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So, for once I have a question rather than an answer here on KKCook, and I know we have some Seriously Knowledgable readers.

I’m currently trying to improve my cookery knowledge, and I’m looking for stuff that can seriously improve my skills and my understanding – hardcore French cooking, theory, techniques and skills, and so on.

The only thing is that I really don’t much like books that are just a list of recipes – I don’t get a lot out of them.

So far, I’ve been recommended James Peterson’s Sauces and Shirley O. Corriher’s “Bakewise” and “Cookwise”, and I love (of course) “On Food And Cooking”, “Don’t Sweat The Aubergine”, and just about anything with the words “Heston” and “Blumenthal” on the cover.

So, what Serious Cookbooks would you lot recommend that are more discussions of food, building a meal or a menu, techniques and so on, rather than just pretty picture → recipe with no discussion → pretty picture → recipe?

Still on holiday, so whilst some recent reading tempted me to write an alternate blog post (entitled ‘Joel Robuchon is an ignorant twat’ – read the last[EDIT: that should be last-but-one] question), here’s a probably safer option from the archives.

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So this time, we’re testing canned tomatoes – do they really make a difference? Are you as well using ASDA Smart Price tomatoes for everything?

In the cheap-artificial-red corner, we have ASDA SmartPrice Plum Tomatoes, at 19p a can. And in the natural-cherry-red corner, we have Vitale Pomodorini Di Collina, at £1.38 a can from Valvona and Crolla.

I’ll be cooking a simple red tomato sauce with pasta – gently fried onion and garlic with the tomatoes, with a bit of oregano, and finished off with some chopped fresh basil. A very simple dish that leans heavily on the quality of the ingredients.

Phew. First chance to update away from the cooking – it’s pretty hectic. Preparing two sauces at the same time means that they both cook much faster (smaller quantities) and I’ve already slightly burnt the onions in the cherry tomato pan.

Talking of the tomatoes – the differences between the two are obvious from the moment you open the can. The cherry tomatoes have a much richer, thicker sauce, and they themselves are still very well-formed, as opposed to the very thin juice of the ASDA tomatoes. Think Value orange juice compared to Del Monte and you’ll get the idea.

The flavour of the expensive ones raw is very rich, very fruity indeed. But we’ll see how they do once we’ve cooked them.

Finished cooking. The ASDA tomatoes have pretty much dissolved into a sauce, whilst the cherries still hold their texture. Interestingly, the cherry tomato sauce also coats the pasta much better than the ASDA tomatoes.

First tastes, and there’s no comparison. The ASDA tomatoes are quite nice (I’m good at this dish), reasonably salty and interesting, very much a base for the other flavours of the dish. They taste simple and comforting, something to wolf down quick when starving.

The cherry tomatoes hit your mouth, and you go “Jesus, I’d forgotten what a tomato tasted like!”. They’re fruity – something you don’t get out of tinned tomatoes normally. They’re incredibly rich in flavour, they’re clearly the highlight of the dish – using these as a base for another dish would be sacrelige. They made me immediately reach for freshly ground pepper to set the dish off – sure sign of a strong flavour.

On the more thinly coated pieces of pasta you might expect the difference to be less, but it’s actually more. The ASDA sauce barely coats it at all, whilst even on the thinnest-coated cherry pasta, you can taste the smokiness of the overdone onions, the oregano, and even the basil – amazingly the cherry doesn’t overwhelm it.

Overall? Wow. Serious wow.

OK, I’d expected the ASDA tomatoes to get a bit of a kicking, but I wasn’t expecting the cherry tomatoes to be that nice. That’s incredible. You might be able to make a better meal using vine-ripened fresh cherry tomatoes, but I’m not sure of it – you’d not have the rich juice.

The ASDA tomatoes make a good base for other flavours, although they do need thickening a bit. They’re not bad, but they will never make a meal on their own. If you added a few of the Valvona cherry tomatoes to the sauce, it would probably perk up to be pretty damn good.

