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And it’s the answer to the question you’ve all been asking (and I have indeed been asked multiple times) – did we survive the Week of Fife?

Some of you may be curious about the methodology behind the rice/potatoes comparison in the episode.

Firstly, to be blunt, this is definitely back-of-an-envelope level stuff rather than a controlled study. However, even at that level, it demonstrates that there’s clearly a lot of variation in energy and hence carbon emissions from cooking, probably more than travel in a lot of cases.

CO2 emissions for travel were taken from a major climate change site (can’t recall which one, sorry), and the capacity of the plane was taken from the Wikipedia entry on 747s. I assumed that the rice was being air-freighted, which is probably wrong, so in actual fact the carbon emissions for travel are likely to have been much lower.

Cooking figures were assuming an induction hob, because that’s what I had the wattage figures to hand for, and also because an induction hob is, according to the stats I’ve seen, about as carbon-efficient as gas and a lot more carbon-efficient than normal electric cooking. I’m assuming a one-person portion of both rice and potatoes, although it’s me so it’s a pretty large one-person portion. The rice is cooked with 2.5 times its volume of water, a la Nigel Slater, whilst the potatoes are boiled. (Roast potatoes come out orders of magnitude less efficient still).

So – possibly not exactly right, but where I had the chance, I made assumptions in favour of the “food miles” camp, rather than against them.

As a related note, this does throw up one important point. If you’re concerned about your food-related carbon emissions, and you have a conventional electric cooker, you’ll probably make a much greater dent in your emissions by switching to gas or induction (twice as efficient) than any amount of local shopping!

Anyway – there it is! Fife Diet over. We’ll have a summary mini-episode a bit later on, discussing the week as a whole, and we might post soon about what we’d do differently to make up a livable locally-sourced diet, but in the meantime – what do you think? Have you tried living locally? Is it something you’d give a go, or have we put you off?

Thinking about getting the DVD, but haven’t yet?

Our Manufacturing Department (aka, erm, me) is going on Christmas holiday on Tuesday. However, if you want to get our Season 0 part 1 DVD (with commentaries on every episode and a bunch of extras, lest you’ve forgotten) before Christmas day, we can still get it to you if you’re in the UK!

Technically, the Royal Mail say that you’ve already missed the final posting date. However, if you order using this link, we’ll post it out to you Special Delivery, meaning it’ll arrive for Christmas Day:

It’s a bit more expensive because it’s coming next day delivery, but it’ll get there!

This only applies to the UK, sadly. If you’re outside the UK, please feel free to still buy a DVD, but it’ll arrive after Xmas now.

Today on the Fife Diet Retrospective Channel, some minor successes with limited ingredients….

In today’s exciting installment of our daily Fife Diet journals, Hugh narrowly averts crisis, Alex grazes, and Paul rediscovers sugar.

We’re continuing with our daily journal entries from Fife Diet Week. Paul subverts the dominant paradigm! Hugh eats offal! All this and more herein!

Don’t forget that the concluding episode will be released on Monday (the 22nd), not Wednesday, this week.

We index properly here at Kamikaze Cookery. That’s why our first season of shows was Season 0. In similar vein, we present our daily blogs from the first day of Fife Diet Week.

These are the rules we set ourselves for the Fife Diet challenge:

• All food and drink consumed over the course of the week was to be grown in Fife, produced in Fife, and sold (or otherwise available) in Fife. We also allowed ourselves the producers listed on the Fife Diet website, even though those producers weren’t always up to the same Fifely standards.
• Salt and pepper were allowed, but no spices or other condiments. Unless they were from Fife, which they weren’t.
• Tap water was allowed. We figured that it was about as “locally-sourced” as you could get.
• Home-grown vegetables or window boxes would have been allowed, but none of us had any.
• Since we all have lives, we were each permitted one (1) non-Fife business lunch over the course of the week. Hugh and Paul took advantage of this rule. Alex, instead, had a cake that someone had given him during the week. We think that’s fair.

