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I’d combined the meringue and the almond mix, spread the result on greaseproof paper, which I assumed was the same thing as baking parchment, (nope, it’s not). Meanwhile, Alex had combined about 1/5 of the original intended quantity of Garam Masala, and stuck it in the oven. We were sitting pretty.

Which was, of course, when our evil viewers decided that we should commence the Emergency Ravioli.

We were terrified of the ravioli recipe. However, I’d cunningly stolen a march on the entire thing by agreeing with Alex that I would, later on, fry the chilli, a process almost guaranteed to result in my choking my lungs out on capiascin fumes. In exchange, he’d agreed to undertake the – apparently less lethal – pasta making.

I am The Cunning.

See, the pasta-making recipe isn’t your regular pasta. This is super-pasta. Uber-pasta. Holy-crap-that’s-going-to-take-a-while pasta.

Whilst Alex continued to very slowly move his hand in a circle, I got back to my Dacquoises, which had by now nicely cooked.

I cut out little circles, stuck ’em back in the oven, and read some Twitter replies. Alex continued to move his hand in a circle.

I ate a kit-kat, captured some video, looked through the rest of the recipe.

Alex continued to move his hand in – yes, you’ve guessed it – a circle.

Feeling rather smug, I decided to start on the agliotti sauce. I’d had a quick look over the thing, and it mostly seemed to be a rather relaxed process of heating and blending a mixture of marscapone and beans.

And then I realised I’d failed to read one key line.

“First, peel all the fava beans.”

kamikazecookery http://twitpic.com/6i165 – Sisyphus had it easy

http://twitter.com/kamikazecookery/status/2010379340

Oh, cock.

(part 3)

Meanwhile, Alex had started his garlic roasting, peeled a million garlic cloves, and started work on the garam marsala. All was going well.

I had now started on the next stage of the blueberry soup – the Dacquoise. First problem: We had NO CLUE what the hell a Dacquoise was when it was at home.

kamikazecookery Anyone know what a “Dacquoise” is?

http://twitter.com/kamikazecookery/status/2008533013

Our viewers soon put us right with the aid of Wikipedia – but unfortunately the description was a bit, erm, confusing (“A dacquoise is a dessert cake made with layers of nut meringue and whipped cream or buttercream” – but we didn’t have any whipped cream!), and we didn’t have time to look at the pictures. Nuts to it, said I, and plowed boldly onward.

Next, we needed to blend some almonds, sugar, and various other things. The only problem? You guessed it – no blender. However, we DID have a smoothie maker…

Amazingly, 100% success.

The same could not be said, sadly, for Alex and the Garam Marala, through no fault of his own. We’d simply underestimated the massive, massive quantities of spices Heston needed for the spice mix – 75 grams of pepper turned out to be about two jar’s worth, whilst 120 grams of Coriander Seeds would have cost about as much as an entire meal out. We were in serious trouble.

And then, Alex noticed the comment that we would have a bit of Garam Masala left over at the end of the recipe. Maybe we had hope. And a little while later, flicking through in a panic, he realised just how much “a bit” would actually be…

Meanwhile, I’d started whipping some eggs and adding in sugar. It may be noted that amongst the things I direly suck at, whipping eggs is high on the list, not helped by the subtlty of the tools I had to work with:

However, we knew that this wasn’t true of our viewers, so we started on a bold new experiment: egg whipping, directed by Internet.

I whipped. I stopped. I held up to the camera. From next door, our host/assistant Tina shouted through that there was a massive delay on the video, and I appeared to still be whipping. Eventually, the collective intelligence of the Internet came to a conclusion on the whippiness of my egg. I whipped a bit more. Repeat.

Remember, many eyes make eggs frothy.

(Part 2)

We’d gotten back, and we had ingredients. A LOT of ingredients.

Job #1 for Alex was to brine the chicken, a task basically consisting of making some salt water, then putting the chicken thighs in it. What could go wrong?

kamikazecookery http://twitpic.com/6hkvb – As Alex put it, “It’s an Archimedean problem. Chicken go in, water go out.”

http://twitter.com/kamikazecookery/status/2008363342

Meanwhile, all I had to do was heat some cream and mix some sugar in. Of course, Thomas Keller lists all ingredients in cups, which those of us in the Old World don’t use, but a bit of ingenuity plus a hundred-million-dollar emergent artificial intelligence solved that problem.

At the same time, I realised that I’d been cooking on induction for so long that the concept of using actual flames in cooking gave me the Fear.

But my colleagues coaxed me out from under the sink, persuaded me to stop gibbering about the blue dancing burning fairies, and I got to work – until I hit an unusual snag with live-on-the-Internet cookery.

I was so busy Twittering I forgot about the cream, and it boiled over.

