Aidan Brooks: Trainee Chef

Taking A Break

2010-05-12T21:13:00.001+02:00

One Saturday morning when I was just 15 years old, I got dressed, grabbed a quick breakfast and set out to catch a bus from Hackney up Blackhorse Road to Waltham Forest College.

I was understandably apprehensive that morning. I was heading somewhere new, meeting a bunch of people for the first time and about to realise a dream I'd had since I first helped mum to make cupcakes as an eight-year-old. Months later, in the spring of 2004, I returned to Waltham Forest for the final time, to proudly collect my Junior Chef's Academy certificate. From that moment I knew that I was never going to look back. I would become a professional chef.

Of course I couldn't realise that ambition overnight. For the next few months I had to put all thoughts of cooking aside and concentrate on my GCSEs. That was a condition laid down by my parents for allowing me to go to catering college and, as it turned out, it was also a demand of the college.

Westminster Kingsway took no prisoners when it came to the battle for achievement. Those three years were mercilessly hard at times, but that merely served as a foretaste of the pain that was to come later as a hospitality professional. It's not an easy industry in which to excel. At least we were well prepared, with great work experience postings and a "realistic working environment" restaurant open to the public. In summer 2007, I collected my Professional Chef Diploma.

During my second year summer break I had discovered the fun of writing something about what I was doing and this blog was born. In those days I had buckets of spare time - enough to research and write, to document and record, to video and share my thoughts and experiences with the wider world. For a while I even managed to knock out a few pieces for a national newspaper.

But my focus was always on my career and during my third year I spent a lot of my spare time researching the world of fine dining. I concluded that Spain was the place to be and found a restaurant that looked just perfect. Back then I was as cynical about the awards system as I am today, but that feeling of being part of kitchen team winning its first Michelin star was something I'll never forget as long as I live. Being part of that crew at Comerç 24 taught me so much about teamwork and I'm so proud to count many in that kitchen today as life-long friends.

If Comerç gave me a solid foundation, Martín Beresategui's Lasarte gave me a taste of cooking at the next level of refinement. And that prepared me for Ferrero, where I learnt such a massive amount about self-discipline, professional organisation and perfection of execution. I may have had a few difficult moments during my time there, but I'll always credit Paco Morales as the man who showed me how a restaurant should be run.

Viajante was never part of my career plans but was always destined by the Gods to happen, like an adventure of Jason and the Argonauts. Bacchus was my last fine dining experience before I set off for Spain and I already knew by then that Nuno Mendes, working just a few hundred yards from my London home, was one of Britain's most creative chefs. And when I returned to London, Nuno was preparing to open Viajante down the road in Bethnal Green.

Very few restaurateurs get an opportunity to work through the agonies and ecstasies of the birth of a serious fine dining restaurant before they open their own establishment. I'm sure that in future years I'll count this as one of the most valuable learning experiences of my career. And it reinforced what I always knew - that there are very few chefs in this country with the creative brilliance of Nuno Mendes.

It's been six and a half years since I made that first bus trip to Waltham Forest. Six and a half years during which I've emerged both as a chef and as a person... and it's time to take a break. My passion to become a chef and restaurateur hasn't diminished one iota, but lately I've come to understand that there are some things in my life of even greater importance than my career. Working 17-hour double shifts and then collapsing in bed at half one in the morning is a guaranteed way to lose those precious gifts and that's not a mistake that I intend to make. Last week I handed in my notice and Sunday was my last shift at Viajante. I wish Nuno and the crew the best of luck with a venture that, if all goes well, will surely become one of London's most respected places to dine.

For the time being, this will be my last blog post. It was becoming increasingly difficult in any event, as regular readers will have noticed. Lack of time is one factor, but it's also the case that at this stage of a career it's almost impossible to write about your activities. You can't criticise your employers because that undermines your own position and you can't praise them without being thought biased. So with that in mind, I'm taking a break - from fine dining and from blogging - to do something different for a while.

I'll keep the blog open, because I know from my email that many young people starting out in the business come here and read about my experiences. I can be contacted via the email link if you click on contact above. Friends can search me out on Facebook as Aidan 'Trig' Brooks and keep in contact that way. All that remains for me to say is - in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger - "I'll be back."

Open For Business

2010-04-25T20:00:00.007+02:00

It's been six weeks since I posted. Six incredible, crazy, exhausting weeks during which I've been helping to prepare Viajante for the official opening which took place a week ago. We're open for business!

Several food blogging friends of mine have already sampled what we have to offer during the past month or so and everyone seems to have enjoyed the overall experience even if, inevitably during a startup phase, not everything was perfect. Thanks to you all for putting up with the inconveniences that come with visiting an establishment during a pre-opening trial period and in particular for accepting the restrictions on publishing that applied during soft openings. I'm well aware of just how frustrating it must have been for food bloggers to eat a meal that stimulated both their intellectual and digestive juices, but which they were unable to write about. It's one of the reasons for my blog silence recently - it didn't seem fair for me to post when other food bloggers were so tightly circumscribed.

I'd like to say hello to Douglas Blyde of Intoxicating Prose who, along with the other members of his party, really appeared to enjoy his experience here the other week and who wrote a really excellent article in Glass Magazine. I thought it was a brilliant example of how a skilled columnist can overcome restrictions that would paralyse an ordinary scribbler like me, to end up with an entertaining and informative piece of writing. Next to my long-standing cyber-friends Jeanne Horak of Cook Sister! and Johanna Wagner of The Passionate Cook. I'm so pleased that you and your husband enjoyed your dining experience the Wednesday before last, Jeanne, and equally sorry that you and yours couldn't make it in the end, Johanna. I hope you'll visit us soon - we'll do our best to make up for the earlier disappointment.

Last Saturday night my dad came to visit, accompanied by Niamh Shields of Eat Like A Girl and Patrick Carpenter of Ostrea Edulis. Apologies once more for the fact that we were still on soft openings, which had been extended for a few days - I know it was disappointing and frustrating not to be able to take photos and write up the visit. Recent focus on work has meant I've neglected some other people, so let me make amends. Firstly, apologies for my silence to my long-standing cyber-friend, The Boston Foodie.

Next I want to say hello to another very good friend, Aaron Langille, who started working at Comerç 24 around the time I left and with whom I spent many happy evenings and weekends eating and drinking in Barcelona. London-based American food academic and blogger Adrienne of Gastroanthropology recently ate at Noma in Copenhagen and photographed the stagières hard at work, including Aaron (second left). Those who have followed Nuno's progress from The Loft project to Viajante will know just how influential Noma has been in the development of his philosophy as a restaurateur. Ben Greeno and Clayton Wells from Noma have both been Chef in Residence at The Loft and René Redzepi has been an advisor and mentor for Viajante.

Hopefully, once we've fully settled into a routine (though routine is not exactly what Nuno Mendes and Viajante are about) I'll find time to blog occasionally, although it's likely to be very irregular from now on. Right now my priorities are clear and I am totally focused on the task in hand.

More importantly, there's simply no time for writing. Take a look at this pie chart, which shows how my time is currently divided. On a normal working day I have just one hour to get showered, dressed, breakfasted and prepared for work and the same amount of time in the small hours of each morning to catch something on TV or just flop down with a drink.

There's an ironic twist here. In 2006 I spent five weeks on college work placement at one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants, trekking across London each day from the East End to The Berkeley Hotel in the West End to learn something about cooking. Some time afterwards a little birdie told me that El Gordo, when told he had a young food blogger working for him, replied: "If he's got time to blog, we're obviously not giving him enough work to do." Well, Mr. Ramsay, I've got plenty enough work to do nowadays thank you, with hardly any time to blog. But it's all worth it. Ask your former protégée Marcus Wareing, now Michelin 2* chef/patron of his eponymous restaurant at The Berkeley Hotel, who trekked across London the other day from the West End to The Town Hall Hotel in the East End to experience the food at Viajante and pleasantly surprise Sabrina at the next table. It was a pleasure to cook for him, as it was also a pleasure to cook recently for the executive chefs of two of your current fine dining restaurants. Presumably they don't have enough work to keep them fully occupied these days. Touché!

During working hours I'm dedicated to my section, to Viajante and to our customers - the executive chefs, food writers, gastronomes, celebrities and the hundreds of ordinary people who simply love great food. What little time I have to spare outside of work is devoted to spending quality time with a very special person in my life. I hope your question is now fully answered, William.

For those readers who never managed to pay a visit to Bacchus or The Loft and don't know about Viajante, here are the links to Viajante's official websites and online services: Viajante, Viajante Facebook, Viajante Twitter, Viajante at The Town Hall Hotel.

So far I've seen some great comments: "the most exciting opening of the year so far", "tastebuds still singing", "spectacular meal there last night", "groovy", "masterful 12-course journey", "sublime soy jelly consommé", "Nuno's food has gone up several knocks in balance, flow and flavour", "fantastic dinner at Viajante this evening... each dish was meticulous" and (surely a bit OTT) "blew Fat Duck out of water". I especially liked: "I read that [Viajante] as Viagra at first." OK - if our food can help with your more intimate problems... we're only too pleased to help! I hope the writeups that will appear in the coming weeks now we're fully open will be as positive as these initial reviews that I've collated.

Many readers will be aware that, tomorrow night, the magnificent Guildhall in the City of London will once again host the annual San Pellegrino World Top 50 Restaurants event. The list of restaurants is drawn up following a poll of the world's most celebrated chefs, renowned food critics, leading restaurateurs and well-travelled gourmands – collectively known as The World's 50 Best Restaurants Academy. San Pellegrino always causes controversy and this year will be no exception. Chefs who have been ignored by Michelin sometimes find themselves propelled to international fame by the recognition paid to them by their peers - Fergus Henderson at St. John was perhaps the best example of this a few years ago. So, watch out for some interesting news in this year's announcements.

Now, Voyager!

2010-03-14T19:53:00.006+01:00

The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted,
Now, voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find.

— Walt Whitman

From its earliest beginnings, the East End has been home to the poorest inhabitants of London. Much of its land was in need of drainage, development was inhibited by the medieval system of copyhold and it was home to noxious industries such as tanning, glue-making and the Bryant and May factory at the centre of the infamous Matchgirls' Strike of 1888. While the political centre of London developed in the west of the city, the east remained a low-wage economy, with slums, sweat shops and low-paid industries based in and around the docks. What Ellis Island was to American immigration, the East End was to British immigration with countless waves of migrants - from oppressed Protestant Huguenots, to Jewish victims of the pogroms, to Muslims fleeing more recent poverty and oppression - all making it their home and turning it into the vibrant multi-cultural centre it is today. I was born in the East End.

Now I've returned to seek and find an untold want: great fine dining in the place where I spent my formative years. It's a daunting prospect, as evidenced by this map of Central London:

Red dots denoting London's 2010 Michelin-starred restaurants flood the West End - an area bounded by Chelsea to the south, Kensington to the west, Marylebone to the north and Holborn to the east. Three can be found just off the map to the southwest and three have dared to wander eastwards into Smithfield, Clerkenwell and to the edges of the City, but the vast majority are happily based in London's safe, trusted, wealthy West End. The East End - an area bounded by the Thames to the south, Shoreditch to the west, south Hackney to the north and the River Lea to the east - has precisely none. The man who gave me my very first cooking certificate and one of my first ever experiences of work in a kitchen, Professor Cyrus Todiwala, earnt well-deserved Michelin Bib Gourmand recognition for his excellent E1-postcoded Café Spice Namasté, but it's not fine dining. To my knowledge, there has never been a Michelin-starred restaurant here... and few if any fine dining establishments. Only the insane, the recklessly brave or a true visionary would open a fine dining restaurant in the East End...

For those who don't know him, let me introduce you to Nuno Mendes. Back in October 2006, just starting my third year at Westminster Kingsway, I read a post on the Food and Drink in London blog about a "molecular gastropub" called Bacchus that had opened in Hoxton, within walking distance of my home in Hackney. Its unique selling point was "fine dining in trainers" - and when I eventually got there almost a year later, it blew me away. What I loved most about Nuno's menu was its fluidity - the extreme opposite of French conservative haute cuisine. Where a top Paris restaurant would insist on perfect replication year on year, Nuno wasn't afraid to develop and improve dishes even in the middle of service. I described his food back then as "combining the precision of classical music with the inventiveness of jazz".

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since that night. Nuno encouraged me to train in Spain, extolling the virtues of his mentors at El Bulli and nominating Mugaritz as the place for me to learn my trade. I never worked at either, but during my two years in Spain I trained with two of their great chefs - El Bulli's Carles Abellan at Comerç 24 and Mugaritz's Paco Morales at Ferrero. Returning to London recently, I met up with Nuno and enjoyed a brilliant night cooking with him at his dining club, The Loft:

What I found was a chef who, while I was away in Spain learning the basics of our trade, had been perfecting the skills of chef/restaurateur. A man neither insane nor recklessly brave - but a voyager with a truly sparkling vision for the East End of the future. The Portuguese word for "voyager" is "viajante". And, in the new 5* Town Hall Hotel rising from the ashes of the former Bethnal Green Town Hall, just 300 yards down the road from my old school Raine's Foundation, is Restaurant Viajante.

If ever there was a time for change, this is surely it. The area to the west of Bethnal Green has been transformed by the yuppification of Shoreditch, Hoxton and Dalston. The area to the southeast is London's new financial district of Docklands, emerging strongly from the recent recession. And to the northeast is the site of London's 2012 Olympic Games. Communications in the area have been transformed, with the Docklands Light Railway, a new underground link and the forthcoming Crossrail overground service. Government agencies have made huge efforts to shift the balance of wealth from west to east, with the result that Bethnal Green is unrecognisable as the crime-rife former stomping ground of the Krays. The trainers have gone. It's a great spot for fine dining going forward from 2010.

If the photo above looks a bit odd, that's because it's a still from the Portuguese daily TV current affairs programme 30 Minutos, transmitted recently by national broadcaster RTP. For anyone with a keen eye and a working knowledge of Portuguese, it was rather a give-away. Of course I only have a bit part, but it's pretty obvious that I'm doing a little more than just helping out on a busy Friday night:

I am thrilled to announce that when Viajante opens soon I shall be Chef de Partie, Cold Section - a proud part of a team of chefs from around the world who have descended on the East End, determined to achieve something that has never been done before. I look forward to seeing you there.

Koy Shunka - Barcelona's Hidden Treasure

2010-03-07T17:51:00.004+01:00

Nobody goes to fine dining restaurants to eat. Even people like me, whose lives are committed to fine dining, divide eateries into two groups: those we go to for the cerebral thrill of experiencing a great chef's creativity, passion and originality... and those we go to because we're hungry. But every now and again you come across a restaurant that spans the gap between dining for intellectual pleasure and dining for hedonistic pleasure. It's a rare experience, but a handful of chefs have managed to build that bridge. Peter Gordon is one example and I'll be writing about him again soon. Hideki Matsuhisa is another. If you read this, Hideki, I haven't deserted you. It's just that I'm now living 709 miles away, so it's a bit difficult to pop in on a Sunday night.

Hideki Matsuhisa and his business partner Xu Zhangchao (known to regular foodies and local pool players as "Sam") run one of Barcelona's true hidden treasures, Koy Shunka. Located in a small alleyway off the Via Laietana not far from the city's tourist hub at Plaça Catalunya, you could easily walk straight past the place and not notice it was there. But great quality doesn't go unnoticed. Pop inside, and you could find yourself seated next to regular customer Ferran Adrià or any one of a number of other top chefs, celebrities and gastronomes. For Koy Shunka is predominantly a kappo-style counter restaurant in which customers sit at one of about 24 places around a bar, while 10 or more chefs busy themselves preparing the food right in front of the customer. The most junior chefs cook the hot food in the centre, their superiors work around them and the most senior chefs plate up dishes, prepare cold food, sauces and extras and attend directly to their 'personal' customers. Hideki Matsuhisa supervises all sashimi dishes personally.

Although I've eaten there several times and written enthusiastic comments about the place more than once, I never managed to take any food photos and consequently never wrote it up in my restaurants section. Thinking about that the other day it came home to me that it wasn't a coincidence - when you dine as a critic you bring your critical apparatus with you, but when you dine as a member of a family it just doesn't seem appropriate somehow. Hideki Matsuhisa always made me feel like I was at home.

Luckily for me my friend Professor Paulina Mata - Portuguese food scientist, molecular gastronomist, author and broadcaster - paid a visit to the Catalan capital recently, equipped with a copy of my 2009 post Dining out in Barcelona. Better still, she returned home with some great photographs of the food at Koy Shunka, which she's encouraged me to reproduce. Click on slides for descriptions of dishes:

Readers with a command of Portuguese should read Professor Mata's writeup on her gastronomic forum NovaCrítica-vinho.com. "I adored the environment, I adored the food", she reported. "When I return to Barcelona I shall certainly revisit Koy Shunka." I'll raise a glass of sake to that!

It's front of house, rather than the kitchen, that ultimately makes all the difference to a restaurant by turning great food into a great customer experience. In Koy Shunka, personal chefs entertain and inform you throughout the meal. But waiters and waitresses also operate almost invisibly on the customer side of the counter, removing and replacing crockery and cutlery, topping up glasses and attending to every issue that makes the experience perfect. Including important rituals such as offering a hand towel at the start of the meal. Except that at Koy Shunka, even this transcends ritual to become entertainment. Click left and enjoy!

For anyone who can't afford to visit Tokyo but can manage the fare to Barcelona, I can't recommend Koy Shunka too highly. Make sure you call ahead and book - then just turn up and be pampered.

So Proud Of Our Global Community

2010-03-05T18:05:00.007+01:00

I always knew there was something very special about the global foodie community. Ever since I started my blog over three years ago, I've been surrounded by friendly, supportive people from all corners of the globe. My stats report tells me that the quarter of a million people who have visited my site in that time come from a staggering 207 different countries, as far apart as Haiti, Rwanda and Norfolk Island. Not only is it a global family - it's a wonderfully generous global family. Take a look at Pim Techamuanvivit's annual Menu For Hope fundraising for the World Food Programme to see just how generous.

When on Monday 15th February I heard about the kitchen fire at Mugaritz, I was particularly moved by the story of the stagières' knives. As someone about to contract his first ever paid position as a chef without first starting as an unpaid stagière, I knew how devastated these three young trainees from Guatemala, Sweden and the US would have been to lose their most precious possessions and the tools of their apprenticeship. That night my dad and I decided to see what we could do to help. After a few days fruitlessly trying to sort out the logistics of an appeal fund, dad wrote to food blogging friend John Sconzo in upstate New York... and the rest is history.

Overnight, the appeal fund that John established a fortnight ago smashed its target of $2,500. The overwhelming generosity of chefs, foodies and bloggers everywhere means that Diego Telles, Mattias Hogebrant and Greg Kuzia-Carmel will soon be able to buy brand new knives to replace the ones destroyed in the fire. I won't acknowledge all of the individual donors here, as John Sconzo has published a comprehensive thank you on his own blog. What I will say is that seeing the names of world-famous chefs, food writers, bloggers and fund-raisers on that list of donors, inter-mixed with the names of ordinary people like dad and me, makes me so incredibly proud of the global food community.

Bananas!

2010-02-25T19:43:00.002+01:00

Back in November 2008 I published a post celebrating Victory For The Different! After years of massive food waste, the European Commission had at last agreed to abandon the laws that dictated the look of Europe's fruit and vegetables. For the previous two decades, EU legislation had meant that greengrocery which failed to meet the "perfect profile" in terms of shape, size and absence of blemishes could not be sold for direct consumption. Wonky cucumbers and comedy carrots were outlawed and only perfect-looking produce could be found on supermarket shelves. One of the first challenges to the law came from Waitrose, when in 2007 they introduced Class II produce, offering ugly fruit to their eco-conscious customers. A year later the EU caved in to pressure from the green lobby and we celebrated a wonderful victory for ugly fruit, sexy vegetables and non-conformist people.

Fifteen months later and the protectionist farmers are back. Greater availability of food and the introduction of new competition into the expanded European markets had resulted in significant price reductions during the intervening period... and the French, Spanish and Hungarians are not happy about it. Their massive agro-industrial producers could afford the physical handling and computer-aided sorting equipment necessary to manage compliance with the EU legislation, whereas the smaller local growers couldn't afford to go down that path. The ending of the 'ugly fruit ban' meant that the market dominance of the few was challenged and the consumer benefitted hugely as a result. But a few days ago, led by Spanish MEPs, the European Parliament's Agriculture Committee voted to bring the ban back.

The proposed re-introduction will now go before the European Parliament where, hopefully, it will be thrown out. "Food is food, no matter what it looks like", said Timothy Kirkhope, Conservative MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber. "To try to stop stores selling perfectly decent food simply because of its shape or size is morally unjustifiable, especially when we are worried about global food supplies and still in the mouth of an economic downturn." His colleague Richard Ashworth MEP described the Spanish-led move as "nonsensical" and UKIP Euro-MP Stuart Agnew said: "They are crackers."

When the debate first started back in the 1970s after the establishment of the European Community, the tabloid newspapers revelled in stories about rules defining the shape and size of bananas, which became an iconic target for eurosceptic fun in the years to follow. Ironically, however, bananas are one item of produce that has never been covered by the legislation, being covered by other laws. But the papers were never going to let the truth get in the way of a good story. And with the picture above, neither am I.

Thanks to -eko- for the Magritte-inspired banana photo.

Mugaritz Fire - Stagières' Knives Appeal

2010-02-22T15:40:00.005+01:00

Early last Monday fire severely damaged the kitchens at Mugaritz, the world-famous restaurant in Spain's Basque Country. Luckily, no-one was hurt. For the management and staff of Mugaritz, the destruction of their workplace was a tragedy. But for three other young people, this was also a calamity.

Stagières are unpaid apprentices, usually young, without whom no top restaurant can function. Driven by a common passion to learn from the world's best chefs, they travel from all corners of the globe to train at world-class restaurants.

When the dust settled on Mugaritz after last Monday's inflagration, Mattias from Sweden, Diego from Guatemala and Greg from the US found themselves without their most valued possessions. Their precious knife sets, not covered by the restaurant's insurance, had been incinerated. Read Greg's story here.

This is something I understand well - two and a half years ago I set off for Spain as a novice stagière myself. It's taken me years to put together my knife set, so I know exactly how devastated these lads now feel and I want to help set up a fund to help them recover their combined $2,500 losses and re-equip themselves for work. They lost some great tools, including knives by Forschner Victorinox, Kasumi, Porsche, Nenox, Misono, Kikuichi and Wüsthof.

Many of you will be familiar with John Sconzo of Docsconz - The Blog. John is a food blogger widely known across the world of hospitality and he has kindly volunteered to set up and administer the fund. Can you please help with a personal pledge? Donations will be so welcome, no matter how large or small. Email John at docsconz[at]gmail[dot]com with your pledge and he will get back to you as soon as possible with details of exactly how you can contribute to the fund. Would food bloggers please copy this post and publish similar appeals (email me for text and picture). Together we can make so much difference to a group of people who really deserve our support.

UPDATE: We now have a donation page on firstgiving for anyone able to contribute by credit card. Other methods of contributing to the fund can be arranged by emailing John Sconzo or myself.

There's A Fire In My Kitchen

2010-02-18T13:12:00.003+01:00

A couple of years ago I wrote a critical review of dinner at Mugaritz. It's not something I regret because I've changed my mind about what happened on that particular evening, or because I no longer think I should be honest in expressing my opinions. What I do regret is that I never took the time since that post to balance the books. I'd like to make amends for that omission now.

