As you may have noticed, I’ve been having a bit of an “appreciate the simple tools” time in my kitchen recently (hence my pean on the electric kettle). In fact, the most recent gadget I bought was a set of digital food scales, accurate to +-1g, for about £8, from Sainsburys – and I really can’t believe I went so long using crappy analogue scales.

They’re the universal solvent of cooking – they make my coffee better, they make my experiments easier, and they make my cruddy measuring jug less necessary.

Give it up for the scales.

Beverages

I bought the scales for coffeemaking, and they haven’t disappointed. As I mentioned in the article on cafetières, accurate scales are absolutely vital for good coffee using a cafetiere or, I suspect, a filter, whether manual or automatic.

It’s not just coffee they’re great for. As we should all know, measuring ground solids by volume is a fairly crappy way to go about things, particularly if the individual grains are large and uneven. You’ll need a microgram scale to get the best results with measuring tea, but if you get one, you can start optimising toward the perfect brew (I really need to do that “A/B testing for food” article soon – sound interesting?). Unfortunately there’s very little info available on exactly how much tea you’ll need per pot, but Wikipedia recommends 2.25g per 180ml for black tea, which means that you can use even a normal scale for a pot of tea for three or more (assuming about 275ml in a mug, you’re looking at 825ml for three people, so make a litre to avoid the dregs, using 12.5 of tea).

Hot chocolate, squash, citron presse, all of these things are vastly variable on volume, and bloody difficult to reliably reproduce using just the regular teaspoon. Did 17g of Green and Blacks’ hot chocolate with 450ml of hot milk produce the Best Chocolate Evar? Now you’ll know.

Which leads me on to…

Repeatability

We’re all geeks here, right? I mean, I’m actually sitting typing this wearing an XKCD Science: it works, bitches T-shirt. So we should know by now the value of being able to reproduce our results.

You needs you a good set of scales to do that. And once you’ve got them, you can actually embark on an entirely different sort of cooking, which you may find more or less fun depending on your personal preferences – actually setting up multiple different variations on a dish and seeing what works best. Many cooks might find that unutterably boring, I know, but it has one great advantage that you can actually start adding to the Great Cook’s Canon this way: rather than following along with other cooks and chefs, having vague discussions, you can not only optimise your own dishes, you can tell other people EXACTLY how to produce your results.

Retire the measuring jug

I have a bit of a thing about my measuring jug – I can’t stand it. It’s crappy plastic, it’s hard to read, I have to bend over, squint and guess even to get readings to within 100ml of where I’m aiming.

And then, I realised that an awful lot of the time, what I’m measuring is either water, or so close to water as to make no difference. Beer has a density of 1010 g/l. Milk’s about 1030 g/l. Wine’s around 970 g/l. If you assume everything in your kitchen that’s substantially composed of water has a density identical to water, you’ll get volume measurements at least as accurate as you’d get out of a measuring jug. (And if you need to measure other stuff, there’s a good chart of densities of common liquids available online).

Advantages? Numerous. Make up stock from a stock cube by pouring hot water onto the cube in a jug on the scales. Get a precise 3/1 or 4/1 ratio for vinaigrette (and then test, and reproduce, as above!). Only heat as much water as you need to.

Diets and portion sizes

I’ll be honest – I hadn’t thought of this one until I did a bit of Googling. But it makes perfect sense. Want to control your portion sizes for weightloss, muscle-building, or just making sure you and your friends get the same amount of the roast beef you’ve just cooked? Enter the scales.

Again, you could do this using volume, or marked supermarket weights and some guesswork, but scales make it easier – and make it possible to accurately predict how many calories you’ll get out of that portion of pasta (which you ain’t volume measuring without getting Archimedian on its ass) or that hand-cut slice of bread.

Baking.

It’s science for hungry people.

Anything I’ve forgotten? Any other reasons to love the humble scale?

I really like the idea of coffee pods. For those of you who haven’t run across the things, they’re basically an attempt to make coffee as easy as humanly possible – they produce something between expresso and filter coffee on a mug-by-mug basis in about 15 seconds, using closed, easy-to-dispose “pods” with coffee inside.