Leap, grab, cool. Aargh, aargh, aargh. But I seemed to have saved it – provided I could whisk the cream and get it into the mixture, fast.

I turned around to our host, Phil, and asked where the whisk was. He, to my abiding horror, pointed me to a hand whisk.

Toy game soldiers of to that nuts. It was time to unleash… our secret weapon.

Some say that he can maintain a 58 degree water bath – with the power of his mind. All we know is…

The cream was perfectly whipped – of course. We listened for the sound of the Not-Stig roaring away on his way to another cooking emergency, then mixed in the whipped cream, and poured the result into hemispherical moulds. well, the closest to hemispherical we had, which turned out to be cute little frog moulds. Less yoghurt Charlottes, more yoghurt McCartneys.

(Part 1)

So, about 6pm, we fired up the live stream, got a’twittering, fired up the TwitPic, and … promptly went shopping.

kamikazecookery Got to the supermarket. Realized we didn’t have a pen with which to cross off our million purchases. Job 1 : buy pen.

http://twitter.com/kamikazecookery/status/2006656847

Meanwhile, our charming viewers, bereft of our presence on the live chat, started a lively discussion as to which of our many ingredients we’d forget on our return. We scoffed, and headed deeper into the cyclopean expanse of the local 24-hour Tesco.

A sudden win – half-price blueberries – was followed by a loss – Tesco being out of all other soft fruit. Warning: Out Of Fruit Error. But everything else fell before the swathe of our mighty shopping prowess – until we hit the Fava Beans.

First question: WTF is a Fava Bean when it’s at home?

We assumed it was something terribly sophisticated, and possibly found in the “To Eat With Human Flesh” aisle. Our viewers quickly put us right.

marcmagus @kamikazecookery wikipedia says: Broad Bean, Fava Bean, Faba Bean, Field Bean, Bell Bean or Tic Bean

http://twitter.com/marcmagus/status/2006966296

We’d found ghee. We’d found chickpea flour (tip – also called “Gram Flour”, found in the speciality baking aisle). How hard could a feckin’ broad bean be?

Well, we checked the canned beans. No juice. More surprisingly, also no broad beans. We checked the dried beans. We checked the fresh beans. How many goddamn bean sections does this supermarket have? We checked the OTHER dried bean section. We asked a member of staff. She asked another member of staff.

And then Alex shouted “AHA!”, and it was indeed a mighty “AHA!”. See, it turns out…

Broad beans are in fact peas. According to Tesco.

So, one day down, and where have we got to on our live cooking extravaganza?

For those of you just tuning in: for our first live streamed event, we’ve decided to attempt to make not one but two massive three-Michelin-star style recipes, in a normal kitchen, using the full power of Alex and my Mad Cookery Skillz. AND we’ve decided to do the entire thing live on the Internet – for all of the ways you can watch the second half tonight, see our earlier post.

The US contender for our recipe is Cream of Blueberry Soup with Yoghurt Charlottes", from Thomas “I was the cooking consultant on Ratotuille, you know” Keller, maestro of the French Laundry, regularly rated as one of the best restaurants in the world. We’re cooking from his "French Laundry Cookbook.

Meanwhile, in the blue corner, the plucky contender is Perfect Chicken Tikka Masala" from Heston “I once cooked an entire pig sous-vide” Blumenthal, ex-repo man and proprietor of the "Fat Duck, which is not only another contender for the best restaurant in the world but also more or less the reason Kamikaze Cookery exists. This recipe isn’t from his restaurant, but from his book Further Adventures In Search Of Perfection.

As a backup, in case we found both recipes too easy, we also had the “Emergency Ravioli”, aka the “Fava Bean Angolotti with Curry Emulsion” from Thomas Keller’s book. We were going to leave it up to our noble viewers to decide if we needed to undertake that additional challenge. Guess what they chose, the bastards?

We’re off to shop right now, but we have the … IPHONE!!!!! … so if you comment here, we’ll pick it up and reply either then or later.

So, we’ve assembled our shopping list for the KKC shopping trip in about two hours’ time. And it’s, you know, nice and short…

We’re a bit worried about a couple of things. So, rather than do our usual thing of making it up and then having a million people tell us that no, it isn’t a blender, we’re going to get all KKC Live and ask!

1) 1.5 pints of blueberries – how many blueberries is that? This one’s from the French Laundry. I mean, I guess we could take a pint jug along to the supermarket, but I can’t imagine they’ll be too happy with us opening packets of berries up and pouring them in…

2) Chickpea flour looks like it’s going to be a pain in the ass to get. Should we just get some chickpeas, something heavy, and a hairdryer?