The Fife Diet footage was all filmed a few months back, and we each blogged about our daily experiences on our personal journals. Here, for your edification and (hopefully) delight, are those old posts. Today: before the Diet starts….

Yes, it’s nearly the end of Kamikaze Cookery Season 1, and that means two-part special time!

In April this year, we decided to test out the so-called Fife Diet, which was inspired by the Canadian 100-Mile Diet. Its creator claims that not only can you live on 100% Fife produce, but that you’ll eat better food doing so, and save the planet by reducing carbon emissions. We decided to find out if that was true, by trying to eat 100% Fife produce for a week.

In Part 1, we trek to the wilds of Fife and attempt to buy enough local food to last the week. Given that it’s farming country, how hard … could it be?

Part 2 will be going up on Monday next week, not Wednesday as usual, as a) we figured that you’d want to wait less time for the thrilling conclusion and b) Wednesday’s Christmas Eve!

Also – watch out later, as we serialise our journals of the week on the Fife Diet – coming every day this week.

I’ve not got very much for you all today, but I think it’s important to note that today’s Dinosaur Comics comic contains many important life lessons and truths that I, personally, deeply believe.

I’ve been sassed by a cow before (it happens), and nothing would have pleased me more than to say to her “I will use your flesh for digestive energy”. Sadly, she was a dairy cow, so had I said that, it would have been inaccurate at best, and possibly scandalous at worst.

I’m not sure I should have just told you about Bunty being a dairy cow. That’s a Kamikaze Cookery trade secret. You’re supposed to buy the DVD for insights like that. Oh well. You can have that one on me. Call it an early Christmas gift to our loyal readership.

I am totally going to say “I will use your flesh for digestive energy” to the next farm animal I meet, though. Maybe in the next series.

And sheep really do have rectangular pupils and yes, it really is freaky the first time you see it. I have no idea why this is so, but it is. Anybody have any ideas?

Kamikaze Cookery: answering the hard questions about food, and about things that may one day become food.

There will be an episode for you all tomorrow.

Recently I’ve been corresponding with a gentleman from Memphis, Tennessee, who asked me: “Why are there no restaurants with Scots cuisine?” It’s a good question, but one which can be quite easily answered. Americans reading this might want to have a go themselves. Would you ever go to one? Haggis and oatcakes and porridge aren’t particularly exciting. Most people, when they go to a restaurant, want to eat something that tastes nice.

There is, of course, a lot more to Scottish food than offal and cattlefeed. We have some of the best beef in the world; excellent lamb, game, and seafood; more fresh vegetables than you can shake a green leafy stick at; and there are more things that can be done with whisky or redcurrant sauces than you can imagine. But the popular perception is that we’re all a bunch of skirt-wearing haggis-eaters who can’t talk properly (thank you, Robbie Burns), and popular perceptions are what keep restaurants open.

Incidentally, for the benefit of anybody who hasn’t tried it, haggis is fantastic. It’s just a spicy mince made with the cheaper cuts of meat. There’s nothing wrong with it unless you look at the ingredients list.

I was in Linlithgow yesterday, and it reminded me that the last time I was there, I made a fool of myself in a pub. Not in that way. I’d ordered the chicken Balmoral, which was listed on the menu as “chicken breast stuffed with Chieftain haggis”. “Chieftain haggis” doesn’t mean anything, but the haggis in question was delicious—rich and moist, perfectly complementing the chicken it was served with.

So naturally I’d asked the waitress who their supplier was. She ummed and ahhed for a while and tried to avoid the question before admitting that it was Grant’s. That’s the cheap stuff that you buy in cans in lower-end supermarkets. And it makes perfect sense—for stuffing into a chicken breast you want something reasonably cheap and filling, with some added moisture to make sure that it fills all the gaps. Using artisanal haggis from an upscale butchers would have been a waste of time. The most expensive haggis in the world is still composed of the bits of pig’s lung that nobody else wanted to eat. It doesn’t help to get pretentious about it.