Particularly for social situations, the ability to knock out cups of varying types, strengths and flavours of coffee, and even tea, quickly and easily sounds damn good. And let’s face it, producing good coffee’s a bit of a hassle – I’d estimate my morning mug of coffee takes 10 minutes, between preheating, grinding, boiling, waiting, measuring and steeping.

Now, that’s not a problem for me, because I’m extremely sensitive to stimulants, and more than one cup of coffee inside six hours puts me straight into a gibbering twitching government drugs-are-bad-mkay American Psycho state. So I have my little ritual in the morning and my damn fine cup of coffee. On the other hand, if I was running an office on six cups a day, and making for the rest of the office every time, that really wouldn’t be sustainable.

So, as I say, enter the pods.

Too Long, Didn’t Read: the Coffee Pod Summary

• They’re very convenient indeed, and work particularly well brought into the workplace to replace shitty office coffee.
• The taste is somewhere between “foul” and “pretty good”, heavily affected by whether you buy the “official” pods (shonky) or ones from third-party suppliers (links below).
• The Nestle Nespresso is generally considered to produce average to half-decent coffee (much better than the average office dispenser) but is very expensive and ties you to Nestle.
• If convenience is very important or quality isn’t, they’re the win. Particularly good for an office setting.
• Otherwise, get a cafetière /cafetières instead.

What’s Out There?

There are a whole bunch of different pod systems and sizes out there, and they’d take more than the length of this article to go into. Thankfully, there are also several excellent dedicated sites focussing on pod machines – if you;re looking at getting one of these machines, I’d recommend a trip to http://www.singleservecoffee.com/ and their forums at http://www.singleservecoffeeforums.com/.

The question of what the best machine is seems to be nearly impossible to answer. Singleserve coffee.com have rounded up their reviews and some of their recommendations, but even that recommends 4 different machines.

Of course, the range of beans is one of the make-or-break factors. The general rule, from Coffeegeek.com and elsewhere on the ‘net, seems to be that the brand-name beans from the machine manufacturers vary between average and awful, but that third-party suppliers (a number of posters mentioned http://www.bettercoffee.com ) produce coffee that, whilst it doesn’t hit the heights of really well-prepared fresh-ground coffee, is pretty damn good. One poster on CoffeeGeek said “Nobody’s going to mistake this for fine French press coffee, granted, but after the Senseo and Yuban attempts, it’s a revelation”.

The Nespresso system belongs slightly in a category of its own. It uses a different pod technology to the other systems, aggressively guarded by patents (indeed, according to Wikipedia, they’re suing one manufacturer of compatible cartridges right now . The pods are very expensive (about 50p each) but are generally considered to be of reasonably decent quality (see below).

Do pod coffee machines produce good coffee?

Depends on what you mean by good coffee. One poster on Metafilter, talking about the Nespresso machines, said "Honestly, they probably produce better espresso than a many people with home espresso machines that don’t clean them properly or don’t have a decent burr grinder, and the patience to dial it in. "

In general, if your coffee palate’s particularly refined, they’re not going to perfectly satisfy. However, many of the awful reviews given to pod machines on sites like CoffeeGeek seem to have been using the default manufacturer’s coffee pods – Senseo pods came in for a particularly thorough kicking, both for lack of quality and lack of range. By contrast, third-party pods offer much more of the range serious coffee afficionados would expect – BetterCoffee offers a few hundred options compared to the dozen or so offered by most machine manufacturers.

Overall, the answer seems to be “satisfactory”, but very much dependant on individual preferences. See the range of reviews for the Phillips Senseo , for example, which vary from “If you’re desperate enought to call this swill coffee, you’d better switch to another beverage.”, through cautious optimism (I’d recommend this review) in particular for a balanced overview) to “Great price, great coffee”.

The Nespresso, again, appears to be a special case. All of the serious coffee connosieur reviews seem to converge on “pretty good, but not as good as an espresso pulled by someone who knows what they’re doing”. Given the relative levels of effort involved, that’s pretty high praise.

Any hacks we should know about?

As you’d expect from a rather cool and complex system exposed to the Internet, there’s a lot of discussion about hacking and improving the darn things.

Most notably:

• You can make your own pods for the machines half a dozen different ways, the most convenient of which seems to be the Perfect Pod Machine . Potentially useful, again, for an office setting.


