been alive, most of that in a professional context for a string of high-profile customers who have never once, to my knowledge, died as a result. And then she tries to tell them how to cook sausages.

And the overwrought battles over Council Tax and multiple-occupancy licensing. And the frivolous small-claims court summonseses. And the flagrant breaches of the Data Protection Act. And their horrendous website. But now I’m digressing.

Oh, yes: and they cancelled the Farmer’s Market this week. That bit’s even relevant to a food blog.

Thermometers, it would seem, are a tool of The Man, used to keep us down. We know how to cook food, right? Thermometers are only any use if you need to fill in forms to keep your job.

Not… exactly.

I’m a recent convert to thermometry. Being in the episode certainly helped, and in a later episode you’ll see the results of my half-assed attempt to buy a cheap one (spoiler: it didn’t work). I actually got around to buying a proper one just this week. It was five quid from Ikea. Predictably, just as I buy one Hugh buggers off to Singapore for a week, so I’ve been having to get by on my own without the use of his built-in temperature encyclopaedia.

Thus far, given the weather and the fact that I seem to have spent the last few weeks lying in cold mud being filmed for another project, I’ve been using it mainly to produce my newly-developed cure for the common cold. This involves raising a bunch of things to 83°C, but no higher, and holding them there for a while. Once Hugh gets back I’m going to borrow his copy of On Food and Cooking to make sure I’m doing the right things with volatiles and flavonoids and whatnot. In the meantime, it tastes nice, and it actually seems to work at curing colds.

My thermometer does everything Hugh’s does, is cheaper, has a nicer form factor, and comes in black (which is important). It’s also not melted along one side. Admittedly, when Hugh’s thermometer goes beep it plays the Archangel Network tune, whereas mine just goes beep, but this is something I can live with.

I still don’t think they’re necessary, but they certainly make some tasks a lot easier. One thing I’ve noticed is that instead of watching the pan constantly while you cook, you can leave it unattended while you slip off and do something else, as long as you remain within earshot. That’s worth a fiver all by itself.

I’ve yet to road-test the thing with a full Sunday roast, because the Farmer’s Market was cancelled this week. And once again we see the insidious Council conspiring to ruin my quality of life.

Anybody know anything else that thermometers are useful for?

I heard a rumour a while back, that a pint of Guinness is a meal in a glass. I’ve been wondering whether there’s any truth in this and so decided, for the sake of Science to look into it. Now, I needed something to compare it to, so I chose (I think reasonably enough) a can of baked beans.

Initially, it looks like a pint of Guinness does feed you up. 500g of Baked Beans (a pretty large meal) has a mighty 470 calories, but Guinness comes in at a respectable 160 calories per pint. Given that calories are meant to make you fat, surely this means that two pints of Guinness would provide a decent meal?

Then I noticed something. There’s only 7.7g of carbohydrate (about half a rice-cake’s worth) and no fat at all in a pint of Guinness. This compares to a mighty 105g of carbs, and 1.5g of fat in the beans. Now I know fat and carbohydrates are where the body gets energy from in food, so where’s the rest of the energy come from?

Well, I did a bit of research on this. The calorie content of food is determined simply by removing the water, burning the rest, then measuring the heat that comes off. What this means is that in alcoholic drinks, most of the calories come from burning the ethanol (Science term for drinkin’ alcohol) in them.

Fair enough, so you drink the Guinness, your body turns the alcohol into energy, then can use the energy as it would anything else in a meal (such as letting you run, or making you fat). The Guinness lunch is on.

Nope.

Thing is, your body isn’t a furnace, and the calories from alcohol don’t go to weight anywhere near as easily as normal calories.

So all these websites (and believe me, as I found out today, there are many) which harp on about the terrible calorie dangers of beer and wine, are being misleading. Alcohol, on its own, doesn’t actually provide much food value.

So, Guinness, meal in a glass? Well, it may provide a little energy, but it won’t really feed you, so no.

PS If anyone’s got the hard scientific facts (I don’t honestly care what dieting websites say) on the efficiency of alcohol absorption, I’d be fascinated to see them. It’s chaos out on the internet.

Occasionally we get comments so great we decide to repost them. And this is one (indeed, the first) of those occasions.

For those who didn’t know, Gordon Ramsey recently did a live show on Channel 4 in the UK entitled Cookalong with Gordon Ramsey. Apparently, you were supposed to be able to follow along cooking with the great chef as he cooked a gourmet meal – and at the end, you’d have done it too!