Sometimes there’s a case for splashing out on the expensive locally-sourced foodstuffs, and sometimes there isn’t.

I’ve waxed lyrical in the past on the value of locally sourced food. I like it because it tastes good, but I’ have no illusions that it tastes good because it’s local. The air in Scotland doesn’t magically turn cheap pigs into premium specimens. We don’t have special soil. And it’s not as if the farmers have been trained from birth with specialist farmers’ knowledge, any more than anywhere else—half the people at the Edinburgh Farmer’s Market are accountants from Milton Keynes who woke up one morning a few years ago and, faced with the prospect of another daily commute, thought “fuck this, I’m going to run a farm instead”.

I’m pretty sure that the difference is that local producers actually give a damn about what they’re producing. They’re smaller companies run by people who eat food, not by Human Resources and Marketing departments. (Marketing employees don’t eat food. They’re fed a rudimentary bio-nutritive paste that sustains their organic systems during the company-sanctioned maintenance cycle.) As a result, you’re getting food from someone who cares, which is far more important than where it’s come from.

Or have I missed something?

We’ll be talking a lot more about local-sourcing over the next couple of weeks. Wednesday’s episode covers Part One of our epic journey into the Fife Diet. What will we find therein? Find out on Wednesday.

I saw a news article recently that the London borough council of Waltham Forest is planning to restrict where fast food outlets (including smallholder kebab and fried chicken shops) can open.

They want to restrict it so that there can be none within 400m of parks, or schools, presumably so that schoolchildren don’t really have the option to buy fast food at any point. They also want to restrict opening hours.

It’s being quoted as “one of the first” authorities in Britain to propose such restrictions and the Government’s children’s secretary supports it, all of which suggests that it’s the first of many. The media generally seem to agree that this is a good thing, but is it?

Well, the local businesses aren’t happy, they say it will hurt night time business (which is probably mainly non-children). They also say that this is really a consumer choice.

I think they’re right. The reason so many fast food shops are open there is that so many people buy fast food. If you don’t want to eat unhealthily, don’t buy crap food. If you don’t want your children to eat unhealthily, teach them to eat healthily. You can’t just say, “we’re acting badly, please Mr Council, come and take away our temptations”, that’s just shit.

The council state that “… at the moment residents simply don’t have enough choice because of the amount of fast food takeaways.”. Maybe there’s too many, but arguing that not allowing any fast food restaurants to open within 400m of a school is “improving children’s choices” is patent doublespeak. This is an attempt to eliminate a food choice, rather than increasing the options.

We’ve got to educate children, and healthy food in school canteens is an excellent idea (vague kudos to Jamie Oliver).

Working with takeaways and restaurants to try to get them to provide healthy food is also a pretty neat idea. Perhaps tax breaks should be given on healthier food shops to help them open and stay open?

But restricting what sort of food is available isn’t okay. It’s a person’s choice what they eat, not the Government’s, and if they suffer from it, that’s their problem.

OK, a week or so I promised some sensible tips on how to eat more frugally whilst a) actually saving significant money and b) not depriving yourself unnecessarily.

In fact, it turns out I have rather a lot of tips, so here we go…

Freezer-Fu

• Buy frozen meat and fish. Freezing is actually an excellent way of preserving food, and it has the advantage that the supermarkets can keep frozen food out for much longer than chilled. That means cost savings, which they can pass on. For example, frozen tuna steaks cost £8.30 per kilo at Sainsburys in the UK, as opposed to £14.99 for fresh.
• Figure out what you can cook from frozen Canonically, you’re meant to defrost all food beore cooking it, but bollocks to that. It’s perfectly safe to cook appropriately-stored sous-vide food from frozen, so that implies that similarly reliable methods – like slow cooking and stewing – should cook fine straight from frozen, although of course browning will be harder. (Anyone?)
• When you cook, do a fridge audit. If there’s anything freezable in there that goes off today or tomorrow, unless you know for certain you’re going to be using it, stick it straight in the freezer. This saves me about £4 a week, because my schedule’s unreliable and my memory’s less than perfect…
• Catering pack + expensive stuff + small quantities = win My best food purchase by far this year, cost-wise, has been a big bag of frozen king prawns from a huge Chinese supermarket. It cost about £5, and contained an absolute ton of frozen king prawns – I don’t know how many, but I reckon about 2kg. I’ve been using half a dozen as the meat in a dish at least once a week for the past month and a half, and haven’t run out yet, working out at about £.50 per meal.

Putting the “Special” in “Special Offer”

• Visit the supermarket at odd times And keep a note of the special offers that are out. Supermarkets have varied schedules for discounting items, and there’s often one “God time” per week when they suddenly massively discount a pile of stuff. Try Friday about 4pm.
• Raid high-end supermarkets for special offers In the UK, Waitrose is an extremely expensive supermarket, the equivalent of Whole Foods in the US, I think. Even I would think twice about doing my weekly shopping there. However, several of my friends have noticed that they discount about-to-go-off items very, very heavily – to 20% of their cost or less. See if it’s true where you live, and if it is, go on a raid.
• Don’t buy me because I’m special Before you buy a non-freezable special offer, check that you haven’t already filled up your needs for the next day or so. It’s easy to get carried away. If I did this every time, I’d save pounds on stuff that I buy in a fit of enthusiasm.

Taming the Shopping List

• Snack before you start The oft-repeated advice is “don’t go shopping hungry”. However, sometimes Mr Life doesn’t help with that. You’ve got nothing in the fridge, you’re starving, and you’ve just left work? You’ve got to go shop. However, in this case, do a quick shop for something you can eat right now, eat it, THEN shop. Buying food for the week when you’re ready to chew on the shelves gets expensive.
• Keep a count This one’s only for people who can hold numbers in their head. However, if you can – keep a running total of your spend in your head as you shop. That’s it – don’t try and optimise, don’t try and hit a fixed total – just keep a running account, and if you lose it, go through your basket and add it all up again. I don’t know quite why, but this massively reduces my bills.
• Consider value over time Buy the expensive rice or the cheap rice? Well, how long will it take you to go through a packet? I never buy anything less than the top-quality rice, for example, because a 500g bag will do me for a month, and the extra 60p is worth it over that duration.
• Keep high-quality essentials You can save a lot of money by making sure you never run out of certain things. For example, bread is about the cheapest snack-producing substance there is. If I’ve got bread – even really nice, artisan-made, expensive bread – in the flat at all times, I save a fortune on snacks at the shop. And if it’s really nice bread, I’ll not buy a sandwich whilst I’m out, because I know I can have a much nicer sandwich if I wait until I get home.

Random Stuff

• Buy expensive lunches Pre-made sandwiches consume cash like you wouldn’t believe. If you don’t have a subsidised canteen at work, you’ll save more money by making up your own lunch than you will by cooking your own dinner a lot of the time. To help with that, buy Nice Stuff that you can assemble, meaning that your lunch isn’t just cheaper than the local Tesco Metro’s offering, it’s nicer too. (Yeah, this takes some time. However, it’s a lot less than a lengthy cooking process.)
• Ramen FTW Start with a decent ramen packet – Indomie do fantastic Nasi Goreng and other Indonesian noodle ramen bases. Fry some onions – spring or regular – garlic, ginger, chilli, and a bunch of other veg, plus half a dozen frozen king prawns, scallops, regular prawns, or something similar. Fry or boil an egg if you can be arsed and it’s appropriate to the type of noodle. Prepare noodles as per the packet. Mix together, add the egg, and bingo, instant, lovely noodle dish, cheap, fast, tasty. Total cost? 1 egg (about 30p these days), 1 pack of ramen (30p), some prawns or whatever (20pish), some cheap veg (20pish). Meal for a quid.
• Essentials Try and find a meal that you like that doesn’t cost much or require anything other than canned, frozen or long-lasting food. My staple is pasta with onions, garlic, sweetcorn and canned tuna. Gorgeous and cheap. Keep the makings of that in at all times, in case of “oh, shit, I’ve run out of everything” emergencies that would otherwise send you running to the takeaway.

