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At work yesterday, in my Undisclosed Hotel, we had a three-course lunch served in the Lavish Victorian Dining Room. We don’t usually do lunches and everything was a bit hectic. I stayed out of the kitchen, for once, and concentrated on doing front-of-house things. Mostly this involved wandering around with a bottle of wine in each hand: flashbacks of the previous night.

When it came to the dessert course, I was asked by a nice old gentleman what these things were. I told him they were crème brûlées. Then I was asked what a crème brûlée was.

I happen to know quite a bit about crème brûlées, and, since I was in customer-service mode, instantly launched into “Well, invented at Trinity College Cambridge in the eighteenth century…”

I didn’t get asked any more questions that day.

Today, randomly, I was asked what the raspberry-growing season was in Scotland. I knew that one because of the Fife Diet, which took place at about this time last year. It’s surprising what you pick up.

As you may have noticed, we’re running a bit low on things we urgently want to blog about over here. So, in the spirit of the Web being a conversation, we thought we’d ask you:

What’s interesting that’s going on in science, food and cooking right now? What should we be learning about, experimenting with, looking into? What’s inspired you lately?

I love my sous-vide cooking. You may have figured this out by now. For reasons why I love cooking stuff sealed in vacuum at precise temperatures, check out my previous article and the video. We’ll not go back over that stuff.

No, here I have one simple aim – to give you 10 quick tips to make your sous-vide better.

Let’s go.

Universal Tips

• Use kettle water to get to the right temperature This tip applies to all sous-vide, and it’s awesome. Don’t, whatever you do, start your sous-vide device from cold – instead, mix cold water with hot water from a kettle until you’re at about the right temperature. It’s the easiest way to get stovepot/oven sous-vide right to start with, and it cuts half an hour minimum off even the most pro SV setup.
• Seasoning for the win Particularly for red meat, I often just use salt and pepper as a seasoning. Season both sides of your steak, for example, with salt and pepper, then vacuum-seal it. The results are just stunning – far nicer than unseasoned meat, and insanely simple. More complex seasonings will really come out in sous-vide, and are very much worth doing – although it’s sometimes a bit random what will be absorbed and what won’t be. Garlic doesn’t seem to get particularly strongly absorbed into most meats, whilst I’m told fresh thyme can easily become overpowering. Butter works great with everything. Experiment.
• Cheat’s chamber sealer You might think that you can’t use liquid seasonings unless you freeze them or invest in a vacuum sealer. Actually, that’s not quite true. For starters, you can use the water seal technique below. You can also just brush meat with liquid, preferably reduced – whilst lots of liquid will get sucked out of a cheap vacuum sealer, liquid brushed onto a piece of meat seems not to be such a problem.
• Cook chicken legs at 75 Yes, I know that everyone else says you should cook a chicken leg at 62C-ish. They lie. Deboned, flattened chicken thigh can be quite nice at 63, as recommended by Thomas Keller, but if you’re cooking a bone-in or rolled leg, just cook the darn thing at 75 degrees (167 Fahrenheit). It’ll be less greasy, it’ll still be very tender, and it won’t have the worrying bloody-looking bits. Since chicken legs are pretty darn cheap, this is a Really Useful Tip. In general, after reading the science you’ll be tempted to cook at as low a temperature as possible. This is not always a good idea!
• Sear for longer than you think you need to This one’s a Thomas Keller tip. I used to have trouble getting a decent sear – despite a really hot pan, I just couldn’t get a good brown sear on my meat in what I thought was the maximum time of 30 seconds or so. Then I read Thomas Keller’s “Under Pressure”, where he advises in a lot of recipes to sear the sous-vided meat for two minutes on each side. Seems like far too long? Well, it seems to work pretty damn well for most things. Give it a go and see what you think!

