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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.