—-

160g Table Salt
8 chicken thighs
6 bulbs of garlic
250g olive oil
200g root ginger
100g Coriander seeds
100g cinnamon sticks
75g black peppercorns
25g cloves
20g mace
5 dried bay leaves
450g greek yoghurt
50g whole cashews
1 kg vine-ripened tomatoes
2 large onions
40g tomato puree
Fenugreek
Tumeric
1 tin coconut milk
1 green chilli
750g self-raising flour
20g sugar
6g baking powder
1l whole milk
100g whole eggs
12 more eggs
8 oz all-purpose flour
2 lb fava beans
100g marscapone
Curry powder
8 spring onions
Fresh veg stock
600ml double cream
100ml Creme Fraiche
Unsalted butter
Pack of sugar
Gelatin
300ml yoghurt
Vanilla bean
1 pint raspberries
1 pint strawberries
Mint
3 oz blanched almonds
Cornflour
Small bottle Sav Blanc or similar dry white
1 unwaxed lemon
1.5 pints blueberries

65g green cardamom pods
35g black cardamom pods
130g cumin seeds
200ml ish ghee
25g chickpea flour
10g Kashmiri Chilli powder
20g dried melon seeds
5g coriander seeds

We have the technology! Here are all the streams that we’re going to be using to communicate tonight:

Twitter: Follow kamikazecookery on Twitter. This is going to be our main feed for the entire thing – if you want to know everything that’s going on, check here. We’ll be highlighting our blog posts, our pictures, our vids, our audio and everything else, as well as posting whenever anything interesting happens.

YouTube: Video pieces will be going up on the Kamikaze Cookery YouTube Channel , straight from our exciting new solid-state camera. Don’t expect fine editing, but it’s the best way to get a look at what we’re doing, live (well, almost) and in colour.

UStream: If you want the full-on Big Brother experience, we’ll be attempting to run a live Webcam stream over at Ustream. We understand you can comment live on it and all sorts of other interesting things.

Audioboo: Probably a lot more frequently than the video, we’ll be recording little audio clips of our progress with the stonking new audio-miniblogging device Audioboo. We’ve already started, so go check us out!

Blogging: Whenever we get the chance, we’ll get out of the micro- and into the actual-blogging on this very site.

Pictures: Our Special Mystery Guests will be taking pictures throughout the evening – we’ll be posting them on the Twitter feed via the miracle of Twitpic

This is very much an experiment, so we don’t know quite how it’s going to go or what will happen. But it’ll be fun finding out!

Join us in just over two hours… and counting!

And of course, this is an interactive event – indeed, that’s the interesting part for us. So, please do blog/comment/twitter/pic right back at us, and we’ll respond … in real time.

OK, now I have an idea for a cooking show featuring Jack Bauer.

Yep, we’ve planned our first Kamikaze Cookery Live event, and we’ll be pitting two three-star chef recipes against each other and Alex and I as the normal (ish) people.

We’re going to be attempting to live-cook Cream of Blueberry Soup with Yoghurt Charlotte (from the French Laundry Cookbook) and Perfect Chicken Tikka Marsala (from More Adventures in Search of Perfection) over the 12 hours of our Live adventure. So tune in here or on Twitter tomorrow (continuing Wednesday), as we start what’s sure to be a series of misadventures and mishaps.

We have to build a home-made tandoor, for pity’s sake.

What could possibly go wrong?

UPDATE – We’ve also decided to add another possible dish, just in case there’s not enough going excitingly wrong. So, be sure to watch for the appearance of the Emergency Ravioli (as it has been christened).

If you’re interested in starting cooking sous-vide, and you’re in the UK, you might find this new offer from bargain supermarket Lidl interesting.

It’s a vacuum-sealing device for £19 – a lot less than the £60 or so you can expect to pay even second-hand for a FoodSaver.

No word on the temperature-stability of the bags, sadly – anyone know more?

Thanks to friend-of-the-blog Nojay for that one.

OK, the Kamikaze Cookery Live Event is coming to an Intertube near you, soon!

Yep, a week today, Alex and I will start on our first live test event. We’ll be taking a semi-Normal Person Vs format, as we attempt to cook a recipe from either Heston Blumenthal’s In Search Of Perfection series, or something from the French Laundry cookbook, and we’ll video, Twitter, blog, live stream, and Flickr our way through the entire thing.

More details soon! So, join us next week, on the evenings of the 2nd and 3rd as we boldly venture into new territory of ambitious-but-rubbish cookery – LIVE! Any questions or suggestions, ask ’em below!

KKC Live #1 – Tuesday 2nd of June and Wednesday 3rd of June from 7pm BST (1pm EST, 10am PST) until about 2am BST (8pm EST, 5pm PST). Be there!

Ok, we know what we’re going to do next. And it’s a bit different!