If you don’t have fancy kit

If you don’t have your very own circulator or even a controlled crockpot, these tips might well help:

• Stick the pot in the oven This one doesn’t apply if you’ve got an induction hob, or if you’re really good with your gas hob. Otherwise, the best temperature hold device you’ve got in your kitchen is almost certainly your oven, and it’s also the best-insulated, meaning that temperature changes will be really gradual. Get the biggest pot you can, get it to approximately the right temperature, and stick it in the oven with a probe thermometer in it and the oven on a really low setting. Then check it every 10 minutes and put the oven up a bit (a SMALL bit) or down a bit appropriately.
• Water is an excellent vacuum sealer Thanks to Martin for this idea – if you’re having trouble sealing your bags, or you don’t want to suck on chicken juice, stick your seasoned meat in a freezer bag, then push the meat and bag into the water, keeping the opening above the water. The pressure of the water will neatly push all the air out of the bag, and you can carefully seal it.
• Simple stuff Stuff that works really well cooked sous-vide in a pot and doesn’t take too long includes salmon (make sure it’s uber-fresh) and tuna, steak (gorgeous), chicken legs (see my tip above about cooking temperature) and theoretically pork steak, although I’ve not tried that.

If you’re thinking of investing some cash or already have

• Foodsaver and crockpot works perfectly well Nutters like me might buy proper water baths, but over a year of cooking tells me that something like a Sous-Vide Magic box plus a rice cooker or crockpot(aka a slow cooker, British people) and a FoodSaver works perfectly well to cook Sous-Vide.
• Remember, you can cook from frozen If you’re considering whether to spend money, this one might tip you over the edge. You may not have considered just how handy it would be to just be able to pick a piece of meat from the freezer and cook it straight off – if you’re like me, you never get around to defrosting meat as you’re meant to over a 24-hour period. Having a sous-vide cooker almost turns any frozen meat into a ready meal – it’s fantastic. You can also cook-chill, of course, which really does turn anything you cook into a home-made ready meal.
• Uncirculated baths appear to be a LOT quieter This one comes from discussion on the comments thread last post – comparing Martin’s water circulator with my unstirred bath, it appears that a major unheralded advantage of an unstirred bath is that it’s much, much quieter. Also, a bath that comes with a proper lid loses a lot less water. Both points to consider!
• Long-term cooking for the win Now that you’ve got an automated bath, you can play with the most fun elements of sous-vide – fun, and convenient too. Stick the bath on just before you go to bed, and put in some beef shin, some mutton, a duck leg, some pork belly. Leave for 20 hours and you’ll have a totally unique cooked meat sensation waiting for you. And it’ll be really cheap to boot. And you can just keep the meat frozen and cook it whenever you like, because with that cooking time, the defrost won’t be a problem.

I’ve not done a sous vide post for a while, as you may have noticed. Now, you might have thought that was because I’d abandoned this silly cooking things in plastic fad.

You’d be wrong. In fact, these days I’m using sous vide at home almost daily.

Let’s back up a bit. What’s sous vide? Well, we explain it in our first ever episode, in fact – basically, it’s cooking using a water bath whose temperature is very precisely controlled to ensure that the reactions – and only the reactions – that you want to happen in your food actually take place. You don’t want all the water to be squeezed out of your steak, so you cook at a temperature where that won’t happen. But you do want the bacteria to die and the meat to be tenderised by the proteins breaking down, so you cook it hot enough for that to happen.

There’s lots of science and practical stuff, and it’s all very fascinating, and I recommend Douglas “I’ve been interviewed on Khymos now” Baldwin’s superb guide to the topic if you want to know more.

Most professional cooks using sous-vide will use laboratory water baths, but they cost a lot of money, so home cooks tend to either use a big pot of water and a thermometer or an improvised/cheaper sous vide water bath made with temperature controllers or an Arduino and rice cookers. And that’s the way I’d been doing sous-vide, on and off, for a year or so. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass, though – you can cook that way, but the slow cooker I was using took about 3 hours to reach the right temperature, so I didn’t exactly use it daily.

However, in December, I finally got fed up. I wanted to use sous-vide more, and I wanted to cook stuff without worrying I’d hit the wrong temperature. So,(Puts Clarkson voice on) I found this on the Internet:

That’s a full-on commercial dual waterbath. It’s not cheap, for £1000-ish (post-haggling) orders of not cheap. But it has finally allowed me to incorporate sous-vide, more or less, into my daily routine.

Is it worth it? Is sous-vide actually usable enough day-to-day that it’s worth spending that much money? Well…

“why use high-quality ingredients and corrupt them with chemistry?”

- Johnathan Benno, Per Se

So, I guess you’ll only be serving raw food from now on, Mr Benno? Without salt?