• The pods also make very convenient storage mechanisms for coffee for the Aeropress – as one CoffeeGeek user reports.


• There are a fair number of minor optimisations it’s possible to make to the coffee-making process with a pod – with most pods, one of the most important tips seems to be to pre-wet the pod with hot water before inserting it into the machine.

Any experience?

All of this is from my research, of course. I’ve not used one of the things extensively myself.

Have you? If so, what did you think?

I’ve been on a bit of a coffee mission in the last few months, ever since discovering the wonders of Has Bean Coffee subscription coffee plan. One single-estate coffee through your door every week, what’s not to like?

And as a result, I’ve been working out how to make that coffee taste as awesome as humanly possible. Now, I’m a bit old-fashioned, and grew up with a heavy francophile influence, so my preferred way of making coffee is the cafetière (“French press” for the USAians amongst us, although I’m sure there are states where it’s now officially referred to as the “Freedom Press”).

cafetières are awesome, actually. Baristas seem to reckon they’re one of the best ways of making coffee, period, and certainly one of the top ways that doesn’t cost hundreds or thousands of pounds. They produce coffee similar to that from a filter, but less burned-tasting than filter machines often produce, and with a real complexity of flavour depending on how you brew.

And there’s the rub. Making coffee with a cafetiere might look simple, but there’s a LOT of optimisation you can do…

Optimise your grind

Hardcore types will already know that blade grinders, the cheapest type of coffee grinder, are fantastic for chopping chilli but sodding useless for coffee (although, IMO, if you have to use one a cafetiere brew is one of the less-horrible ways to do it). Pre-ground coffee is only of much use if you drink it within a day or so of grinding, and even then it’s nowhere near as aromatic as fresh-ground. So, one of the first stops on the coffee pilgrimage tends to be the burr grinder, with variable grind size. But here’s the rub – even burr grinders aren’t created anywhere near equal, and a bad burr grinder is particularly bad for cafetiere grinds, which need to be large and even. It turns out, you see, that cheap burr grinders can set a maximum grind size, but will randomly produce lots of finer-ground particles of coffee smaller than that grind size too, and that equals sludged-up cafetière and overbrewed coffee thanks to excessive surface area.

After screaming at the price of top-end grinders, I’ve settled for now on a Hario Skerton hand grinder. It’s a pain to figure out how to use it initially (I’ll write a guide on here at some point), and it’s certainly some fairly hard work to grind 50 grams or so of beans for four people, but it produces a very, very nice, smooth grind, and the smell when you first open it up after grinding is worth the price of admission on its own. Plus, I’ll probably study Brazilian Ju-Jitsu at some point, so the increased grip strength from using it every day ain’t going to waste…

A/B testing cafetières’ brews

OK, let’s start simple. Get a set of scales with a 1 gram sensitivity. Better than that would be great, but they need to be able to handle a maximum weight of 2 kg or so, and most microgram scales can’t cut that, at least not on a non-lab budget. (Please do tell me if I’m missing a brand here – I’d love to get a set of microgram scales with a wide weight range).

Why do you need scales? Because the single biggest optimisation I’ve been able to make to my cafetière coffee has been precise weight measurement, both of the beans and the water. Measuring by volume works very, very badly for coffee – the ground beans froth varying amounts, the volume can be widely different dependant on the grind size, there are all the usual problems of volume compared to reasonably large eliptical objects. Get a set of scales in play and you can get granular on the problem. So to speak.

Now, there are four variables in the process. People who design websites, ads, software or Toyota cars for a living will be starting to make a matrix in their head already.

1. Temperature. Coffee is brewed somewhere in the 88-93 degree centigrade ( 190F to 200F ) range, but there’s not a lot of agreement beyond that as to what the ideal temperature is. (Yeah, I know I said 93 in the electric kettle article. But, as usual, it’s more complicated than that.)
2. Brew time. Artisan Coffee in Edinburgh say 3 minutes, Square Mile Coffee say 4 minutes. My experience is that 3 minutes produces a more fruity, acidic brew, and 4 minutes produces a richer, heavier, and more caffinated brew.
3. Amount of coffee. Again, not a lot of agreement here. Somewhere between 5 grams and 8 grams per 100ml works well, with 8 grams working for heavier, smoother beans, and 5 grams working well for the lighter and fruitier, although it can sometimes produce a smooth brew too.
4. The bean. Different beans respond different ways to different approaches. A Kenyan Gethumbwhini will work well with a 4 min/7g/l combination, wheras the El Salvador Finca Argentina (a fantastic bean from this week’s subscription) seems to respond better to 5g/l / 4min.

