Hello folks! We’re still here (sometimes) and I hope that you are, too. Cooking is still taking place, and sometimes we blog about it.

You might recall that about three years ago I performed a magnificent destruction of Jamie Oliver and all that he stands for. I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the intervening three years improving on his methods. Recently, over on my other blog, I combined everything together into the finest meatball lasagne el diablo you have ever seen.

I’ve had Italian people tell me that my recipe is not a proper ragu, but I don’t care, it’s still better than Jamie’s.

Who remembers the perfect steak? We love the perfect steak, but many people (read: nearly everyone except Hugh) claimed that sous-vide was too fiddly. It turns out that you can do it very easily in a cool box. I shall be trying this as soon as I get hold of a cool box. More general details on sous-vide are available from the same site. They also have a brilliant sans-sous-vide recipe for doing a steak in the pan, the way our ancestors did, if that’s more your thing. My friend at Northern Food has been having a great deal of fun practising this.

They seem to like their steak at that Serious Eats site. Here’s an article on why you should salt steak, as long as you do it right (hint: do it well before you cook the thing).

I hope these are helpful to someone. What other food sites (other than KKC of course) are on your required reading lists?

Hey, guys! Long time no see. (Sorry about that – crazy busy on other projects. I haven’t forgotten about you, about KKC, or about food!)

I just had to nip over here to point out this truly fascinating article over at Meathead, about the science of what BBQ cooks refer to as the stall

"You get a big hunk-o-meat, like a pork shoulder for pulled pork or a beef brisket, two of the best meats for low and slow smoke roasting, and you put it on the smoker with dreams of succulent meat dancing in your head. You insert your fancy new digital thermometer probe, stabilize the cooker at about 225°F and go cut the lawn. Then you take a nap.

The temp rises steadily for a couple of hours and then, to your chagrin, it stops. It sticks. It stalls for four or more hours and barely rises a notch. Sometimes it even drops a few degrees. You check the batteries in your meat thermometer. You tap on the smoker thermometer like Jack Lemon in the China Syndrome. Meanwhile the guests are arriving, and the meat is nowhere near the 190°F mark at which these two cuts are most tender and luscious. Your mate is tapping her foot and you’re pulling your hair out.

Sterling Ball of BigPoppaSmokers.com, a major retailer of grills and smokers and a successful competition cook says that “no matter what I tell customers, when the stall hits them, they are horrified. It seems to last forever. They crank up the heat. They bring the meat indoors and put it in the oven. They call me at all hours.”"

I’ve been experimenting with barbeque recently, and whilst I didn’t experience the stall with my tests, it’s nonetheless a really interesting bit of science. The solution’s simple, and the approach they take is really practical.

Highly recommended!

So, it turns out that something rather alarming happened recently.

I became fat.

Well, fat-ish. Turns out that suddenly going from walking 4 miles or so a day to having access to a car will do Bad Things to your body fat percentage, particularly if it’s tied in with an increased consumption of sweet stuff. I FAIL at the blindingly obvious.

Fortunately, as a huge fan of Tim Ferriss, I’d been reading his new book, The Four Hour Body, whilst smugly thinking to myself “well, this diet stuff is interesting, but I don’t need it.” So, when it turned out that yes, Mr Blood Pressure Meter and Mr Groaning Scales agreed that I did indeed need it, stat, before I started to resemble a BBC report on Scottish health, I was prepared.

World of Warcraft players will have predicted what was coming next.

YOU ARE NOT PREPARED!

In this case, You Are Not Prepared for the sheer volume of one thing – beans.

Oh, God, Not More Beans

Tim Ferriss’s diet – which appears to be working rather stonkingly well, btw – works on one simple princple. There’s no calorie counting or going hungry – instead, you just drop all simple carbs and grains from your diet and replace them with beans. (Oh, and there’s a few other princples too – the diet’s explained online – but the beans are the issue here.)

This works. It’s nutritionally sound. Unfortunately, for a foodie, it has one major flaw.

Exactly how many ways do you know to cook fucking beans? Or equally fornicating lentils?

Tim Ferriss is a big fan of just repeating a few simple meals. Were I to follow that advice, as a hardcore foodie, I’d soon be a big fan of stabbing random strangers in the street – and I live in Edinburgh, not Glasgow, so that sort of thing’s really not done.

So began my quest for more interesting ways to cook sodding legumes.

I suspect this is going to be a multi-part series, at least until “svelte” is an adjective that can be applied to me in a non-ironic way, but for now, here are some of the ways I managed to stave off psychotic rage in the first few weeks:

Basic Bean Tricks

• There’s virtually nothing on earth that doesn’t taste better sauted with butter and garlic, and optionally chilli. This was true of jellyfish when I foolishly tried to cook the stuff for a Chinese banquet, and it’s equally true of almost any flavour of beans. Lentils and, unsurprisingly, butter beans work particularly well. Yes, butter’s fine on the diet, according to Tim.
• There are more beans out there than you think. I strongly recommend Wikipedia-ing legumes, and looking through the list. For me, frozen broad beans have been a recent lifesaver – I like the things, they taste nice sauteed with butter – win. For my girlfriend, the discovery that peas can – sorta (they’re a bit low-calorie) – substitute for other legumes prevented her from gnawing on the cat in sheer hunger.
• If you don’t like beans, try black beans. They work tremendously well with soy sauce, they’re a lot darker and meatier-tasting than most beans, and they have a different texture, particularly if fried up.
• Most stock cubes are dubious diet-wise – sugar bad. But Swiss Boullion or other vegetable boullion is fine, and will really enhance the taste of just about any liquid dish.