(Longer blog post about sous-vide in day-to-day life coming soon – I’m on deadline on another project, which is delaying things.)

It seems to me that a lot of our disfunctional food culture problems stem from one simple assumption: that if you love food, you’ll love cooking (and, arguably, vica versa).

Jamie Oliver seems to believe that the only way to get anyone to eat healthily is to teach them to make (very long, complicated) recipes from scratch. UK and US foodie culture in general seem to hold that if you love food, you’ll automatically also love its manufacture.

Which, on the face of it, is a very odd assumption.

I love good furniture. I’m perfectly happy to spend £400 on an office chair if it’s the best available. But that doesn’t mean I’ve got any interest in engineering or upholstery.

I know plenty of people who are very into their computer games who can’t program their way out of a paper bag, and wouldn’t know a spline from a NURB.

There are thousands of wine buffs, but few of them own their own vineyard. And home-brewers are a very distinct beardy subsection of beer lovers.

And indeed, the idea that you have to cook all the time to love food would seem very odd in many parts of the world. Take Singapore, for example, a country which is obsessed with food to a scary degree. My understanding is that very few Singaporeans cook for themselves on a day-by-day basis. Instead, they eat out – usually at mall food courts which serve food better than most UK restaurants for about £2 for a firey hot main meal.

Likewise, my mother’s a very good cook and, whilst she’d probably deny it, a pretty keen foodie. But these days she lives in an apartment with a shonky electric cooker and about three pots. Why? Because in Luxembourg just about everyone who doesn’t have a family just eats out, most or all of the time, at pretty darn cheap and extremely high-quality restaurants.

This seems to be the norm in most of the world. If you think of China you think of food stalls serving just-killed snake (OK, maybe that’s just me). Japan’s a total food culture, but that’s why they leave it up to the experts. I don’t know too much about African food culture, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it’s very similar.

But in the UK and also the US, we have the idea that if you don’t cook for yourself, you’re not interested in food.

Now that’s just wierd. Ok, I happen to like both food and the process of making it – I enjoy learning about new techniques for flavour combination, I’ll happily sit there with a whisk for 10 minutes making exactly the right consistency of whipped egg, and I’ve painstakingly developed a reasonable repetoire of knowledge about the chemistry and physics of how raw food becomes a cooked meal. But I can’t see any reason why that’s necessarily the case for everyone who likes food. Why does liking the taste of a well-cooked steak mean you enjoy repetitively flipping something in a dangerously hot pan? Why does enjoying a salad mean you like memorising ratios for emulsions? Just because someone likes the taste of rice, why should they enjoy cleaning a pan dozens of times whilst they figure out the best way to cook the bloody stuff?

There’s a lot of comment about the fact that the US, UK, and other similarly-encultured countries have an epidemic of obesity and unhealthy eating. Perhaps that’s because we refuse to give people who don’t actually enjoy cooking another healthy choice? Instead, we seem to say that if you want to eat well, you have to master a difficult, time-consuming and often tedious skill.

Why isn’t Jamie Oliver complaining about the quality of shopping center food courts? I mean, after Singapore I wanted to bomb my local shopping center for the appalling, unapetising shit they’re serving.

Why isn’t there a Government commission into producing really fuckin’ excellent microwavable meals? It’s not impossible. Why aren’t there grants for reasonably-priced restaurants? If you want people to eat well, it would make sense to put some money into giving them good food.

And why do we, as foodies, persist in looking down our noses at anything that isn’t made from scratch? Why doesn’t anyone review ready meals? Let’s face it, the quality level of any product is partially determined by the feedback they get. If there was a Michelin equivalent for takeaways, you’d better believe there would be some shit-hot chippies out there. Where’s the effort toward criticising, improving, developing anything that isn’t home-cooking or an expensive restaurant? Even when some shops, like Marks and Spencers, do make an effort to produce good pre-prepared meals, we tend to treat them as things to be ashamed of eating.

It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Sure, a lot of people enjoy cooking and enjoy eating, and that’s great. But why do we persist in yoking the two together? Isn’t that unfair to people who just want to have something good to eat?