When Twitter alerted me to news of the fire that broke out in the kitchen at Mugaritz in the small hours of Monday morning, my immediate reaction was one of shock. Only a few hours earlier I'd been relaxing with someone very special, enjoying the delights of a Saint Valentine's Day meal at The Providores. The news shattered the peace of a soft, dreamy morning. My first thought was for my friend Gilbert from Comerç 24, currently working as Pastry Chef at Mugaritz. I checked the web for news of whether anyone had been hurt, my thoughts turning to everyone else who'd been in that kitchen earlier in the day, from the porters and stagières to the boss Andoni Aduriz. Mercifully, there were no casualties. The destruction of years of work in just three hours of inflagration was tragedy enough, but at least the kitchen had been cleaned down and the restaurant closed for the weekend before the events unfolded.

That evening I spent back in July 2008 at Mugaritz was little more than another fine dining experience to me, though I'd been strongly urged to go there by two chefs whose opinions I highly respected - Nuno Mendes of Bacchus and my then boss Arnau Muñío of Comerç 24. Ironically, it was my meal the following night a few miles west along the Basque coastline that began a train of culinary education that was to fundamentally alter the way I was to come to view Aduriz and his achievements. Looking back now at my review of The Guggenheim Bilbao it's clear that I still hadn't quite grasped what Martín Berasategui had taught his protégées Alija and Aduriz, although 18 months later it's clear as day. Almost everything I've done since has been driven by that school of ingredient-led cooking - dishes seeking to bring out the very best of perfect ingredients, sometimes with complex processes of deconstruction and preparation, but with purity and simplicity of presentation. I spent a large part of last year learning some of these skills alongside one of Mugaritz's most talented sons - Paco Morales of Restaurante Ferrero.

Mugaritz will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes of Monday's fire and it will continue to inspire young chefs to travel across the world to learn the art of cooking. I wish everyone associated with the restaurant and its brilliant team all the very best of luck in the days and weeks to come.

Meanwhile, in case you were wondering why I've been so silent about my plans since I returned to England, let me reassure my readers that there's still a powerful fire in my metaphorical kitchen. That fire was stoked high a few nights ago when I spent an amazing evening working alongside a truly great chef and his team. I'd love to be able to tell you what I'll be doing in the coming months, but I have some more thinking, discussing and planning to do before I can say anything more. Rest assured that I'll be bringing some great personal stories to this blog in the near future.

Spanish Roundup - Two Great Restaurants

2010-02-10T19:53:00.012+01:00

Most bloggers find themselves from time to time with some half-written posts that somehow never got completed and published... and I'm no exception. Looking through the drafts on my testbed the other day I found partial write-ups of two Spanish fine dining experiences that I want to share with you before I move on to the new phase of my career. These restaurants are Espai Sucre in Barcelona and Torrijos in Valencia - and both thoroughly deserve to be listed amongst my greatest dining experiences in Spain.

Let's start with Espai Sucre (Sugar Space). There's something very funny - in a puerile sort of way - about tucking yourself in a corner and stuffing yourself with sweets. Going to a "dessert restaurant" taps into that vein of guilt associated with scoffing a whole chocolate bar or adding three spoons of sugar to your coffee. But Espai Sucre isn't really like that at all. Jordi Butrón and Xano Saguer are professional pastry chefs alright - they run a patisserie school on the premises, training students in the fundamentals of "restaurant-style pastry making". But when they apply these skills to their restaurant menu, the intention is to transcend any normal convention of dessert-making. As they put it: "Espai Sucre restores the restaurant-style dessert as an element with its own personality and codes, where the result of combining technique and experience shades away the limits that separate the notion of sweet and savory elements." In other words, it's the dessert's addendum role - the guilty pleasure of something sweet enjoyed after real savoury food - that Butrón and Saguer set out to overthrow.

So what qualifies a pastry chef to challenge the received orthodoxy of centuries of gastronomy? Like many Catalan chefs, Butrón studied at Barcelona's Escuela de Restauración y Hostelería, before taking an apprenticeship at the famous Pastelería Escribà where he learnt his trade as a pastry chef. He took stages at three of the most creative restaurants in Europe - Pierre Gagnaire, Michel Bras and El Bulli, returning home to take up a post at Jean Luc Figueras. His experiences at these centres of gastronomic excellence taught Butrón that second place is not good enough. Desserts deserved their own tasting menu, he concluded, with a natural flow from the light, acidic and refreshing to the heavier, more robust and more tightly constructed. With no elements barred from the new, liberated desserts.

Butrón codified his position as follows:

1. Flavour is the priority. Technique and aesthetic are complementary means of increasing quality, remaining faithful to the original flavour.

2. The monopoly of sugar is to be ended. The range of tasty possibilities is widened to include sweet, salty, bitter, acidity, spicy, sweet and sour.

3. There should be respect for tradition, but the use of new techniques, products and tools permits better control over the flavour.

4. The arrangement of food components is an essential variable as flavour may differ according to the ingredient placement.

5. We must introduce immediacy into assemblies, expanding the options for hot/cold combinations, volumes, etc.

6. The dessert is an independent discipline with its own codes and specialists, but there must be close relationships with the world of savoury cuisine.

7. The most important intangible element of a dish is a discourse (idea, concept, theme, argument) which invisibly transcends the components.

There's nothing new here. Principle #9 of Pau Arenós' Ten Fundamental Principles of Technoemotional Cooking states: "The frontiers disappear between sweet and savoury, between the main ingredients and the complementary ones. The ideal means of expression is a degustation menu." It's just that few, if any, chefs have achieved this objective. The vast majority still present their savoury dishes first and their dessert dishes as an after-thought - "blurring the frontiers" perhaps with a pre-dessert.

It took a couple of pastry chefs to open Espai Sucre and put the principle fully into practice. Well, that was the theory, at least. A year ago, while I was training at Lasarte months before my appointment as Pastry Chef at Ferrero, I went to see for myself. Unfortunately, my notes have long since disappeared. But my photographs of the dishes and my memories of a truly excellent dining experience remain. Enjoy the slideshow and, next time you're in Barcelona, visit Espai Sucre for yourself and enjoy the real thing.

Last May I left Catalunya and moved south to the Valencian Autonomous Community. The capital doesn't boast a single Michelin 2* or 3* restaurant, but has no fewer than five 1* ones, two of them cited for the first time in 2009 and one in 2008. If any part of Spain can be called up-and-coming gastronomically, it's Valencia. So friends might have been well surprised one day last July to find me lunching out in one of the city's longest-established and most respected dining rooms. But they'd only question my conservatism if they failed to notice that, two decades after Óscar Torrijos first opened his eponymous restaurant, the sign outside has changed to read simply "Torrijos". There has been a generational change, with daughter Raquel taking over front of house and her husband Josep Quintana taking control of the kitchens.

It used to be difficult for me to eat out due to the fact that most Spanish restaurants operate the same timetable - open when I'm working and closed on my days off. But finding myself with the good fortune of a free Tuesday, I was able to jump into a car with my fellow chef Luis and drive to the big city for lunch. And it was to Torrijos, in the Barrio Russafa in the heart of the old town, that we headed.

The grandfather of modern Valencian cooking, Óscar Torrijos, opened his restaurant in the city centre in 1987 and it soon became established as one of the most elegant addresses in the city and the place to go for fine food, winning a Michelin star in 1992. Two decades later, Óscar handed over the reins to daughter Raquel and her chef husband Josep Quintana and between them they have revitalised and modernised the restaurant while maintaining the best of its traditions (and its Michelin star). Raquel runs front of house and is an accomplished sommelier - now in charge of a wine cellar focused on French, Italian, Chilean and Argentinean wines and estimated to run to some 25,000 bottles.

Josep Quintana is a largely self-taught Catalan who learnt to cook in a traditional family environment. Only when he trained at some of Barcelona's finest restaurants, including Gaig and Espai Sucre, did he learn the techniques that were to underpin his subsequent professional development. His style is characterised by sourcing the very best produce and bringing together perfectly cooked components into a balanced plate. Several reviews quote the chef describing his cuisine as "Mediterranean", but I suspect that the word has been taken out of context as this does a disservice to the complexity of the menu at Torrijos. Much of Spain's cooking can be described as such because it is based on produce grown locally in the southern communities, imported into al-Andalus a millennium ago by the Arabs and Moors or discovered in Italy and the Mediterranean islands in the 14th century by the seafarers of Catalunya.

But to use the term "Mediterranean" to describe a menu often implies a loose eclecticism - whereas these menus are far more carefully constructed. At the heart of what Josep Quintana does is to strike a careful balance between recognisable local dishes rooted in Valencian tradition, the very best of the high Spanish kitchen and outside influences that elevate dishes to a contemporary global status. Med-Asian fusion might be going too far as a description of these more outward-looking dishes, but there are very recognisable Asian influences in Sr. Quintana's cooking and they show the careful selection and balance that I associate with the best of fusion food after my brief spell training with Peter Gordon.

Anyway, enough of philosophy and history - I came to Torrijos to sample the tasting menu. Their lunchtime offering is an abbreviated version of the full evening menú gastronómico - showcasing the best of Josep's creative cooking while leaving guests still fit for an afternoon's work. I've put photos of all the dishes into the Flickr display below and if you click on a given picture you'll get a description.

Interestingly, the old man isn't exactly putting his feet up and watching daytime TV. Having passed the baton to Raquel and Josep at Torrijos, Óscar has re-established Restaurante Torrijos a mile away to the northeast, just outside the city ring road in the Westin Valencia Hotel. Here Óscar has returned to his roots in the neighbourhood of Mestalla, with a bar at the entrance where you can enjoy a drink with some tapas and a small gourmet dining room. If Óscar hasn't lost the art of cooking, he hasn't lost the art of PR either. From my researches on the web, I reckon he's outdoing his daughter and son-in-law in web references to their respective restaurants!

Adiós España... Por Ahora

2010-02-01T14:31:00.003+01:00

Two years, four months and four days ago a Ryanair flight touched down at Girona airport and - armed with a suitcase full of clothes, my knife roll and my college diploma - I set foot on Spanish soil to begin my training as a professional chef. It was the start of a great adventure that was to take me from early days struggling to cope with the demands of a pro kitchen to the triumph of being part of a Michelin star winning team to my first appointment as a chef de partie. An adventure that led to my stages at the now Michelin 2* Lasarte at Hotel Condes, followed by an extraordinary seven months with Paco Morales at Juan Carlos Ferrero's hotel in the mountains of València where I learnt a level of kitchen discipline that exceeded anything I'd previously experienced and where I was privileged to be appointed Pastry Chef.

I can't write about my time in Spain without mentioning Barcelona's awesome Boqueria market, my first experiences with the tools of molecular gastronomy, my first real understandings of the immense scope of responsibility of a Head Chef, eating at Bilbao's inspirational Guggenheim, at Barcelona's exceptional Cinc Sentits and at Girona's perfect El Celler de Can Roca. And I have immense pride at having cooked for two of the world's greatest living chefs - El Bulli's Albert Adrià and pastry genius Paco Torreblanca.

But time moves on and we all come to points in our lives when it's time for a change. Last Friday night a Ryanair flight touched down at Stansted airport and, armed with my suitcase full of clothes, my knife roll, my college diploma and a whole bunch of incredible experiences, I returned to my home country. If I had my time over again, I would make exactly the same decision. Two decades ago a young chef would have packed his or her bags and set off for the world's leading culinary country of the times - France. In my era, the country any aspiring young chef was bound to head off to was France's southern neighbour. I don't regret one single minute of my time in the truly wonderful country of Spain and I'm sure I'll be back.

Who knows where the future will take me. But, starting today, I've decided to seek employment as a chef in the land of my birth. It's been great to be away. It's even better to be home again.

Job Wanted - Chef De Partie in Progressive Fine Dining Restaurant

2010-01-17T14:56:00.009+01:00

ENTHUSIASTIC young professional chef seeks post as chef de partie. 3-year Professional Chef Diploma from top college plus two years' experience in Michelin 1* and 2* kitchens in Spain, one full year as chef de partie running starters and desserts sections (cuarto frio and postres), plus experience on meat and fish sections. Willing to travel. Fluent English, Spanish & Portuguese, some French. Excellent references. Salary level not key issue - finding the right kitchen with strong philosophy, good teamwork and bright future far more important.

Maybe, in the words of Michael Pritchard and Frank E. Wright, it was simply "too much, too soon". But having progressed from Comerç 24 to Lasarte and Ferrero, I simply don't want to go backwards. I'm now no longer comfortable cooking at a level below that associated with Michelin 2*, whereas my two years in the professional kitchen don't easily earn me the right to a paid job at that level. Add into the mix the huge problems brought about in the hospitality industry by the economic crisis and the fragility of rural and seaside restaurants during the winter - and it makes the job-hunting task even more difficult.

Mind you, none of that merits what happened to me over the past few days. For a restaurant to invite me for interview knowing I had to fly 1,100km and drive a further 500km and then to have an HR officer who knew diddly-squat about cooking interview me not for the job I'd applied for but for one in a tapas bar they were opening nearby, was absolutely inexcusable. More so as they postponed my interview 24 hours while I was in transit, insisted on a trial shift which continued until all the banks had closed for the weekend and then refused to loan me €50 for petrol to get home after I was caught out with no plastic. I won't name them, but shame on one of the Basque Country's leading Michelin-starred restaurants.

All I want to do is get back in charge of my own section, with my own team of chefs, and turn out the best food I can possibly produce. If anyone can help me do that, I'd love to hear.

Monks To The Left Of Me, Jockeys To The Right, Here I Am... (For Lunch)

2010-01-12T15:09:00.010+01:00

If someone was to suggest lunch in a cramped, white stone medieval blacksmith's workshop wedged in-between a massive Augustinian priory and one of the country's tiniest racecourses, you'd probably show a degree of reticence, especially if it involved a long drive in icy conditions. If they were to tell you to expect one of your best ever British dining experiences as reward for the expedition, you'd probably think they were utterly bonkers. But my dad wasn't daft. The food was truly exceptional.

It was the Sunday after Christmas Day and time for a delayed Christmas present - a planned two-hour drive to what dad assured me was North-West England's finest restaurant, L'Enclume in Cumbria. We headed out in snowy conditions, uncertain whether we'd arrive on time or even arrive at all. But, amazingly, just 90 minutes after we set off from Skipton we found ourselves in the tiny village of Cartmel and managed to negotiate the car across the local racetrack and safely into the icy car park.

As we ambled past the door of our lunch destination, the Maître d' and his staff were attentive with anticipation and, given the road conditions, seemed pleased to have the safe arrival of his booked customers pre-announced. That left us with 20 minutes with which to explore the local priory church round the corner. Which, as you can see from the photo, came literally as a massive surprise. Cartmel Priory was founded in about 1189 by William Marshall, Baron of Cartmel and Earl of Pembroke and was populated by Augustinian monks until dissolution in 1536. Although the priory was destroyed, the church was saved because it had earlier been shared with the local parish and given its own altar and priest.

The nearest sizeable town is Grange-over-Sands, which fronts onto the mud flats of Morecambe Bay, brought to public attention in 2004 with the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster in which 21 Chinese migrant workers were drowned or died of hypothermia after their work gang leaders misjudged the incoming tides. Tragedy apart, the area offers some of England's best seafood, along with hill farms that provide some of the best quality livestock in the UK. If ever there was a perfect location for surf and turf dining, this is it, as the founders of the Priory were well aware. Farming and fishing were the mainstays of life for the local population in the Middle Ages, supported by the monks of Cartmel Priory.

And that brings me full circle back to L'Enclume. Those with knowledge of French will be able to translate this as "The Anvil". The building in which the restaurant is located was once the Priory smithy, where iron hinges, horseshoes and farming implements were forged for the monastery. Today they forge superb fine dining experiences, using the very best produce that the local area can provide. Our visit being for lunch, we took the shorter of the tasting menus. Next time we'll take the longest one.

With such limited space it wasn't easy for front of house to accommodate the anticipated relaxation between door and table, but somehow they managed to find a small cosy seating area where we could settle ourselves with an aperitif, select our menu and confirm our special dietary requirements. Taking seats at our table, service began with snacks of goose fat and peanut lollipops, spiced popcorn and flavoured crackers. A pleasant start, but nothing exceptional and no real indication of the pleasures to come.

But our collective experience told us we were in for something very special even as the second snacks were being served. An absolutely perfect mouthful of crab mousse and crabmeat on a corn cracker, accompanied by a cucumber cocktail in a Martini glass, topped with a ginger beer and lemongrass head delicately dispensed at the table from a soda siphon. A superb, challenging combination of a very traditional, conservative flavour and texture with a modern, young flavour and texture. Stunningly good.

In fine dining, good freshly-made bread is taken as as a given - but it's amazing how many restaurants fail this basic task. Not so L'Enclume. The selection of warm rolls baked with white flour, wholemeal flour and a traditional English spelt & barley mix, served in an attractive wooden box and accompanied by a seeded, nutty gluten-free bread for my coeliac dad (which he described as tasting something like a toasted brioche) was absolutely perfect, as was the butter served with it.

The first of our eight-course dishes, Creamed foie, radish and smoked eel, brought smiles as it arrived at the table. My immediate thought as a professional was of the gap between the delight of its artistic creator, the discomfort of the chef tasked with getting it safely to the pass and the misery of those faced with doing the washing up afterwards.

The purses - at first glance white leather - turned out to be ceramic vessels, perched precariously on ridged tiles. Inside, a foie and smoked eel mousse with a foie gel topping and pieces of raw radish adding texture and colour through the dish. The pleasure was in drawing up the base through the topping, with the contrasts hitting your palate unexpectedly. In that respect it reminded me of the signature dishes of two great Catalan chefs - Carles Abellan's potato, egg yolk and truffle kinder egg and Jordi Artal's maple syrup, cream and cava sabayon. A delicious start to the menu.

One of only two dishes unsuitable for my pescatarian mother, the foie and eel purses were replaced for her by a dish of Baby beets and fennel snow. Local baby beetroot, cooked (as far as I could judge) in beetroot juice and served with a fennel granita and garnished with fennel leaf. Here was a dish very much of the modern produce-led era, drawing the purest balanced flavours from the simplest of ingredients, valued in the kitchen every bit as highly as the foie gras that they replaced. Simple perfection. My mum absolutely loved it.

To Cumbrians, the name Humphrey denotes healing. Humphrey's aquifer is a hawthorn-enclosed stone structure set in a cleft in the cliff of Humphrey Head, from which saline water spurts and feeds the holy well of Cartmel Priory, renowned for centuries for its healing powers. The water is now bottled locally as Willow Water and is known to contain the natural analgesic salicin - a close relative of aspirin - produced by rainwater washing through ancient strata of white willow bark.

So it was a reasonable guess that our second dish, Humphrey's pool, was L'Enclume's tribute to the local healing waters of Grange-over-Sands. The dish was a lightly salted seafood broth, made with shellfish juices and containing mussels, razor clam and cockles, with locally-collected seaweed providing colour as well as additional links to the coastline. We agreed that it was a delicate and pleasing dish, although none of us thought it outstanding. The otherwise good execution of the dish was spoiled for me by the beards left on two of the mussels.

The third course of our tasting menu was billed as Salad of Artichokes and fresh goat's cheese, though there was no need to highlight the third word to deliver the wit of the dish.

Globe, Chinese and Jerusalem artichokes worked brilliantly together despite the fact, of course, that only the former is a true artichoke - the second being a tuber of the mint family and the latter a tuber of the sunflower family. They were presented with a cheese wafer, goat's cheese cream, baby chard leaf, malted soil (gluten-free ash for dad) and drops of tarragon oil. This dish combined the most delightful flavours, textures and colours - held cleanly apart but working harmoniously together. It was simply perfection on a plate.

Our fourth dish surprised me. I can't ever remember being served chopped scallops in a fine dining restaurant before, but this was billed as Sea scallop meat and pearls and comprised scallop pieces with scallop and mustard cream, watercress purée, samphire, dulse seaweed and chervil. Dad declared that the scallop meat would inevitably be overcooked during searing, but he hadn't realised that they were cooked whole and cut afterwards. They were absolutely perfect. This was yet another beautifully balanced plate with a superb choice of flavours and textures.

Douglas fir - native to North America and introduced to Britain in the C19th - is not something you often see on a dinner plate, though our next dish made good use of it. Actually, this evergreen pine has multiple uses. The young shoot tips offer a subtle woodsy flavour in cooking, whereas a refreshing tea is made from young leaves and twigs. The fresh leaves have a pleasant balsamic odour and are used as a coffee substitute, while the inner bark has been dried, ground into a meal and mixed with cereals for making bread in times of famine. The tree was employed medicinally by various indigenous North American tribes who used it to treat a whole host of conditions from cuts to coughs and venereal diseases to athlete's foot.

Skate 'belly', cauliflower, buttered stems and Douglas fir used the pinnate leaves in a flavoursome air to dress a dish of skate. Being a flatfish, skate cuts into upper and lower fillets - the lower being the thinner and more delicate. This was perfectly pan-fried and served with cauliflower purée, wild mushrooms, parsley stems and the air of Douglas fir leaf. As with so much of this meal, we were all in agreement on this plate. There was nothing wildly original apart from the foam, but it was as well executed as anything we'd eaten anywhere. We all really enjoyed this dish.

I remember watching a Ray Mears Wild Food programme extolling the virtues of sea buckthorn, a salt-tolerant coastal shrub which bears vibrant orange berries in the autumn. In the sixth and final savoury dish of our tasting menu, Goosnargh duck breast, wild greens, parsnip and sea buckthorn, the plant was put to good effect in generating a golden emulsion to accompany sous-vide cooked duck from across Morecambe Bay, crispy gizzards, foraged greens and roast parsnip chips.

The dish was well presented with a great balance of colours. Unfortunately the meat, although still pink as a result of being cooked at the right temperature, had been cooked for too long and passed its optimal point of tenderness. A very attractive dish, sadly not executed correctly on this particular day.

It's a long time since I ate in a restaurant where they brought a cheese trolley to the table. Very retro and very French, but the selection of fromages on L'Enclume's Chariot of cheese was very modern and we devoured every last morsel. Our selection from the amply-stocked chariot included a Livarot, a Bleu D'Auvergne, two goats' cheeses, a Brie and a local ewes' milk cheese. They were served with crackers and wafers - tapioca cracker, poppyseed wafer, walnut crisp and fennel biscuit, along with toasted gluten free bread for our coeliac diner and a caramelised red onion relish.

Our cheese chariot break over, it was time to attack the menu's pre-dessert of Ice cream made from Cumbrian stout, pistachio, blackberry. This dish comprised ice cream flavoured with Cumbrian oatmeal stout from a local micro-brewery, pistachio sponge and a blackberry granita. The dish cleverly balanced sweet, bitter, tart and nutty flavours without being oversweet. We all agreed it was a clever pre-dessert that served well as a palate cleanser and introduction to the main dessert.

It seemed that we'd not long sat down, though by the time our final dish arrived at the table with the customary perfect timing we'd been feasting for well over two hours. Time was simply drifting by in a haze of hedonistic pleasure. Caramelised quince, Ribston pippin sorbet, rosehip and cobnut crisp was yet another dish drawing on the very best of local produce, totally seasonal and beautifully thought out.