The cherry tomatoes are astounding. With better-quality pasta and perhaps a couple of free-range poached eggs or a little bit of parma ham (and a cook paying attention to his pan temperature), they don’t just make a nice meal, they make a meal that’s easily restaurant-quality. I have literally never had canned food as good. The meal even felt more filling.

No contest at all – not because the ASDA tomatoes are bad, because they’re not, but because the Valvona tomatoes are astonishing. The only downside is that if you’re planning to cook them with anything, it had better be at a similar quality level or they’ll just outshine it.

No, you idiot, you add the chillis to the stir-fry LAST!

From the department of nearly-having-to-evacuate-my-flat-due-to-aerosolised-chilli-oils

We reported recently that the Royal Society has produced what they call the “perfect” Yorkshire Pudding recipe. As an old Yorkshire boy, I had my doubts. Surely no such recipe is “perfect” unless you were taught it by your grandmother. Nonetheless, in the interests of Science, I gave it a go.

I was pleasantly surprised.

I’m on holiday this week, so we’ve got a slightly shorter and odder episode for you. Enjoy!

Next week: Gordon Ramsey.

I’m on holiday this week, and I badly need to be dealing with angry royalty, if you know what I mean, so here’s one from the archives – my first taste-test of the cheapest versus the most pricey…

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So I’ve been curious about how much difference very expensive ingredients make to cooking. Hence, I’m going to try to do a series of taste tests pitting “average” ingredients against the best I can reasonably buy.

The first one: Pasta. In the red corner, famous deli Valvona & Corolla’s La Molisana pasta, price £1.10 for 500g. In the blue corner, Asda/Wal-Mart’s own-brand fusilli, price 34p.

I prepared a very simple dish – pasta al dente, with extra virgin olive oil (the expensive Lidl one) and parmesan (reggiano, again from Lidl).

The differences became obvious pretty much immediately – the ASDA pasta went floppy whilst the V&C was still undercooked. But how would it taste?

The ASDA pasta tastes pretty much like the pasta you’d expect – it just missed al denta, and came out floppy, very smooth-tasting, and turned to paste and disappeared pretty much as soon as you put it in your mouth. Comforting food, but lacking texture in particular, and also any definite taste.

The V&C was definitely nicer. It put up a bit of a fight, for starters, coming apart with a rough floury texture that left you in no doubt very good flour had been used in its creation. It had a definite taste to itself, faint but definitely there, like unleavened bread, and the oil taste worked extremely well with it.

There’s no doubt that for a dish this simple, the V&C pasta is vastly superior- in fact, I’d say it was pretty much essential if you’re going to be doing anything this simple – it adds the extra flavour that’s vital for something this minimal.

However, in any pasta dish with a more definitely flavoured sauce, I’m not so sure. The extra texture of the V&C pasta would definitely enhance the dish, but not as much as other decent ingredients, and the subtle taste that makes the V&C such a winner with olive oil would definitely be lost even under a simple red sauce.

Overall? Buy the V&C, for sure, but keep it for dishes where the pasta and the pasta alone will be the focus of the dish – minimalist lunches like this and perhaps some pasta salads. For everyday eating, whilst it’s nice, other ingredients that are less expensive per dish and have a greater effect on the sauce will provide better value for money.

This whole being-without-an-oven thing, as we call it in the trade, is forcing me to reevaluate my cookery. Normally, I get in from work (late) and stick something ready-made into the cooker. Proper cooking with ingredients is reserved for my days off. There are two main reasons for this: one, it’s late and I’m tired and hungry; and two, cooking properly, with ingredients, is something I actually enjoy doing, so I don’t particularly want to do it when it’s late and I’m tired and hungry.