This article speaks to me on a personal level, despite the rather shocking lack of research demonstrated about post-apocalyptic scenarios. “Never in any apocalyptic scenario in any movie I have seen – and I have seen them all – does anyone try to live off the land”, says Tanya Gold. Presumably the orignal 1970s Survivors or the 1981 BBC version of The Day of the Triffids don’t count. Or The Chrysalids or The Kraken Wakes for that matter. Or any of the Fallout series—what do you think all of those Brahmin were for? Or Strange Company’s own Rogue Farm, which even had a farm in the title.

So, despite the fact that Tanya Gold clearly knows next to buggerall about post-apocalyptic literature, she raises some interesting points. Could any of us survive in a wood after the collapse of civilization? For those of you who aren’t quite as obsessed with post-apocalyptic scenarios as I am, there are still important questiosn here. Pheasant is delicious, as we all know, but how many of you are actually willing to twist its head off with your own hands, and pull out its organs?

One of the things I like about society is that there’s always somebody willing to do the crappy jobs so I don’t have to. Tonight I’m going to raise a glass to butchers. Thanks, butchers.

It’s that time of year – the time when the KKC team start thinking about episode ideas. We’re intending to begin shooting a single episode in the fairly near future, with Season 1 coming later in the year.

With that in mind – give us ideas! Ideas for episodes! Ideas for stuff you want to see us investigate! Ideas for celebrity chefs you want to see us test! Ideas for insane cookery techniques We Must Try!

Don’t worry about whether you think we can do it on our budget (although cheap ideas certainly are appreciated). Just splurge it out. What do you think we should be doing/eating/cooking/testing/showing/burning/exploding?

(While I’m waiting for my blogging mojo to return, have this enlightening report from a few years back:)

I spent a considerable portion of today going around Real Shops™, which was fantastic. The shop staff at these small, independent establishments were invariably friendly, chatty and helpful, and neither Wal*Mart, Starbucks, Macdonalds or News Corporation got a penny out of me.

In a random Spanish-themed spice shop on Leven Street I picked up a phialbottle of ‘Da Bomb’; a habenero-based hot sauce described on the label as “Beyond Insanity”. It further claims to be “One of the hottest sauces on earth! Pure habanero pepper enhanced with habanero infused flavor[sic] create a sauce measured at 119,700 ”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale">Scoville units".

This reminds me of the time when Alex (not that Alex, a different one) bet that I couldn’t drink neat Tabasco sauce. I did, and I won, and while I survived the experience I won’t be doing that again unless there’s some very good reason. This stuff is somewhere between 25 to 50 times as hot as regular Tabasco⁰.

It’s been one of those evenings. I’ve had a nice relaxing day, I’ve had a few drinks, and I bought intriguing food items which clamour to be tried. So I tested the hotsauce. A note of clarification: by ‘tested’ I mean that I removed the various warning labels from the bottle, wiped my fingertip lightly over the (dry) top end of the bottleneck, and licked my finger.

Yaaaaaaagh.

After half an hour of lying on my back gargling about half a litre of milk¹, I now feel competent enough to present this LiveJournal entry of my experiences. (And I have (hic) a sho(hic)cking case of (hic)hiccups. Excu(hic)se me.)

Yaaaaaaaagh.

“It is theorised” (Wikipedia tells me) “that the pain induced by capsaicin causes the human body to release endorphins”. I’m sorry, but just no. Endorphins are strongly associated in my mind with the high following sex, or some other pleasant experience. The sensation of lava-in-the-mouth is not one I plan on ever associating with anything I ever might want to do again².

YaaaaaAAAAGH! heeeehhhhhh

“Symptoms of [capsaicin] overdose include difficulty breathing, blue skin, and convulsions and uncontrollable, painful nipple erections”, Wikipedia further tells me⁴, and <whoah! TMI>I must admit that my chest has gone all tingly</TMI>. I feel obliged also to observe that “The Uncontrollable, Painful Nipple-Erections” wbaenfarb.

I just spent half an hour gargling milk in order to relieve the agony. I’m not sure if I should be more concerned that the entire event was self-inflicted or that the resultant liquid I was swallowing (because there’s nowhere else to put milk once you’ve gargled it) was essentially chilli-fried bovine lactic secretions.