It was a dish that had everything. Contrasting temperatures with the warm quince and membrillo and the cold apple sorbet; complementing textures with the softness of the rosehip jelly, the crispness of the cobnut and the crunch of walnut powder and a colour spectrum from the deep ruby of the quince to the delicate green of the aniseed leaf. Drawing on local, autumnal produce with the rosehips, hazelnuts and heirloom variety of apple. It was a superb conclusion to our meal.

Well, not quite the conclusion, of course. We were still to be treated to petit fours and coffee. The waiter arrived with stylish wooden platters bearing malt macaroons with a malt cream filling, mint cake & dark chocolate lollipop and red grape & raisin Turkish delight. However eclectic these may have sounded they were - as with so many of L'Enclume's dishes - deeply rooted in local produce. Not least of this was the mint cake for which the nearby Cumbrian town of Kendal is world-renowned.

Dad couldn't resist taking a close-up shot of the chocolate lollipop half-eaten, with that delicious local mint cake filling on the verge of dripping from the centre. Our sweets were accompanied by as much coffee as we could comfortably consume. I didn't enquire as to details of its source, but I can be certain that it wasn't locally grown. It was an excellent choice of fine coffee bean, selected and ground by people who really care about their work. Our petit fours and coffee made the ideal end to a near-perfect meal.

This was food at a level indisputably above the 1* ranking of the restaurant - many of the dishes held their own against those of the best 2* restaurants at which I've eaten in Britain and Spain. Simon Rogan's menu showed consistent and clever use of traditional local products, especially local wild herbs, flowers and fungi and ingredients foraged on both sides of the water-line along the local coast. The hallmarks of a chef known to admire Marc Veyrat , Homaro Cantu and Grant Achatz are unmissable, despite his more conventional tutelage by The Great White. There were many hints of modern French cuisine but with a strong English theme throughout, very good execution of dishes with clear, delicate, well-balanced flavours and good textures and a great eye for colour and form. All within a relaxed and informal service environment very much to my personal taste, but probably with too many violations of Michelin's strict codes for their inspectors to overlook when considering a second star.

I could find a few criticisms here and there, but no more than I found at Mugaritz or Quique Dacosta. This was a splendid fine dining experience from a team clearly able to maintain the highest standards despite the boss being on his day off when we visited. It was a meal that will long be remembered.

Photo of Cartmel Priory Church courtesy of Roger Savage, Flying Pictures, Penrith. Other photos by my dad.

Ximo Canet - The Art Of Food

2010-01-05T22:20:00.001+01:00

When the words "food" and "art" are juxtaposed, most people with an interest in gastronomy are likely to think of Pierre Gagnaire - the iconoclastic chef universally acknowledged to have reinvented French cuisine by creating challenging plates of food through the artistic juxtaposition of contrasting flavours, textures, aromas and, most importantly, the visual appearances of individual components. Turn the concept of arty food on its head... and you have the amazing Ximo Canet, who creates foodie art.

I met Ximo recently, quite by chance. For the final meal of my family visit to my home village of Banyeres de Mariola, we made the short trip down the road to the excellent La Alquería del Pilar. It was my chance to say goodbye to Angeles, who had become a close friend when working in front of house at Restaurante Ferrero and is now employed as the Maîtresse d' at this elegant and multi-awarded casa rural (country house with rooms) with its own blog. Ximo was there - like so many artists engaging in his second, "mortgage-paying" occupation - in his case, as the chef. Keen to support a fellow cuisinier, I eagerly purchased a copy of the guidebook to Ximo's latest exhibition at Alcoy's Ovidi Montllor Centre. The exhibition "Safrà, Canyella... Diàlegs Íntims amb les Espècies: Paisatges Onírics" - translates as "Saffron, Cinnamon... Intimate Dialogues with the Spices: Dream Landscapes" - and the catalogue contents blew me away. If you haven't got the food link yet, the exhibition title should be a good clue to the reason for this post.

Born in 1967 a few kilometres south across the Sierra mountains from Banyeres de Mariola, Ximo developed a passion for painting at an early age and mounted his first exhibitions in his home town of Alcoy, in Benidorm and the Catalan capital Barcelona when he was exactly the age I am now. Since then he has remained fiercely loyal to the province of Alicante, working and exhibiting regularly in the towns of Alcoy, Xàbia, Cocentaina, Elda, Altea, Banyeres and Benilloba with occasional ventures further afield to València, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca and Girona.

Ximo turns his back on artificially coloured paints wherever possible and engages with his subjects - largely, but not entirely, landscapes - by using a combination of plain acrylics and natural materials. His browns, oranges, reds, blues, greens, blacks and yellows are derived from local herbs and spices, as well as vegetables, blood, milk, coffee, rock dust, earth, grass and anything else that can provide the colours, aromas and textures to complement his visual impressions. Here are just a few recent works:

A month ago I ate at Quique Dacosta's restaurant, just a few kilometres from the epicentre of Ximo's artistic world. The final dessert dish, "Stones", represented the dry crunchiness of a Valencian road on a summer's afternoon - a chocolate mousse path sprinkled with dusty chocolate crumbs, panettone and mint stones, grass-like strands of kataïfi pastry and dancing crystallised herbs and flowers. Had it been presented on a wall instead of a plate, it could have been a work by Ximo Canet. Both artists bring to their work a profound and exceptional awareness of the multi-sensory offerings of their beloved native land of La Comunitat Valenciana and translate this into their work. I'm honoured to have met them both.

And So That Was Christmas...

2009-12-31T18:24:00.005+01:00

Another Christmas is over. I've been oop North to 't' grim frozen wastes and despite the best attempts of the local highways department to convince me otherwise, I've managed to get back down to the Smoke. Happy to have survived the snow in Yorkshire, I hadn't realised that there's also been snow chaos back in Spain until I saw the photo on my Christmas e-card from Hotel Ferrero and read the news.

Despite everything with legs (apart from us) being banned from the Christmas table this year, we enjoyed a right royal feast. We began with a glass or two of Gran Campo Viejo Reserva from Rioja, chosen as a tribute to my adopted country. To start our meal, I made Scallops on bok choi leaves with a warm Thai vinaigrette, while dad put together the main course of fresh herb stuffed sea bass, Maris Pipers roasted in goose fat and a selection of roast Yorkshire root vegetables including some delicious seasonal parsnips. It being a Christmas table we couldn't go without the mandatory little round green brassicae, so I made truffle-creamed sprouts that went down rather well if I say so myself. And just to prove that the best of wining and dining isn't entirely Spanish, we enjoyed a superb Maison Louis Jadot Mersault from the Côte de Beaune. Our meal was rounded off with dad's infamous and seriously alcoholic gluten-free Christmas pudding and cream.

It all goes to show that, much as I enjoy meat, it's perfectly possible to create a superb feast with little or no trace of four-legged friends. A truth that we experienced at Quique Dacosta a few weeks ago and one that was to be reinforced on Christmas Sunday when we sat down to one of Simon Rogan's tasting menus at L'Enclume in Cartmel (more on this to follow soon).

Although we worked our way through many of the other vegetarian, fish and seafood dishes planned for the week - the moules marinière, fish pie, king prawn curry with dhal and kedgeree were all eagerly devoured - somehow we never found the time to manage the broccoli & Stilton soup, the butternut squash risotto or the American breakfast pear pancakes. Still, we managed to consume large quantities of chocolates and nobody went hungry. The photo on the right, by the way, shows my response to dad asking me to "make something with an interesting texture using leftover sprouts and carrots". Well, there comes a time when you've done enough cooking.

To all my readers - have a very Happy New Year or un feliz año nuevo!

Postscript: A little note to the vicar of Holy Trinity Church Cowling. No, you weren't imagining it on Christmas Eve. Your small, dedicated Anglican congregation was indeed augmented by a party of Agnostics, Catholics and Jews taking the opportunity to enjoy a brief period of contemplation and spirituality before the gregariousness and over-indulgence began. So get that letter off to The Church Times.

Happy Christmas Everyone

2009-12-23T18:43:00.002+01:00

May I wish everyone the very best at this seasonal time of year. Belated greetings on the celebration of Hanukkah, Bodhi Day, Al-Hijira, Yule and Litha. Have a happy Christmas, Makar Sankrant, Oshogatsu, Zarathosht Diso and Ashura. Whatever is your thing and whoever is your God, if you believe in one, may peace and happiness be with you over the winter holidays. Salaam and shalom to you all.

Yesterday morning I received an email from my dad, with two photos attached. The first picture shows a toy Santa, sat up high on the brightly decorated Christmas tree with a sack of presents alongside, waiting for the real Santa to pay a visit on Christmas Eve. This year my brother Joel is spending Christmas here in London with his mum-in-law Jacqui, while mum and I are spending the holiday week up in North Yorkshire with dad. As per last year, it will be the best of local food. This year the livestock get a break and surf takes over from turf, as we indulge ourselves on king scallops, king prawns, crab, mussels, smoked haddock, smoked salmon and baked stuffed sea bass, along with roasted Maris Pipers and a selection of Yorkshire's finest root vegetables, brassica and herbs.

There was just one potential problem with our plans, illustrated by the second photo which shows dad's driveway, pictured from an upstairs window on Monday night. The local road is under about a foot of snow and the hill up from the village has been impassable to all but four-wheel drive vehicles. But never mind. Dad has parked his car on the main road up in the village, so we can get out to do the last-minute shopping. And neighbours have offered him the services of their Freelander to ferry us from the village if needed.

And that's what it's all about, really. Fighting its way through the materialism and self-indulgence, Christmas and New Year is all about community, friendship and people helping and supporting eachother. So together we can all celebrate the ending of one decade and the coming of a new one.

As it happens, we didn't need the rescue service and we arrived safely a couple of hours ago. The food is in the fridge and the freezer, a bottle of Cava has been opened and we're ready for the festive season regardless of what the weather brings. I hope you are too. Wishing you all the very best. Aidan.

Westminster Kingsway Quality

2009-12-20T10:09:00.001+01:00

I've never been into competitive cooking. Not because I'm particuarly nervous in a competitive situation or in public - I used to be very successful at youth football and I've worked on stage in public alongside Gordon Ramsay, Jean-Christophe Novelli and Raymond Blanc. It's simply that some people are turned on by cooking contests, while others including me are not. Selin Kiazim is certainly someone who gets a big buzz from culinary competition. The 23-year-old chef was a year below me at Westminster Kingsway College, from where she graduated in 2008 with a Professional Chef Diploma with Distinction.

While still a student at WestKing, Selin won two cooking gold medals at Hotelympia, Britain's biggest professional hospitality event, and went on to reach the final of Taste of Mexico, before winning the winning the NZ-UK Link Foundation Culinary Competition. The prize was a five-week working trip to New Zealand where, after work experience at Peter Gordon's Dine in Auckland, Selin secured a job back in London at his flagship restaurant, The Providores and Tapa Room. My opinion of this Marylebone eaterie is well known to regular readers - I spent two of the most formative weeks of my culinary development working there alongside Peter Gordon, a truly brilliant chef for whom I have the utmost respect. Last autumn Selin was voted top achiever at the 2008 Graduate Awards presentation lunch at the Royal Garden Hotel, a month before setting off for the Culinary Olympics in Erfurt Germany as a member of the multi-medal winning British junior team.

The other week Selin was in front of the cameras once again, this time reaching the semifinals of BBC Young Chef of the Year. No disgrace coming third behind chefs with years of experience at two of the country's most talked-about restaurants - Fergus Henderson's St. John which I hugely enjoyed back in 2007 and Simon Rogan's L'Enclume, where I have a family reservation for post-Christmas lunch next Sunday. With such drive and passion, Selin is bound to make a great career for herself. I can only wish her the very best and congratulate WestKing on yet another quality graduate.

A Pastry Chef Comes To Hotel Ferrero

2009-12-13T10:30:00.005+01:00

I wasn't able to show my readers much of our food while I was working at Ferrero, but now for the first time I can give you an insight. Scottish ex-pat Brian Campbell is Pastry Chef at Kermadec, a stunning, award-winning restaurant overlooking Auckland's Viaduct Harbour in New Zealand. He recently decided to take a month out to visit Spain - but it wasn't to laze about on beaches. I know this because Brian is a blogger who made contact just before visiting and has subsequently written about his experiences.

In my Restaurants section, I quote Ferran Adrià: "The best chefs I know are the ones who most enjoy eating" and explain how he inspired me to improve my knowledge and standards not only by cooking in many kitchens but also by eating in many dining rooms. This October Brian Campbell put me to shame. In three weeks he ate at El Celler de Can Roca, El Poblet, Martín Berasategui, Arzak, Mugaritz, Sergi Arola Gastro, L'Angle, Ferrero and several great tapas and pintxos bars, shopped at two of Paco Torreblanca's pastry shops and experienced the fresh food delights of La Boqueria. And he wrote up most of his experiences, with loads of photos! Click on the links above for Brian's reports.

Chef Campbell has now published an excellent summary of his Spanish gastro-tour, which I encourage everyone to read. It's clear that Brian and I share a very similar opinion of food. He chose El Poblet (now Restaurante Quique Dacosta) as his best dining experience in Spain, closely followed by El Celler de Can Roca. I would cite the same two, albeit in reverse order, for my own best meals in Spain. Brian's choice for best individual dish was the squid dish from 3-star Restaurante Martin Berasategui. Although I have yet to eat there, I've worked in MB's Lasarte restaurant in Barcelona and wouldn't hesitate to cite a dish from one of his kitchens on the basis of the ability of his head chefs to deliver stunning natural flavours. Runner-up was Quique Dacosta's Foie Cubalibre dish, which I experienced as part of my birthday meal and thought was absolutely brilliant.

Brian's choice for best hotel of his trip came as no surprise to me: "Hands down this goes to Hotel Ferrero. The hotel has it all - a world class restaurant, a stylish and luxurious design, stunning bedrooms with everything you want, beautiful outdoor pool area and attentive staff. It has just recently been included in the Relais & Châteaux guide, which is all about luxury. I loved every minute and felt so relaxed at this hotel." Of the food, he kindly commented: "The meal was standout, and I certainly don't understand Michelin any more - they are blind to the food coming out of that kitchen."

This slideshow of Brian's photos comprises some of the hotel, followed by the individual dishes of the restaurant's Menú Innovación. Click on slides for dish descriptions and Brian's comments.

Now safely back home, Brian recently posted Exploding Strawberry Milkshake. Why do I mention this rather odd-sounding dish? Let Brian explain: "So here we have another dish recently gone on our menu, influenced by my trip to Michelin 3* Restaurant Arzak in San Sebastian. I serve a milkshake poured tableside, which then starts to bubble up and sauces the rest of the plate which actually makes up the main part of the dish... A jelly veil is made from an intense jus extracted from strawberries. This is draped over cheesecake mousse and then we garnish up and around the jelly with strawberries, raspberries, black and blue berries, a blackcurrant meringue, strawberry and blackcurrant fruit tuiles, pineapple sage flowers, coriander flower and corn flowers. Also compressed watermelon adds... extra freshness to the dish. A small amount of black olive and muscavado powder adds a little savoury touch. The dish is finished off with a lavender ice cream and... the strawberry milkshake is poured by the waiter." Click on this link for a clip of his innovative milkshake in effervescent action.

And that sums it all up. Even a non-professional can see clearly in this write-up a whole plateful of influences from Brian's trip to Spain. And that is what creativity is all about. It's so important to eat at other chefs' restaurants, but we don't do it in order to steal their ideas. We eat at other chefs' restaurants in order to fill us with the inspiration to be truly creative and original ourselves.

TGRWT #20 - Chicken And Pumpkin

2009-12-07T13:45:00.006+01:00

Launched in April 2007 by Norwegian organometallic chemist and gastronomist Martin Lersch of blog.khymos.org, They Go Really Well Together (TGRWT) is all about unusual flavour pairings - combining culinary ingredients in ways that we aren't necessarily familiar with from classical cooking. The scientific hypothesis behind these experiments is that if two foods have one or more key odorants in common, they might go well together and perhaps even complement and enhance each other.

I was pleased to host TGRWT #18 and when I saw that the current event TGRWT #20 was being hosted by my friend and professional mentor John Sconzo, aka. Doc Sconz, I was quick to volunteer an entry. I couldn't do anything at first because I was busy moving myself from Valencia to Catalunya and getting ready for my Christmas trip back to Blighty. And it was while I was packing my things and considering options for a chicken and pumpkin dish that I came up with an even better idea. I'd get my staff to do it.

I've got a year's experience as a chef de partie under my belt now and in shortlisting potential employers for my next job I've focused on larger kitchens where I would get the opportunity to manage a team. So why not test my powers of delegation on TGRWT #20? After all, my dad thinks he knows something about food these days and, after eating with me at Quique Dacosta the other week, he should have learnt something about technique and presentation. More importantly, I've discussed the taste spectrum with him many times, so he should know where to start when designing a dish. So I briefed my father... and what follows is the result. All his own handiwork, including the photos.

The host of TGRWT #20 initially chose cooked chicken and lemongrass for the ingredients, before amending the challenge to fit the technical criteria by replacing lemongrass with pumpkin. So I decided to follow his initial line of thought and attempt a dish using all three of these ingredients. My offering is a slow-cooked chicken and pumpkin roulade on a bed of pilaf rice, with a sauce of coconut and lemongrass. Mostly Cambodian, in tribute to my son's love of Khmer cooking, with a bit of Thai and some French and Persian influences. The place to start, so Aidan explained to me, is analysing the principal flavours of the key ingredients. For pumpkin, the dominant flavour is sweet and for chicken the dominant basic flavours are umami and sweet. So my first thought is to cut through these with salt, sour and bitter flavours along with some astringency and pungency if possible. It was that line of reasoning, together with the lemongrass hint, that led me to the cuisines of Cambodia and Thailand.

The pumpkin choice now became obvious, although I had a lot of trouble finding one until last Friday, when Waitrose in Otley obliged. Kabocha is generally assumed to be indigenous to Japan (it's commonly called Japanese pumpkin), but it surprised me when I first discovered that its origins were in Cambodia, from where it was brought to Japan by Portuguese sailors in the 16th century. The Japanese name has roots in the words 'Kambuja' and 'Kampuchea' (the Khmer names for the ancient and modern states of Cambodia), while in Khmer it's called 'Lpoeu'. On the left is my trophy. She's not the most beautiful of vegetables (actually, if we're going to be correct, like all squashes, she's a fruit), but she's really delicious all the same.

My first task, the night before cooking, was to remove the breasts from a corn-fed free-range chicken (who said I had to make a peasant dish?) and marinate them in home-made kroeung paste. The use of kroeung lends this dish its distinctly Khmer character. I used finely chopped shallot, sliced lemongrass stalks, crushed kaffir lime leaves, some dried lime, a little chopped chilli, crushed and finely chopped garlic, a teaspoon each of galangal paste and powdered turmeric (rhizomes of the latter two are difficult to obtain in Britain and especially so in Yorkshire!).

The kroeung didn't entirely go to waste after use as a marinade because I used some of it in the next component of the dish, a soured variant of Somlor Machoo Ktiss, or lemongrass and coconut soup, inspired by this dish from Bay Area Cambodian food blogger Khatiya of Khatiya Korner that I found quite easily via a Google search. For my version I used coconut milk, the kroeung paste made for the marinade, some nam pla, shrimp paste and tamarind paste - cooking slowly for 30 mins before straining through muslin and reducing to a thick sauce. Wow, those flavours were intense!

Next I prepared my chicken roulades, starting by carefully trimming and slicing into each breast of marinated meat to create large, thin sheets. Having already cooked down my pumpkin pieces (setting a few aside for the final plating) and roughly blitzed the resulting purée together with sautéed spinach and finely chopped mushroom, I seasoned this mixture and spread it across the chicken breasts. They were then rolled in clingfilm and tied at each end to create stuffed meat sausages, which I cooked for half an hour in a water bath maintained at around 85°C.

While the chicken was slow cooking, I tossed some pre-soaked short grain rice in fat that I had set aside when trimming the chicken the previous day and subsequently rendered down. I used Thai kao niao (sticky rice) on the assumption that this would not be dissimilar to a Cambodian sticky rice, although with hindsight I would probably have substituted a less glutinous product for this part of the dish. After adding some chopped Thai basil leaves, I covered the rice in stock made from the chicken offcuts and bones and put the rice in the oven to cook.

Just before serving the rice, I unwrapped the chicken roulades and seared them in very hot chicken fat. Plating up, I made a mound of pilaf on which I placed slices of the stuffed chicken. I poured some of the reduced sour lemongrass and coconut soup into the bowl and finished off the dish with some pieces of reserved pumpkin lightly caramelised in chicken fat with a sprinkling of palm sugar. So here's the final dish - Kroeung Marinated Chicken Roulade with Pumpkin, Spinach and Mushroom on a bed of Chicken and Thai Basil Pilaf with Caramelized Pumpkin and a Reduced Sour Coconut and Lemongrass Sauce.

So, how was the pairing? I don't know if chicken and pumpkin is a traditional combination in other cuisines, but a quick search on Google turns up recipes for Thai, Moroccan, American, Italian and even British dishes. Anyhow, it's certainly a combination that works. It stood up well to competition from the intense flavours of coconut and lemongrass, shrimp and tamarind. My pilaf, combining sticky rice fried in rendered chicken fat with chicken stock, was simply too rich and sweet. If I repeated the dish, I'd also think more carefully about the colours. The combination of turmeric and tamarind turned an otherwise beautiful soup into a muddy brown liquor, so next time I'd make part of the kroeung without haldi and look for a clear tamarind extract or use another souring agent. I'd also make the dish more sour, because the sweetness still dominated. It took me ages to make this meal, but it was happily consumed within minutes. And it certainly convinced me that chicken and pumpkin go really well together. Mike.

OK, so I wouldn't advise dad to give up the day job (actually he's retired) - but for someone whose idea of fine dining used to be a pickled gherkin with his spare ribs and chips, that's not at all a bad effort.

Dinner In Dénia

2009-12-02T20:29:00.015+01:00

It's not every day you fork out £500 on dinner for three... and then happily surrender a further £100 for the accompanying book. But then dinner at Quique Dacosta (formerly El Poblet) is no every day meal.

It's no surprise that Quique Dacosta has eventually abandoned the name of the El Poblet district of Dénia, with its down-market shopping parade, and renamed his distinctly up-market restaurant eponymously. But it must have been a wrench for the largely self-taught Michelin 2* chef who began his culinary career locally as a 14-year-old dish-washer.

Quique's philosophy was shaped though years of experience in Costa Blanca restaurants, including the pizzería where he first took control of the stoves and understood the pride and attention to detail with which the Italians cook simple local produce. From that moment it was only a matter of discovering the Valencian culinary roots, becoming familiar with the abundance of local fresh produce (especially the amazing local seafood) and learning something of the new techniques being developed in Catalunya and the Basque Country... and a master chef was born.

The decor is a comfortable balance between rustic and modern minimalist, with partition screens and table positioning creating privacy without seclusion. The first thing that strikes you as you take your seat is the elegant tableware with its unmistakeable signs of expensive tastes and wallets to match. That famous phrase comes immediately to mind - "If you need to ask how much, you can't afford it."

Next to seize your attention is the introductory note. At Mugaritz the note poetically encourages you to abandon your worries and enjoy a few hours of stress-free relaxation. With Quique the welcome is more practical - explaining the importance of temperature to several dishes and the consequent need for consumption without delay. As you read it you realise that you have surrendered yourself into the arms of a chef who not only focuses on flavour, aroma and visual appearance, but also on texture and temperature techniques. It can only be a matter of time before the headphones arrive, à la Blumenthal.