Viewer Amanda wasn’t impressed…

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I’m very much looking forward to the KKC ‘normal person’ against Gordon Ramsey segment, having watched the car-crash that was Gordon Ramsey’s Cookalong Live’ last week. (Friday Night, Channel 4)

It was absolutely awful television. For a man that protests to hate ‘celeb chefs’, he’s currently wearing the crown of ‘Most annoying’ of their kind. The format is supposed to be simple – check the Radio Times listing magazine or the web site for the ingredients, somehow manoeuvre your tv into your kitchen, and cook a three course meal live alongside Ramsey. During the course of the hour, he’ll cut to ordinary people cooking via the wonder of web cams, and sprinkle through some segments criticising other celeb chefs along the way.

And of course, to prove that anyone can do it, a celeb of the week will be cooking alongside him in the kitchen.

In reality, he failed to give anything approximating proper instruction, he insulted or ignored his celeb (Patsy Kensit) to the point that she just looked upset and angry, and she totally failed to be able to cook the dishes. And that’s when she’s standing next to Ramsey! I actively found it unpleasant to watch, while his studio audience were reduced to nervous giggles.

When he did, infrequently, cut to his ‘people at home’ cooking along, most of them were cocking it up too.

What instructions there were, were delivered at break-neck pace with little hope of anyone with a fear of cookery being able to keep up. Things like scoring the pastry on the main course were completed, and then followed up with instructions on how not to do it. Each section finished with a useful summary of how to make the recipe, something that would have been much better placed at the beginning of each course to give a vague hope of following proceedings.

‘Gordon proves that everyone across the nation can prepare and enjoy a three course home-made meal’, proclaims the website. Bollocks. I can’t see anything more designed to turn people off cooking than being made to feel like a useless idiot.

His segments criticising other celeb chefs – this week, St Delia of Smith – were also pretty patronising. So, he crashes her cookery school in a (rubbish) disguise, which comedian John Thomson in tow. He didn’t actually critique her course – it was just a cheap shot.

For a man with as many television shows and franchises as he has, (and with a wife who’s a cash in cookery book queen) he should think a little more before casting stones at others!

There’s another five weeks of this kitchen nightmare ahead. Jamie Oliver might be a mockney prat, but at least he seems to be interested in the people he’s helping to cook. I know which one I’d rather have try to teach me anyway…
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Now may be a good time to mention that we’re testing a Gordon Ramsey recipe in a few weeks – and we won’t be going easy on him…

Did you see the Cookalong? What did you think?

Yep, the Digital Thermometers episode now has its very own Episode page.

Thanks to the guys at Bytemark who helped make that happen after I landed 5,000 miles away from home without my password!

It’s episode time! This week, I attempt to convert the other two to the Joy of Digital Thermometers.

Note – the video won’t appear on the Index page or the Episodes page immediately. That’s because I’m currently in Singapore and there’s a minor issue with access to the server that I’m sorting out. Expect to see it there later in the day.

We mention in the video that we’ll be listing some temperatures that you can use to cook with. Well, here we go…

(I’ve added Fahrenheit temperatures by popular request.)

Beef and Lamb (lean) – 53C/128F for rare, if you’re confident of your source (do sear them on the outside). 57C/135F for medium-rare. 62C/144F degrees for medium-well done. Above that for shoe leather. Remember to let your meat rest before serving!

Chicken and Turkey – Realistically, above 70C/158F degrees if you’re not cooking sous-vide. No, that won’t dry them out too much. I find that chicken thighs are perfect about 75C/167F, and if I’m cooking them bone-in, I’ll take them to 80C/176F just to be sure I didn’t miss a cool spot.

Venison – Nothing above 57C/135F for lean meat. Again, remember to sear.

Fish – VERY much a matter of taste. 44-49C/111-120F will taste gorgeous for many fish, although there’s a small danger of nasties in there – if you’re cooking something that’s likely to be parasite-tastic, like swordfish, go to more like 60C/140F degrees. In general, white fish can easily be taken to about 60C/140F, red fish to much lower. There’s a lot of argument over the perfect temperature for tuna, but everyone agrees it’s somewhere in the 44-49C/111-120F range.

Sausages and hamburgers – ground meat means high chance of bacteria, so don’t fuck around here unless you’re really, really confident of your source. There’s a reason e. coli came to be known as the “hamburger bug”. Take ‘em to 70c/158F at least. I tend to take grilled sausages to 80C/176F, as otherwise I find they’re a bit watery.

Pork – As we indicate in the episode, if you’re certain of your source (UK or US), you can and should cook pork rare-ish for the best taste. 58-62C/137-144F ish should do it.