—

fn0. Assuming that the Scoville scale is linear; I don’t know for certain and I have more important things in my mouthon my mind just now.

fn1. Capsaicin is insoluble in water, but can be soluble in dairy products; this is why you shouldn’t drink water after a hot curry, and why Lassis are sold in any reputable Indian restaurant.

fn2. Although, strangely, I’m strongly tempted to try it again, to see if the results are replicable, in the interests of Science, of course³.

fn3. Oh, the things I do for Science. Science, my harsh mistress. I’m going to stop now before people start extrapolating.

fn4. Corrected for shitty spelling perpetrated by some Wikipedia `editor’.

We often get praise for our sarcastic, British attitude to food. Well, sometimes, anyway. OK, that one time.

But we’re not the only sarcastic British people who eat. Indeed, we’re not even the most sarcastic British non-Breatharian people on the Great Intertubes.

I commend to your attention, for example, “Very Good Taste”‘s post on teamaking . The writer, Andrew, has recently moved to Canada, and whilst I understand he’s actually rather enjoying it, like any decent Brit he’s not letting that stand in the way of a good rant. And this is a very good rant.

If you want to hear about some sublimely silly tea-making gadgetry (yes, OK, I did kinda want one), read and enjoy.

Ok, that’s our CAPTCHA upgraded. With any luck it’ll keep the spammers out for a while.

Sorry about that pile o’ spam, and thanks for keeping going with all the great comments and suggestions whilst the Viagra was piling on.

It seems to be a month of running across tips for cooking vegetables in new, interesting and scientific ways.

First up, I finally got around to testing out the New York Times’ “The Minmalist” column on microwaves, in which he alleges that they’re arguably the best way ever to cook vegetables. And, indeed, he’s not lying.

Cooking a bundle of asparagus on a plate with a little water and a cling-film covering, after two minutes they were intensely flavoured, fully cooked, but still incredibly crunchy, as opposed to the slightly droopy asparagus that you’ll often get boiling or steaming. Try it – it works. I’m trying aubergine next.

Secondly, Paul’s blog article on mashed potatoes produced some very useful discussion, including a tip from the Lab Cat -

You can make your potatoes more floury by storing in the fridge before using them. The cold temperature causes the starch to be converted to sugar so they taste sweeter too. This conversion is, as far as I know, reversible.

It’s stuff like this that makes me think that molecular gastronomy still has a long way to go before the plateau of productivity. I never knew that. I know there are interesting reactions that happen with tomatoes in the fridge (don’t put tomatoes in the fridge. It deactivates a lot of flavour compounds). What else hasn’t been widely spread? What other complex chemical reactions in food are we still to discover, that we can use for day-to-day cooking? There’s a lot more than spheres and foams out there.

Finally, the lovely people from Ideas in Food have been experimenting with green vegetables and the cooking therof, with the exciting result that it’s possible (more or less) to cook green veg sous-vide without losing the green colour. Very cool. Check out their experimentation – you don’t even need a water bath.

I hope everyone had a good Burns’ Night. It’s another one of those festivals I’ve never really understood. We don’t have a Shakespeare night or an Orwell night or a Joss Whedon Night. Instead, we celebrate a faintly-mediocre poet who couldn’t spell. A poet whose sole contribution to society was to sell out millennia of rich Scottish history and culture for personal gain, and the direct cause of the fact that the entire planet now thinks that we’re a race of skirt-wearing offal-munchers who can’t talk properly. I hope that, at least, the readers of this blog are aware that there is much more to Scottish culture than just Rabbie Burns.

This week, the demigodlike A A Gill tells us that ``cynicism is the luxury of a gluttonously overindulged society‘’, and that in these belt-tightening times, the world turns en masse to simpler, non-ironic pleasures, such as steak. Cynicism dead? That’s me fucked then. And there’s a subtler implication that gastro-pretension is on the way out too, which raises questions for the future of molecular gastronomy.

Molecular gastronomy is, it has to be said, a very indulgent practice, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but indulgence is going out of style. It’s shortly going to be terribly declassé to flaunt the fact that you have enough money to pay someone to slow-braise an entire pig for eighteen hours so that it’s just right. And when that day comes, I will be waiting with my slow-cooker, my collection of 1970s cookbooks, and a smug grin. They always come back to me in the end.