There’s probably more, but that’s all I can think of for now. Think there’s something on there that’s not very helpful? Got a tip I forgot? Any favourite cheap+easy+tasty recipes? Comment below!

The episode more or less says it all, but I thought I’d just clarify a few things for you, my adoring public. Our adoring public. Something like that, anyway.

The Kitchencraft™ “cook’s blowtorch”, advertised as lasting for sixty minutes, actually lasted more like sixty seconds. This was a pretty pathetic showing. That said, it had been quite a while since it was bought, and it’s possible that it was a leaky model, or something. People in the comments have reported no such problems with their own torches, so maybe we were just unlucky. Also it’s worth observing that it gave a reasonably nice, even, caramelized brown top to the crème brulée, and you’ll notice that Alex was able to talk with a measured tone of voice while operating it—as distinct from Hugh, who was yelping like an abused puppy. As we found with blenders, sometimes MOAR POWERRR isn’t necssarily a good thing.

Hugh’s crème brulée was completed in a third of the time, which is something important to consider if you’re having a dinner party and you’ve got twelve of the things to do sharpish. And “sharpish” is an appropriate word to use, because the caramelized sugar on top of Hugh’s brulee was like shards of glass with a hint of propane. We found the same thing when we used the Bernz-o-Matic™ plumber’s monstrosity to finish off the Perfect Steak": the result tasted slightly of blowtorch fuel. This might be okay in a MAN’S KITCHEN, when you’re roasting whole cattle in leftover engine grease and you use an oily rag to lift the hot dishes out of the ironmonger’s furnace you’re using as an oven before you sit down to play poker with cards made out of chainsaws. On the other hand, it might not be quite the effect you’re looking for at your dinner party. The choice is yours.

With the Perfect Steak, as I’ve mentioned previously, we found that we got slightly better results from searing the finished product in a pan, the old-fashioned way. This had the added benefit of imparting to the steak any flavours you might get out of whatever oil you use—my personal preference is for peanut oil. With the crème brulée, no-one can deny that the MAN’S BLOWTORCH worked, but it lacked a certain degree of the finesse and elegance you should expect from a crème brulée.

You couldn’t use the tiny blowtorch to sear a steak. You wouldn’t use the big blowtorch to light a cigarette, not if you were remotely sane. Maybe the true answer lies somewhere in the middle: in the meantime, neither of them are particularly expensive, and it might be worth investing in both.

The hairdryer, by comparison, is utterly useless. Don’t even bother.

(Having said that, I know that hairdryers are recommended all over the place for caramelizing sugar—if anyone has ever had a good experience with one, or even an amusingly bad experience, please let us know in the comments.)

I’d also like to observe that the pink hairdryer isn’t mine, and that I am perfectly secure in my masculinity, thank you very much. I dry my hair with a towel, the way that REAL MEN do.

It’s here! This is one of my favourite episodes, as well as possibly our most Top Gear moment to date…

What do you think? Personally, I still prefer my big blowtorch. Have you tried blowtorching in the kitchen, and if so, what’s your preference?

If you want more KKC, the Kamikaze Cookery Season 0 Part 1 DVD is available from our shop now.

Great post over here at the SF Chronicle on “10 techniques every cook should know”.

OK, the title’s a bit Digg-baiting, but there’s some good stuff in there – how to fold, how to make a roux, how to make a pan sauce, and more.