No self-respecting meal in the Valencian Community would start without bread and olive oil. Here we are talking warm, freshly baked bread (including a gluten-free offering substituted effortlessly for my coeliac dad) with a choice of superb local extra-virgin oils presented with a selection of paired vinegars. Along with a mellow Gramona Imperial Gran Reserva 2005 Cava, with its subdued and beautifully integrated carbonation and light flavour of apple balanced by the most subtle toasted aromas, it signalled the perfect start to an evening of blissful gastronomic indulgence.

Utterly brilliant and something I would definitely do in my own place was the supply of individual menus for each customer, printed in their own language and tailored to their individual dietary choices. I've seen this done at the end of a meal, but doing it at the start of the meal and thus providing a written guide to each dish was truly inspired. Another nice gesture - this time aimed more at the affluent diner than at the eager gastronome - was the depositing of small cushions on the floor beneath mum's handbag and dad's camera. It's those little touches that earn you accolades.

Inspired by a love of Italy dating from Quique's youthful experience as a pizzeria chef, "White Truffle from Montgó" brought excitement and intrepidation in equal measure. The aroma was unmistakeable. But an Alba truffle this size must cost a fortune! Is it an extra, to be added to the bill? A second glance reveals the dish to be a crafty reconstruction - a parmesan mousse moulded into a rustic truffle shape, plunged into liquid nitrogen to freeze and then quickly dusted in a powder of five dried wild mushrooms to form an aromatic, crusty shell. If great dishes are meant to make you smile, this one brought tears of joy.

If the first dish brought memories of the woods at sunset, the second was redolent of the forest at sunrise. A green pea purée base soft under foot, with vegetables and shoots, mushrooms, herbs and flowers gently raising their heads into the early morning mist. After the earlier use of liquid nitrogen, "The Haze" was a perfect occasion for the deployment of solid carbon dioxide, or 'dry ice'. The concept behind this dish was flawless. The only problem was the difficulty of delivering flavours to match the aromas, temperatures, textures and appearance.

Anticipating "Foie-Gras Cubalibre", you might expect your rum & coke to be served with crushed ice & lemon in a glass alongside a piece of foie. But you'd be reckoning without Quique Dacosta's skills of deconstruction and reinvention. Here we have a base layer of light and incredibly smooth foie mousse beneath a gelatine layer of rum and Coca-Cola reduction. In the centre, compressed lemon granita providing a vibrant contrast in colour, flavour, temperature and texture. Where a sorbet would have been pleasant, the crunch of the ice crystals counterbalanced the smooth, creamy unctuousness of the foie cubalibre. The mustard leaves were a step too far. But a fabulous dish all the same and one that will long be remembered.

The alternative dish provided for my pescatarian mum was billed as "Weird Leaves", although a better translation of the original Spanish "Hojas Raras" would be "Unusual Leaves". On offer were pairings of sweetleaf and chameleon plant with olive oil & black olive, kalanchoe with jamón fat & tomato, nasturtium with truffle oil & anchovy, sempervivum with hazelnut oil & wasabi, begonia with smoky beetroot oil, echeveria with avocado oil & eucalyptus, majii with walnut oil & Moscatel and oysterleaf with codium seaweed, all presented over a tomato water gel. A panoply of sensory experiences to excite and challenge the palate, nose and eyes.

Next to arrive was "Iberian Oyster". Not the most attractive dish, with the initial appearance of a raw mollusc left long enough for its life juices to leech out and the corpse to suffer a severe fungal attack.

Luckily, however, the dish tasted far better than it looked. The flavours were fresh as a daisy. The oyster was presented raw, perched on top of a jamón gel, with a nitro-frozen "oyster air" made from baby squids blended with the oyster's natural juices to create a dark grey liquid base to which lecithin was added. The base was then frothed up and spoonfuls of the air dropped into liquid nitrogen to instantly freeze the bubbles into a solid structure. A pleasant and interesting dish, but not exactly ground-breaking.

"Dénia's Red Prawn" offered the best of local seafood, presented in a deceptively simple arrangement on a salt crust rock. Cooked à la plancha, then in sea water. According to the Maitre d', the red prawns brought in at the shores of Dénia are especially sweet because of the seaweeds on which they feast. The waters in which they swim are apparently so deep that the seaweeds on which they feed have yet to photosynthesise - resulting in a unique product with an extraordinary flavour.

For me this dish was the out-and-out winner of the evening, for sheer beauty in simplicity and incredible flavour. The only criticism I can make is that the prawns weren't deveined properly, which at this level of cooking isn't really excusable.

Dish 6, "Langoustine, from las Rotas" was one of the few disappointing plates of the evening. There are times when you feel like cracking thin langoustines with miniature nutcrackers and extracting the flesh milligram by milligram with a winkle-pin, but this wasn't such a time. The shellfish were split neatly down the middle longitudinally to form a symmetrical pair of halves, and was dressed with a sea water air, which to be honest wasn't very salty. Not a very impressive dish, I'm afraid.

Strangely named, "The Hen of the Golden Eggs", given that the heroine of Aesop's fable about prodigal poultry was a goose. Even more strange that such an unoriginal and outmoded dish, with its low temperature egg and excess of gold leaf, should be ascribed to invention as recently as 2005. But the dish worked well, both as a visual treat and an oral experience, with a perfect yolk spilling into the mouth orgasmically like a scene from Tampopo, to be washed down with a reduced stock made from its progenitor. Not the most challenging dish of the evening, but a satisfying one nonetheless.

During the discussion of dietary requirements, I'd asked for a rice dish to be included on the tasting menu. After all, Quique is a recognised expert on modern rice dishes. "Senia Rice with Black Truffle from Morella and Smoked Pigeon Liver" was one of those creations I view as a victory for Michelin expectations over good cooking. Far too much truffle (partly our own fault, as we accepted the offer of an additional grating of Alba), masking the flavours of both pigeon and rice. Cut umami with something acidic or pungent and the effect can be stupendous. Layer umami on umami and it's simply over-indulgent.

With "Monochrome of Coconut", the first of two desserts, came the shock of snowblindness. Surely we weren't expected to munch away at a pile of shredded coconut? With each spoonful the apprehensions dissipated and the smiles extended. Silky coconut ice cream covered with shavings of grated coconut gelatine, small pieces of raw virginal coconut flesh, a smear of smooth coconut purée and tiny dancing balls of coconut 'caviar'. Monochronicity suddenly made sense. Remove the visual stimulus and the sense of flavour and texture is enhanced. Simple, ingenious, flawless, delicious. Possibly the best dish of the evening on texture alone.

With Quique's 2009 dessert "Stones", the meal ended where it began - back on Valencian soil. Not now the dampness of the woods on a truffle-hunting autumn evening nor the chill of the forest on a misty spring morning, but the concept of dry crunchiness of a road on a summer's afternoon. Stepping onto a chocolate mousse path sprinkled with chocolate biscuit crumbs, with huge stones made of panettone coated with a special sugar preparation, plunged into liquid nitrogen to form a crust and then painted with mint. Tiptoeing through strands of kataïfi pastry and dancing crystallised herbs and flowers. Full of amazing textures and, like all truly great chocolate dishes, without excess sweetness. Sublime.

I must say something about the accompanying wines. When we ordered our menús degustaciónes, we followed the now established pattern of electing paired drinks (I say "drinks", because beers, sakés and other alcoholic beverages are finding themselves increasingly paired with dishes these days). So it was somewhat of a surprise when the sommelier suggested a bottle of Gran Veigadares 2005 to accompany several of the courses, with other specifically paired wines for just three of the dishes. And what a choice that turned out to be. Gran Veigadares is one of the high quality vinho verdes known as Galicia's Green Gold, from the Condado de Tea subregion of the Rías Baixas. Like many of the fine wines in the region, it is made from the local Albariño white grape by one of the many female winemakers for which Rías Baixas is famous. It paired the seafood exquisitely. A wine more suited to me you couldn't find. Cross the Minho into Portugal and it's not long before you reach my home from home, where cheaper vinho verde is consumed avidly. Wines provided for specific dishes were a light sweet Sidra de Hielo icewine, a full-on complex Bota de Manzanilla Pasada sherry and a local Fondillón 1980 demi-sec monastrell from Salvador Poveda in Monóvar, Alicante. For the first time ever in fine dining, I couldn't fault a single wine pairing. They were simply perfect.

Service was attentive - perhaps a little too much so at times. But we had, after all, arrived so early that kitchen team scarcely had time to turn on the ovens and we'd clearly disrupted the Maître d's smooth service plans for the night. It was good to see that the request for gluten-free bread was noted across front of house. Dad is fond of recounting experiences of announcing his coeliac status to one waiter while rejecting the offer of grissini, only for a second waiter (or worse still the same one) to recommend the ravioli. Slightly disappointing was that the clinking of our cava glasses accompanied by a distinctly audible birthday toast went unnoticed. Balloons and sparklers would be a tad vulgar for this sophisticated establishment, but a simple candle with the final dessert would have been nice.

With smoking now banned at restaurant tables in Spain, the new lounge area provided the perfect retreat for coffee, petit fours and liqueurs and for mum to exercise a habit she should have given up years ago. It was also the opportunity to meet Chef Dacosta and discuss our dining experience.

If you click on the photo left to enlarge it, you'll see a large white book hidden away beneath a book of Picasso paintings and a travel magazine. Arroces Contemporáneos (Modern Rice Dishes) is a seminal work on the cuisine for which Valencia is most famous. Nobody pushed the book at all, but when I asked if I could have a copy for my birthday and my folks agreed, the restaurant was quick to oblige. Within minutes the waiter reappeared, brandishing a brand new copy of the book for Quique to sign.

OK, so he misspelt my name. After the perfection of the meal, it was a mistake I could happily forgive.

Three Years, Three Michelin Stars

2009-11-26T22:35:00.008+01:00

2009 was my third consecutive year as a chef in the great country of Spain... and the third consecutive year I've been touched by Michelin.

On Sunday 9th September 2007 I announced my choice of restaurant in which to start my professional training in Catalunya. Seven weeks later, on Thursday 22nd November 2007, I was thrilled when that restaurant - Comerç 24 - won its first Michelin star. Thrilled for two reasons. Firstly because when the team of which you are a part wins one of the highest accolades that can be awarded to your profession you are inevitably delighted. Secondly because a few months earlier I'd sat in London researching hundreds of restaurants in Barcelona and, of all of them, I'd chosen Comerç 24 as the one most deserving of award. It gave me enormous confidence in my judgment when, having read the menus and looked at photographs of the food but never tasted it, my mental palate rang bells. "The three factors that drove me to apply to Comerç 24", I wrote on this blog, "were the food, the food and oh... the food."

Nine months later I read about a place in Barcelona being named amongst the six best eateries in Spain by El País and listed by Condé Nast Traveller as amongst the world's 80 best new restaurants. These comments could have been so much hot air, but I simply had to go and see for myself.

On Tuesday 19th August 2008 I wrote of Cinc Sentits: "If you chose to go down the route of simplicity, you have to justify that by using the best ingredients and preparing them with perfect execution. Cinc Sentits does all that and a great deal more. I know where I want to work next..." Three months later I sat down with my father to enjoy another fabulous meal at Cinc Sentits. Imagine my unbridled delight when the following morning, Thursday 20th November, I discovered that Jordi, Amèlia, Roser and their staff had been awarded a highly-deserved first Michelin star. In my congratulatory post I explained that I'd been discussing a job at Cinc Sentits for some time. I'd wanted to work there ever since my first experience of the food and I'd come very close to joining Jordi's kitchen team. I can't claim to have contributed in any way to the accolade, but I'm so pleased with my gastronomic judgment.

So that brings me to 2009. In recent years the Michelin awards for Spain & Portugal have been embargoed for publication on the third Thursday of November. But this year the announcement was put back a week to yesterday, when it was made in Madrid's San Miguel market at a Michelin gala celebration of the centenary of the guide publication in Spain. And today the news is out across the web.

How I would love to be telling you that Restaurante Ferrero had just won its first star. But, alas, it was not to be. Based on my experience of eating in Michelin-starred restaurants and working with experienced chefs from around the world, I'm convinced that our kitchen team at Ferrero have been producing food not just at 1* level but at a 2* level of precision and consistency of execution. But I suppose there are many other considerations to be taken into account. And at the end of the day it's not my opinion that counts, but that of the Michelin inspectors and their masters. Sadly, they've decided not to recognise Paco Morales and Restaurante Ferrero with an honour this year.

Like everyone who worked at Ferrero since it reopened in April, I'm bitterly disappointed. I'd already given notice to finish my contract last week, hoping very much that my departure would be shortly followed by the news that every member of our kitchen team had been hoping for. As they strive for recognition in the coming year, I shan't be part of that team. But I'll bet my worldly fortune that my friends at Ferrero will achieve their first star in a year or two. The food is simply too good to ignore.

So if Head Chef Paco Morales didn't win an accolade from The Fat Man this week, how come I've entitled this post "Three Years, Three Michelin Stars"? Well, Restaurante Ferrero isn't the only place I worked during the 2009 Michelin season. From January to March this year I spent an excellent period on stage at Martín Berasategui's Lasarte at Hotel Condes de Barcelona. And today I'm over the moon to share the news that Head Chef Antonio Sáez and his kitchen team have been rewarded with their second Michelin star. Once again I can't claim much of a contribution, but it fills me with pride to have been just a tiny part of that success.

One final ironic note. I reported last Sunday that I was considering restaurants in Galicia and Madrid for my next step. Today one of those restaurants was also honoured by Michelin. I must just be star-struck! And one note of slight embarrassment. This evening I must also add my congratulations to the team at Restaurante Julio in the tiny settlement of Fontanar dels Alforins, less than 15km from my former home in Banyeres de Mariola. Well done on your first star. I'm sorry I never got round to experiencing your food, but I'll definitely make a point of visiting next time I'm back to see my old friends.

This year's awards for Spain are as follows...

2* to 3*:	El Celler de Can Roca (Girona, Catalunya: Joan Roca)
1* to 2*:	Casa Marcial (Arriondas, Asturias: Nacho Manzano); Lasarte at Hotel Condes de Barcelona (Barcelona, Catalunya: Antonio Sáez); La Terraza del Casino at Casino de Madrid (Madrid: Paco Roncero); Les Cols (Olot, Catalunya: Fina Puigdevall)
New 1*:	Asador Etxebarri (Axpe-Marzana, Euskadi: Victor Arguinzoniz); Enoteca at Hotel Arts Barcelona (Barcelona, Catalunya: Paco Perez), A Estación (Cambre, Galicia: Beatriz Sotelo), M.B. at Abama Golf & Spa Resort (Guía de Isora, Tenerife, Islas Canarias: Paolo Casagrande), Bo.Tic (Corça, Catalunya: Albert Sastregener), Casa Julio (Fontanar dels Alforins, València: José Luis Ungidos), La Fonda Xesc (Gombrèn, Catalunya: Francesc Rovira), Cocinandos (León, Castile and León: Yolanda León García & Juanjo Pérez Robredo), As Garzas (Malpica, Galicia: Caco Agrasar), La Cabaña de la Finca Buenavista (El Palmar, Murcia: Pablo González-Conejero), Alejandro (Roquetas del Mar, Andalucía: Alejandro Sánchez), El Torreó de L'India at Hotel Villa Retiroin (Xerta, Catalunya: Francesc López), La Broche (Madrid: Ángel Palacios), DiverXO (Madrid: David Muñoz), Kabuki Wellington at Hotel Wellington (Madrid: Ricardo Sanz) and Ramón Freixa Madrid (Madrid: Ramón Freixa).
2* to 1*:	Tristán, (Portals Nous, Mallorca, Balearics)
Lost 1*:	Kursaal (Donostia-San Sebastián, Euskadi); Gallery Art & Food (Gijón, Asturias); Lillas Pastia (Huesca, Aragon); El Chaflán (Madrid); Solar de Puebla (Santa Cruz de Bezana, Cantabria), Read's Hotel (Santa María del Camí, Mallorca, Balearics), La Taberna de Rotilio (Sanxenxo, Galicia); Alejandro del Toro (València).

Postscript: Along with so many other chefs and gourmets, I'm absolutely delighted to see the Roca brothers win their third star. One year ago next week, just after they failed to achieve this ultimate accolade, I was privileged to eat with them. It was (and remains to this day) the most sublime dining experience of my life. I said at that time that they would surely receive the recognition they so deserve this year and today, along with many others worldwide, I'm so pleased to be proved right.

Moving On

2009-11-22T18:09:00.006+01:00

I first encountered these imposing gates on Friday 17th April 2009. At 9.30pm I took my seat in the Restaurante Ferrero and began a three-hour Menú Innovación feast. The following morning I returned to the hotel with my knife roll under my arm and began the two-day trial stage that led to my subsequent appointment as Pastry Chef in this amazing kitchen. Now, seven months later, it's time to move on.

I can't overstate just how much I learnt during my period under the tutelage of Francisco 'Paco' Morales. The steadfast respect for ingredients and unwavering focus on precision of execution that I experienced at Ferrero will stand me in great stead when I come to work in a 2- or 3-star kitchen. And my experience in pastry - especially in understanding the importance of perfect textures - will be invaluable one day when I take on a senior role requiring me to manage and develop my own team. A few days ago, Hotel Ferrero was honoured with membership of Relais & Châteaux. I hope the restaurant will shortly be honoured by The Fat Man and make the timing of my leaving perfect. The team certainly deserves it.

But Hotel Ferrero isn't all that I'll miss in the coming months. The local towns of Bocairent, Ontinyent, Villena and Alcoy all offer their own individual attractions, but the settlement of Banyeres de Mariola, infamous for not having a single street of level gradient, has become a much-loved home. I'll really miss the place. I'll miss my flatmates, co-workers and drinking companions past and present - Alén, Moreno, Rafael, Luís, Eduard, Jon, Leonel, Josue, Manel, Mariona, Carmina and Angeles. Some of you I'll meet again professionally one day, I'm sure. As for everyone else - Facebook will keep us in touch.

I'm currently engaged in the job application process for my next move so I can't reveal anything yet, but restaurants in Madrid and Galicia are strong contenders. Meanwhile I'm heading back to Barcelona to visit friends in a week or so and then planning a break in the UK before I start the next job.

It's a bit early to be writing about my Christmas presents, but this year Santa Claus is coming early to relieve me of a persistent pain. Ever since I've been in Spain I've had intermittent problems with internet access, PC functioning and phone network access. This new mobile should help me to address all of these problems. With built-in WIFI, it means I'll be able to send messages, check emails and post to my blog while on the move. About time this modern lad got some modern technology!

Regular readers will know that, for contractual reasons, I've not been able to write much about my work recently. And with little spare time and IT problems, it's not been the best of times for my blogging.

Now that I'm between contracts that should change and hopefully I won't be subject to such tough publishing restrictions in my next job. So I expect to be able to post more frequently and with more relevance. Something I'll definitely post soon is the write-up of a very special dinner. I managed to get time off recently to celebrate my mum's birthday and my own birthday two days later with an extraordinary and extravagant feast. I've photoshopped out the chef's name from his jacket. See if you can recognise him and identify the establishment. I'll give you a clue - the restaurant changed name a few days before we ate there.

Relais & Châteaux

2009-11-20T19:45:00.004+01:00

Anyone who spends any time researching hotels and restaurants will be familiar with Relais & Châteaux.

Established in France in 1954, Relais & Châteaux is a global association of outstanding establishments with a truly unique character. It is a family of independent hoteliers and top chefs from all over the world who share a passion for and commitment to the very highest levels of customer experience. In other words, Relais & Châteaux is a club for the very best of the best when it comes to hotels and restaurants. The group is known for its extremely strict admission standards. In addition to luxurious facilities, members must have special features that distinguish them from chain hotels. Most are historic landmarks such as castles, manor houses, or townhouses in idyllic settings and offering exquisite cuisine. Prospective and current members are evaluated by the group's traditional "Five C" motto: Character, Courtesy, Calm, Charm and Cuisine.

Very few make it into the exclusive group of Relais & Châteaux. In 2009 there were just 475 members in 55 countries. In the UK they included The Fat Duck, The Waterside Inn, Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons, Gidleigh Park and Inverlochy Castle. Here in Spain, Akelaŕe, Arzak, Martín Berasategui, Can Fabes and Sant Pau are amongst the members shown on the map below. This week two new Spanish members were introduced to this exclusive club for 2010. One was the Hotel Palacio de Luces in Asturias. The other was a small, recently refurbished boutique establishment in the south-east of Spain. Click on the map to discover which hotel restaurant that was.

Yes, the second new Spanish member of Relais & Châteaux is Hotel Ferrero, home of the fine dining Restaurante Ferrero by Paco Morales and Rut Cotroneo.

Equally pleasing from my standpoint was that the one establishment in Portugal to be granted Relais & Châteaux status this week was Joachim Koerper's Restaurant Eleven in Lisbon. Back in summer 2007 I applied to Eleven for my first stage after leaving college. Chef Koerper asked me to come to his new restaurant in Catalunya instead - and that began an adventure that resulted two years later in my becoming a chef de partie at Restaurante Ferrero. Now both Eleven and Ferrero are members of this very exclusive club. I guess I truly have a nose for the finest things in life.

Getting Old!

2009-11-16T18:57:00.001+01:00

I can't believe a whole year has passed since I posted this. It's a sure sign of approaching old age that I've grown out of publishing photos of my birthday presents. My parents flew over on Saturday and we've been celebrating my anniversary with a visit to the Sierra de Mariola national park and a trip to the seaside in Gandia. With luck we'll be spending some time with friends in the Murcian seaport of Águilas. Oh yes. And we'll be enjoying a few very good meals...

Replacing Recipes With Ratios

2009-11-09T17:07:00.010+01:00

I've been very remiss with my book reading recently, but last weekend I found time to read Ratio - the latest work by Michael Ruhlman. And what an amazing experience that turned out to be. Regular readers will know that I've never been very keen on recipes. As we develop as professional chefs, we learn cooking techniques and the skills of execution and apply these (and our palates) to the task in hand, without much reference to the written word. We come to see recipes as being for amateurs.

Pastry, however, tends to be viewed as an exception. As anyone who's ever baked anything will attest, even the smallest error in ingredient quantities can lead to disaster. Cookbooks and dish specs provide us with complex recipes, detailing the ingredients down to the nearest gram and leaving the poor cook or chef to scale everything up or down according to crockery size.

Michael Ruhlman, in contrast, introduces us to the science of cooking with ratios. In so doing, he unchains us from the shackles of detailed recipes by explaining exactly how the basic elements of the patissier's trade - water, flour, butter, oil, milk, cream and eggs - actually work together when combined. "Change the ratio and bread dough becomes pasta dough, cakes become muffins become popovers become crepes", he explains with blinding simplicity.

The thought process advocated by Michael Ruhlman could and should be emancipating home cooks everywhere from the tiresome and boring exercise of recipe-following. Ruhlman explains that if you begin to understand the basic guidelines for following a ratio not a recipe, you're effectively opening up an infinite amount of new possibilities in your home kitchen. Think of it as algebra. Cake = butter + sugar creamed together + eggs added one by one + flour. Or... Cake = eggs + sugar foamed together + flour folded in gently + melted butter. Both of these methods use the same ingredients in the same quantities - but they produce different results. And what's the difference? The second method produces a lighter cake. Why? Because foaming the eggs and sugar together incorporates much more air into the preparation than creaming the butter and sugar together. In other words, understanding the basic scientific principles of what happens to ingredients depending on how we combine them, and in what order, can allow us to think for ourselves instead of being dictated to by a recipe.