Anything you think I missed? Or do you like cooking to a different temperature?

Side-by-side, this week, I’ve been reading Heston Blumenthal’s amazing “Big Fat Duck Cookbook” (which is more of a treatise on food, and possibly a weight-training device, than just a cookbook – absolutely inspirational, and I’ll be writing more about it soon) and the various reviews of said big, fat cookbook.

Food critics have been plumbing new depths of silliness and prejudice with this one, with the honourable exception of the Telegraph, who actually tried cooking from the book and found, shockingly, that the recipes produced really nice food.

Whilst I reserve a certain place in my heat for the Guardian critic who complained that Heston wanted us to use such inaccessible equipment as a “cartouche” ( a circle of greaseproof paper), pride of place must go to the Observer critic Laura Potter. Making a heroically half-arsed effort to follow one of the recipes, she discovered it needed maltodextrin, couldn’t find that in Tesco, and so used rice pudding instead, then complained that the recipe didn’t work.

Apparently it’s an “elusive ingredient”. I’ll let you judge that for yourself .

So, in this spirit, here are a couple of other dreadfully inaccessible-sounding ingredients or equipment (I’m avoiding calling them “molecular gastronomy ingredients” here, because I now understand a bit more about Dr Blumenthal’s objection to the term, and am still mulling it over) that are actually cheap, easy to aquire, and make great food:

Xanthan Gum

You can find this in pretty much any health food/organic food/general hippie store. It’s used for baking gluten-free bread and so on, but we’re more interested in its uses as a hydrocolloid.

Xanthan works to thicken fluids, and apparently is not only used in foods, but also the oil industry. Who knew? I’ve mostly used it to create thick, lucious foams – anyone interested in foams in cookery at all needs to try Martin Lersch’s Strawberry and Coriander foam, made with Xanthan, which is absolutely stunning – an incredible combination of tastes that you’d never have thought of together, but combines to give a stunningly intense, fruity hit of flavour.

Agar

Another ingredient that pops up all over the place, you can find agar in any Chinese supermarket. Derived from seaweed, it’s used for all manner of things, from growing bacteria to traditional Japanese cookery.

Most interestingly for cooks, it’s soluble in heated liquids, but quickly solidifies to a jelly when cool, taking whatever it’s dissolved in to a jelly state too. It’s possible to make all sorts of solid preparations this way – gelling stocks, for example, making terrines of things you can’t normally, erm, terrineiffy, or creating thick mousses.

My favourite use for it is as a rather more user-friendly ‘sferification’ substance than the alginates that El Bulli uses. ‘Sferification’, a term coined by Ferran Adria of El Bulli in Spain, is the process of forming liquids into ‘caviars’ or ‘ravioli’ – here’s a blog post going into a bit more detail.

Mixing Agar with hot, diluted Ribena, say (about 1% agar to Ribena, so 2g of Agar for 200ml of Ribena) then dripping the solution into a bath of cold oil will produce a pile of tiny blackcurrant spheres. You can then add these to champagne to a “Kir Molecular” – something half-way between a drink and a lava lamp, where the blackcurrant flavours occur in tiny bursts in between the champagne, when you chew on a pearl.

(You’re not using Creme De Cassis in this recipe because the alcohol, as I discovered 45 minutes before a dinner party, messes up the agar reaction. Oops.)

You can also use Agar in the same way as gelatin in a lot of recipes – notably, you can use it like gelatin to clarify stock, rendering out a beautifully limpid clear liquid with an intense, often unexpected flavour. The most fascinating use of this I’ve heard of so far (from Harold McGee’s article) is clarified barbeque sauce.

More

There are dozens of other relatively easily accessible chemicals and pieces of equipment out there – we’ll be talking more about digital thermometers tomorrow, for example, and Martin Lersch recently discussed improvising a separation funnel from a plastic bag. Lecithin and, yes, Maltodextrin are both easily available from health food shops, and with a couple of calls and a bit of bluffing it’s possible to get a much wider range of substances, from “meat glue” Activa to alginates for El Bulli recipes.

And if you’re interested in the wonderful world of hydrocolloids, like Agar, Xanthan, Lecithin and Maltodextrin, there’s even a free cookbook out there, as I’ve mentioned before – Khymos’s Texture , containing info and recipes for all sorts of things.

Tried any of this yourself? Got any tips for aquiring harder-to-aquire chemicals (I’m particularly interested to hear about aquiring liquid nitrogen)?