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My reticence towards what I saw as unnecessary gadgetry and gimcrackery in the epsiode about digital food thermometers 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 the calories in Guinness and other such nutritioney things. 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. Plus, read on for my Handy Guide to Meat Temperature (as in the temperature you should cook the darn stuff at).

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, which mostly use the phrase “molecular gastronomy” a lot, despite the fact that Heston Blumenthal himself hates it.

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 in the molecular gastronomy world, 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 (without buying their expensive molecular gastronomy kit).

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)?

(No blog from me today, because I managed to contract a mild-to-moderate case of hypothermia (self-induced, while filming). Instead, have this post from the dim and distant past:)

Happy pigs make the best bacon, it’s true, but I’m with A A Gill on chickens. Not only because he’s disagreeing with the Mockney Prat, but because I really hate chickens.

Jamie’s got himself some good press recently, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. Right now he’s campaigning about the living standards of chickens, and chickens are scrawny little bags of evil covered in fluff, worthwhile only as an accompaniment to bacon. I have looked into the eyes of a chicken, and it was then that I knew true hatred. (Admittedly, I did proceed directly to eating its unborn offspring, who were delicious.)

You can’t cuddle a chicken or train it to fetch your paper. Cows, sheep, and pigs could be considered cute and/or fluffy. Even fish have personalities, and I’m in favour of farms that include playparks and whatnot for fish. Chickens, on the other hand, are drumsticks with a beak attached, held together by pure rage. It’s a bloody good job for them that they’re so damn tasty. If it wasn’t for the existence of garlic, I firmly believe that we would have eradicated chickens long ago, like we did to wolves and snakes.

Before that, Jamie gained notoriety by championing the concept of nutritious school dinners. Nice try, but I don’t care about children either. Children should shut up and eat their gruel, or whatever it is they have nowadays, thus leaving more of the good food for me. (Such as those free-range chickens that take up acres of farmland.) I had to suffer when I was their age. We called it ‘character-building’.

The right ideas, the wrong targets. Despite some mellowing in his old age, he still has some way to go before I’ll admit to agreeing with him about anything. And besides, in my head he will always be the Naked Chef, and as a result deserves eviscerating with a blunt whisk.

I am in favour of free range, organic, slow-reared, locally-produced food not because of ethics and certainly not because “it’s got more effics innit, geeza”. I give neither a hoot nor a fig for my Carbon Footprints or my Food Miles. I am in favour of free-range, slow reared, locally-produced food because it tastes better.

This week has been hand held Blender Week at Kamikaze Cookery Towers, so I thought I’d share a couple of tips that didn’t make it into the episode.

The two blenders we tested at first were horrendous, but that doesn’t mean that all cheap blenders are crap. I use a £15 one from the godlike Grays of George Street, which has never caused me any problems. So if you don’t want to drop ninety quid on an all-performing ultrablender, or a hundred quid on one with Gordon Ramsay grinning at you from the box, you’ve still got options.

We discussed in the episode that more power is not necessarily better. Blending was traditionally done by hand. You want something that will automate that process and save your carpal tunnels, not something that can reduce everysing in zer vorld to pulp. It’s not a contest. Be gentle.

Next, the beaker. Most blenders come with a dinky wee plastic container that you can blend things in, or so they claim. In my opinion these are best shunned, ignored, spurned, and thrown away. The whole point of having a stick blender is that you can stick it into things and blend them (which is another reason why they’re called “stick blenders”). Use the biggest pot you have available, which will help reduce spatter, or whichever pot your ingredients are already in, which will help to reduce washing-up. Use the provided beaker only if you’re having a party and you’ve run out of proper glasses.

Then there’s technique. Things are going to splash if you work at the top of the liquid, so don’t do that unless you have to. If you’re making a soup out of large chunks of vegetables, you might have to come down from the top a few times at first to break them up. After that, leave the business end of the blender on the base of the pot.

If you’re making a foam or a froth, you’re trying to get air into the mixture, and for that you need to be near the surface of the liquid, near where the air is. The proper name for the technique used to do this is “drawing up”, or, as it’s described at Kamikaze Cookery Towers, “you’ve gotta wank it”⁰. Hold the blender upright at the bottom of the container, start it blending, then gently pull it upwards towards the top of the liquid. Stop when it’s getting too close to the rim of the container. Repeat.

Make judicious use of the pulse button.

Finally, don’t over-blend. Once you’ve reached the consistency you’re looking for, stop blending. It’s a simple suggestion, but it’s an easy one to overlook. Over-blending things is the best way to turn food into glue.

Also finally, do not use the blender as a massage device. Although there’s probably an appropriate attachment you can buy for the Bamix uberblender. That damn thing does everything.

⁰ An allusion to the Wankel Rotary Engine, which is reminiscent of the rotary action of the blender blade, and also to the piston-like action used in the drawing up technique. Why? What did you think we meant?

Damn them, the guys over at Ideas In Food have done it again.

Steamed Brioches – what a wonderful idea.

Right… Goes off to dig out a Brioche recipe

So, Spud asked for a piece on eggs – and since we’ve not got any episodes coming up featuring ovoids (unless you count the Gordon Ramsey souffle episode coming in a few weeks), I thought I’d share some info on boiled eggs.

First up, a question that I’ve looked into a couple of times – are soft-boiled eggs really likely to give you salmonella?

How many eggs are infected?

Quite what the likely salmonella incidence in eggs is is a complicated question. An FSA study in 2007 showed a .38% incidence of salmonella – however, that was in cooked eggs served in restaurants and other catering places. (The same study warns that it’s best to be careful with egg product from Chinese takeaways and restaurants, which showed a very high tendancy to store eggs at ambient temperatures and pool eggs). It’s very hard to find out what the incidence of salmonella in UK eggs is – there aren’t any figures on the FSA site.

However, Andrew Wadge, Chief Scientist of the FSA, at one point refers to the UK’s having 10 times less salmonella in eggs than they found in foreign egg samples, implying an infection rate of about 1 in 300 boxes. However, the foreign egg survey also showed that 157 of the cases they found were salmonella on the outside of the egg only, with only 10 being salmonella inside the egg – and no details on how deep inside.

Given that salmonella on the shell will be killed immediately in a boiled egg, you’re talking about a 0.02% chance per box of eggs that there’s salmonella, rather than Intel, inside one of them (assuming you’re using a UK egg).

In the US, the Department of Agriculture did a survey in 2002 that showed there was an incidence of salmonella in 1 in 30,000 eggs produced in the US. That’s, erm, not very many (and almost exactly the same as my estimated UK incidence).

Harold McGee says that there’s basically no difference in infection rates between battery farmed eggs and free-range.

What precautions can you take?

The FSA and various other places advise that soft-boiled eggs aren’t safe – but the risk factor appears to be pretty darn low. Added to all the information above, whether or not the salmonella survives cooking depends on where it lies in the egg – because there’s a steep temperature gradient in boiled eggs, with the surface, obviously, getting pretty near boiling, the salmonella needs to be pretty deep into the egg to not boil alive, even if you’re cooking a soft-boiled egg.

On a practical note, I’ve been eating soft-boiled eggs for quite a few years now, with, touch wood, no salmonella so far.

Of course, you should still store eggs in a refrigerator – there’s no downside to doing that, and it prevents the growth of any salmonella that might be there. And as Heston Blumenthal and various other people point out, you should always wash your hands after handling raw eggs in their shells, because there’s actually far more likely to be salmonella on the shell than inside.

If you really want to be 100% sure, and you’re either fairly patient or have a sous-vide setup, you can pasturise eggs. Just stick them in a water bath at 57 degrees centigrade for 75 minutes for a large egg (thanks Douglas) – you can find out more in the Practical Guide to Sous-Vide. That’ll kill everything in there without coagulating the protein – although it may alter the taste and texture a bit. McGee mentions that you can also buy pre-pasturised eggs, although I’ve not seen them in the UK.

Of course, if you’ve got a sous-vide setup, you can also just cook your boiled eggs using it. Bruno Goussault, who more or less invented sous-vide, says that the perfect temperature to cook eggs is 64.5 degrees Centigrade. I must admit, I’ve tried cooking eggs sous-vide a couple of times, and the results have been a bit disappointing – but that’s a topic for another post. One thing that’s certain is that an egg held at 64.5 degrees for a few minutes will definitely be bacteria free.

So…

No, it’s not very likely that you’ll get salmonella from a soft-boiled egg, although it’s not impossible. It’s a non-zero chance, so if you’re feeding eggs to young children, adults with weakened immune systems, or anyone else who might die of salmonella infection, it might be best to be cautious.

But for a healthy adult, given the infection rates I’ve mentioned above, you’d have to eat a soft-boiled egg every day for a little under 100 years to even have an odds-on chance of encountering one contaminated with salmonella. And even then, there’s a good chance that the bacteria would die in the cooking process, or you’d just fight off the infection.

Hurrah. Back to the egg-n-soldiers for me.

Various Kamikaze Cookery bits…

We have a Facebook group! Yes, join us in our, erm, booking of faces .

The weekly Egullet conversation – this week, it turns out that we accidentally managed to buy the Rolls Royce of blenders.

And if you were wondering whether the Bamix does just as well in a crappy plastic beaker – I tested this morning.

Fruit

Fruit tastes okay, and many don’t produce any washing up. Remember that you need to eat fruit to avoid scurvy. The downside is that they’re sometimes difficult to get into, and normally produce some sort of litter (apple cores, skins etc.).

If you’re really lazy you can get the vitamin C you need to live from Fruit Juice drinks They’re quite cheap at the lower value end, especially value orange juice. However, you probably miss some sort of goodness from doing this, so if you’re really lazy just stick to apples, pears and tangerines, they’re easy enough to eat, and don’t cost that much.

Staples

Staple foods bulk out your meals. They normally don’t taste that good, but they’re okay. Here’s some advice on the common ones:

Rice
Rice is cheap, and generally tastes okay, but it really goes best with a meal with sauce. It can take a bit of effort to get the cooking time right as well; It’ll be crunchy and not quite edible if you leave it too short, and watery and unpleasant if you cook it for too long. Finally cooking rice involves a sieve and a pan, both of which will be covered in a tough, glue like substance if you don’t wash them straight away. Not the win.

Pasta
I’ve never liked this as much as rice, it’s bland as hell, and also really needs a sauce to make it taste half decent. However, it’s cheap and easy to cook, and doesn’t gum your stuff up anywhere near as badly as rice.

Potatoes – an old enemy.
Potatoes can be baked, roast, boiled, or fried. Especially baked and with butter and cheese they can actually taste quite nice. They’re also extremely cheap when bought in large quantities. You may wish to be careful how much you buy though.

At one point during lean times, Hugh persuaded me to buy 10 kilograms of potatoes at a tiny price, to make sure I was fed. After about 3 weeks of eating nothing but potatoes, I was thoroughly sick of them. I left the remaining 9 kilos in the cupboard thinking I’d want to eat them later. Now, potatoes, if left in a warm dark place, surrounded by organic matter (such as other potatoes) have a habit of growing. By 1 month in, our entire flat stank of potatoes, and a sizable potato plant had taken hold of the cupboard. Man, that was a pain in the arse to get rid of!

Bread
Bread is the student’s friend. It’s already cooked, you can put paté or cheese on it, or use it to hold the meat you’ve just fried. It’s pricey, and goes off quick, but it’s by far the easiest staple to use.

Various people have suggested it might be useful to have Alex’s Being A Student guide all together in one place, so here it is!

If you can think of someone or somewhere that might benefit from his studenty wisdom, please do let them know!

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It’s at around this time of year that loads of people will be moving away from home for the first time to take up university studies. Now I remember when I started my university life, I didn’t know the first thing about cookery, and frankly didn’t care to learn (that came about 3 years later). I was, however, required to somehow keep myself alive during this period, on not much money.

There were lots of student cookbooks, (my parents duly bought me one), but all of these seemed to want you to do things like use more than one ingredient, use herbs, measure things properly, and other such annoying time consuming stuff.

So over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be explaining some of the dos and don’ts of minimalist student cookery. The aim of this endeavour is to eat in a survivable way, very cheaply, with minimal effort, and without everything tasting minging.

1: Cooking, Washing up, and Student culinary life in general.

Yep, it’s that time of the week – the latest Kamikaze Cookery episode is available, and this time, we’re taking on… blenders.

Watch it over on the episode page or right here:

It must be a nightmare being a kitchen technology company. By and large, cooks are really pretty closed to the idea of new tech – even someone like me buys a new piece of kitchen technology incredibly rarely, and would far rather spend money on a cookbook the size of Belgium than, say, an exciting new blender.

The Bamix blender (£89.99 or therabouts) we feature in the episode really is the mutt’s nuts – it’s astonishingly good. But I’d have never bought one if we hadn’t wanted to test it for the episode. And it’s reminding me how much other cool kitchen tech there is out there that I’ve just not touched.

For example, the Tefal Actifry – apparently it’s an astonishingly good alternative to deep-frying that uses a tiny amount of fat. I’ve heard various people raving about them, but have I even seriously considered buying one? Hell, no.

Or the various halogen ovens (couldn’t find a useful link for these). Again, I’ve heard rave reviews. Apparently they’re pretty close to being a new way of cooking – we’re talking roast chicken in 15 minutes, plus pretty lights on your countertop. Have I bought one? Have I bollocks.

I’m a huge coffee fan. But have I bought myself a vacuum coffee maker, despite the fact that they supposedly make the best damn cup of coffee in all creation? Not so much.

And to that, add the fact that kitchen gadgeteers have to compete with lab equipment manufacturers and even hardware stores getting some of our hard-spent food money – it must be a pretty tough life.

No wonder some of them have started coming up with pretty unconventional tactics to sell their product.

Any kitchen gadgets you’ve been thinking of buying, but just haven’t gotten around to? Anything exciting that you think everyone should aquire?

This is a piece from the archives a while ago on the subject of Heston Blumenthal’s bolognaise (which is awesome)- I thought it might be interesting in light of this week’s bolognaiseness…

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So, just before Christmas I aquired a copy of Heston Blumenthal’s In Search of Perfection , where the genius chef behind The Fat Duck explores 8 different classic British dishes and attempts to come up with a recipe for them that gets as close as possible to his idea of perfection.

(I’m not going there. He knows perfection’s not possible. You want more, read the book.)

Several reviewers have described his recipes as being far too complex for anyone to actually cook. I then proceeded to describe their reviews as “bollocks”. And to prove it, over Christmas, my mother and grandparents agreed to act as guinea-pigs for a try-out of Heston’s recipe for Spaghetti Bolognaise.

His recipe is reasonably traditional, but complex, boiling down over a kilo of onions and another kilo of tomatoes, plus a list of about 20 ingredients, over three distinct stages of preparation and about 10 hours. Given that I’d probably say that I can cook a Bolognaise better than any other dish, and my version’s evolved from one that my mum taught me – one that can be cooked in about an hour – "Perfection"’s recipe was up for a challenge.