This type of thinking really attracts me. Using one's own common sense first and foremost, then seeking guidance if necessary, is a liberating philosophy. One of the very first things I was taught at college was the ratio of basic vinaigrette - three parts oil to one part vinegar. Any other ingredients I chose to add were just an added bonus. I could take away the chopped chives and Dijon mustard and it would still be a vinaigrette. But if I remove the oil, it would certainly cease to be one. If I wanted to add lime juice for flavour, I'd probably reduce the amount of vinegar slightly, thereby breaking the 3:1 rule. Does that really matter? Of course not - it's called the simple application of common sense. Would I still have a vinaigrette at the end of the day? Of course.

Ruhlman goes on to explain the finer details of stock-making, thickening with rouxs, the art of the tricky but sublime mousseline, brines and similar pickling concoctions and hot and cold emulsified sauces including his own all-time favourite Béarnaise. He concludes by tackling everything you could possibly need to know about "the custard continuum", from the ratios required for the humble crème anglaise to even simpler ratios that result in the triumph of caramelisation that is butterscotch sauce.

What I enjoyed most about reading Ratio was the fact that, although I've read The Big Fat Duck Cookbook, A Day at El Bulli, Alinea and other recent iconic œuvres of the kitchen arts, I've never before felt that I was drawing as much inspiration and sprouting as many new ideas as while I navigated the pages of this book. I can only describe Ratio as an essential culinary bible. And that's coming from a self-confessed modernist, radical, technology-dependent boy. I read books first and foremost in order to learn from the ideas of others, but I also read for the inspiration that helps me come up with my own ideas. Michael Ruhlman's Ratio certainly gave me that kick-start. My brain has hardly stopped whirring ever since I closed the covers of this incredible book.

I often find that, based on one sentence I've just read, my mind can wander off for hours into a faraway land of brainstorming creativity. When that happens I pull my mobile phone out and start jotting down notes for as long as I can keep my concentration. It's not intricate spherifications and imaginative, post-modern elaborations that get my creative juices flowing. It's simple, straightforward basic open-ended concepts that allow my own brain to do the leg work. And believe me, my brain can run marathons when I let it. Ratio is full of such concepts, it's a book that is fuel for the creative mind in the purest form. If you think of the creative process as a tree, the best place to start from is the trunk, with a multiplicity branches heading outwards in all directions. That's exactly where Ratio is - at the central power station from which all ideas can grow.

Here's a perfect example of what I'm getting at. What is mayonnaise? Answer: an emulsion of fat and water - traditionally vegetable or olive oil and the water in egg yolks. The lecithin present in the yolks (and in the optional mustard) helps to stabilise the emulsion and the extra water content provided by vinegar or lemon juice enables more oil to be added in order to achieve the correct consistency. But forget about the technical details for a moment - let's just think fat and water. Now open your mind. Which other common culinary preparations are simply a combination of fat and water? What happens to cream when we whip it? What could be used as the fat content instead of oil in mayonnaise? And what could be used instead of vinegar or lemon juice as the water content?

How could the preparation be flavoured? Could we infuse the oil beforehand, use an aromatic oil or employ a combination of oils? What could be used to provide acidity if vinegar or lemon juice aren't utilised as providers of water content? What's a Hollandaise, if not a warm cousin of mayonnaise? All at once a whole new avenue of possibilities has opened up. Fats are generally liquid when warm, so that means loads of alternative fat-content possibilities that weren't possible in a cold mayonnaise. Rendered bacon fat whisked into warm, foamy yolks. Goose fat leftover from Sunday's roast. Foie fat...

This book truly opened my mind to a new way of thinking - and one that I hope to continue following in the coming years as I develop as a chef. Ratio should be read by everyone from experienced professional chefs to rank amateur home cooks, because different people will take different ideas and principles from it to suit their own requirements. Moreover, it's as gripping as a Stephen King novel. I read it cover to cover in a few days and I could probably tackle it again right now and discover a world of ideas I'd overlooked the first time round. Mr Ruhlman - congratulations on a truly inspirational read.

Thanks to Kristian Madsen for the oil and water photo and to Leonardo da Vinci for The Vitruvian Man.

It's A Tough Life As A Professional Chef...

2009-11-02T23:40:00.002+01:00

...so I thought I'd take time out and pay a snap visit to Portugal to visit some friends.

Well... a man's gotta have a break some time.

Oooh Mummy, Can We Have Some Umami?

2009-10-27T00:20:00.009+01:00

Not something likely to be said back home in Britain, where the word umami is still relatively unknown. But something a toddler might say in Japan, from where the word originates and where it means 'tasty' or 'flavoursome'. Surprisingly, many people still question the validity of the 'fifth flavour' today, even though we have long had scientific proof of the specialised receptor cells on our tongues that detect the carboxylate anion of glutamic acid and give rise to the meaty, brothy or savoury taste that is umami.

Founding father of gastronomy Brillat-Savarin came close to discovering umami almost two centuries ago when, in his iconic work Physiologie Du Goût (Physiology Of Taste), he discussed osmazome, describing it as "the most meritorious ingredient of all good soups", which "gives game and venison its peculiar flavour." And, recognising the pleasure it gave to those who remained blissfully unaware of its existence, added: "Osmazome, discovered after having been so long the delight of our fathers, may be compared to alcohol, which made whole generations drunk before it was simply exhibited by distillation."

Even three years ago, when I was at catering college, the word was virtually unspoken - confined to gastronomy blogs, the writings of Harold McGee and the odd conference of radical chefs. So imagine how surprised I was to hear that a whole section of a peak-time BBC evening TV show the other week had been devoted to the topic of umami. OK, so the shoppers who were interviewed still couldn't tell umami from sudoku. But it's a huge step forward, being discussed on a show with about 6m viewers. Enjoy!

Nelson Mandela, Che Guevera, Gandhi And... Carrot Crew

2009-10-21T19:57:00.001+02:00

"Jamie Oliver's lost sight of what's right."
Maybe, maybe not... but it sure looks like, when it comes to losing the plot, some schoolteachers
and ancillary staff have a far more serious problem than their schoolkids. Laugh or cry (or maybe both).

Many thanks to Kate Rudkins for kindly granting me permission to rehost and republish this video.
Visit Kate's YouTube site to see this and other videos in the series "This is Our Youth", written and directed by Nathaniel Barrett and Kate Rudkins and made by Eleven Film for Channel 4's "3 Minute Wonder".

Seafood... Eat It!

2009-10-14T23:51:00.003+02:00

The Brits may not be very fond of the fruits of the sea, as foodie blogger, author and globe-trotter Robin Majumdar asserted earlier this year, but seafood is absolutely fundamental to the cuisines of Spain.

It's hardly surprising - over three quarters of The Kingdom of Spain's population lives within 50 miles of the sea and, with the exceptions of Madrid, Seville and Zaragoza, all the major centres of population density are on the coast. Move Canberra to Alice Springs and Spain would demographically resemble Australia.

Of course when we talk about seafood and Spain, our thoughts turn to the northern coast line - to Galicia and The Basque Country and to Asturias and Cantabria in-between. But there's almost nowhere in Spain where fish and shellfish aren't an important part of the regional cuisine. Even in most of the landlocked autonomous communities we find river fish and crustaceans playing an important role. You get a good idea of the importance of seafood to the Spanish when you discover that the world's second largest fish market after Tsukiji in Tokyo is Mercamadrid, with a covered surface area of 42,000 m² and annual sales of 132m kilos of seafood. What's notable about that is that Madrid is over 300km from the sea!

When Spain celebrates something, it does so by building. The architectural traditions of the Basques, the Catalans and the Islamic conquerors of south and central Spain have brought some of the most spectacular structures to be found anywhere in Europe. Elsewhere in the world such excesses may be confined to palaces and grand houses of culture, celebrating monarchy and opera. In Spain, a stunning edifice of steel, glass and ceramics is just as likely to celebrate the cheese, the sausage and the shrimp.

In the city of València is just such a celebratory structure, standing proud against the skyline adjacent to La Lonja de la Seda, the ancient Silk Market. El Mercado Central de València is a stunning piece of Catalan modernist architecture, initiated in 1914 and opened fourteen years later. The market is an 8,000m² expanse of steel and glass decorated with typically colourful Valencian ceramic tiles. Built by architects Alejandro Soler March and Francisco Guardia Vial who trained in Barcelona with the iconic Lluís Domènech i Montaner, the art nouveau building even includes the colors of the Senyera regional flag (the base of the modern Aragonese, Catalan, Valencian and Balearic communities) in its windows.

A few weeks ago I visited central València for lunch at Restaurante Torrijos (more to come shortly). Having arrived an hour or so early, what better way to whet my appetite for the feast to come than to gaze upon some of the city's freshly caught aquatic residents at El Mercado Central. The seafood section of the market is vast, so I only captured a small part of what was on offer. Click on individual slides for descriptions of the seafood on display.

Thanks to Kike@ and birdbath for the structural photos of the market. All seafood stall photos by me.

Thanks Guys

2009-10-10T09:21:00.003+02:00

Thanks to the 194,141 people who looked at 348,185 pages on my blog since I began in August 2006 and especially to my 46 registered Google Followers. Much appreciation also to the 1,379,717 people who have visited my YouTube site since September 2006, my 170 regular video subscribers and the many thousands of people who have checked out the photo sets on my Flickr site (Flickr stats only just started recently). It's not always easy to find the spare time and motivation for blogging in-between the work shifts of a highly demanding day job, but you guys really do make it all worthwhile. Thank you.

They Go Really Badly Together - Potato And Orange

2009-10-03T09:34:00.003+02:00

Let's face it. We all know that when it comes to being the ultimate arbiter of taste, there's no-one to beat the French. There's cooking and there's classical cooking... and classical cooking at top level means French cooking. And when it comes to artistic brilliance on the plate - there's absolutely no competition. Well, leastways... that's what a Frenchman told me.

The other day I watched a hapless contender on British TV cooking show Masterchef: The Professionals stand in front of Michel Roux Jr. (he of the Michelin 2* Le Gavrôche) and have the audacity to knock up a dish in which pieces of orange were plated alongside potatoes.

Quelle horreur! Quel dommage! Luckily, capital punishment has been abolished in France as well as Britain, or it might well have been Madame la Guillotine for the unfortunate contestant.

Here's an edited version of the reaction.

Having recently hosted a round of They Go Really Well Together, my thoughts turned immediately to the prospect of They Go Really Badly Together. I'm not intending this to be a serious meme and I hope Martin Lersch won't take offence at my French colour co-ordinated version of his logo. But I simply couldn't resist inviting everyone to come up with dishes that successfully combine potato and orange.

There's one dish you are not allowed to submit and that's Ensalada Valenciana. Now I must point out that, just to be confusing, there are two different salads with this name. Once is a lettuce and pimento salad with olives, tomatoes and anchovies or other fish. The other - more relevant to this post - is a simple salad of potatoes, oranges and pimentos, with a light vinaigrette. You can find Ensalada Valenciana on the menu at many roadside cafés and restaurants near to where I live and work.

The dish was created about 500 years ago when, the orange-planting Moors having earlier been vanquished by James I of Aragón, the Conquistadors brought back the potato from the Americas. Recipes are kindly offered by Cook It Simply, Apple Pie, Patis, Pâté and the combination is noted on Spain-Barcelona. There are even some recipes that combine the two varieties of Ensalada Valenciana to produce a fish, orange and potato salad, such as these from Madreshaymasdeuna and from Elbocaito. Being relatively novel, I can understand why French chefs haven't heard of these dishes. It's quite a long way from València to Paris, and even further to London, so maybe the news didn't arrive yet.

Given the response I received to TGRWT #18, I'm sure there are chefs and foodies out there who can really crack this one by describing dishes they've cooked recently or experienced in restaurants, that will leave M. Roux with a good dollop of orange and potato on his head. I'm especially keen to hear about classics from non-European cuisines that combine potato and orange. Maybe there's something from one of the world's top non-European producers of both oranges and potatoes - China, India or the US? Suggestions by comment, please. Unless, of course, you really want to publish a post and send me a link by comment.

Please don't take the title "They Go Really Badly Together" literally and suggest saffron potato mash with kidney & orange velouté and pomegranate foam, thanks.

Photo of Ensalada Valenciana and material for composite photo kindly provided by Jude of Apple Pie, Patis, Pâté.

Is It A Bird? Is It A Pain?

2009-09-26T09:33:00.003+02:00

It's a fair bet that you're at least familiar with ostrich meat, even if you haven't yet tried it for yourself.

A quick search for "ostrich" amongst the bloggers indexed on Elise Bauer's Simply Recipes site proves far more successful than my search for "camel", turning up ostrich steak tartar from Rosa's Yummy Yums, scotch ostrich egg from Blogjam, ostrich with brandy, cream and wild mushrooms, ostrich liver, ostrich with honey and apple sauce, ostrich with plum and ginger sauce, ostrich with black pepper and honey sauce and ostrich 'yakitori' from Living To Eat, Greek ostrich burgers from Amazing Dessert Recipes, ostrich chop suey and ostrich tapa fried rice from Home Cooking Rocks!, ostrich fillet steak with hand-cut oven fries and ostrich steak strips stir-fry from The W.H.O.L.E. gang, ostrich sausage rolls from Gluten Free In South Africa, ostrich strips with broccoli gratin and mint carrot salad from My French Kitchen, tofu omelette with ostrich sauce from Feast With Bron, tarragon scrambled ostrich egg from Folkmann, ostrich risotto from The Amateur Gourmet, ostrich Steak with a Simple Paprika Sauce and ostrich Wellington from Good Food, ostrich steak from Domestic Goddess In Training, ostrich egg frittata from Fresh Kitchen, ostrich burgers from Gild The (Voodoo) Lily, ostrich steak with brown beech mushrooms from Food Stories and several more.

No wonder this ostrich is sporting such an indignant look, with all those food bloggers ready to eat him.

Meats low in fat and cholesterol are very much in fashion right now. I've been very fond of ostrich, which fits a similar profile, since Izzie introduced me to Sue Farr's Gamston Wood Farm stall at Borough Market three years ago. And we ate ostrich from Weatheroak Ostrich Farm in Preston one day during last Christmas holidays. After my failure to discover a big gastronomic future for camel meat in Britain, I thought it was about time I discovered something about the country's apparently more successful ostrich farming sector. How many farms are there in Britain, I wondered, and is there much demand for ostrich meat?

Ostrich shares the same characteristic that led to the demise of goose as the meat of choice at Christmas and its replacement by turkey - it's very difficult to battery farm these stroppy creatures. When intensive agriculture became the norm in the 1970s there was little demand for free-range food, which was generally viewed as a throwback to a bygone age. Now that ethical consumerism is very much on the agenda and free-range farming is rapidly expanding its share of the food market, demand for 'exotic' meats is also on the rise. Especially with the internet providing a new channel to market through e-commerce. Once we're through the current global recession, demand for ostrich meat is likely to take off in a big way. So how difficult can ostrich farming be?

You're dealing with an animal that stands 7-9ft tall, weighs in at over 100kg, can jog alongside your car at 30mph and is quite capable of kicking you to death. "OK", you think to yourself, "I'll get clever and stand behind it. After all, it can't run or kick backwards." Do that and it's likely to sprint away from you at 45mph, after it's emptied its bowels and given you an experience you won't forget in a very long while. How far can it go? In the wild, ostriches range daily over an area as great as 1,000 km² while foraging for food and they live in groups of up to about 50 individuals comprising several possessive males each with a harem of females. For those who can't do the maths, I make that 5 tons of ostrich meat running around an area two-thirds the size of Greater London. So if you thought you'd just raise the odd one or two alongside the chickens in the back garden, you'd better think again.

Then, of course, there are the problems with feeding, breeding, finding an experienced vet and all those other little issues associated with animal husbandry. For anyone able to address the physical management issues, there are the regulatory ones to face. When ostrich farming took off in Europe in the 1980s, governments were very slow to support the initiative, classifying ostrich as farmed game bird in the EU at a time when the British government was subjecting it to the Poultry Meat Regulations. Confusion over the regulatory framework for farmed ostrich made it very difficult for British producers to develop a successful industry. And to make things worse, this was a period when the supermarkets were establishing a stranglehold on the food market and retail butchery was in severe decline.

Unlike almost all other forms of livestock production, all ostrich units in Britain are independently inspected and licensed on an annual basis. The vast majority of ostriches are processed through dedicated, specialist facilities operated by the breeders' trade body, The British Domesticated Ostrich Association, all members of which are subject to independent monitoring by DEFRA officials and by the Humane Slaughter Association. So ostrich farming involves considerably more oversight than almost any other animal farming in Britain.

Despite all of these issues and the huge investment needed to turn ostrich farming into a viable business, several families decided that it was for them. As a result, Britain now boasts a number of breeding farms selling meat and other ostrich products, including Westcountry Ostrich in Devon, Riverwood Ostrich Farm in Berkshire, Oslinc in Lincolnshire, Gamston Wood Farm and Ostrichfayre in Nottinghamshire, Bisbrooke Ostrich Farms in Rutland and Pathfinder Ostrich Farm in Buckinghamshire. If you're just planning to buy some meat, you shouldn't have too much trouble. And if you're a vegetarian you can always wander along to Eden Ostrich World, the award-winning family farm visitor attraction near Penrith in Cumbria, where you can learn about our feathered friends without actually eating them. But do be careful if you're planning to invest your life savings in ostrich farming. Eight years ago investors poured £875,000 into a new development in Swansea, only to discover that the whole deal was a gigantic fraud. Beats chasing those big birds round the field as a way of making money, I suppose. Until it's you who gets caught.

Finally, devoting your life to ostriches isn't all boring, hard slog. There can be some fun, too.

TGRWT #18 Plum & Blue Cheese Round-Up

2009-09-15T20:30:00.026+02:00

I've really enjoyed hosting TGRWT #18 on behalf of Martin Lersch at blog.khymos, inviting both amateur food bloggers and professional chefs to suggest dishes that combine stone fruits of genus prunus subgenus prunus with matured cultures of cow's, sheep's or goat's milk with added penicillium. Put more simply, that's dishes that combine plum with blue cheese.

I'm delighted with the response which, with 30 submissions from countries as far apart as the UK, New Zealand, Mexico and Germany, was well beyond what I'd envisaged. I wasn't just pleased with the volume of responses but also with the overall quality and the culinary intelligence applied by so many of the respondents. Click on the links to read individual contributions and on the photos to enlarge them.

The question I posed was: Do these two go really well together? But I was so pleased to see several amateur cooks change this question into the one that the professionals posed for themselves: What do I need to do to balance and enhance the flavours, aromas and textures of these ingredients? The predominant flavours of plum are sweet and sour and those of blue cheese are salty and astringent. So lay plum and blue cheese side to side and the result is unlikely to be appetising.

But that wasn't going to stop John Sconzo of Doc Sconz - The Blog from getting in straight away with his initial suggestion of a Toasted Open Sandwich of Sliced California Plum and Boucher Blue Cheese.

In fairness, I should point out that Doc hinted at some more sophisticated combinations and subsequently came up with one (see below). I might well have ignored this entry, were it not for the fact that John is responsible for me being employed at the amazing Restaurante Ferrero up here in the Valencian mountains. So I'll let him off completely and give his sandwich pride of place in the round-up. In any case, John may be a global gourmet, but he never claimed to be a creative cook.

At this point I must confess that I was initially concerned that the highlight of TGRWT #18 might be Prune, Rocket & Crumbled Stilton Salad. I was wondering whether I would see some more creative entries, let alone any that met the criteria for my side competition in which I asked for desserts that weren't dominated by the sweet part of the flavour spectrum.

Clearly I needn't have worried as I discovered when, just a couple of days into the event, Neil Rankin of The War On Cookbooks offered a simple plate of cheese and biscuits that turned out to be Gorgonzola Ice Cream on Shortbread with a Plum & Port Sauce. Not only a great start to TGRWT #18, but a dish also clearly eligible for my creative dessert competition, even if not an entirely original concept. Friends credit Nuno Mendes with serving Gorgonzola ice cream in the past and Gordon Ramsay has reinvented it more recently.

Neil was followed by sous chef Craig Dryhurst of Strictly Fine Dining - someone well capable of generating fine dining restaurant level dishes without help from a 21-year-old pastry chef. He's created a Roulade of Mirabelle Plum & Barkham Blue Cheese with Plum Wine, Plum Chips & Acacia Honey:

"The plums are sliced thinly and the blue cheese blended with a little sour cream and rolled into a roulade. Underneath is a salad of plum and almond marinated in plum wine. There are slices of plum carpaccio and dried plum crisps. The dish is finished with a touch of long pepper and acacia honey. Craig explains that plum and blue cheese need help to gel together. "A floral note is welcome from the long pepper and the honey tones down the strength of the blue cheese and glazes the plums to highlight their sweetness. A little micro celery adds a slight bitter note also which complements the blue cheese."

Craig gets a one-point deduction for using French plums, but a five-point bonus for pairing them with a prize-winning local Berkshire cheese. Next up was Christine of yumbug with Plum and Blue Cheese Tart.

Regular readers will know that the "y" word is normally banned on this blog, but I'll happily make an exception for Christine, whose write-up is a refreshing example of how to blog with honesty. She is clearly someone who is enjoying learning about food and developing a palate, despite early prejudices. And someone not afraid to challenge recipes, input her own creative thoughts and learn from mistakes. I like the idea of thyme, adding an aromatic note with a bitter tone. Other herbs I thought might be worth trying for a balanced flavour triangle are dill on the bitter side and bergamot on the sour side.

John Sconzo promised Schwarzenegger-style that he'd be back, and a few days later he was true to his word with Grilled Veal Chop with Blue Cheese And Plum Sauce.

John marinated veal chops from a local up-state NY farm in a sauce made from an Oregon smoky blue cheese and a Japanese Redheart plum. He slow cooked the chops and sauce in a CVap before finishing off the chops on a charcoal grill. John served the dish with fresh green beans with a mint & walnut oil vinaigrette and fresh grilled corn on the cob, pairing the dish with a Syrah from the Languedoc."The dish of sliced grilled, marinated veal chops and blue cheese plum sauce was well received by our guests. I could see this working quite well with pork or duck too."

I could see this working quite well with me sipping a glass of Negly La Porte du Ciel while the veal chops are served al fresco against a panoramic backdrop of the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York. I shall be checking my mail regularly for an invitation.

The next entry was from British-based American pastry chef Dale of component, with Victoria Plum, Acacia Honey & Nanny Williams Blue Goat's Cheese with Cheese Croquant, Muscovado Jelly & Plum Purée. The title is mine by the way of description, as Dale didn't name the dish. Given the deliciously laid-back style of his post, however, I suspect it would simply appear on his menu as Plum and cheese. I thoroughly recommend everyone to read Dale's post, as it gives such a clear insight into the process employed by a professional chef and how different that is from the approach of an amateur.

