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I’m on holiday this week, and I badly need to be dealing with angry royalty, if you know what I mean, so here’s one from the archives – my first taste-test of the cheapest versus the most pricey…

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So I’ve been curious about how much difference very expensive ingredients make to cooking. Hence, I’m going to try to do a series of taste tests pitting “average” ingredients against the best I can reasonably buy.

The first one: Pasta. In the red corner, famous deli Valvona & Corolla’s La Molisana pasta, price £1.10 for 500g. In the blue corner, Asda/Wal-Mart’s own-brand fusilli, price 34p.

I prepared a very simple dish – pasta al dente, with extra virgin olive oil (the expensive Lidl one) and parmesan (reggiano, again from Lidl).

The differences became obvious pretty much immediately – the ASDA pasta went floppy whilst the V&C was still undercooked. But how would it taste?

The ASDA pasta tastes pretty much like the pasta you’d expect – it just missed al denta, and came out floppy, very smooth-tasting, and turned to paste and disappeared pretty much as soon as you put it in your mouth. Comforting food, but lacking texture in particular, and also any definite taste.

The V&C was definitely nicer. It put up a bit of a fight, for starters, coming apart with a rough floury texture that left you in no doubt very good flour had been used in its creation. It had a definite taste to itself, faint but definitely there, like unleavened bread, and the oil taste worked extremely well with it.

There’s no doubt that for a dish this simple, the V&C pasta is vastly superior- in fact, I’d say it was pretty much essential if you’re going to be doing anything this simple – it adds the extra flavour that’s vital for something this minimal.

However, in any pasta dish with a more definitely flavoured sauce, I’m not so sure. The extra texture of the V&C pasta would definitely enhance the dish, but not as much as other decent ingredients, and the subtle taste that makes the V&C such a winner with olive oil would definitely be lost even under a simple red sauce.

Overall? Buy the V&C, for sure, but keep it for dishes where the pasta and the pasta alone will be the focus of the dish – minimalist lunches like this and perhaps some pasta salads. For everyday eating, whilst it’s nice, other ingredients that are less expensive per dish and have a greater effect on the sauce will provide better value for money.

This whole being-without-an-oven thing, as we call it in the trade, is forcing me to reevaluate my cookery. Normally, I get in from work (late) and stick something ready-made into the cooker. Proper cooking with ingredients is reserved for my days off. There are two main reasons for this: one, it’s late and I’m tired and hungry; and two, cooking properly, with ingredients, is something I actually enjoy doing, so I don’t particularly want to do it when it’s late and I’m tired and hungry.

I have a friend (hi David!) who’s a much better cook than me. It’s a bit embarrassing for both of us. I’m supposed to be the internet-famous cookery show star, and no one’s ever eaten anything I’ve cooked; and he always apologizes every time he produces some fantastic culinary marvel that he suspects might not be entirely perfect. (He’s usually mistaken.). But we both know more-or-less as much as each other about food and what you do with it. So why is he the one who gets to play with quails and fondant tarts, while I can just about stretch to a Sunday roast if you give me a day to do it?

I think the answer is time. I’ve gone off on one already about the Findus Crispy Pancakes generation, but the fact remains that sometimes I want to eat something in order to stave off imminent starvation, without having to go to the effort of putting my creative head on. If I finished work at five and got home by six, with the evening stretching out ahead of me, I might feel differently.

Without an oven, I’m being forced to get creative. (I know there exist microwaveable ready meals, but come on, I have some standards.) For instance, I’ve just reinvented pizza. They all laughed at me when I said I was going to spread toast with tomato puree, then put chicken and cheese on top of it and grill it. (I still have a grill. An oven without a door is a grill.) But I’ll show them, I’ll show them all. And I still have a hob, which means that I’m rediscovering soups.

I’m also making an awful lot of toasted sandwiches. Toasted sandwiches are another way that you can play around with flavours and combinations of ingredients without having to do any real work. I have a sandwich toaster, but I don’t own a health grill, which is a shame, because then I could toast sandwiches and do other stuff as well.

We cover health grills in greater depth, after a fashion, on Wednesday, in the appropriately-named Health Grill Episode. It’s a shorter episode than usual, because it turns out that there’s not a great deal to say about health grills. We hope that we’ve covered all the basics and still managed to be amusing.

In the meantime, does anybody have any other useful tips for coking without an oven?

Those bloody Actual Scientists are getting in on the cooking game, it would seem.

Reader Kris forwards us this piece from UK tech site The Register, in which the Royal Society, one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific institutions in the world, gets into the cooking business with a recipe for the perfect Yorkshire Pudding

Cambridge University chemist and science author John Elmsey wrote the following in response to the Society’s national request for feedback:

“"I have seen many grim results from people who have tried to get their Yorkshires to rise. They frequently made gross errors. After all, cooking is chemistry in the kitchen and one has to have the correct formula, equipment and procedures. To translate the ingredients into chemical terms, these are carbohydrate + H2O + protein + NaCl + lipids.”