So what do you do? Well, there’s a variety of approaches you could take. At the hardcore end, I’d recommend half a dozen small cafetieres, a big pile of ground beans, a matrix table, and some serious tasting. (I keep meaning to organise this in Edinburgh). You might want to Google “A/B testing”. At the lighter end, just vary your brew between the extremes every time you make a morning cuppa, and keep notes (that’s what I’m doing normally).

(Anyone got a systematised way for optimal testing of this sort of thing? My maths ain’t up to it.)

Either way, the important thing to remember is that each bean responds totally differently. So don’t assume a brew method for one bean will result in a good brew with another – I’ve had one bean which actually tasted plastic if given a long, high-density brew, but was fantastic at a much lighter brew.

All cafetières are not created equal

For starters, there’s the temperature drop-off through the side – whilst the classic cafetiere is made of glass, that means that it’ll lose heat really quickly, meaning that the optimal extraction temperature drops off. (Hmm, we should really do some taste testing on this – watch this space.). There are a couple of ways to mitigate that – remember to pre-heat the cafetiere, for starters, as it really does make a difference. Wrap the cafetiere in something insulating, like a towel or some foam. And if you really want to get hard-core, you could immerse the cafetiere in hot water, or even water heated to exactly the right temperature in a water bath. (Again, must try that.)

Your best option for convenience and quality is probably to buy a double-walled cafetiere, though. Sadly Square Mile seem to have stopped selling their excellent-looking silver ones, but Amazon have a fair selection. They’ll hold heat like a thermos flask, meaning you get a much, much better brew.

The other variable, of course, is shape. As Mathias pointed out in the kettle article, the shape and material of a brewing vessel has a hell of an effect on the brew. In general, bigger, wider vessels should ensure greater extraction in less time, and they’ll also lose less heat to boot (volume and hence heat energy goes up as a cube whilst surface area only goes up as a square.). Having said that, the press will also work better the higher up the cafetière the coffee starts, so balance is important.

And that’s about it. Any other cafetiere tips out there?

We’ve had a particularly heavy load of spam today, and one of the comments on the kettle post was deleted. Sorry, I suck. Will be putting stuff in place to avoid that.

Preparing more content here, and looking at more ways of doing it, and I need a bit of help from you guys.

What I could really do with is the answer to this question:

What would you most like to know about cooking right now?

What’s really kicking your arse? What problem would it be infinitely better if it was solved?

What’s the thing you most want a solution to, food-wise?

Chicken doesn’t have a great reputation as a meat. People call it bland. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

During my time off from Kamikaze Cookery, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking, and learning a lot of new stuff. Some of it isn’t directly applicable to everyday living, like knowing the national dish of Laos (larb, a minced meat salad – nicer than it sounds). Other bits, though, really are – notably having had time to thoroughly go through many of my neglected recipe books.

I’ll be sharing a fair bit of this stuff over the next months, but right now I want to talk about what might be my favourite dish of all from a year’s testing – grilled chicken.

By “grilled” here, I mean grilled on a grill pan, a solid chunk of metal with ridges that you put on a stove, or potentially a barbeque. (Personally I’m using a seriously battered Le Creuset cast iron model) Top-down grills, which the Americans amongst us would call “broilers”, have rather seriously different cooking qualities (although they’re ace for sausages). But a ridged grill cooks fast and delivers lots of gorgeous searing on the meat, meaning Maillard reactions are a go, for that amazing caramelised crunchiness contrasting with the hot, fresh, tasty meat.

Thigh FILLETS are the win.

Chicken breasts don’t have a great reputation amongst the cookerati, which I think is slightly unfair. However, for a simple grill, you really want the flavourful, mixed dark and light, slightly fatty meat of a thigh. Grilled chicken breast is not only more expensive but also less tasty.