We’re going to take a project that we’d normally cover in the show – probably a Normal Person vs, perhaps the long-awaited Us Vs Heston Blumenthal – but rather than do it, shoot it, edit it, and let you see the results some months later, we’re going to try something a bit scary.

We’re going to show it to you live.

Yep, Kamikaze Cookery will be going live some time this month. We’ll let you know when it’s going to be – probably, if we’re doing something Hestonalicious, it’ll be over a couple of weekday evenings.

What we’ll do is:

• Twitter. We’ve just set up a Twitter feed, and as we cook, we’ll Twitter everything that goes wrong – erm, I mean “on”. Goes on.
• Flickr. We’ll have a cameraperson there and we’ll be firing cool images up – of food, of FAIL, of frantic cooking – as we have them.
• Video. Yep, you won’t be able to escape our ugly mugs. Expect to hear from us pretty regularly, talking about the science, arguing about the task, and possibly running screaming from a flaming kitchen. We might even have some animation for you…
• Blogs. We’ll blog how it’s going as we have the time.
• Webcam. For the hardcore, we’ll also set up a webcam, so you can watch the entire thing as we cook.

So – how does that sound? We’re really excited about it – it means we can have a lot more interaction with people, we can tackle longer or harder subjects, we can do Proper Testing™, and we can argue about the difference between a blender and a food processor . It’s also going to mean less months of post-processing, which means more Kamikaze Cookery, faster.

Also – any ideas for what we should do? We’re definitely thinking Kamikaze Cookery vs the most complicated Heston Blumenthal (or maybe Thomas Keller) we can find, but we’re not fixed on that yet…

So, what’s going on with Kamikaze Cookery, then?

We’ve gone a bit quieter lately, as you’ve probably noticed. That’s a) because I’m on holiday, and b) because we’re starting to ramp up for the next KKC release.

The next KKC release(es) won’t be another series, but a special feature, somewhere between one to three parts. We’re aiming to shoot it in May or early June, and it should be with you pretty soon after.

We’ve also been looking into prettiness – I’ve got a new camera, the rather wonderful HF-10 from Canon, which will bring our shooting technology into the 21st century from the late ‘90s where our last camera left us, and we’ve got an agreement to borrow some lighting kit, so everything should look a lot prettier.

As far as format goes, we’re looking at making each episode shorter, which should reduce the workload, and also increase our viewership. The big problem with KKC at the moment is that it’s basically a full-time job for about 4 months to produce the scale of series we did for Season 0, and whilst our viewers are all, without exception, lovely, they’re also not numerous enough to support that financially! We’d need about 10-20 times more viewers to support that level of production.

In addition, we’ve all got other projects (which has been the reason for the quiet patch, too). Notably, I’m (as the editor and director) engaged in developing a bunch of different technology for the day job at the moment, and we’re intending to start on a new series there soon, so once again, that cuts into KKC time.

So we’re not entirely sure what’s going to happen series-wise. Our current plan is to make a “special” in May and see how it goes! Hopefully the additional quality will get us a whole bunch of new viewers, and we can see what happens from there.

(In other news, we’ll also be releasing the second DVD from Season One at the same time, with the usual commentary and extra material).

So, that’s what’s up! If we blog infrequently in the next while, it’s because time that could have been blogging time is going into production – we’ll try and get you some stills, some concept stuff, some ideas of what we’re working on, as soon as possible!

Let us know if you have any ideas for increasing our audience or making the series faster – we’d like to make more!

I’m on holiday right now, hence the paucity of posts, but I had to share this one with you.

Longtime readers may be aware that I’m somewhat obsessed with finding the perfect way to cook a soft-boiled egg. I’ve had one virtually every day for breakfast for years, so there’s something of a payoff for me there.

Now Martin “Khymos” Lersch has written a huge and fascinating post on the subject. I’m going to be spending some time testing next week, I think…

• Every so often, Ideas In Food come up with a really cracking concept. Here’s their latest one – curing meat and fish using roasted coffee beans . I HAVE to try this.

• Fresh meat with a shelf-life of 3 months? 100% microbacterial destruction at room temperature? I may get around to writing an entire article on the implications of high pressure pasturisation , but for now, marvel at the concept!

• Do copper bowls actually help when whisking eggs? Yup! The copper helps the sulphur bonds tighten – and apparently is perfectly safe due to only being incorporated into the egg in tiny amounts. (Which makes sense – otherwise well-used copper bowls would end up with a hole in the bottom). Apparently a tiny pinch of a health-food copper supplement will do the same trick.

• Please do realise that when following suggestions from Kamikaze Cookery, you’re often following advice from this man:

Photography by Erin Hardee, who has also done some rather wonderful lightbox food photography