Perhaps the rot has begun already. I bought a bag of ratte potatoes at the Farmer’s Market this week. Theyr’e a very waxy kind of new potato, brilliant for boiling, but not all that useful for much else. The chap on the stall told me that “the Michelin chefs” (all of them, as a group, apparently) mash them in a 1:1 ratio with butter. I gave him a look and observed that, if I’d wanted mash, I would have bought different potatoes.

Seriously. Fifty per cent butter? That’s expensive. My initial thought wasn’t that it’s nice for them as can afford it, but just that it’s a terrible waste of good butter when you could just use potatoes suitable for mashing instead.

I’m still going to give it a go, of course, but only on a couple of the smaller spuds. It’s going to be an experiment, not a meal.

What does everyone else think? Does the credit crunch sound the death knell for innovative cuisine? Is it such a bad thing if it does? Or is a steak maybe not the harbinger A A Gill thinks it is?

I’m currently thinking out a big post on the difference between enjoying food and enjoying cooking, which will probably arrive next week. In the meantime, though, I’ve been making some revelatory discoveries – convenience foods which are actually good!

The entire thing started when I discovered the Freshly Frozen Company’s boil-in-the-bag lamb shanks, which they claim to have been “slow cooked”, and which arrive vacuum sealed in a temperature-safe bag. Hmm. Cooked slowly in a sealed bag then frozen. Could it be…

Yep, I’m pretty sure that this stuff is basically sous-vide lamb shank, available to buy and eat whether you’ve got a water bath or not. And it’s gorgeous. The meat’s tender but still juicy, falls off the bone, is full of flavour, and the sauce is rich, thick and tasty. I’d prefer a slightly larger shank, and there’s generally too much sauce, but honestly, for zero-hassle food, this is pretty staggering – and you can microwave it in about 16 minutes.

They aren’t full of terrifying additives either – just xanthan gum, a couple of modified starches, and an acidity regulator I don’t recognise but looks to do roughly the same job as Sodium Citrate.

(Buy ’em from Sainsburys in the UK – anyone know a US supplier?)

Second up, a friend of mine recommended porridge as an excellent way to start the day. My historical hatred of the stuff seems to have faded, and I was getting a bit tired of breakfasts consisting of two eggs and whatever cold meat was in the fridge (largely because eating two eggs and a pack of ham every day is expensive), so I ventured out to see what Progress had wrought.

And I discovered one of the best-designed convenience foods ever.

See, Quaker Oats have apparently been moving with the times. And since their product line is pretty simple (In that it’s "oats"), they’ve obviously had time to think about their market. Enter… the oat packet.

Small waxed packet of oats. Tear it open, dump into a bowl, fill the packet with milk (yes, it’s waterproof and designed to be exactly the right size so that you don’t need to find a measuring container), dump that in the bowl too, and microwave for just under 3 minutes.

Hot, filling, tasty breakfast. Incredibly filling, actually – to the point where I’ve nearly forgotten to eat lunch a couple of times since starting eating them. No additives at all apart from soya lecitin, which apparently stops it all boiling over in the microwave (they actually tell you this on the packet – handy tip!). 20 packs for £2.95.

And finally, that old favourite of penniless grad students and film directors – ramen. I became rather familiar with ramen a few years ago when I decided for various complicated reasons to cut wheat out of my diet for a bit. However, not all ramen are created equal.

A knowledgable friend of mine tells me that the quality of ramen can easily be determined by the number of different packets of sauce and flavouring you get with the noodles. One packet – bad. (Mmm, Supernoodles). Two packets – OK. Four packets? Well, that’s Indomie.

Mostly offering Indonesian-style dishes like Nasi Goreng, I was absolutely stunned at the taste of these 30p ramen when I discovered them a month or so ago.

They’re pretty heavy on the MSG, so if you dislike that you’re not going to be a fan, but otherwise they’re incredible. Fry an egg and some vegetables to go with them, and you’ve got a dish that you probably couldn’t tell came from a ramen packet. In five minutes. For a decent lunch. For 30p.

There’s some damn good convenience food out there these days. Anything you’d recommend? Or are there things out there you’d recommend that we avoid at all costs, instead?

Aargh, we seem to be under heavy assault from the viagra spammers. I’m (more or less, technically) on holiday this week, so a decent fix will have to wait a few days, but I’ll keep picking ’em up.