Aidan Brooks: Trainee Chef

Three Years, Three Michelin Stars

2009-11-26T22:35:00.006+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

2009-11-22T18:09:00.005+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

2009-11-20T19:45:00.002+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!

2009-10-14T23:51:00.002+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 Valèncian 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, Valèncian 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

2009-10-03T09:34:00.002+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 Valènciana. 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 Valènciana 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 Valènciana 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 Valènciana 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

2009-09-15T20:30:00.025+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 Valèncian 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

2009-09-09T09:44:00.002+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 València 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.