But there’s a problem with that – a whole thigh takes forever to grill, and is a bit of a dicy proposition even if you’re using a thermometer. My one undercooked-chicken FAIL of the last year was courtesy of some stovetop-grilled chicken thighs – you’ve got to watch hot and cold spots, which even induction cookers and cast iron can produce, you’ve got to watch cooking all the way through the meat, and you’ve got to watch the wierd thermal dynamics around the bone. In short, whole chicken thighs are great for all-over cooking in stews or ovens, but suck donkey balls for grilling.

However, most UK supermarkets at least now stock thigh fillets. They’re damn good value (about four pounds for 500g of free-range high-quality thighs from Sainsburys in the UK), they taste gorgeous, and they’re thin, so they cook extremely fast on a grill. Most of them are skinless, but the grilling process gives so much flavour it doesn’t matter.

You could fillet your own thighs, of course. I could peel tomatoes for ragu too, but I can’t usually be arsed to do either. They’re about comparable levels of pain in the ass.

(Finally, one neat tip if you cook sous-vide. Grilled chicken breast is a two-minute job if you cook the breast at low temperature – and by “low” we mean 60 degrees centigrade, a la Douglas Baldwin’s guide. ONce they’re done, simply slap them on the grill for a minute each side – the only way to get really tasty grilled breast. Make up a really good caesar dressing, grab some anchovies and some crispy lettuce, and you’ve got the basis of a world-beating grilled chicken salad. )

“Smoky” is the name of the game in grilled chicken recipes.

Solo, grilled chicken thighs aren’t bad. But the heat and the fat means that they take up appropriate flavours like you wouldn’t believe.

My vote for best meal I’ve made all year goes to Nigel Slater’s chicken thighs with thyme leaves. Just rub the thigh fillets with good olive oil and fresh thyme – don’t even bother stripping it from its branches, just stick sprigs of it on there – then grill. The smell is incredible – one of the few meals that works much better if you’re eating it where you’re cooking.

He also recommends balsamic vinegar, onions, or French mustard as tastes to go with grilled chicken. I’d also suggest lemon or lime – grilled lemon chicken is a classic, of course – to cut through the smoke and bring out high notes to the taste, or maybe even white wine – you could try just heating the pan hot then almost basting the chicken with it every couple of minutes. Barbeque sauce, provided it’s good stuff, or Moroccan tastes like cumin also work a treat.

Fat, fat, fat.

It’s all about the fat in recipes for grilled chicken. Chicken thighs already have quite a bit, of course, and this is a good reason to keep the skin on if you can get the skin-on fillets. (The other reason, of course, is that chicken skin is gorgeous).

Otherwise, you’ll be wanting to add some serious fat content in there. Olive oil rubbed into the chicken tastes fantastic in an “oh my god, I’m in an Italian tourism advert” sort of way. Butter, either rubbed on, plonked on after, or both, gives it a rich, expensive feel. And cream or creme fraiche makes a great base for a sauce, contrasting nicely with the spare feel of the grilled chicken and picking up all the grilled, charred flavours.

Any other tips for grilled chicken?

It’s a source of amazement to me that when I visit the US, in particular, I don’t see electric kettles.

Of all my household gadgets, the humble electric kettle is certainly the most frequently used. More frequently than my sous-vide water bath, my Bamix mixer, even my (wonderful, wonderful) induction hob, the £10 kettle from Tesco is what gets me through the day.

And as a result of this, and of being, as we all know, an enormous geek, I’ve managed to run across a fair amount of useful information on the subject of water, heating of. So here it is, my ode to the humble but awesomely useful kettle.

Only a Tea Kettle should boil!

You don’t actually want to use boiling water straight out of the kettle most of the time. Instead, each type of beverage has its own preferred brewing temperature.

Black tea SHOULD be made with boiling water, yes. Indeed, if you don’t make it with just-boiled, 100 degree water, the extraction doesn’t work properly and it tastes like crap. Herbal teas – effective, ineffective, or just tasty – appear to mostly go the same way.