Analysing his principal flavours as sour and astringent, Dale chose to balance these with sweetness for which he identified muscovado sugar and acacia honey. He also thought about balancing the textures and concluded that some crunchiness could be provided both by cheese and muscovado. Only then did he think about the cooking processes and the presentation of the final dish. The exact opposite of what you see on TV cookery programmes, where contestants so often "experiment with the ingredients to see how it will all turn out". Full marks to Dale for using fresh local ingredients throughout his dish.

Anyone with the personal motto: "A day when nothing new is tasted is a day that hasn't been lived" and whose first thought is cooking with leftover ingredients is going to gain my instant affection. Dutch experimental home cook Dennis of Kookjegek.nl, faced with spare risotto rice, rose to the challenge and hunted for ideas in Wikipedia. Not always the best source of recipes, but on this occasion it inspired him to Bleu Rice Pudding with Plum & Apricot Coulis, which Dennis flavoured with Bleu D'Auvergne cheese, lemon zest and thyme.

Without being able to taste the final product I can only assume that, although any astringency and saltiness of this quite delicate blue cheese may have been a bit overwhelmed along with the bitter tone of the thyme, the dish would more than punch its weight with umami and balance the sweetness nicely with the tartness of the coulis. So, clearly another entry eligible for my dessert competition.

When I first announced TGRWT #18, I scanned the blogosphere for interesting dishes that combined plum and blue cheese ingredients and invited the bloggers to develop their recipes and republish. Olga of Mango & Tomato was well satisfied with her earlier recipe for Plum Pizza with Gorgonzola & Pine Nuts and republished it. This dish offers a rainbow of flavours, needing only a little chilli to make up the full flavour spectrum. I haven't tried it myself, but Olga says it's not only easy but great, so I'll certainly take her word for it.

Norwegian food science lecturer and molecular gastronomist Erik Fooladi of Fooducation.org was initially sceptical about the combination, but was determined to test the pairing without too much distraction. So he opted for Blue Cheese & Plum Soft Ice Cream using his new Bamix immersion blender.

"This pairing", declared Erik, "was amazingly good: well balanced flavour-wise, and the cheese was noticeable but not overpowering. Resemblant of frozen yoghurt. Very smooth texture with small pieces of creamy, more dense cheese (a very slight bitter note). The flavours blended in an excellent way, while playing against each other in a way to complement rather than conflict. Also, something strange happened: from the bits of pure cheese (garnish) a sweetness emerged that wasn't noticeable in the cheese alone. Hence, the mixture brought out new flavours in the cheese, quite fascinating." Erik reports a sweet, sour and bitter balance of flavours, with some subtle notes coming through and a great balance of textures as well as flavours. This is a dish that I'll definitely try myself, perhaps taking up his suggestion of using lecithin emulsifier to inhibit curdling.

Next up was blog-free Florida line chef Derek Gerry, who came up with the challenging Blue Cheese and Spiced Pickled Plum Tart. It was clear from the outset that Derek was going all guns blazing for my "non-sweet" dessert competition, with a dish that made me pucker as I observed wine vinegar, sumac, chilli and pickling jus amongst the ingredients. Not content with one variety of plum, Derek used yellow, red and black fruits - the softer, yellow one in his sauce and the latter two in his tart.

"My plums sat one week", Derek told me. "The flavor and aroma of the plums was amazing. Plum flavor still dominating but with support from the citrusy sumac, the astringency and punch of vinegar, and slight bite of heat at the end." Declaring that the dish would be equally good as a cheese course or dessert, Derek explained: "together with the cheese in the tart it worked surprisingly well, the sweetness of the of the cream mix and pungency of Gorgonzola blended nicely with the plums and the sauce really brought it all together. But the tart shell finished the dish, with its sweet, crumbly, buttery crunch."

A 2,000 km journey westwards brings us to Mexico, where chef and culinary instructor Roberto Navarro of Mex Mix responded to TGRWT#18 from his home city of Monterrey. Roberto took up my dessert challenge, treading a fine line between savoury and sweet with his dish of Pecan Bread French Toast, Danish Blue Ice Cream, Pluots Fresh & Gastrique and Bacon Fat Pecans.

Roberto's write-up once again shows the approach of a seasoned professional - analysing the flavours and textures of his ingredients and choosing appropriate cooking processes to achieve the desired balance. Roberto confesses to having been overly-conservative in his choice of mild Danish Blue cheese which, used only in the ice cream, didn't bring enough saltiness. But the pairing of cheese and plum worked really well, with a sweet-sour foreground set against an umami-rich background of pain perdu and bacon fat pecans.

This looked like a very promising first attempt at an interesting and unusual dessert dish and just the sort of thing I would attempt myself. It's only a shame the delicate flavour balance was overpowered at the last minute as a result of the dish being paired with an overly-sweet Riesling Icewine.

Italian scientist Alessandro of The Independent Chemist has discovered blog.khymos and been getting seriously into food pairing with his offering of Plums & Gorgonzola Chip Cookies in a Sandwich Shape. "I got excited about this idea, so today I bought gorgonzola cheese and other ingredients, I got the plums from the garden of one of my friends, organic yellow-green Sicilian plums and went back home to make a dessert for lunch. The result was amazing, a great combination, a great dessert." Once again I can't tell without tasting, but this looks like a good balance of umami, sweet, salt, sour and astringent that could be both unusual and delicious.

Next up was someone with whom I've shared my culinary voyage for this past three years - my favourite antipodean food blogger, the multi-talented Haalo of Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once.

Not one to be put off by the inconvenience of plums being completely out of season down under, Haalo managed to come up with not one but two dishes - Plum and Blue Cheese Pannacotta with Plum Jelly (right) and Plum and Blue Cheese Crumble (below). Haalo is something of an authority on Australian cheeses and she chose the Garden State's Tarago River Shadows of Blue, which she described as "a fabulously creamy and rich cheese that is quite soft and with a really pleasant blue bite to the finish". Using plums that she had previously poached in sugar syrup, she created a plum and panna cotta base topped with a layer of reduced plum syrup set with leaf gelatine. A simple and elegant dish with sweet, sour, salty and astringent flavours that I would expect to be clearly defined in both space and time, which is exactly what Haalo found.

Her second dish was a crumble, with a poached plum base and the blue cheese rubbed into the crumble mix along with the butter. Haalo described the subtlety of the dish: "If I could be guided by the way this dish was inhaled, this was a complete success. The blue isn't a dominating flavour or factor but it adds something special to the crumble - you know there is something different but familiar but until you are told exactly what it is, it stays out of reach. Once told, the lightbulb turns on and it all makes sense." Do visit Haalo's blog and pay special attention to her photographs, which show food not as porn but as the object of true love. I've long thought that Haalo should work at The Guggenheim Bilbao - consulting on local produce in the gastronomic restaurant and hanging her photos in the gallery.

Not to be outdone in the antipodean stakes, Brian Heslop of Foodology proved that anything Australians can do New Zealanders can do better, with his unnamed entry that I've identified as Blue Cheese Parfait with Plum & Tamarind Jelly, Crushed Macadamia & Pistachio and Honey with White Balsamic Crème.

Also forced to use preserved plums, gourmet Brian selected as his cheese Kapiti Kikorangi, a sweet triple cream kiwi cheese with a golden curd and rich buttery texture, marbled with dense blue veining that adds a strong pungent tone. Brian's (actually his partner Claire's) parfaits were a mix of blue cheese, milk, cream and gelatine, to which Brian added his tart jelly and nuts with a drizzle of honey and white balsamic crème. "Make the presentation a little cleaner", Brian concluded, "with a little more punch in the jelly and a little less kick in the parfait and you would have a very presentable dessert." A good attempt at balancing complex flavours in a highly presentable dish.

Serial TGRWT respondent Yannik Schelske of the eponymous blog Yannik Thorsten Heiko Schelske and his friend Robert were next up from Germany, with their entries Plum Dumpling with Blue Cheese and Red Wine Sauce and Blue Cheese Steak with Spicy Plum Compote and Blue Cheese & Plum Quiche. Having responded to two previous rounds of TGRWT involving rose flavour, Yannik was over the moon to be faced with a different challenge this time.

Rejecting his initial ideas of Greengage & Salty Cheese Cocktail and Plum Soup with Blue Cheese Balls (sounds like a Jerry Lee Lewis track), Yannik eventually settled on "a traditional dish with a twist" in the form of Plum Dumplings with Blue Cheese Sauce. "The blue cheese sauce’s taste was rather unorthodox and rather sweet", he concluded, "because I added a lot of honey. I also used too much cheese and the sauce was therefore too dominant, but keeping this in mind, I think an acceptable solution can be found. (I also prepared a red wine sauce with a hint of cardamom, which fitted well.)" Ummm... I remain to be totally convinced.

Both the steak with plum compote and the quiche were "very satisfying in taste", Robert reported, although "the quiche... fell apart due to excessive moisture." His steak, interestingly, was roasted before being topped with blue cheese, which was then melted in the oven. And the accompanying compote was spiced up, in the style of mulled wine, with cinnamon and chilli. And, in yet a further twist to conventional cooking, the baked quiche base was topped with plums and sprinkled with onion and gammon, used in this case "as a spice". I can only say that herein may lie genius, or total disaster.

Whereas the previous pair sounded distinctly French (as individuals, if not as cooks), the next entrant from Germany sounded positively Italian. Alessio Fangano of Recipe Taster offered Reconstructed Plum Tatin with Blue Cheese Butterscotch Sauce and Lavender, concluding: "this combination of ingredient is quite successful and the contrast of textures, moistness and aromas of the dish quite fulfilling".

"When approached to the nose, the first aroma to fill it was the round and spicy one coming from the gorgonzola. The delicate lavender aroma followed it. It was quite a nice contrast. Round, spicy and buttery against a light, fresh and springy one. To the bite, the galette is what plays the major role with its crispiness with its light sweet and spiced flavour. The sensation of the dry dough is soon compensated by the juiciness of the plums and followed by the rich cheesy aromas coming from both from the sauce and the pure cheese. Every now and then, you will bite on a lavender flower that will release its spiky, fresh and light aroma. The natural tartness of the plums helps cutting through the natural richness of the bite." Sounds good.

The last-minute entries were by now arriving thick and fast. It was inevitable that someone would try ingredient role reversal, as per rashers of egg with smiley bacon or deep fried cheese with cauliflower espuma, and I was delighted to see such an approach originate from my beloved Portugal. Ana Castanho of C.e.u.d.a.b.o.c.a. (a play on "céu da boca" or "oral heaven") proposed Roquefort Mousse with Chocolate-Plum Truffles - a dish in which plum becomes cheese and cheese becomes plum.

Full marks to Ana for starting with a simple segment of plum and slice of cheese and tasting them. That led to an unsuccessful attempt at a light plum mousse on uncooked cheese - a good flavour combination but so out of balance that it inspired the role reversal - lightening the cheese by making Roquefort mousse and strengthening the plum by creating chocolate plum truffles. "The chocolate imbues the plum with both a strong taste and texture", writes Ana, "creating a nice contrast with the lightness of the salted cheese mousse". A successful dish, concludes Ana, "somewhere between an appetizer and a dessert".

Canadian Larry Pike of the modestly-named Tri2Cook was next, with an offering of Cabrales Cheesecake with Pickled Plum Sorbet, Sablee Nuggets, Cabrales Crumble, Plum Slices & Plum Coulis.

It's not clear from Larry's blog whether or not he's a professional chef, but what's immediately obvious is that he knows a thing or two about culinary design and technique and his blogroll includes many of my own favourite sites. Larry doesn't comment on the taste of his dessert, but there are many hints throughout his recipe to suggest that he thought very carefully about balancing both flavours and textures. His sweet cheesecake has a sour tone, his pickled plum sorbet is both sweet and tart with pungent tones, the nuggets and crumble offer contrasting textures and the coulis helps to unify the disparate elements of the dish. I'd certainly like a sample sent to me airfreight, please.

Larry's "classically modern" dish was followed by Sino-Japanese-European fusion from Seattle's Dan Garlington of What's Cookin', Good Lookin' (Delicious Dining & Culinary Catastrophes) in a dish that pushes the boundaries of the dessert world to places rarely visited. Dan's Profiterole of Blue Cheese Ice Cream with Li Hing Mui Coating, Paired with a Blue Cheese Stuffed Umeboshi was only missing harmony grits, bush tomato sabayon and a shower of yak's cream to qualify for UN Global Dessert Of The Year.

Dan describes himself as "an unpretentious foodie with a love of trying new ingredients", such as live ants, braised goat (live?) and mac salad (which I presume contains pasta and not a PC or a waterproof coat). For this recipe he decided to use crack seed, which is not what you're thinking, but a form of dehydrated fruit. Dan's write-up is far too good for me to précis, so I urge you to read it for yourself. He reports that his flavour and texture combinations were inspired by experiences "on the rim" in Hawai'i and little balls that "explode in your mouth like a flavor firework". Spoilt only by him conservatively resorting to Michael Ruhlman's Ratio for the quantity of Wisconsin Blue.

The second blogless entrant was Brit Ian Conlon, who spotted TGRWT while on holiday. He experimented while in France, using local Reine Claude greengages and Stichelton cheese from his rucksack. Unfortunately, by the time Ian was ready for a more serious shot he was in Canada and all of his Nottingham Stilton had been devoured. So in his recipes he used Roquefort and Canadian Blue plums.

The wandering gourmet wasn't shy to crack directly at my side competition with his Cheese and Pickle Tart, deciding on "a (sort-of) dessert" with a sour taste introduced by vinegar, umami from cheese and sweetness from plum, sherry and sugar. I must confess that I remain sceptical about the umami element of this combination. Although Roquefort contains glutamates, I suspect its salinity and astringency far outweigh other flavour contributions and in any event the 'pickle' will introduce considerable saltiness as well as sourness.

In Cheese and Pickle Tart Version 2, Ian used thinner pastry and jellies made with sherry vinegar and Pedro Ximenez sherry. "I think the dish might work as a bridge between savoury and sweet courses or be served as a snack before the main courses", he concluded. "I would keep the contrast of sweet-sour and sweet-alcoholic in the jellies, and add cinnamon to the vinegar jelly as the cinnamon/sour combination is effective. I'd also probably use the Reine Claude/Stilton combination, perhaps tweaking up the amount of cheese in the pastry."

I can understand why you were impressed by your Chicago experience, Ian, when a chef plated up a dessert at your table. It's certainly something I'd try myself, as you suggest, although perhaps a teeny bit of the magic may have been in the fact that your chef was a chap by the name of Grant Achatz. Next, Rob Connoley of The Curious Blogquat unashamedly tried to creep round me with his most Spanish of dishes The Niña, Pinta & Santa María [aka Espuma de Turrón con Ciruela]". A good try, Rob, but you'll "play to the audience" even better if you spell my name correctly, lol!

This was an entry to challenge the most extrovert of Paco Torreblanca's efforts - candied plum vessels with plum skin sails on an almond nougat foam. A dish clearly dedicated to the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus to The Bahamas and representing his fragile vessels on the choppy seas. Setting the expedition inside a sugar bottle added that final authentic touch of Alicante repostería. For the experienced Rob, this was all too easy. "In TGRWT we always like to share how it worked. In this instance, it was all a natural. Of course honey goes well with Gorgonzola. And of course plums go well with blue cheese, so it is all well tied together. I found this dessert to not be overwhelmingly sweet, in fact, I found a bit on the savory side." Still working me, right to the end!

Conspicuous by his absence up to this point had been the man who started all of this madness - Norwegian research scientist and amateur molecular gastronomist Martin Lersch of blog.khymos.

Never one to miss out on the fun, Martin came up with the deliciously camp Norzola Puffs with Plum Reduction which appeared to have suffered a severe sand storm but which he assures me more than satisfied his wife, who came back for second helpings. Martin decided to use puff pastry dough and laminate some Norzola Norwegian blue cheese (made to mimic Gorgonzola) between layers of pastry. To accompany this he made a plum reduction with star anise and ginger. "This one was y... ", said Martin [oh, I just cannot bring myself to type that word!]. "It's both sweet, sour, creamy, airy, crunchy – and it's even got tannins (plum skins + walnuts)", he extolled, stretching the binary adjective to its breaking point.

I'd been hoping to see the classic combination of fruit cheese and blue cheese, and I wasn't disappointed when Indonesian-born kiwi Arfi of HomeMadeS submitted her Damson Plum Cheese with Blue Brie.

For those unfamiliar with fruit cheeses, they are not dairy products but preserves made with stiff fruit purées. Once found in the pantry of all good home cooks, fruit cheeses have gone out of fashion in recent years. But with today's emphasis on local produce and avoiding food waste, I see these products as very much part of renaissance cooking. And what a great pairing with blue cheese: "There is a subtle chemistry between plum cheese and blue cheese", says Arfi, "and a close connection of tart-sweet-ness is handled perfectly once they hit my tongue. The earthy and nutty flavour of blue cheese, indeed, is a perfect soulmate of plum cheese. There is also tangy texture, hidden somewhere in your mouth, and then topped with mellow flavour of blue cheese. Have it with walnuts or almonds, that is sublime."

If you've never tried making plum cheese, try Arfi's recipe. I'll wait for an invitation to come and sit out in the beautiful countryside of South Auckland with a plate of plum cheese and blue cheese, a bowl of palate-cleansing grapes and a glass of floral New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. While visiting Arfi, I could pop down to South Island to visit NZ's largest grower of sun-ripened damson plums (I say "pop down", though Auckland to Culverden is almost as far as London to Bordeaux!).

Lowry Peaks Traditional Fruits is an award-winning family business "dedicated to making good food exquisite – from every day to entertaining". They specialise in gourmet sauces and pâtés and they are the largest grower of sun-ripened damson plums and quinces in New Zealand. So I was delighted to have Lowry Peaks co-owner Jossy Davison contribute to TGRWT #18 with not one but two recipes. Blue Cheese and Damson Plum Toasties are a simple but delicious snack made by lightly toasting soda bread and topping with blue cheese and plum pâté.

Jossy's second offering was Nut Coated Blue Cheese with Damson Plum Sauce and a Small Rocket Salad. Slices of blue cheese are chilled, dipped in egg, coated with a mixture of almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts and sesame seeds and fried in grapeseed oil. The nut cheese is served with damson plum sauce and a rocket salad. Once again, a simple and elegant combination of great products. Both recipes use multi award-winning Whitestone Windsor soft blue cheese and both boldly balance sweet, sour and astringent flavours, with the recipes introducing bitter, pungent and umami flavours to excite the palate.

With another dish of elegant simplicity, DC-based foodie Colleen Levine of FoodieTots offered a mouth-watering and beautifully photographed bowl of Chilled Plum Soup with Blue Cheese Panna Cotta.

Colleen still has dreams about a goat cheese panna cotta in rhubarb soup once made for her by Executive Chef Tony Chittum of Vermilion. So she decided to swap the goat's cheese for a creamy, sweet blue cheese - reducing the spicing so as to keep the flavours simple and well-defined. "I found that my soup was just slightly tart and a nice balance with the sweet panna cotta", Colleen reports. "The blue cheese flavor is subtle at first but on the whole I think it was a pretty good pairing. I'd love to try it again with Roquefort to compare." Next time I'm over to cook for President Obama I'll pop in for some of your soup, Colleen.

Alex of Cooking Sideways entered his interesting Blue Cheese Pastry with a Plum Custard Shell also at the last minute - appropriately for a student. "I am a student of engineering, a bartender, a writer, a painter, musician and an avid and ever learning cook", he wrote, "...[who] can't make up my mind about anything." Describing his digs as "a studio flat with a kitchen obviously designed for people who never cook", and misspelling my name, Alex began with what could only be described as a multiple handicap.

But I couldn't fail to warm to a chap prepared to attack my pastelero challenge by making multi-flavoured puff pastry and custard in a microwave oven - even if it was, in his own words, "a little overambitious". Yup. That's one way of putting it, Alex. And I'm fairly sure that when Heston Blumenthal puts his pastry in the fridge he doesn't forget it for an entire week while it "accumulates some of the smells from its neighbours on the shelf". But as with all great stories, everything turned out well in the end. Well, almost. Setting aside the overpowering taste of microwaved custard and the visual distraction caused by it having curdled, the complex bitterness of chocolate, tartness of plum and saltiness of Danish Blue cheese made a stupendous combination. You may not win the prize for cooking, Alex, but you made me laugh until it hurt. Your true vocation is obvious. After all, you live in Edinburgh.

And the winner is...

Launching TGRWT #18, I announced a competition for the entrant who most impressed me with a dessert dish incorporating at least two of the following flavours: salty, sour, bitter, umami, pungent, astringent. "Being a dessert", I wrote, "your dish will probably also have a sweet dimension, but if you can pull off a successful dessert without the sweetness dominating, I'll be even more impressed". In the event, over two-thirds of all respondents submitted recipes that, as far as I could tell without personally tasting the end results, satisfied my criteria.

Noteworthy runners up were Colleen Levine with her Chilled Plum Soup with Blue Cheese Panna Cotta, Ian Conlon with Cheese and Pickle Tart Version 2 and Rob Connoley's Espuma de Turrón con Ciruela. What I loved about Colleen's soup was its pure simplicity and elegance - it looks simply stunning. Next time, Colleen, try triangulating the flavours with a little pungent spice (cardamom, clove or peppercorn), but be very careful not to overdo it. Ian will probably be surprised to see his name here but, as a snack, his second attempt was an excellent combination of ingredients. The sherry vinegar will work really well and this is definitely great work in progress. Finally, Rob gets an honourable mention not for any of the crawling, but for good flavour balancing and for such a visually exciting and adventurous dish.

But my winner is Larry Pike, for Cabrales Cheesecake with Pickled Plum Sorbet, Sablee Nuggets, Cabrales Crumble, Plum Slices & Plum Coulis. It's not easy to be both creative and well-balanced - as we see from so many artistic but ultimately unsuccessful chefs - but I believe this offering achieves both. Knowing my predilection these days for simple, ingredient-led cooking, some people may be surprised at my choosing a dish with so many elements. My response to that is simple. There's nothing wrong with a choir - so long as the choristers all sing in harmony. As I said earlier, I can't promise to get a version of this accepted onto our restaurant menu, but I'll try my best. We'll name the dish alliteratively - Canadian Cabrales Cheesecake.

Well done to everyone who took part in TGRWT #18. Thanks for all your efforts and a big thanks to Martin Lersch, without whom none of this would happen. P.S. Don't miss the latest round of TGRWT, Tomato & Black Tea, hosted by Pablo at Medellitin.

Teamwork Is Everything

2009-09-09T09:44:00.003+02:00

It's the middle of a busy service and the pressure is really on. There's a table of sixteen, all of whom have ordered the Menú Planetary Discovery - the restaurant's fourteen-course fusion tasting menu. Sous chef has called away course eight, "Hunting In Wild Forests And Swamps", and you are already at the pass, starting to plate up this complex dish.

The roulade of wild boar and açaí is already on the slates, the yuzu-confit crocodile is being laid down and topped with perfect quenelles of bullfrog & wild eucalyptus mousse and tarantula tempura are being carefully scattered across the bed of smoked bamboo shoots. At this precise moment the forest caterpillar and manzanilla jus should appear at your left elbow... but... the chef responsible is nowhere to be found.

A disaster like this happened in Valencia a couple of weeks ago. No, not at our restaurant, God forbid. Our kitchen staff always function with impeccable teamwork. Unlike the poor lads in this video clip.