I have a friend (hi David!) who’s a much better cook than me. It’s a bit embarrassing for both of us. I’m supposed to be the internet-famous cookery show star, and no one’s ever eaten anything I’ve cooked; and he always apologizes every time he produces some fantastic culinary marvel that he suspects might not be entirely perfect. (He’s usually mistaken.). But we both know more-or-less as much as each other about food and what you do with it. So why is he the one who gets to play with quails and fondant tarts, while I can just about stretch to a Sunday roast if you give me a day to do it?

I think the answer is time. I’ve gone off on one already about the Findus Crispy Pancakes generation, but the fact remains that sometimes I want to eat something in order to stave off imminent starvation, without having to go to the effort of putting my creative head on. If I finished work at five and got home by six, with the evening stretching out ahead of me, I might feel differently.

Without an oven, I’m being forced to get creative. (I know there exist microwaveable ready meals, but come on, I have some standards.) For instance, I’ve just reinvented pizza. They all laughed at me when I said I was going to spread toast with tomato puree, then put chicken and cheese on top of it and grill it. (I still have a grill. An oven without a door is a grill.) But I’ll show them, I’ll show them all. And I still have a hob, which means that I’m rediscovering soups.

I’m also making an awful lot of toasted sandwiches. Toasted sandwiches are another way that you can play around with flavours and combinations of ingredients without having to do any real work. I have a sandwich toaster, but I don’t own a health grill, which is a shame, because then I could toast sandwiches and do other stuff as well.

We cover health grills in greater depth, after a fashion, on Wednesday, in the appropriately-named Health Grill Episode. It’s a shorter episode than usual, because it turns out that there’s not a great deal to say about health grills. We hope that we’ve covered all the basics and still managed to be amusing.

In the meantime, does anybody have any other useful tips for coking without an oven?

Those bloody Actual Scientists are getting in on the cooking game, it would seem.

Reader Kris forwards us this piece from UK tech site The Register, in which the Royal Society, one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific institutions in the world, gets into the cooking business with a recipe for the perfect Yorkshire Pudding

Cambridge University chemist and science author John Elmsey wrote the following in response to the Society’s national request for feedback:

“"I have seen many grim results from people who have tried to get their Yorkshires to rise. They frequently made gross errors. After all, cooking is chemistry in the kitchen and one has to have the correct formula, equipment and procedures. To translate the ingredients into chemical terms, these are carbohydrate + H2O + protein + NaCl + lipids.”

Anyone care to try the recipe (in the article above) and tell us what they think?

On the comments on our Nigella episode a couple of weeks ago, Sabrosa questioned our assumptions, and said that “Most normal people I know do know what to do with pastry”.

This interested me, not least because I would have said exactly the opposite – just about all the people I could think of who could handle pastry-making were serious foodies, and not even all of them would be 100% confident. So, I did what anyone with access to a blogging medium did, and ran a poll.

And the results really got me thinking.

It turns out that the proportion of people who could do the pastry thing to those who couldn’t was almost exactly 50/50. But if you divided by sex, an interesting thing became obvious: nearly all of the women who answered my poll could make pastry (80), whilst less than 30 of the men could. And if you adjusted by removing serious foodies from the mix, the figures polarised even more sharply – 20% of men, 77% of women.

What? What’s going on there?

Baking seems to be tremendously female-identified: after all, Nigella’s baking book was even called “How to be a domestic goddess”, a tremendously gender-polarising title which I can’t imagine getting past the publisher unless they were pretty certain the audience was almost entirely female. I’m not at all sure why. Perhaps it’s because baked goods are so comforting, warm, soft, usually sweet, nurturing? Whatever, it’s so powerful as to almost render baking a seperate process from cooking as a whole – several women mentioned that they hardly cooked, but they could bake.

And for that matter, what’s with the male identification with barbecuing? Sure, there’s the fire, wood, metal, charred meat thing, and sure, in general, blokes like large charred chunks of dead animal, but why’s it so extreme? Why do men, even men who don’t normally cook at all, suddenly get all proprietorial as soon as charcoal’s involved? And why is it that women are usually less into that? I mean, you can grill vegetables. And anyway, I know more than a few women who slobber over Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Meat.