Green tea shouldn’t be let within a mile of boiling water, or you’ll overextract the tannin in the tea, of which there’s a lot more than in black tea. Green tea brewing times are complicated, complicated stuff, but the TL:DR summary for supermarket-quality tea is about 80 degrees Centigrade (180F – ish), for about 2 minutes.

If you pour boiling water straight out of your kettle onto your coffee, Steve from Has Bean Coffees will bury your house in used coffee grounds. Well, OK, he won’t. But you’ll make crap coffee. The temperature for coffee extraction is one of those frightningly complicated problems that causes any argument to end in graphs. However, for a French Press, which is probably what you’re using if you want water from an electric kettle, various sources specify anything between 89 and 93 degrees centigrade.

For both tea and coffee, remember that the temperature of the water changes when it hits a cold teapot or coffee pot! Preheat for, as the kids say, The Win.

Deoxygenation – the myth and the tests

Most coffee connosuiers would say that you shouldn’t leave water in the kettle once it’s boiled, if you want the best quality tea or coffee. Boiling the water drives off the dissolved oxygen, and that oxygen is important both for tea making and coffee. Allegedly.

Is this true? Well, there appears to be some truth in it, but it ain’t proven by any means. However, some testing over at CoffeeGeek seems to show that oxygenated water may change, and perhaps clarify, the taste of coffee. in addition, some hardcore coffee geeks are experimenting with post-brewing aeration of coffee, just as it’s done with wine. Interesting stuff, and look for a test on it here soon.

The coffee and tea extraction processes is terrifyingly complex, hence the uncertainty, involving at least 800 flavour compounds, according to Harold McGee. His book “On Food And Cooking” has nothing to say about freshly-brewed or otherwise water, but does mention that many waters aren’t ideal for tea or coffee – he recommends using Volvic mineral water.

Beware the “Water Heater”

Tefal’s Quick Cup electric kettle promises “Hot water in 3 seconds”, by heating water as it’s pumped rather than in a chamber like a kettle. It’s a neat idea, and only heating the water you need makes sense.

However, according to all reports, the darn thing doesn’t produce boiling water, just hot water, around 88 – 92 degrees centigrade. That’s arguably a little cool for coffee, great for green tea, and totally useless for black tea – and indeed, the Amazon review page is full of unhappy tea drinkers .

Caveat teadrinkor.

Rival hot water gadget the Eco-Kettle, by contrast, actually offers three temperature settings – 80 degrees, 90 degrees, and 100 degrees. That’s actually a damn fine idea, and might persuade me to buy one. Anyone know how accurate they are?

PID for Tea

This one’s more of an idea than a tip. There’s no reason you couldn’t take a PID temperature controller such as the one I originally used to build an improvised sous vide bath, and connect it to a cheap electric kettle. (Let’s face it, when you’re playing with the electricity supply, you don’t want to risk melting your sixty quid Dualit kettle.)

Why? Well, one of the major pains in the neck when brewing french-press coffee, in particular, is timing the grinding of the coffee to the heating of the water. The water, of course, hits 100 degrees, and then starts cooling down, and we want to catch it at about 94-95 degrees C (202F) in order to achieve optimum brewing temperature. However, we might well also be using a hand-grinding coffee grinder for the best grind, we don’t want to leave our coffee ground because the aromatics escape, and timing a hand-grind of 50 grams of coffee to 30 seconds after your kettle boils is… tricky.

(Oh, and the temperature drop is obviously dependent on the volume of liquid in the kettle. Basically we’re talking thermometers at dawn here.)

However, with a PID, there’s really no reason you couldn’t hold the temperature at 94 degrees Centigrade indefinitely, or at least for the 3 minutes it takes to frantically grind. Worth A Try. Another KKC test coming up, I think.

No it isn’t.

However, it is on extended hiatus. Basically, my intention was to pick up KKC again last year, figure out a format that meant we could produce it in a reasonable time and, as the orcs of today say, GOOOOG!

Then Death Knight Love Story://www.deathknightlovestory.com happened.

For those of you who don’t know, my day job is as an animation director. During the first year of KKC, I’d been taking a sabbatical to work with Real Film – hence, KKC. However, in 2009 I got back to work, and decided to write a script for a short film to get started making motion capture projects.