Working-Class Gastronomy (Having A Larf)

2009-09-03T09:19:00.009+02:00

Much as I'm a massive fan of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, it's hard to ignore the fact that he was born in Hampstead, educated at Eton and Oxford and has children named Oscar, Freddy and Chloë. However you perceive HF-W, as he's affectionately known by eco-foodie fans, it's certainly not as a working-class culinary hero. Step forward Dave Myers and Si King. OK, so Dave attended grammar school and both men developed media careers, but nobody watching Hairy Bikers can fail to recognise that Dave and Si both originate from northern working-class backgrounds. Why is that important? Because it took HF-W many years to gain the level of public acceptance he now enjoys, whereas Dave and Si are going down with ordinary folk like a plate of bangers and mash with onion gravy. Which is the reason for this post.

In their latest series The Hairy Bikers' Food Tour of Britain, the leather-clad foodie duo are doing something quite exceptional that's really rung my bells. They're bridging the gap between comfort food and fine dining - not in the usual patronising middle-class way but with all the honesty and joy of ordinary people discovering the better things that life has to offer. And that, I hope, will encourage a lot more young people from non-privileged backgrounds to raise their aspirations and train in this wonderful business.

The format of this series involves visits to thirty counties across the British Isles, meeting local people, visiting food producers and cooking the county's traditional favourite in front of a local audience. The boys are then pushed beyond their comfort zone in a cook-off against one of the best chefs in the county, the challenge being to create a fine dining dish using local produce that typifies the area.

In order to give you a taste of the fine dining side of the show, I've had to edit out some really enjoyable material in which Dave and Si source local produce and cook in public. You'll have to tune in on BBC2 from 17:15 to 18:00 Monday to Friday between now and October 2nd to catch the whole show, or pick it up on BBC iPlayer. Meanwhile, here are extracts from Episodes 3 and 5, in which the Hairy Bikers visit Fermanagh and Shropshire and cook against Noel McMeel of the Catalina Restaurant at Lough Erne and Will Holland of the Michelin 1* La Bécasse in Ludlow, respectively.

Noel McMeel can't keep a straight face in the cook-off, but still manages a smile when The Bikers win

Will Holland only just out-cooks The Bikers, despite serving up a dish well worthy of his Michelin star

Apparently, so many top chefs explain how they sear their meat "to stop the juices from flowing out" that The Bikers are thinking seriously of inviting Harold McGee to come on tour with them in Series 2. By the way, Dave, Kiev isn't a Russian city. Not if you ever want to be allowed into Ukraine, it isn't!

Sugar Daddy

2009-08-28T19:00:00.004+02:00

Every now and again I'm lucky enough to meet someone truly inspirational. The other day a visitor to the kitchen shook my hand, smiled warmly and told me that I'd be welcome to come and work at his family business in Alicante one day. It was a massive boost to the confidence of a young pastelero, coming from one of the world's greatest pastry chefs. Maybe one day I'll feel ready to seek a secondment with this master of the trade. In the meantime, let me introduce you to Francisco 'Paco' Torreblanca.

Born in Villena in Alicante in 1951, the grandson of bakers and pâtissiers, Paco started work in bakery at the age of 13. A year later, his father sent him to Paris to apprentice with Jean Millet, a friend from the Spanish Civil War who had become a Meilleur Ouvrier de France and one of France's greatest pâtissiers. Following the death of Spain's dictator Franco, Torreblanca returned to Alicante, married Chelo Coloma and moved to the city of Elda. In 1978 they opened Totel (named after the Japanese term for the first rays of daylight). A decade later, Paco was named Best Master Pastry Chef of Spain and he was awarded the European title in 1990. International recognition came with elaborate sugar sculptures made in tribute to Pablo Picasso, including Guernica and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - causing some to call him "The Picasso of Pastry".

Paco has won numerous prizes for his confectionery creations - from the most delicate bonbones and financiers to the most complex cakes - including a 7ft masterpiece combining olive and pumpkin seed oil, dark Tanzanian chocolate, hazelnut mousse and Marcona almonds for the wedding of the Prince of Asturias, Felipe de Borbón y Grecia, heir to the Spanish throne. Paco's CV is nothing short of awesome.

My connection with Paco Torreblanca is much more than our common occupation of pastelero. My own father is almost exactly the same age as Paco and, in Joel and myself, has two sons of similar age. The Torreblanca family have Jewish roots dating back to before the C14th when they crossed the mountains from France and settled in Spain. Paco's sons Jacob and David are named in honour of this heritage, just as my brother Joel was named in honour of my grandmother who fled from Poland to escape German fascism. Jacob is a world-class pâtissier in his own right - winner of Spain's Best Desserts Chef in 2003 and World Sub-Champion Desserts Chef in 2004.

Despite a history of oppression, both families look outward to the world for inspiration - in particular to the artistic contribution of Japanese cuisine to world gastronomy. Always more interested in pushing the envelope than perfecting the art of the establishment, Paco thrived in the "anarchical and liberal" culinary atmosphere of post-Franco Spain. Those who know me will recognise the maverick affinity.

Paco's refusal to accept the artificial division between cook and patissier pioneered a culinary movement represented in succeeding generations by Albert Adrià of El Bulli and Jordi Butrón of Espai Sucre. "One of the most important things I learned", says Paco, "is that the pastry should be in continuous development... experimenting with new products from all corners of the world... looking for pairings of fruits and products from all countries. But the really essential, without sacrificing the above, is not to forget our gastronomic roots." You just couldn't sum up my own philosophy more perfectly.

Paco put that philosophy into practice when he began to substitute Spanish olive oil for French butter in his pastries and chocolates, re-introducing the baking techniques of an earlier Spanish generation. His Catalan compatriots were inspired to do the same, reconstructing the pre-war snack of chocolate, olive oil and salt and raising it to a truly gastronomic level. My own affinity for Catalunya reflects a connection between Paco and Catalunya established nearly twenty years ago when two little-known brothers from the Costa Brava came to stage with Torreblanca in his pastelería. Those two young trainees were Ferran and Albert Adrià.

In recent years, Paco has been recording his life work in a series of publications. His eponymous book Paco Torreblanca introduced readers to plated desserts, cakes, sugar and isomalt decorations, chocolate and chocolates, artistic compositions and traditional doughs. It also covered postres complements, including different types of tea and coffee and the pairing of wine with cakes and desserts.

Paco followed this up with Paco Torreblanca 2 in which he explored new techniques, adding creative value to simple ideas with sections on crunchies, dry meringues and milks, sugar candies and caviars, brioche and financier cakes, vegetable crystals and pañuelos. And he addressed both sweet and savoury pastries.

Last February Paco Torreblanca announced the publication of Colección. Piezas de Azúcar (Collection. Sugarworks), which he considers to be "undoubtedly the most personal and creative book that I have ever written". In this latest work, he addresses the work that has obsessed him in recent years - the creation of elaborate, artistic sugar works falling "between architecture and sculpture". He explains the techniques of pulling, blowing, casting, spinning and bubbling sugar and includes sections on candy sugar, fondant pulled sugar, cracked glass sugar and isomalt blocks. The results, in the hands of a master, are magical reinterpretations of familiar shapes that alternate between opacity and transparency, playing on light and shadow and simply begging to be eaten.

So, once a youthful "anarchist", now a late middle-aged man firmly entrenched in respectable, bourgeois Spanish society? Not a bit of it! Last November at the tenth Congress of Lo Mejor de la Gastronomía in the Kursaal Palace in Donostia-San Sebastián, Paco caused something of a stir by serving delegates a chocolate dessert containing dried cannabis leaves, explaining to the bemused attendees that marijuana offers aromatic and aesthetic qualities that are ideal for postres. Mind you, this gains no prizes for originality. Baking with this ingredient is a well-established pastime, allegedly.

There's not a huge amount of publicity material for Paco Torreblanca on the web, but the video clip on the right shows him demonstrating just a few of his amazing skills. These desserts are all perfectly legal and the voiceover is in Spanish, but I'm sure you'll enjoy watching the clip all the same. Watch Paco demonstrating some sugar techniques that he makes look so easy. Believe me, it's much more difficult than it looks in this masterclass demonstration. I'm still working on perfecting my own skillset.

Thanks to fran_noche for the video link.

Hop, Step, Jump, 17.73... Simples!

2009-08-20T16:44:00.006+02:00

A few days ago I celebrated the third anniversary of my blog and talked about how far I'd come in those past three years. In August 2006 I was still at catering college when a former student from Raine's Foundation, my school in London's East End, came a poor fifth in the European Athletics Championships.

One year later, as I started my voyage towards professional status, he won European honours. In 2008, as I became a chef de partie in a Michelin-starred restaurant, he became World Indoor Champion. This year I'm doing well, but Phillips Idowu is doing even better. On Tuesday night he became World Triple Jump Champion. He inspires me to the unshakeable belief that, no matter where you start out in life, you can reach the skies if you really want it.

Postcript

This edited interview of Phillips Idowu by Richard Bacon on Radio 5 Live echoes everything I've said about hard work, aspiration, perseverance, supportive teachers, mountains and foothills, Rudyard Kipling's two imposters and everything that can be achieved if you really want it badly enough.

TGRWT #18 - Reminder Of Closing Date

2009-08-17T09:57:00.006+02:00

As host of They Go Really Well Together (TGRWT) Round 18, I've invited food bloggers and professional chefs to come up with interesting and tasty dishes that combine plum and blue cheese.

If you haven't found time to try something out yet, don't panic. You've got another two weeks until the deadline of September 1st. All you have to do between now and then is to prepare a dish using plum and blue cheese (either an existing recipe or your own invention), write up your preparation on your own blog with at least one photo and some comments about how the flavour pairing went. Then drop me an email or comment on my blog telling me where to find your write-up.

We've had some interesting submissions so far, ranging from snack food to fine dining and from a cave man's savoury/umami feast to the most intricate and delicate bitter-sweet dessert. And one would-be entrant who's got me excited by proposing to use plum in the form of a certain Slavic liqueur (well I did encourage thinking outside the box). So, come on and join in. You never know - you might just discover that, when you balance it with fruit, you quite like blue cheese after all.

Feeling Good In Leather

2009-08-13T09:02:00.008+02:00

Well, it was either leather or crystal... or fuchsia. They're all suitable presents for a third anniversary, but leather suits me best. Today is the third anniversary of this food blog and, looking at how far I've come in those three years, it's difficult even for me to believe it.

Back in August 2006 I'd just completed my second year at college and was enjoying the summer holidays. I'd written a letter to "The Father of Fusion" Peter Gordon asking for work experience, and been thrilled to be offered a two-week stage at The Providores. And I was about to experience two polar opposites, with a dreadful day working in the kitchens of Sketch Gallery and a fabulous day working at Zuma. I was getting my first tastes of work in a professional kitchen.

A year later, the comfort and security of college dissolved away. My diploma in hand, I was about to set off for Catalunya and a whole new set of experiences as a stagière in Barcelona. By last August that apprehensive, inexperienced stagière had been transformed into a chef de partie in a Michelin-starred restaurant, confident in his ability to run an entire section of a fine dining kitchen.

Now, one year on I'm a chef de partie in a newly relaunched restaurant that is turning out some of the best food I've ever experienced, working under the direction of the man voted Spain's Chef of the Year and - for the first time - able to make some creative input into a fine dining restaurant menu. I'm still blogging away, although it's getting harder by the day to find the spare time. I know that I'm never going to be a famous blogger. But I may well be a famous chef one day... and I'll never forget the experiences, the friends and the pleasure that food blogging has brought me during these three years.

Cambodian Food

2009-08-05T23:08:00.003+02:00

In August 2005, celebrating a successful end to my first year at catering college, I spent a few weeks travelling across Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Like most Londoners, I already had a pretty good idea about Vietnamese and Thai cuisines - but I knew absolutely nothing about Cambodian cooking. What I discovered during my brief visit opened my eyes to a truly world-class culinary tradition. When I returned home, it was Khmer food that I was talking about with the greatest enthusiasm.

Of course I didn't visit Cambodia just for the food. There was also the small matter of the remnants of a great empire that dominated South-East Asia during the Middle Ages. An empire that coalesced the best of Chinese and Indian cultures... including their food. That pinnacle of Khmer civilisation lives on today in the form of UNESCO World Heritage Site Angkor, where the temple complex of Angkor Wat draws ever-increasing numbers of foreign tourists, including me. I'm in the foreground in one of my many Portuguese football shirts!

"Cambodian cuisine, arguably long underrated", says Wikipedia, "is finally beginning to win recognition from food lovers for its subtle flavour and its wide range of unique indigenous dishes." Whoever wrote that entry has some issues with spelling, but no problem with his or her palate. Khmer food is based around river fish as the main source of protein, rice as the source of carbohydrate, a wide variety of vegetables and fruits and a unique blend of "Indian" and "Chinese" spices - turmeric, tamarind, galangal, cardamom, star anise, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemongrass, garlic, coriander and kaffir lime leaves. And then there's the country's speciality prahok, or fermented fish paste, which gives so many dishes a unique flavour. And last but not least the legacy of a century of French colonialism - la baguette.

Recently arrived in my TV goody bag was the latest food travelogue - Rick Stein's "Far Eastern Odyssey" - and episode 1 is set in Cambodia. I should warn you that Rick displays some of those colonial attitudes that typify his generation and sound quaintly racist to someone of my age. But his heart's in the right place, despite his insistence on referring to things as "oriental" and "exotic" and never having seen a dragon fruit before. He certainly doesn't shy away from discussing the nightmare years of The Killing Fields and discussing the cultural impact of Khmer Rouge rule on the country and its cuisine. In these edited clips, I've removed the political discussion - not because I don't think it important, but because I'm severely limited by restrictions on YouTube. I hope you enjoy this glimpse of Khmer cooking.

Announcing They Go Really Well Together #18 - Plum And Blue Cheese

2009-07-29T10:06:00.006+02:00

I'm delighted to host round 18 of They Go Really Well Together, better known as TGRWT.

Launched in April 2007 by Martin of blog.khymos.org, TGRWT is all about unusual flavour pairings - combining culinary ingredients in ways that we aren't familiar with from classical cooking. The scientific hypothesis behind these experiments is that if two foods have one or more key odorants in common, they might go well together and perhaps even complement and enhance each other. With the advent of modern analysis tools and the establishment of the Volatile Compounds in Food Database, this research has become much easier to undertake. But, as they say, the proof of the pudding...

I wrote an article on this topic for the Word Of Mouth blog in March 2008, in which I discussed flavour combinations drawn from Martin's research, the work of Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal and my own humble experimentation. Examples include chocolate & salt, cocoa & garlic, strawberry & coriander, trout & peppermint, mango & pine, liver & jasmine, carrot & violet, banana & parsley, harissa & apricot and saffron & beetroot. Several of these have been investigated in earlier rounds of TGRWT - with varying degrees of success.

For this round of TGRWT, running through the month of August, I've chosen plum and blue cheese. Your plums could be anything from Victoria to Mirabelle (or even greengages) and the cheese could be anything from Gippsland Blue to Dolcelatte to Roquefort. It's entirely up to you.

So, what do you need to do to take part in TGRWT 18?

1.	Prepare a dish combining plum with blue cheese (plus any other ingredients of your choosing). You can use an existing recipe (if you can find one), or come up with your own idea.
2.	Take a picture of the dish and write an entry in your blog by September 1st with TGRWT #18 in the title and a link back to here. Readers will be particularly interested to discover how the flavour pairing worked out, so make an attempt at describing the taste and aroma and whether you liked it or not. Don't be shy if things didn't work out the way you'd hoped. Only from the experience of failures do triumphs eventually surface!
3.	A round-up will be posted here in mid-September, with pictures and credits. Please email trig[dot]chef[at]gmail[dot]com with the following details: Your name, URL of your blog, URL of your TGRWT #18 post and a picture of your dish (in .png or .bmp format and at least 400px wide). If you don't have a blog, email me your name, location, recipe, photo and a brief description of how it worked out and I'll be glad to include you in the final round-up.

Lots of luck with your cooking - I'm looking forward to some creative and original submissions.

Something extra to round off the meal

As per the usual rules, you can produce either a sweet or a savoury dish to test this pairing and appear in the round-up. I've chosen ingredients that will allow either. But I'm a pastry chef, with a passion for balanced food that makes good use of the flavour spectrum. So I'm running a competition for the entrant who most impresses me with a plate that:

1.	Is a dessert dish (you can push the envelope a long way, but venison & plum cheesecake would be too far even for me!).
2.	Incorporates at least two flavours from the following options: salty, sour, bitter, umami, pungent, astringent. Being a dessert, your dish will probably also have a sweet dimension, but if you can pull off a successful dessert without the sweetness dominating, I'll be even more impressed.

Remember, you don't have to take part in this extra bit of fun, but if you are having a go then please make that clear in your email. The prize for the winning submission is that I'll develop a fine dining restaurant level version of your creation, with your name built into the title of the dish, and I'll try to have it incorporated into my menu at work. I can't promise to achieve this, but I'll do my very best.

Recommunicado

2009-07-25T16:48:00.002+02:00

Blogging is an interactive activity - you need to read, comment and engage with others as well as write about yourself. Over the past few weeks I've hardly managed to write about my own ups and downs, let alone communicate regularly with the family of food bloggers. In short, I've been incommunicado. It's time for me to offer my cyber-friends out there an apology and some sort of explanation.

Firstly, as I hinted in an earlier post, I was a bit surprised to find myself requested not to publish any specific information about the restaurant at which I'm working. I can see the logic behind such a ban, just as I can see an equally strong case for the opposite approach. My problem as a blogger is that I wasn't expecting to face restrictions in what I can write about what I've been doing - and it hasn't exactly made it easy for me to publish a blog about my real-life development from catering student to professional chef. That said, I must stress that my career comes first and the blog second - and my career is chef/restaurateur, not journalist. So risking my job for the thrill of a good story is not something I would consider. In any case when I give my word I stick to it, so I have no intention of breaking that confidentiality agreement.

Another reason for my cyber-silence has been the effort involved in taking up my new responsibilities. Every change of role brings with it a new set of strains and stresses, and my appointment to the position of Pastry Chef is no exception. In the early days it's often hard to find any spare time between working and sleeping during the week - that goes with the territory. But weekends offer a chance to relax and catch up with a bit of writing. Or at least that would be the case, were it not for a few communications problems I've had recently.

The main reason for my communications difficulties has been logistical. It's a sad excuse, but I'm a real city boy. London, where I was born and raised, is a city. Barcelona, where I've been living, is a city. Banyeres de Mariola, where I've been living for the past few weeks, is defined in Wikipedia as "a settlement". In non-Chaucerian language, it's a village. It's over 6km walk in the blazing sun to the nearest settlement in all directions, at least half that distance from my isolated place of work and the public omnibus runs once a day, if you're lucky. So when you meet a patch of diesel on a bend in the road and drive your car into a ditch, destroying the front bumper, lights and offside wheel... you've got a major logistical problem.

No doubt some eagle-eyed petrol head will point out that the car in the picture above, no matter how bad the lighting conditions, cannot possibly be my bright red Renault Clio. All I can say is, as with the accident itself, mea culpa. I took a stock photo from the web. When the accident happened I just didn't think to take a photo, although I did think about getting something to eat. That's exactly why I'm building a career as a chef/restaurateur and not as a journalist.

Mind you, road transport problems aren't half as problematic as when you discover that the inhabitants of the beautiful historic village of Banyeres de Mariola are blissfully unfamiliar with the term "broadband". Or leastways that they appear to be fully conversant with internet technology when it comes to equipping villas for wealthy summer visitors, but give you the right royal Spanish equivalent of a Gallic shrug when you enquire on behalf of student chefs. So I have to drive (when my car isn't in the local garage) into the nearest town and visit the library, or sit outside the station hotel sipping iced tea and taking advantage of the establishment's WIFI hot spot. Either that, or borrow my Catalan flatmate's 3G mobile internet router in the middle of the night and try to get a cell connection from the nearest hill-top.

Or that's how it worked when things were going well. You're beginning to get the picture now, aren't you?

First off, the owners of El Hotel L'Estacio conducted a profitability analysis and concluded that my internet bandwidth usage costs exceeded the profit on a can of Lipton Ice. All of a sudden, my hot spot became very cold. I realised that the library wasn't going to be an ideal alternative when the librarian proudly pointed out that their PCs were supplied by that clever man with the British TV programme "The Apprentice" and enquired as to whether I supported Tottingham Hotaspurs. And my flatmate met a girl in a far off town and decided to impress her by spending several consecutive weekends demonstrating the potency of his 3G mobile and its internet modem. I was, in the technical idiom, stuffed.

So that's why I've been incommunicado for the past few weeks. When a solution eventually came, it was from an unexpected quarter. One consequence of my appointment to a paid post was that I lost my right to the free accommodation provided by the restaurant for its stagières. Which meant I had to find myself somewhere new to live. And on Tuesday I relocated myself to a house-share with a friend - a house WITH BROADBAND ACCESS - and became... recommunicado! I may move again in a few weeks, but it will also be to a fully-equipped pad. So from now on I should be back to normal communications with everyone. Just as long, of course, as I'm able to keep all four wheels firmly on the tarmac.

Monsieur Le Pâtissier

2009-07-20T13:51:00.002+02:00

C'etait la fin des haricots. Les carottes ont été cuites. J'étais dans un beau pétrin. Mais je n'ai pas mis tous mes oeufs dans le même panier. Je n'ai pas eu le coeur d'un petit artichaut. J'ai appuyé sur le champignon. Et maintenant je suis le coq du village*. No, I haven't gone gaga - I'm just practising my French food-related clichés. Why? Because an Anglo-Spanish-speaking pastry chef somehow just doesn't sound right. At that's important, now that I'm a professional pastry chef.

I'm delighted to confirm that I signed a contract last week and have already taken on the full-time role of pastry chef here at Restaurante Ferrero. With my three month stage due to finish in a few weeks time, Head Chef asked me to join his team and I've been thrilled to accept the offer.

There is a point to my attempt at humour above, of course. Most lay people visualise a pastry chef as a cheerful, pompous, distinctly French character with a figure like Napoleon on a bad day, outsized headwear, an onion-seller's moustache and arms permanently outstretched to display trays of freshly baked croissants. This may be true in an ordinary hotel pastry department, but not in a modern gastronomic restaurant. So what exactly is my role as pastry chef? Let me explain.

When most people think of a pastry chef, they think of baking. A classic pastry chef is responsible for the production of the baked goods in a kitchen - pastries, pies, cakes, tarts, cheesecakes, quiches, petit fours, flans, breads, etc. But in the modern fine dining environment, the pastry section only retains that title by habit. What is meant by pastry is the desserts section, or postres as it is known here in Spain. The job has much more to do with ice creams, sorbets and gelées than with bread or cakes, and I use far more gelatine sheets and inverted sugar than bags of flour and baker's yeast.

As someone whose goal is to make sous chef and eventually head chef of a top-class fine dining restaurant before ultimately opening my own place, this is a fantastic opportunity. Whether or not I continue to specialise as a pastry chef in the longer term, working in pastry now will be invaluable in giving me the breadth of experience needed to make a good sous chef in the future. So I intend to take this opportunity very seriously and put everything I've got into making it as successful as I possibly can.

It's been two weeks since I last posted and I've also been very remiss in not visiting other food blogs or replying to emails recently. Why? All will be revealed in my next post, so watch this space.