Right. Now for a couple of recipes.

Yes, I said recipes. I know that normally KKC has a bit of a thing about recipes – as in, we hates them, we hates them forever – but in this case, I discovered that about the point that you’re going “Oh, shit, no rice, pasta, noodles, cheese, milk, or potatoes! I’m going to stab myself with my $200 razor-sharp hand-made folded-steel chef’s knife!”, having a simple instruction manual helped.

Nigel Slater’s Lentil And Tomato

When I first went onto the 4HB diet, I immediately ran, not walked, to my bookshelf to check what Nigel Slater said about beans. The man’s a culinary genius, and the only cookbook writer I know to have never written a recipe that I’ve not found awesome. (Gogo double negatives.)

Sadly, he only really had one 4HB-compatible recipe – but it’s a doozy. Turning a couple of storecupboard ingredients – cheap ones at that – into a wonderful, rich, filling dish with tons of flavour, a bit of spice, and a fantastic balanced texture – genius. Here’s my slightly adapted version.

You’ll need some red lentils – about 150g for a lunch for two people – a can of tomatoes, a bay leaf, some chilli, some onion and garlic, and that’s it.

Stick the lentils in boiling water with the bay leaf, for about 10 minutes. Whilst they’re boiling, chop and gently fry an onion and some crushed or chopped garlic. Add a bit of chilli about 2 minutes in.

Keep tasting the lentils – when they’re tender, drain them, and stick some tomatoes in with the onions for a couple of minutes. Then tip the whole lot together, stir well, taste, add boullion if you like, plenty of black pepper, and serve.

Delicious, quick, warming, and cheap as hell.

Ratatouille With Beans

An accidental discovery, this one, whilst attempting to persuade my girlfriend that beans could actually be edible.

It’s got all the positive characteristics of a normal ratatouille – plenty of complex flavours, comparatively simple to cook – but is even more filling. Add some grilled meat and you’ve got a pretty kick-ass meal.

You’ll need a couple of zuchinni aka courgettes, some onion and garlic (hell, just assume ANYTHING I cook has onion and garlic), some decent red wine (go for Pinot Noir to collect full Ferriss points), some tomatoes (fresh, not tinned), some thyme (dry is OK, fresh is better), some olive oil, some boullion if you have it and some meaty-tasting beans – I used one can of borlotti and one of haricot, but it’s up to you.

This one’s simple but slow. Dice the onion and the courgette, then heat some olive oil in a big pan (yeah, I know, I know, Tim’s over the olive oil thing – but the olive oil adds to the taste here) and gently fry the two for a while. Ideally you want nice soft, golden onion. Chop the tomatoes into eighths whilst you’re waiting.

Now add the garlic and the tomatoes, with the thyme and about half the wine, and cook for about 15 minutes. I don’t skin the tomatoes because a) I like a nice rustic style dish and b) skinning tomatoes is about as much fun as trimming a cat’s toenails, and I like to do it about as often.

Now, add the beans (rinse them first unless gas and intestinal pain is your kink – hey, I’m not judging) along with the rest of the wine. Cook for another 10 minutes, season, and serve.

Want more?

I’m interested to know if this topic’s of interest to everyone. Would you like to see more 4HB foodiness?

A great series of posts from Martin “Khymos” Lersch at the moment, as he’s going through everything he learned from a recent Molecular Gastronomy seminar in Copenhagen.

Today’s one is on stocks – and the big takeaway for me was a detailed discussion of exactly how long meat stocks can be reduced for before they turn bitter.

The TLDR? 15-20 hours over a low heat. Wow, that’s a LOT longer than most people recommend.

So, as you know, at KKC we’re fairly opposed to recipes in any way, shape or form.

But I’ve been thinking about the things recently, and I’m starting to come to the conclusion that there are times and places for such things.

For example, I’d argue that there’s no bloody point whatsoever in any chilli recipe that’s less well tested than Heston Blumenthal’s “Perfect” one. You’re better off understanding the components of chilli (the mince, the vegetables, the chillis themselves, the accompaniment, the beans) and then you can produce not just one chilli, but whatever chilli you like.

A light, firey one with a single bhut joloka and turkey mince. A Texas-style one with cornbread and no beans. A heavy, satisfying beef-based chilli with chopped beef and gentle fire from normal red chillis and some peppers. There are infinite chillis.

On the other hand, if you’re baking bread, you need a recipe, or the damn thing just won’t rise. And if you’re wanting to produce really amazing food beyond your own level, about the only way to do it is to follow a really great chef’s recipe to the letter, as I’ve done several times with both Heston Blumenthal and Thomas Keller’s work. There’s no way I could improvise something that stunning in a million years.

But then there are middle ground elements. Thai curry pastes, for example. Are you better with a recipe or an understanding? When I came to write this post, I was all prepared to say “look, you need a recipe for a thai curry paste”, but now I’m wondering. I don’t understand the ingredients enough, but maybe if I did I could improvise my own to do whatever I wanted at the time.

When do you think you need a recipe? And when are you better to have understanding and flexibility?