I showed it to a few people. Rather famous people. And they showed it to some even more famous people, like Joanna Lumley, Jack Davenport, Anna Chancellor and Brian Blessed. Unexpectedly, they thought it was fantastic, and agreed to come work on it for a pittance.

At that point, all other projects got shoved off the table.

However, one day soon DKLS (as it is known) will be done, and I’ll have some free time. And at that point I intend to do more stuff with KKC. NOt sure WHAT more stuff – a full series might be unlikely, but we might find a way to do it – but more stuff.

So, apologies for the wait. We ain’tn’t dead. We have no idea what we’re doing, but we’re still intending to do something.

Martin “Khymos” Lersch is, as usual, the man. Not the scary I-take-all-your-tax-and-oppress-hippies-and-rockstars man, but the cool, sorted, knowledgeable man. Probably with a very narrow black tie and a sharp suit.

Today he’s got a complete round-up of all the molecular gastronomy books coming out this year and damn, that’s an exciting list. All the El Bulli recipes! Ferran Adria’s A-Z of food! Herve This on ovens!

Damn you, Lersch, you just made my local Amazon branch rather richer.

Heya! As promised, albeit some time ago, here’s our new videoblog, featuring Chantilly Chocolate Orange (a trick to make a mousse using nothing but chocolate and orange juice) and some discussion of the future of KKC. Let us hear your comments!

The camera’s cables vanished. The camera spontaneously discharged. The supermarket was out of ice. And my computer got its first virus in years, which took most of a day to kill. Gah.

So, expect a KKC shortie update first thing on Monday! In it, I’ll be demonstrating a Neat Trick mixing liquid chocolate with orange juice to create a whipped cream of chocolate (you may know it already as a varient on Herve This’ Chantilly Chocolate), and talking about the future of KKC, and why you haven’t seen a new series yet.

UPDATE – On the upside, in the last hour I’ve come up with 4 ideas for new episodes/live shows. So you’ll probably be seeing more soon.

I’ll do the Tandoor post another time – for now, here are some of the pics and videos from Day 2 of KKC Live:

So, Day 2, and the actual cooking.

(If you’re just joining us – we were attempting to cook two horrendously complex dishes from three Michelin star chefs in two days – Heston Blumenthal’s Perfect Chicken Tikka Marsala, and Thomas Keller’s Cream of Blueberry Soup.)

Probably the most pressing question – did the recipes actually work? Can two geeks in a rather bizarrely-equipped kitchen actually manage to cook either of these incredibly complex, three-star meals?

I was pretty confident at first. After all, I’ve cooked several Heston meals before, admittedly with a lot of planning and a very well-equipped kitchen (and mostly with either a fair bit of alteration or some careful choice of recipe). And I’ve cooked one thing from the French Laundry book before, although it didn’t go entirely perfectly.

The first day left me a bit less confident, to be honest. The frog/hemisphere Charlotte mixture worked fine, but some experimentation made it look very unlikely they’d ever leave the mould again. The Dacquoise biscuits just worked by the skin of their collective teeth. On the tikka marsala side, there hadn’t been many major disasters, but I was extremely not confident about the creation of a tandoor oven in our hosts’ back garden on Day 2.

Day 2 did not open well. My attempt to produce the pepper sauce ended up with about twice as much sauce as I’d expected. Alex’s naan dough, meanwhile, spent a considerable portion of the day masquerading as wallpaper paste, mostly stuck to Alex. And then we actually built the Tandoor, which was such a catalogue of, erm, challenges that it deserves, and will get, a seperate post.

My creme anglaise didn’t thicken – at least, I didn’t think it had. When you don’t even know if what you’re producing looks like a finished product, you might well be in trouble. The bottle we’d been using to crush the cashew nuts, after our “blender” (smoothie maker) failed, had proceeded to leak sweet chilli sauce all over them.

Oh, and we had realised that we didn’t have a vital cooking ingredient – the pressure cooker for the Masala sauce. Or a grill at the top of the oven for the naan. Or pizza stones.

But we managed to cobble something together in the end. And what was the end result like?

Stunningly awesome.

We’ll have pictures in the next day or so, so for now you’ll just have to take my word for it, but both recipes came out close to perfect.