…

OK, that was a mental image I didn’t need.

But moving away from Mr Fearlessly Eats-it-all’s wang – what’s up with all this? Why are some types of cooking so gender-identified – not the eating of the result, but the cooking? Any ideas?

If you’re planning on buying the KKC DVD, please comment below. We’re just trying to establish whether, in actual fact, we’d be better concentrating on the series and publicity right now, or whether you’re all gagging for the DVD version…

It seems that the secret cabal that control our supermarkets has been reading my last post. I was in Tesco’s today, and now they advertise that all of their party-themed finger food is designed to be cooked at 190°. So you can mix-and-match different types of party food and put them all in the same oven. This is good.

As long as you’re having a party. If what you’re trying to do instead is cook a meal, then you’re still screwed.

I cover ovens in this week’s episode, with the help of the lovely Jehane, Kamikaze Cookery’s Consultant Archaeologist. Archaeology, I’m reliably informed (by archaeologists, it must be said) is a science, and at Kamikaze Cookery we do cooking with science. So it’s entirely reasonable for a cookery show to have a consultant archaeologist. Also, she was easy to get hold of, if I do say so myself. If anyone knows of someone willing to be the Kamikaze Cookery Consultant Chemist, or Consultant Physicist, or similar, who’ll work for me as cheaply as Jehane does, then feel free to get in touch. Being gorgeous like Jehane would be a bonus.

All of this talk of ovens is largely useless to me at present, since I managed to shatter the glass door of my own oven last night. The entire door assembly has now been taken off and taken to some magical place where landlords look at them and determine if replacements can be found. I’m an hotelier and, occasionally, an actor and/or cookery show presenter: this stuff is beyond me, which is why I pay someone else to do it. In the meantime, I’m currently in possession of a doorless oven which might theoretically serve as a somewhat inefficient method of heating the flat. And I’m eating a lot of takeaways, because any excuse will do.

There’s been some talk in the comments about Agas. Louise “louisedennis” Dennis has waxed lyrical about this in the comments on my own blog in the past. I’m disappointed to hear that they’re, apparently, pretty useless. I still want one, but that’s more because I’m old-fashioned.

One thing we’ve been talking about at Kamikaze Cookery Towers is the halogen oven (warning: horrible javascript website). It sits on your countertop and allegedly it can do a whole chicken in thirty minutes. Some of the reviews seem to suggest otherwise, though. Anybody have any experience with one of these?

We’re preparing the Kamikaze Cookery DVD right now, and we just wondered – what would you like to see on the DVD?

So far, we’ve got:

• Commentaries on The Perfect Steak, all the Normal Person Vs episodes, and The Fife Diet (upcoming).
• Deleted footage from Health Grills (upcoming), Normal Person vs Gordon Ramsey (upcoming), and a couple of others.
• An interview with the team on how we made this show on a tiny budget.
• Bloopers reels.
• Footage from an episode that was never completed, entitled “Sealing Meat”.

What else would you like to see? What would you like to know?

Preheating your oven – it’s a total pain in the ass. Or at least, Paul thinks so. We test to see if you need to heat your oven – with Science. Sort of.

Two weeks to the release of the Kamikaze Cookery DVD, by the way!

It may astonish those of you who’ve been watching me doing my best Clarkson impression on KKCook that I’m actually terribly Politically Correct about international cusines. I’m always thinking that each style has huge depth and complexity, that you need to study it for years to really understand it, and so on. I suspect some of that comes from studying martial arts, and some from the fact that I’m just a nice Guardian-reading boy.

And so it was that I was chatting to Alex the other day about noodle soups, and he mentioned that he’d quite like to learn to cook Tom Yum soup. Just one version, mind – but he wanted to know because it was useful to know how a different culture’s food worked.

My first thought was, of course, that you couldn’t possibly do that. That in order to understand Thai cooking, for example, you’ve got to study it for years. Go out there, probably, spend weeks on a course. You’ve got to live the cooking to know it.

But then my mind moved back to martial arts, and I thought over the idea again. In Muay Thai kickboxing, for example, it’s true that to really master the style you’ve got to spend five or ten years. But you can learn some of its useful self-defence moves – some of the best in the world – in an afternoon. I spent one afternoon learning Jujitsu wristlocks six or so years ago, and I still use them today.

And Alex’s idea made me think about the same things you can do with world cooking. Sure, it takes years to really master Italian cooking. But you can learn basics that can change the way you cook dramatically in a single lesson – the soffrito, for example, or the use of pasta shapes depending on the meal you’re cooking. And then you can apply them to infuse a dish with a sense of a region’s style, or to create something new by combining lessons.

So, what are the three top tips you can learn from a few world styles?

Singaporean/Malay/Thai/Vietnamese area

• Chilli, lime, ginger and garlic. The four ingredients behind most of the region’s cooking (OK, Thai would add lemongrass) give a distinctive, immediately recognisable flavour. You can add them to virtually anything, from beef to scallops, to create a fantastic meal.
• Soup is a meal. Ok, this one’s Chinese too. But the Vietnamese, in particular, raise noodle soups to an artform. Get some fine noodles, some stock, some spice and some chooped meat and veg. Mix together whilst boiling for a couple of minutes. Serve. Uber-quick meal.
• You don’t have to be subtle. I attempted to recreate a Singaporean noodle soup the other day, and one thing immediately made itself apparent – the tiny, almost undetectable levels of seasoning in some Western food isn’t the only way to go. It seems that all the tastes of this region operate according to the Meatloaf school of seasoning (the singer, not the food) – “everything louder than everything else”. Eight birdseye chillis, four cloves of garlic, a chunk of ginger the size of my thumb, and about a quarter of a bottle of lime juice – and it tasted awesome.

It’s our creed here at Kamikaze Cookery that cooking isn’t hard to do. We think it’s even easier if you know what you’re doing, which is why what we’re trying to do here is bring the Science. If you can’t be bothered with the Science, though, there are always ready meals.

Except that you still need to know what you’re doing with ready meals.

Last night I had Roast Chicken Bites™ and chips™⁰. They come in packets that you keep in the freezer. Somebody has done all the hard work for me, and all I need to do is make them hot for a bit. After that, they’re cooked. That’s the theory. Only it doesn’t quite work like that.

The Roast Chicken Bites™ helpfully told me on the back of the packet that they required to be heated at 200° for 15 minutes. The chips™ likewise advised me that they requested 230° for 22 minutes. Theoretically, I could put the chips™ in first and go back later to put in the Bites™ for less time, but I still have a problem. My oven, quite reasonably, I think, only has one temperature dial.

Had I wanted vegetables with my meal, I would have had to cook them for 20 minutes at 180°. If I’d decided to roast my own, I would have needed 240°.

How many ovens do these people think we have?

You can’t just fudge it, either. Trying to work out a reasonable interim temperature between the two, and revised cooking times for different products at that temperature, is going to require a degree in calculus. And you’re still going to end up with soggy chips.

The only reliable guideline I’ve ever come across for frozen food is this: no matter what it says about the time on the packet, if the food product is or may ever have come into contact with a potato, add fifty per cent. If you’re hungry in my flat, and you want to eat something quickly, you might be better off cooking real food from scratch.

If I’m missing some obvious trick that people Just Know, I’d be delighted to hear of it.

Ovens are weird. We talk about them in this week’s episode, coming on Wednesday to an internet near you, pajh-fans. The episode also features the lovely Jehane, Kamikaze Cookery’s Consultant Archaeologist. We used her oven, which is slightly less stupid than mine, but it still has only one temperature dial.

⁰ That’s ‘fries’ if you’re American. Except that they were baked, not fried, so they can’t be called fries. Do you have oven chips in America? And do you call them “oven fries”? Crazy.