Anyone care to try the recipe (in the article above) and tell us what they think?

On the comments on our Nigella episode a couple of weeks ago, Sabrosa questioned our assumptions, and said that “Most normal people I know do know what to do with pastry”.

This interested me, not least because I would have said exactly the opposite – just about all the people I could think of who could handle pastry-making were serious foodies, and not even all of them would be 100% confident. So, I did what anyone with access to a blogging medium did, and ran a poll.

And the results really got me thinking.

It turns out that the proportion of people who could do the pastry thing to those who couldn’t was almost exactly 50/50. But if you divided by sex, an interesting thing became obvious: nearly all of the women who answered my poll could make pastry (80), whilst less than 30 of the men could. And if you adjusted by removing serious foodies from the mix, the figures polarised even more sharply – 20% of men, 77% of women.

What? What’s going on there?

Baking seems to be tremendously female-identified: after all, Nigella’s baking book was even called “How to be a domestic goddess”, a tremendously gender-polarising title which I can’t imagine getting past the publisher unless they were pretty certain the audience was almost entirely female. I’m not at all sure why. Perhaps it’s because baked goods are so comforting, warm, soft, usually sweet, nurturing? Whatever, it’s so powerful as to almost render baking a seperate process from cooking as a whole – several women mentioned that they hardly cooked, but they could bake.

And for that matter, what’s with the male identification with barbecuing? Sure, there’s the fire, wood, metal, charred meat thing, and sure, in general, blokes like large charred chunks of dead animal, but why’s it so extreme? Why do men, even men who don’t normally cook at all, suddenly get all proprietorial as soon as charcoal’s involved? And why is it that women are usually less into that? I mean, you can grill vegetables. And anyway, I know more than a few women who slobber over Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Meat.

…

OK, that was a mental image I didn’t need.

But moving away from Mr Fearlessly Eats-it-all’s wang – what’s up with all this? Why are some types of cooking so gender-identified – not the eating of the result, but the cooking? Any ideas?

If you’re planning on buying the KKC DVD, please comment below. We’re just trying to establish whether, in actual fact, we’d be better concentrating on the series and publicity right now, or whether you’re all gagging for the DVD version…

It seems that the secret cabal that control our supermarkets has been reading my last post. I was in Tesco’s today, and now they advertise that all of their party-themed finger food is designed to be cooked at 190°. So you can mix-and-match different types of party food and put them all in the same oven. This is good.

As long as you’re having a party. If what you’re trying to do instead is cook a meal, then you’re still screwed.

I cover ovens in this week’s episode, with the help of the lovely Jehane, Kamikaze Cookery’s Consultant Archaeologist. Archaeology, I’m reliably informed (by archaeologists, it must be said) is a science, and at Kamikaze Cookery we do cooking with science. So it’s entirely reasonable for a cookery show to have a consultant archaeologist. Also, she was easy to get hold of, if I do say so myself. If anyone knows of someone willing to be the Kamikaze Cookery Consultant Chemist, or Consultant Physicist, or similar, who’ll work for me as cheaply as Jehane does, then feel free to get in touch. Being gorgeous like Jehane would be a bonus.

All of this talk of ovens is largely useless to me at present, since I managed to shatter the glass door of my own oven last night. The entire door assembly has now been taken off and taken to some magical place where landlords look at them and determine if replacements can be found. I’m an hotelier and, occasionally, an actor and/or cookery show presenter: this stuff is beyond me, which is why I pay someone else to do it. In the meantime, I’m currently in possession of a doorless oven which might theoretically serve as a somewhat inefficient method of heating the flat. And I’m eating a lot of takeaways, because any excuse will do.

There’s been some talk in the comments about Agas. Louise “louisedennis” Dennis has waxed lyrical about this in the comments on my own blog in the past. I’m disappointed to hear that they’re, apparently, pretty useless. I still want one, but that’s more because I’m old-fashioned.

One thing we’ve been talking about at Kamikaze Cookery Towers is the halogen oven (warning: horrible javascript website). It sits on your countertop and allegedly it can do a whole chicken in thirty minutes. Some of the reviews seem to suggest otherwise, though. Anybody have any experience with one of these?

We’re preparing the Kamikaze Cookery DVD right now, and we just wondered – what would you like to see on the DVD?

So far, we’ve got:

• Commentaries on The Perfect Steak, all the Normal Person Vs episodes, and The Fife Diet (upcoming).
• Deleted footage from Health Grills (upcoming), Normal Person vs Gordon Ramsey (upcoming), and a couple of others.
• An interview with the team on how we made this show on a tiny budget.
• Bloopers reels.
• Footage from an episode that was never completed, entitled “Sealing Meat”.

What else would you like to see? What would you like to know?

Preheating your oven – it’s a total pain in the ass. Or at least, Paul thinks so. We test to see if you need to heat your oven – with Science. Sort of.

Two weeks to the release of the Kamikaze Cookery DVD, by the way!

It may astonish those of you who’ve been watching me doing my best Clarkson impression on KKCook that I’m actually terribly Politically Correct about international cusines. I’m always thinking that each style has huge depth and complexity, that you need to study it for years to really understand it, and so on. I suspect some of that comes from studying martial arts, and some from the fact that I’m just a nice Guardian-reading boy.

And so it was that I was chatting to Alex the other day about noodle soups, and he mentioned that he’d quite like to learn to cook Tom Yum soup. Just one version, mind – but he wanted to know because it was useful to know how a different culture’s food worked.

My first thought was, of course, that you couldn’t possibly do that. That in order to understand Thai cooking, for example, you’ve got to study it for years. Go out there, probably, spend weeks on a course. You’ve got to live the cooking to know it.

But then my mind moved back to martial arts, and I thought over the idea again. In Muay Thai kickboxing, for example, it’s true that to really master the style you’ve got to spend five or ten years. But you can learn some of its useful self-defence moves – some of the best in the world – in an afternoon. I spent one afternoon learning Jujitsu wristlocks six or so years ago, and I still use them today.

And Alex’s idea made me think about the same things you can do with world cooking. Sure, it takes years to really master Italian cooking. But you can learn basics that can change the way you cook dramatically in a single lesson – the soffrito, for example, or the use of pasta shapes depending on the meal you’re cooking. And then you can apply them to infuse a dish with a sense of a region’s style, or to create something new by combining lessons.

So, what are the three top tips you can learn from a few world styles?

Singaporean/Malay/Thai/Vietnamese area

• Chilli, lime, ginger and garlic. The four ingredients behind most of the region’s cooking (OK, Thai would add lemongrass) give a distinctive, immediately recognisable flavour. You can add them to virtually anything, from beef to scallops, to create a fantastic meal.
• Soup is a meal. Ok, this one’s Chinese too. But the Vietnamese, in particular, raise noodle soups to an artform. Get some fine noodles, some stock, some spice and some chooped meat and veg. Mix together whilst boiling for a couple of minutes. Serve. Uber-quick meal.
• You don’t have to be subtle. I attempted to recreate a Singaporean noodle soup the other day, and one thing immediately made itself apparent – the tiny, almost undetectable levels of seasoning in some Western food isn’t the only way to go. It seems that all the tastes of this region operate according to the Meatloaf school of seasoning (the singer, not the food) – “everything louder than everything else”. Eight birdseye chillis, four cloves of garlic, a chunk of ginger the size of my thumb, and about a quarter of a bottle of lime juice – and it tasted awesome.

It’s our creed here at Kamikaze Cookery that cooking isn’t hard to do. We think it’s even easier if you know what you’re doing, which is why what we’re trying to do here is bring the Science. If you can’t be bothered with the Science, though, there are always ready meals.

Except that you still need to know what you’re doing with ready meals.

Last night I had Roast Chicken Bites™ and chips™⁰. They come in packets that you keep in the freezer. Somebody has done all the hard work for me, and all I need to do is make them hot for a bit. After that, they’re cooked. That’s the theory. Only it doesn’t quite work like that.

The Roast Chicken Bites™ helpfully told me on the back of the packet that they required to be heated at 200° for 15 minutes. The chips™ likewise advised me that they requested 230° for 22 minutes. Theoretically, I could put the chips™ in first and go back later to put in the Bites™ for less time, but I still have a problem. My oven, quite reasonably, I think, only has one temperature dial.

Had I wanted vegetables with my meal, I would have had to cook them for 20 minutes at 180°. If I’d decided to roast my own, I would have needed 240°.

How many ovens do these people think we have?

You can’t just fudge it, either. Trying to work out a reasonable interim temperature between the two, and revised cooking times for different products at that temperature, is going to require a degree in calculus. And you’re still going to end up with soggy chips.

The only reliable guideline I’ve ever come across for frozen food is this: no matter what it says about the time on the packet, if the food product is or may ever have come into contact with a potato, add fifty per cent. If you’re hungry in my flat, and you want to eat something quickly, you might be better off cooking real food from scratch.

If I’m missing some obvious trick that people Just Know, I’d be delighted to hear of it.

Ovens are weird. We talk about them in this week’s episode, coming on Wednesday to an internet near you, pajh-fans. The episode also features the lovely Jehane, Kamikaze Cookery’s Consultant Archaeologist. We used her oven, which is slightly less stupid than mine, but it still has only one temperature dial.

⁰ That’s ‘fries’ if you’re American. Except that they were baked, not fried, so they can’t be called fries. Do you have oven chips in America? And do you call them “oven fries”? Crazy.

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.