Tikka Masala

The tikka masala was one of the best curries I’ve ever had – rich, complex, incredibly creamy. The chicken was just stunning – chicken is one of my favourite meats, and the irregular, charred, moist, earthy flavours, the little crunchy bits and the multiplicity of texture and flavour made all the enormous effort and occasional pain of the tandoor worth it – for all participants. The naan wasn’t browned (because our oven wasn’t hot enough), but it tasted great for all that – thick, rustic, clearly home-made, with a lovely chewy texture. (Phil and Alex were a bit less keen on the naan, but I really liked it).

Our only criticisms were that the sauce could perhaps have been a little more multi-flavoured, and, although I hesitate to correct a three-star chef, there was maybe a bit too much butter (100g) added right at the end.

Overall, Heston Blumenthal’s hideously complex and extremely expensive recipe – does indeed produce a result worthy of it. Fantastic stuff.

Cream of Blueberry Soup

As for the French Laundry – we will add the pictures as soon as possible, but for now, just take my word that the soup came out looking almost exactly as it did in the book’s pictures (except for the frog-shaped Charlottes, which we all agreed rather added to the effect).

The Charlottes I was so dubious about slid neatly out of the moulds when heated, just as Thomas Keller said they would.

And yes, it was staggeringly good. The texture of the soup and the Charlotte blended into one another like nothing else I’ve tasted, except possibly some of the dishes at the Fat Duck. The soup was incredibly complex and utterly, utterly gorgeous, and richer than the guy who told Sergey Brin that sure, he could invest a thousand dollars in this “search engine” thingy. The charlotte was creamy, ultra-smooth, like the best Muller Thick Yoghurt ever created. And the Dacquoises were gorgeously crunchy, nutty and a perfect contrast to the meal.

Perhaps I would have liked it a bit less sweet, but if I’d been served that dish in a top restaurant, I wouldn’t have been complaining.

So…

Again – neither of us are expert chefs. I’m pretty good at savoury courses, but I mostly cooked the sweet, which I was near-totally ignorant about. And the kitchen we had certainly wasn’t restaurant-standard, nice though it is. And of the tasks presented to us, we reckoned we’d screwed at least three quarters of them up.

We, apparently, was wrong.

Particularly when contrasting to our other Normal Person vs experiences, I’d have to say – skip the easy stuff, go straight to “this is how we cook it in the restaurant” books.

So – if you’ve always wanted to try some massively ambitious recipe from a top chef, but are afraid you don’t have the cooking skill, the equipment, the talent – odds are, you can do it. Even if it looks like it’s gone horribly wrong half-way through.

So go give it a go.

And let us know how you do.

We’re live on Day 2 of the KKC Live experience – watch at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/kamikaze-cookery-live, or follow along on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kamikazecookery

And if you’re just joining us and want to know what the hell’s going on, we now actually have something resembling an explanation:

So that’s about where we are so far. I’ve skipped lightly over the epic struggle to remove the Dacquoise circles from the greaseproof paper (hint – greaseproof is NOT non-stick unless greased first. Oops.), and sidestepped the mild anticlimax that was the chilli (heat. heat. heat. Cough a bit. Done.), but, basically, we’re now up to date with the KKC Live experience.

So what do we have to do tonight? Well, we’ve got to build a tandoor, of course, out of a bunch of bricks and Tina’s Dad’s barbeque. We’ve got to cook the masala sauce, which we haven’t looked at too thoroughly, but boy it’s a long section. We’ve got to cook creme anglaise, we’ve got to finish shelling and cooking the fava beans, and we’ve got to roll out the pasta dough sans pasta machine. And we’ve got to make up and cook naan breads in the oven, using our pizza stones. Why, no, we don’t have any pizza stones.

Tune in tonight at 7pm BST, or perhaps a little before, as we get started. It’s emerging that most of the action will be on the live ustream feed, and the associated chat channel – now, hopefully, with a better angle and slightly less clattering on the keyboard (we’re upgrading the mic). We’ll also be Twittering regularly, and we’ll have pictures and audio updates going up there regularly. And of course we’ll round the entire thing up with a Great Big Blog Post and more video on Thursday.

See you tonight!

A few more videos and pictures that typify the entire experience: