Looking Out To Sea

Sometimes, the denizens of the internet just disgust me with their absurd ignorance and desperate need to wade in with irrelevant advice. So I thought I’d keep my ignorant ravings on my own blog instead.

Today I am talking about Kamikaze Cookery’s latest Normal Person versus episode, testing the idea that celebrity chef recipes are manageable for the “normal” cook. The latest episode covered Gordon effing Ramsay. Go watch Normal Person versus Gordon Ramsay, it’s rather fun in that car-crash way.

Just don’t, whatever you do, read the comments. I don’t know why, but the majority of the commenters feel the overwhelming desire to point out that they didn’t understand the concept of the episode. “Look at me, I’m an idiot!” They berate the Kamikaze people for a bunch of irrelevant things, proceed to give really stupid advice about what a food processor is.

That’s the price you pay for being linked from Boing Boing, I suppose — an infestation of knuckle-draggers.

There is one element of the show that merits a bit more discussion, and that’s their definition of “normal”. In the first episode (versus Jamie Oliver) they used someone who clearly knew one or two things, like how to knead dough. The next episode (versus Nigella Lawson) their normal test subject didn’t admit to doing any cooking since Guides, and even then it was her mother who did the work. But still, she demonstrated surprising proficiency and flexibility. (I know this makes me sound like a pretentious twat, but I was honestly impressed that someone who claims to do no cooking is so proficient anyway.) In the latest episode their normal person didn’t know what a ramekin was and had never seen the phrase “season” in a recipe before. So, not to be too blunt about it, what kind of normalcy are they looking for here? Will the next normal person know which end of a knife to hold?

It seems to be Kamikaze Cookery’s belief that a recipe book should teach you how to cook, which has never been my experience. Celebrity chef books tend to be the very opposite of expositional — minimal instructions, glossy photos, lots of white space. The books which teach cooking are very different beasts and don’t tend to come with glossy photos. To my mind, expecting to learn cooking from a chef’s recipe book is a bit like expecting to learn the piano from a Chopin songbook.

Which of the books that we own would teach the basics (or help people along the complex steps)?

Complete Cookery Course, Delia Smith

Yes, Delia will definitely teach you how to cook. More importantly, she also tells you not to panic if any of a number of common things happen (something curdles, there are lumps, etc) and explains how to fix things.

The River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

I think this book would explain how to handle meat properly but would not introduce a person to meat in the first place. If you’re unsure about getting both hands in to a dead animal then Hugh’s not really your fellow. But if you want to get familiar with the obscure cuts (oh, and read some amazing essays) then it would be useful.

Feast, Nigella Lawson

I’m not sure about this one. There are two recipes I’ve made several times from this book. The mini white rolls were my introduction to breadmaking and were very successful. (Please ignore the batch where I forgot the salt….) The chocolate gingerbread is also a gorgeous beast, but it’s also the most horrifying mess to make. A lot of home cooks seem to be terrified of mess and the notion of dirtying more than one pan at a time seems to bring out the Ramsay-style expletives. Feast is for organised cooks only because all the recipes are so massive.

Nigella Express, Nigella Lawson

This book will learn you to cook by subterfuge. But she doesn’t assume you’re an idiot either. You won’t get anywhere without reading between the lines and paying close attention to the photographs (which are, thankfully, plentiful).

Short-Cut Rhodes, Gary Rhodes

I’ve never done anything from this book but I don’t get the impression that the recipes are very easy. I’ve seen Helen try a few things and they never seem to work out as desired. They’re supposed to be abbreviated versions of traditional recipes but they rarely turn out anything like the originals.

Dough, Richard Bertinet

I can confirm that this book will teach you how to make bread.

This is just the selection from memory. We also have a couple of Usborne kids’ cookery books which are used regularly. They will teach you the basics like no other. Similarly, A Young Cook’s Calendar was what I grew up with.

Helen’s definition of normal is pretty different to that assumed by Kamikaze Cookery, though it’s quite succinct: “a normal person should be able to make a white sauce, a tomato sauce and a chocolate sauce without recourse to a recipe”.

What do you think a normal person can cook?

Nick’s masked birthday party last week had a large cask, courtesy of Stewart Brewery. The beer didn’t all get finished on the night, so Nick ended up decanting the remains into whatever containers were lying around and brought us a two litre bottle of beer when he visited.

It’s flat now, and not very exciting to drink any more but it makes great bread. I used a recipe from Crust, the “ale and yeast poolish”, and made four small loaves. There is still a lot of beer left, so I’ll need some other means to use up the remainder. If there are no better ideas I might try stewing with it.

If I’d been sensible I would have started the poolish for this bread early so I wouldn’t be baking last thing at night. Best laid plans, etc. Whatever the regrets about timing, the loaves turned out beautifully. I haven’t had much practice at shaping loaves, so they were a bit haphazard. But this turned out to be a good thing because the varying shapes of loaves reacted differently in the oven, and I got a much better impression of how the bread reacts in general.

Specifically, the two loaves which were more compact and loaf-shaped developed a really beautiful burst and a tantalising crust. They expanded up instead of out, which is an effect I’ve been trying to achieve for some time. The two that were more baguette-shaped (flatter and longer) spread apart where they were slashed, rather than bursting up the way. I consider this a very tasty and successful experiment. We’re learning here!

I’m still not completely sure how to maintain the crispy crust after I pull the loaves out of the oven. When I made the pain de campagne last week I didn’t care about the state of the loaves because I wanted them to go stale for the fondue. So I just left them out. And the crust stayed nice and crunchy. So should I stop putting the bread away until they’ve had several more hours to cool? Helen reckons that the heat and moisture inside the bread gets trapped when the bread is trapped in a container, and softens this the crusts again. This seems reasonable to me. Or maybe the only reason the pains de campagne had nice crusts was because they were baked for longer? Something to experiment with on the next attempt.

I gave one loaf to Nick, along with the money I owed him for the beer. (Sorry for being late in my debts!) The recipe suggests that it’s good with a cassoulet and a glass of red wine. Helen improvised a not-cassoulet from the wrong type of beans and some very old sausages from the freezer. It turned out rather fantastic in the end.

This is the bread I was talking about yesterday. After last night and lunch today we have less than half a loaf left. But I have more bread in the works.

I was up pretty late last night, baking. I didn’t particularly enjoy getting out of bed this morning (…but when do I ever?) but the bread was totally worth it.

I made two pains de campagne. They’re mostly plain flour with a little rye for flavour and colour. They start off with a ferment, which I tend not to do for other loaves because I’m lazy and it doesn’t easily fit into my day — but I thought I would make the effort this time.

(Mostly I make up a ferment the night before and put it in the fridge until the following evening. But a chilled ferment is pretty difficult to work and the yeast is obviously sluggish. It becomes a trade-off between letting the ferment come back up to room temperature, and not leaving it too late in the day to take the loaf to completion. In future I might try putting together a ferment just before I leave the house in the morning. The temperature is probably cool enough outside the fridge anyway!)

The loaves, in the end, looked rather beautiful and smelled fantastic. I’m sorry I haven’t uploaded the photographs that I took last night. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

At the weekend we got another smattering of recipes knocked off the challenge list. In fact, I don’t know if we’d mentioned this at any point, but we have recently completed three chapters. Other chapters are nearing that final moment. Workday Winners has only one recipe to go. If you want a fairly accurate picture of where things stand, I maintain a list of pending recipes which is basically the same as Helen’s challenge page but with all the completed recipes removed.

The plan as I currently understand it is to get everything not in the Christmas chapter (Holiday Snaps) finished by the start of December. This means November will probably be more hectic than December, but maybe it pays to get the headless chicken impressions done early. Otherwise I fear we’ll end up with a Hogmanay Miscellaneous Foods Party, which I’m sure would be very enjoyable but a bit strange. Not the high point we want to go out on.

In short, this evening has been an excellent evening for breadmaking. I am very pleased with what I produced today. Some notes:

• Rolling dough is a mug’s game. Don’t try to make perfect cylinders by rolling. Fold the dough onto itself lengthways repeatedly to get the length you need. This gives a much more even result. (You can still roll to smooth things out, but don’t try to apply pressure to make your dough longer. The dough will resist.)
• Loading an uncooked, unsupported loaf onto a tray/peel and then sliding it off that into the oven… sounds dangerous and a great way of turning your carefully sculptured dough into a pile of mush. But it really does work. The trick is the light dusting of semolina on your peel before loading on the dough. Then it slides beautifully.
• Quick slashes, slow slashes. Doesn’t seem to make much of a difference as long as you don’t make a mess of the dough when you do it.

• Using a little water sprayer seems to work (£1.50 from the shop across the road). But you can never have enough steam, I think.
• Cooking hot is good. Especially if you’re opening the oven wide to load and spray the insides. I tend to forget about reducing the temperature once the oven’s been preheated and it hasn’t really harmed my breads.
• Get a large enough container to put them in, otherwise you’ll feel like a right doofus. Or eager mouths to feed, of course.

I’ve just been reading through the blog from the Kamikaze Cookery people and I’m pretty disappointed to be honest. They don’t apparently seem to like food. Rice apparently “tastes okay”; peas, likewise, “taste okay”. And all the recipes from various books that they do seem to turn out really badly. Why is it we never have these problems?

I’d like to think that a food blog would be a tad more excited about food than this. I know Helen is a lot more enthusiastic than that, and I’m pretty sure it comes across in her writing.

On Sunday I went out to hunt for a spice mixture and found nothing in the end. I did learn that the new Jenners food hall is a travesty of absurd proportions, which apparently only sells whisky and shortbread. And you know how hard they are to buy in Edinburgh. But no Ras el Hanout in the shops nearest the flat. Which is really annoying, because I saw some in Lupe Pintos on Saturday afternoon but thought we already had some…

On the way home after my failure of a shopping trip, I hid from the rain in Waterstones and picked up a copy of Crust, the sequel to Dough by Richard Bertinet. Bread porn!

Last night I sat down to watch the included DVD, which has a guide to making a sourdough ferment, a sourdough bread, and brioche. Brioche! Ah, how incredibly fat I could get eating brioche… there has got to be some reason I can invent for me to make a batch of brioche. They looked like a lot of work but were rather beautiful in the end, so I’ll have to come up with an excuse, however tenuous.

(In a related situation, I haven’t yet made the doughnuts from Dough. I need some hearty appetites to feed and a way to heat oil to the right temperature. We don’t have a chip fryer and when we made fried goujons and later calamari we were a bit hit-and-miss with the temperature of the oil. We don’t have a thermometer that would cope with that kind of heat.)

There are still many recipes from Dough that I want to try, so I certainly won’t be abandoning it. Crust instead has more unusual breads — like the afrementioned brioche, as well as bagels and pretzels — rather than the everyday stuff. There are also more tips that help to clarify a lot of what was written in the first book, and presumably teaching tips he’s learned since opening his school in Bath. Crust seems to be a very good complement to Dough in that regard: more focus on technique, theory and longer, more complicated recipes. You can feel free to learn what you can from the “difficult” book but apply that to the more straightforward recipes in the other.

The temperature this morning was colder than I would have wanted. At some point I think Christmas might happen. And there are a selection of heartier loaves that I’ve been leaving off until the weather begins to get this way. I even owe Nick a loaf of something that I can’t recall. It was brown with interesting things in it — shallots may have been one of the ingredients. (But then again he owes us about a million cooked meals by now so I probably shouldn’t feel too guilty.) Time to buy in another load of flour and crank up the oven…

Last night we all went out to A Room In Leith, which was called The Waterfront when I visited with my work early last year. Food was good, though they’d run out of potato wedges by 8 o’clock so all the steak eaters got asparagus instead. Most of my table had some kind of steak, apart from Emma’s swordfish and my coley. I’d never heard of coley before but it was really tasty on its bed of scallops.

The restaurant is just one room, and the rest of the building is a nice pub with the appalling name of Teuchter’s Landing. It has a dizzying, indeed terrifying, selection of whiskies for sale. Which goes some way to explaining why I didn’t get my ciabatta started until about 10.30 this morning. Pounding dough on the work surface, Bertinet-style, is a lot less relaxing with a drink-induced headache. Thankfully the bread came out really tasty and soft, though not as pretty as I’d hoped. I have trouble with the shaping of my loaves but it’s not something that’s cheap to practise — there’s a lot of preparation involved before you get to the shaping stage.

I’ll let Helen tell you about the rest of the food when she’s good and ready. At the moment we’re both feeling sluggish and brainless with cold symptoms. There probably would have been nothing better than watching more Battlestar Galactica this evening. I’m becoming more desperate and thus more tempted by the Seasons 1-4 + Mini-series + Razor boxed set.

Ciabatta di Como
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After last week’s unfortunate and not well-received brunch we need to make amends. The first thing to do is to make some nice bread to compensate for the Nigella bread which was quite nice but chock full of allergens. Nuts, as they say.

So I was up a wee bit earlier than usual to start a biga for the bread. A biga is a stiff mixture of flour, water and yeast which you let sit for a day in its bowl. By the end of this the yeast has created a light, bubbly mixture that’s a bit like dough. You can then build up a proper dough around this base for bubbly breads like ciabatta, which is what I’ll be making with it tomorrow morning.