Literally: It was the end of the beans. The carrots were cooked. I was in a beautiful kneader. But I didn't put all my eggs in one basket. I didn't have the heart of a small artichoke. I stepped on the mushroom. And now I am the village cockerel. Figuratively: It was the last straw. I'd had it. I was in a right mess. But I covered my bets. I stuck my ground. I increased my effort. And now I'm very proud.

So You Thought It Was Easy, Eh?

2009-07-06T21:45:00.004+02:00

It's not often that I get an opportunity to give you a glimpse inside the world of the professional kitchen. I've yet to experience a Head Chef inviting me to bring my Fuji to work so he can take snaps of me enjoying my daily routine, let alone encouraging me to bring in a friend with a shoulder-mounted Panasonic to follow me round shooting video clips. At some top restaurants, including the one in which I'm currently working, the publication of photographs and comments about dishes and their preparation is expressly forbidden as a condition of employment. So I was excited the other day when I found some serious footage of life in a Spanish Michelin-starred kitchen. Well, I say serious footage...

Yes, I'm afraid you're right. It's a reality TV programme about cooking in a Michelin-starred kitchen rather than the real thing. I did, after all, say "a glimpse inside the world of the professional kitchen" in my introduction. The reason I've made the effort to bring you the clips below is that they convey something of the sheer terror experienced by an amateur cook in a professional kitchen. It's a feeling I well remember from my own first tentative steps into the world of fine dining. What makes it worse is that the victim in this instance is no ordinary, shy, home cook. Nadia Sawalha is an actress and presenter, well used to being thrown into hot spots. Moreover, she won Celebrity Masterchef 2007, so she knows a thing or two about cooking. Or does she..?

Before you enjoy the video I should explain the context. Nadia's task has been set by Jean-Christophe Novelli, although she doesn't know this at the outset. She only discovers his identity when she eventually cooks his lunch at Restaurante Tragabuches in Ronda, Andalucía. So when, at the start, she says to camera: "I bet you wish you had my job", she's referring to being in fabulous, sunny southern Spain - not waiting hand and foot on Jean-Christophe's every pleasure. Mind you...

Here's my insider's guide to the clips. Feel free to ignore my comments and move straight to the action.

Dead right...	Nadia's first task is to sit and taste the food that she is about to cook. I can't stress the importance of this enough. Before I apply for a new post, I always visit first to sample the food. Professional chefs don't cook by recipe but by instinct and palate. The running order is passion, art, technique. In these clips you see what happens when all three of these let you down just a little bit. Combine all three and you have a truly great dish.
Just for UK television...	"Spain's very own, no-nonsense, in-your-face answer to Gordon Ramsay." If it doesn't effing mention effing Ramsay, it ain't effing British TV cooking.
Sing us another one...	"[Head Chef]... has something different to anybody else. He's got a little bit of a temper... Benito doesn't take any prisoners." Actually, Benito Gómez was brought back to introduce a degree of calmness and stability back to Tragabuches in 2005 after wünderkind Dani García (now at the brilliant Restaurante Calima) reputedly started to impersonate Scott Hastings in Strictly Ballroom and introduce more and more unorthodox ideas into his art. Every Head Chef has "a little bit of a temper" and Benito is no exception, but I'm sure he's far from the worst. Toughness goes with the territory.
Yes, it really is true...	Pro kitchens are sometimes even smaller than this one. How does everyone work in such a small space? Not easy, but you get used to it. And compactness helps when several chefs are simultaneously plating up a dish while also looking after those on their own sections.
Pastry cheffing is bloody hard...	Poor Nadia. If her ice cream is too cold it won't scoop. If it's too warm it will destroy the texture of her crispy pineapple crackling. It's a bitch.
Timing is everything...	1. Perfect execution + late delivery = bin. 2. "It's 7am and already Benito is lying in wait for Nadia. She's five minutes late." Bad idea.
Everyone stops to watch...	Other chefs only stop work when you're Nadia Sawalha and they are enjoying watching you trying your damndest but ultimately failing to get the dishes the way they should be.
So that's what they were for...	You didn't believe me when I wrote about my tweezers and cut-throat razor, did you? Slice the tomato with the cut-throat and pluck the hake bones with the tweezers. Perfecto!
For a ha'porth of tar...	Just one crystal of Maldon salt - but what an important component to forget! The tomato soup dish requires such complexity and perfection of execution, yet is totally transformed by that one crystal. Just like my favourite Catalan dish of chocolate, olive oil and salt.
You're never alone...	"To be able to walk into a kitchen like this and to be able to have responsibility for making dishes by yourself...Bravo!". Actually, although as a chef de partie you have responsibility for all your section's dishes, it's rare for any individual to contribute every single element of a dish. Cooking at this level is a collaborative effort and you need to be a team player. Also, you're unlikely to find yourself working on starters, mains and desserts on the same service. But that's TV licence... and, on the BBC, that's something we pay for!
Enjoy it...	"If I've got a bit of advice to give to Nadia it's very simple - enjoy it". No, this is not Jean-Christophe's chat-up line but his advice that, as in most fields of endeavour, good work and stress are incompatible. "Air-lift me out of here, right now!" Relax, girl. And try not to set fire to the place.

As with all TV celebrity cooking programmes, the reality is that some poor sod had to leave his own section every two minutes to help out, while still delivering his own orders. If it wasn't for that unsung hero, Nadia's output would probably have been a disaster. Still, at least he presumably got the Equity walk-on, non-speaking, TV supporting artist's rate of £83.80 plus repeat fees. Whereas someone like me can look forward to a 14-hour working day on contract for about €35 a day, or absolutely nothing if employed on a training stage. But then who said this profession was well-paid?

Oh, yes. I knew there was something I forgot to mention. In the real world we don't just serve dishes like these one at a time. I've had groups of up to 25 customers ordering a menú degustación... and that means plating up 25 identical dishes in parallel - and then repeating the exercise for the other courses on the menu for which I'm responsible. And some tasting menus have 12 or more dishes. I thought I'd throw that in, just in case you were getting over-confident. But I don't want to sound arrogant. I also f**k up from time to time and Nadia did really well, help or no help. Very few amateurs would do better. But then who said this profession was easy?

It's A Small World

2009-06-28T11:24:00.004+02:00

It's a small world - and getting smaller by the day. But despite cheap air fares and the relative ease of crossing national borders, I still haven't managed to visit very many of the world's countries. Just 19 at the last count, or 10% of the world's 192 UN Member States.

But what can't be achieved in the real world can be done in the wonderful virtual world of the web. Although I can't talk directly to most of the planet's diverse peoples, I can extend an arm of friendship through the medium of the internet. So far this month my blog has received visitors from 116 different UN Member States. To all of them, and to readers from an additional 31 UN Member States who visited me earlier in 2009 - thank you for stopping by here and do come back again soon.

To everyone in Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burma, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Kinshasa, Cuba, Djibouti, East Timor, Equatoral Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Malawi, Mali, Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Nauru, Niger, North Korea, Palau, Rwanda, Samoa, San Marino, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Suriname, Togo, Tome & Principe, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu and Vanuatu - I know that poverty, lack of infrastructure and, in some instances, political interference can make internet access difficult if not impossible, but do visit me if you can. You'll be very welcome.

Maps courtesy of World66.

Feasting On The Silk Road

2009-06-22T19:14:00.009+02:00

When the first weblogs appeared just over a decade ago, they were exactly that - logs or diaries on the web. Food blogs soon emerged in which the authors, keen to share their daily experiences with a global audience, described their home cooking activities and favourite recipes. Some still do that with a consummate professionalism that utterly belies their amateur or semi-professional status - Kalyn Denny's Kalyn's Kitchen and Elise Bauer's Simply Recipes are just two of many shining examples.

After a while, new types of food blog began to emerge. These were the products of writers with a different mission - to educate, inform and entertain in areas of specialist knowledge and expertise. Regular readers of this blog will know that, with no disrespect to the former group, it is this latter group of food bloggers that most turns me on. Especially those who attempt something radically new - those who tread where none have stepped before.

Laura Kelley is such a radical author and I fell in love with her blog the moment I first came across it. So I was delighted to discover that Volume One of Laura's cookbook trilogy, The Silk Road Gourmet, is about to be published by iUniverse and thrilled to be invited to review it. Laura describes herself as a renaissance woman - and as someone who can lay claim to being a writer, public health analyst, anthropologist, photographer, musician, wife, mother and much traveled gourmet, that seems like a well-deserved title. I've been unfair in calling her work a cookbook because it's far more than just a collection of recipes. The Silk Road Gourmet is a voyage of discovery in cultural anthropology that, like the blog that spawned it, examines the cuisines of those societies that flourish along those ancient trading routes between Asia and The Mediterranean that we've come to know collectively by the epithet The Silk Road.

Over some 3,000 years of history, those routes formed a conduit through which thousands of merchants traded silks, satins, perfumes, medicines, jewelry, glassware and human slaves from China in the east to Rome in the west. And they introduced items of food produce and spices - fresh, dried, ripe, in seed form, ground and as oils - to societies which had never encountered them before and which readily incorporated them into their national cuisines. Laura explains: "I began to notice distinct patterns in the use of ingredients by Asian peoples sometimes separated by thousands of miles. For example, pomegranates — the use of which began in Iran in antiquity — are now common ingredients from Georgia... to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.... Successive Persian Empires ruled all of these areas at one time or another... Another example can be found in the distinctly Southeast Asian elements present in Sri Lankan cooking. In this case, lemongrass and roasted rice reveal strong connections between the island nation and countries of that region. Consulting the histories of trade and diplomacy... we find out that there was a vibrant maritime trade... that Sri Lanka had with Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia."

Most of us have some degree of familiarity with the food of the Indian sub-continent, Malaysia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam and some of the many distinct cuisines of China. But if you want to discover something of the amazing culinary world of such countries as Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan, Nepal, Tibet, Burma, Bhutan, Indonesia, Mongolia, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, The Philippines and Taiwan and how these cuisines have come to be inter-related through the influence of the passage of trade along The Silk Road, then these books are for you. Of course, you don't have to share Laura's anthropological interest in order to enjoy these works. Full of recipes that can be prepared in as little as 15-30 minutes, you can just open a volume, turn on the cooker and settle down for a delicious feast. I'll be doing exactly that!

Volume One - Western and Southern Asia - will be available from the end of June 2009 through Amazon online and from Barnes & Noble. Volume Two - The Fusion Cusines of Central Asia, the Himalayas and the Pacific and Volume Three - Eastern Asia and the Pacific - publication dates will be announced later. For more information, see Silk Road Gourmet books section.

The End Of The Line

2009-06-15T23:19:00.007+02:00

"Imagine an ocean without fish. Imagine your meals without seafood. Imagine the global consequences. This is the future if we do not stop, think and act." This is the stark message brought to us all by Charles Clover, former Environment Editor of The Daily Telegraph and author of The End Of The Line, made into a documentary film by Director Rupert Murray and released in British cinemas this week. Unsustainable use of marine resources is a subject that's very important to me - I'm proud to have carried the logo of The Marine Stewardship Council in my sidebar for a long time now.

Murray's film should do for our oceans what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change - bring the issue of unsustainable fishing into the public consciousness and shame governments around the world into action. Over-fishing means entire species of fish are under threat and the most important stocks will be in a state of collapse by 2050. The film points the finger at those most to blame - including celebrity chefs - and shows what we can do about it. This is not just a film - it's a campaign for sustainable consumption of fish, for marine protected areas to allow the sea to recover and for a new ethic of responsible fishing.

The End Of The Line campaign is supported by conservation organisations and individuals world-wide.

Organisations include Bite-Back, The Blue Ocean Institute, COAST, The Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace, The Marine Conservation Society, The Marine Foundation, The Marine Stewardship Council, Monterey Bay Aquarium, The Natural Resources Defense Council, Oceana, The Pew Institute for Ocean Conservation Science, The Project AWARE Foundation, Save The Whales Please, The Sea Turtle Restoration Project, The Shark Trust, The Waterloo Foundation, The Wildlife Trusts and WWF and individuals include HRH The Prince of Wales, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Ted Danson, Greta Scacchi, Emilia Fox, Terry Gilliam, Sienna Miller, Jemima Khan, Laura Bailey, Alicia Silverstone, Charlize Theron, Zac Goldsmith, Sting, Trudie Styler, Geri Halliwell, Stephen Fry, Richard E. Grant, Elle Macpherson and Lenny Henry.

We can all do our little bit in different ways. Scacchi, Fox and Gilliam posed naked in a stunt aimed at drawing media attention to the campaign to save the bluefin tuna. I'll pass on that one - but as a chef, I pledge to campaign for fellow chefs to remove endangered species from menus and as a future restaurateur only to serve fish ethically sourced from sustainable stocks. The film has already prompted retailers such as Marks & Spencer and Pret à Manger to announce new policies on sustainable fishing, the removal of endangered tuna species and the switch to pole and line methods of catching in which Sainsbury's and Waitrose had already taken a lead. Some celebrity restaurateurs such as Aldo Zilli have already stepped forward to make the most important first step - removal of the bluefin tuna and other critically endangered species from their menus, along with the restaurant chains of Soseki, Moshi Moshi, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver, Itsu and others. The devil of the piece, widely reported in the media including one of my favourite news sources The Kitchen Rat, is Nobu. The global chain of Japanese restaurants favoured by the rich and famous continues to serve bluefin tuna, despite the global campaign. Nobu Berkeley Street has added a note to the menu pointing out the threat to the bluefin and inviting diners to ask for an alternative. It's hard to find words to describe such an attitude.

I can't get to see the film myself as I'm working long hours including evening shifts here in Spain. But I can urge you to seek out a UK screening or a US screening if you are in those countries and to hunt out details if you are elsewhere. Meanwhile, here's an early version of the promotional clip for the movie:

If, even after that, you're still addicted to those tuna sandwiches and don't know what to do for a replacement, Matthew Fort in The Guardian has some useful suggestions. If you are still unable to break the habit, Sophie at Mostly Eating can offer you tips on ethical buying of tuna.

Strawberry And Coriander

2009-06-08T11:30:00.004+02:00

Pork and apple, tomato and basil, and duck and orange are just a few examples of classical food pairings that are recognised and reproduced across the world's cuisines. Then there are less well-known flavour combinations such as avocado and lobster, spinach and nutmeg and chocolate and salt. These emerged through centuries of experimental home cooking and became an integral part of regional cuisines. But there are other pairings that emerged only with the benefit of modern science. Molecular gastronomy, through identification of common volatile compounds, brought us cocoa and garlic, mango and pine, trout and peppermint, liver and jasmine, carrot and violet and banana and parsley.

Strawberry & coriander is a combination that first came to my attention a couple of years ago. Hosted by Evelyn Grauen of Bounteous Bites as a challenge to cooks and a part of the Molecular Gastronomy series They Go Really Well Together from Martin Lersch's blog.khymos.org, this pairing competition received a great response across the food blogs. I assumed at the time that it was a novel idea, but it soon became clear that the pairing had some history. There were suggestions at the time that it might have originated with Ferran Adrià, but I've seen no evidence of that. Nicola & Bill Donnelly from Melbourne, on the other hand, photographed this hearty Aussie Breakfast of Champions in January 2001.

Along with foamy strawberries with coriander from Martin of blog.khymos.org, responses to TGRWT3 included berry guacamole from Johanna at Green Gourmet Giraffe, strawberry and cilantro terrine from Helene of Neues aus der Kueche, strawberry salsa from Amrite at Le Petite Boulangette, strawberries with campari and coriander filling from Robert of lamiacucina, roasted coriander ice parfait with marinated strawberries and green tea sauce from Klaus of der Kompottsurfer, coriander custard with fresh strawberries from Alexis at See Us Eat, strawberry shortcakes with a coriander buttermilk biscuit and balsamic cream from Mari Gordon of Mevrouw Cupcake, avocados with strawberry salsa on crispy tortillas from Jen at Milk and Cookies, strawberry and coriander smoothie and strawberry and coriander dessert from Dennis of Kookjegek and strawberry-coriander cake with coconut glaze from my good friend Sarina Nicole at TriniGourmet. Thanks to Martin for letting me use these thumbnail photos.

There have been several other dishes created since - a scan through Flickr or a search through the food blogs reveals several inventive combinations. But the reason I'm writing this post is because of one particular dish that nearly didn't come to fruition... but eventually did.

One night early last summer while I was working in the kitchens at Comerç 24, I observed Head Chef Arnau Muñío experimenting with some new creations. He was trying various combinations with strawberries, but with no apparent success. "Why not try coriander?" I ventured, "...poaching the strawberries in a sugar syrup infused with coriander stalks and garnishing with a fresh coriander leaf". My initiative was not met with an enthusiastic response. I got the distinct impression that chef would never pair strawberries with coriander if he lived to be as old as Methuselah.

A few weeks ago, before leaving Barcelona, I spent a great celebratory couple of hours out on the town with Arnau and members of his kitchen team. Inbetween mojitos, Arnau leant across the table and clasped me firmly by the shoulder. "Let me tell you about this new dish I'm putting on the menu", he confided. "It's a great flavour combination and quite unique." You can guess what came next. There's still a very deep smile of contentment on my face now as I think about it.

Postscript: Martin Lersch has kindly invited me to host a round of TGRWT this summer, which I'll announce here later. Meanwhile, perhaps you'd like to suggest the topic for my round via a comment on this post. Here are the food pairings explored thus far and here is a list of possible combinations.

Deconstructing Bourdain

2009-05-31T09:30:00.002+02:00

Back in 2006, before his highly-publicised bust-up with the Food Network, my favourite cook-scribbler Anthony Bourdain worked with the communications organisation on a TV production resulting in the multi-media publication Decoding Ferran Adrià. The other day I came across this ten-minute clip on YouTube, edited and uploaded by skinnylatte, aka. Adrianna, from Singapore. If you haven't already seen it, watch it (a) to learn something about Adrià, (b) to learn even more about Bourdain, (c) for the sheer delight of experiencing a soupçon of El Bulli.

Just bear in mind before you start that the name Anthony Bourdain is usually associated with such biting adjectives as "acerbic", "cynical" and "belligerent"... and that "lost for words" is not a phrase normally applied to one of the culinary world's most outspoken representatives. Note the difference between the poetic eloquence of Bourdain's post-production voice-over and his real-time struggle to find adequate words to describe his journey through The El Bulli Experience. Pull out a handkerchief and enjoy!

Part Of The Team

2009-05-24T09:46:00.004+02:00

Last week I made an excuse for not having written about my experiences at Restaurante Ferrero since I moved here to València in early May to start a three-month stage. Well now I can reveal all. In all fairness I did give a hint when I said "things have been moving so fast since I arrived...", but in truth that was something of an understatement. I actually found myself in the position of Acting Chef de Partie for the Starters section within two days of starting in the kitchen. It was a position of responsibility I'd come here to achieve, but when I drove up the hill from Bocairent that first morning I hadn't imagined in my wildest dreams it might happen just forty-eight hours later.

But that wasn't the end of matters. It soon became obvious that other moves and changes were in progress as Head Chef Paco shaped his new kitchen for the exciting challenges ahead. If being put in charge of a section in my first week came as a surprise, what was to happen two weeks later was truly a shock. Last Wednesday Paco called me into his office and asked how I'd feel about spending the remainder of my stage in training with a view to taking up a contract as Pastry Chef this summer. You don't turn down an offer like that... and I didn't.

I came to Spain a year and a half ago to work with chefs who could help me elevate myself from a graduate trainee to Head Chef material. It's a long and difficult climb up that mountain and I've never underestimated the effort and determination that would be required. I've also come to understand the importance of broadening one's experience to every aspect of the job - even if that involves taking big risks. I'm sure there will be some eyes popping open at the prospect of Aidan Brooks as a Pastry Chef, not least my pastry tutor Andrea Ruff at Westminster Kingsway College. But to become a successful Sous Chef you need to be able to manage and develop staff across all sections and it's never a great idea to criticise anyone for failing or omissions that you share with them.

My working here looked like a risky choice for both employer and employee. From my standpoint, having reached the point where I was being told by my Head Chef in Barcelona that I was ready for a Michelin 2* kitchen, but opting instead to work unpaid in a remote, little known, unstarred restaurant wasn't an easy call to make - especially as I had two contract offers and a paid stage offer in Michelin-starred kitchens in Catalunya and the Basque Country. For Head Chef, taking on someone so young and with so little professional experience when you have set such massively high goals for your restaurant looked equally unsafe.

But the truth is that neither of us really took a risk. I did my research properly before I packed my possessions and left Barcelona. I took advice and, when chefs and food writers for whom I have the utmost respect told me "that's a brilliant move", my decision became pretty much a no-brainer. Equally, Paco and his team made enquiries about me and I'm pleased that they proved positive. He also employed some techniques aimed at identifying staff motivation that I won't discuss any further, other than to say that the experience was very uncomfortable but I survived the test.

Over the coming months I'll write more about my experiences here, including picking wild flowers and herbs for the kitchen in the Sierra de Mariola Nature Park (see photo above). I would have like to have written up the meal I ate in the restaurant back in April, but the menu was still in development so I was asked not to publish photos of the dishes at that stage.

For now, let me just make the initial observation that, in my opinion, the kitchen here is already at Michelin 2* level in terms of the exacting standards of discipline, the quality and creativity of dishes, the facilities we are working with and the collective expectations of perfect execution. And if the kitchen is amazing, the hotel itself is nothing short of stunning. The video clip (left) is an extract from an advertisement on Australian TV Channel 9's ninemsn website, just after the refurbishment in 2007.

Restaurante Ferrero is a clear step up from my previous working environments and reminds me very much of one or two very famous 2* kitchens that I've had the privilege of being shown around. We're hoping that, come November, The Fat Man concludes that we have done enough to merit the award of a first star. I say "we", because I don't look at myself as merely an employee here, but as part of the team that is striving so hard to make this place successful. If we fail, I'll shoulder my share of the responsibility for that failure. I don't for one moment expect to find myself in that position.

The Cutting Edge

2009-05-19T19:14:00.006+02:00

I've been in Valencia for over two weeks now and I still haven't written a word about my new place of work, which must seem a bit odd to many of my regular readers. It's not for want of trying. I've sat down a couple of times to put fingers to keyboard, but things have been moving so fast since I arrived here at Restaurante Ferrero that I've not been comfortable about writing.

That will change soon, I promise you. In future posts I'll have some interesting tales to tell about my role in the kitchen, the people I'm working with, our chefs' apartment, picking wild herbs and flowers and weekend trips to the beaches of the Costa Blanca. So watch this space! Meanwhile... Two new additions to my collection of tools of the trade.

On the left: some very cutting-edge equipment - a cut-throat razor with a blade so sharp... well I don't think I need to remind you of Sweeney Todd, or of Mr. Blonde, dancing menacingly to the sounds of Stealers Wheel. I, on the other hand, have been using this deadly tool for altogether more innocent purposes, such as cutting edible flower petals into brunoise, preparing chives neatly into one inch sections and also splitting them down the length to make coiled chive ribbons for garnish.

On the right: fine tweezers which I definitely don't use to pluck my eyebrows in slack periods during service. These are for precisional placing of delicate and tiny components while plating up - very handy for fiddly items such as juliennes of pepper skin. All completely proper - but I can't help imagining what might happen if I was caught in possession of these by the police and told them that everything was OK because I'm a chef. Would they believe my stories of slicing flower petals and manipulating red pepper skins? Somehow, I doubt it. Maybe I should invent a more traditional southern Spanish explanation - that I specialise in the halal slaughter of small game birds followed by the plucking of awkward little feathers.