Add a touch of tripe to your coleslaw…

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Posted on October 16, 2015 by Tom Wheeler

Wandering past my local Sainsbury’s today, I was delighted to notice a poster in the window advertising various pieces of Halloween-related tat. Not that I’m particularly fond of Halloween, you understand; my happiness came from the hope that this new ad campaign might spell a merciful end for its predecessor.

In case you’ve been judiciously avoiding all media, social and otherwise, for the past month or so, I should probably explain what I’m on about. In its “Little Twists” campaign – I can’t quite bring myself to include the obligatory hashtag – Sainsbury’s encourages us to wax experimental with otherwise familiar meals, adding horseradish sauce to macaroni cheese, instant coffee to spaghetti Bolognese and pickled herring to banoffee pie. (I may have made one of those up.)

It’s not that I’m opposed to innovation in cooking – quite the contrary – although as I’ll come to in a moment, these suggestions aren’t really innovative at all. And I can just about accept the fact that they persuaded the otherwise impeccable Jarvis Cocker to do the voiceover – even though a little part of me dies every time I hear it. My greater problem – and admittedly, it’s a terribly self-centred one – is that people seem to think I must be all in favour of it. “Ah, that coffee Bolognese thing – that’ll be right up your street, won’t it, with, you know, your make-it-up-as-you-go-along no recipe whatnot?”

Well, it’s not up my street. It’s not even in my council ward, postal district or school catchment area. This isn’t creative cooking; it’s just babble – reminiscent of a concussed Manny in Black Books spouting jumbled-up entries from the Little Book of Calm. Not all of the suggested combinations are necessarily awful – Alison Lynch wrote in Metro that she’d tried out the coffee-in-Bolognese idea and found it surprisingly palatable – but that’s not really the point. The problem with the Sainsbury’s ads is that they represent the worst of all cooking worlds: miserable conformity, dressed up as innovation.

For all the [adopts best Christopher Morris voice] FURORE about this campaign – which, of course, is exactly what it was designed to generate – there’s nothing revolutionary about putting coffee in a Bolognese sauce. People – albeit not that many – have been cooking with coffee for years. It even gets a semi-honourable mention as a last minute stew addition in my own food bible, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Meat Book. It’s vaguely rich and vaguely savoury, and as such, makes a vaguely OK addition to most dark, meaty dishes – though a decent beef stock cube will do much the same job, but better.

Ultimately, just as you’ll struggle to come up with an idea that nobody’s had before (cf. every proprietary argument about a Twitter joke ever), there’s barely a combination of ingredients that hasn’t been explored. Be it coffee, Irn Bru or blue WKD, if you can drink it – and in this, blue WKD finds itself on the borderline – you can probably get away with bunging it into a casserole. As long as its predominant characteristics correspond roughly with the effect you’re after – coffee for savour, Irn Bru for sweetness or blue WKD for, er, blueness – you won’t go far wrong.

When it comes to adding the weird and not-so-wonderful to your food, the relevant question isn’t whether it’s right or wrong, or possible or impossible: it’s why you’d want to. Without a coherent answer to that question – an answer that might encompass flavour, colour, availability and necessity, among other factors – you’d be well advised not to bother, pending further investigation.

This is where the Sainsbury’s ads fall down: they rely on us asking “why not?”, rather than the more pertinent question “why?”. They remind me of QT, the forgotten-but-not-gone instant tea, which was advertised in its early ’90s “heyday” with the somewhat plaintive tagline: “Try it – you might like it.” (We did – and we didn’t.)

If you’re in the food business, and the best selling point you can come up with is “well, you never know, it might not be awful”, you probably need to ask some serious questions of your product development and/or marketing teams. Yet, nearly 25 years on, this is effectively what Sainsbury’s are doing. Moreover, it seems to be working, in that their sales of spaghetti and instant coffee have apparently boomed since the campaign began. Which just goes to illustrate one thing: we really are a bunch of pliant, unthinking, head-nodding numpties.

Why else would we go through the joyless exercise of making the same handful of largely boring meals again and again, to exactly the same prescription, then suddenly decide to stir utterly random things into them because some bright spark in an ad agency has planted the idea in our heads? I don’t believe in God, but if I did, this is exactly the sort of situation in which I’d implore him/her/it to help us.

This isn’t just an advertising phenomenon; it occurs on an even more startling level via food programming, when an ingredient used by a TV chef one day becomes virtually unobtainable the next, as thousands of us rush to mimic what we’ve just watched, because it seems easier than thinking for ourselves. How wonderful it is to live in a society in which we can think and do largely as we please; and how depressing to discover that, given the opportunity, we generally elect not to bother.

Is there a better way? Well, of course there is. And because I’m good to you, I’ve already taken the t roubl e to write about it. Just use the same skills you employ every time you pick a meal from a menu, or decide which components of your fry-up should form the next forkful. In other words, pick the flavour and texture combinations that seem right to you. Add something if it fits with what’s there already and the effect you’d like to achieve; and if it doesn’t, don’t. Develop your meal as you would a painting, pausing for thought before you add to it, and it will make sense in its final form, because every decision in its development will have been the product of your own critical analysis and taste.

And if, by that process, you end up adding coffee to your Bolognese, Monster Munch to your burger or Kia Ora to your duck, then that’s absolutely fine. You might just happen upon something surprising and wonderful. At worst, you ought to end up with something unusual (if not entirely new) but still edible.

More often, though, you’ll come up with a meal that may not be radical or outlandish, but is original nonetheless: your own creation, not one of Jamie’s, Nigella’s or Sainsbury’s(‘s). Instead of putting horseradish in your macaroni cheese, you might decide to add English mustard instead: similarly warming and spicy, but in both flavour and colour, a more appetising addition to the cheese sauce. And if you don’t feel like eating the same boring Bolognese, then make it with different meats, vegetables, herbs, cheeses, whatever. As long as you remember to think and taste as you go, it really will turn out fine.

And don’t worry too much about whether the dish still qualifies as a spaghetti Bolognese. If something tastes good, it doesn’t much matter what you call it. And in the extremely unlikely event that you get a knock on the door from the authenticity police, you’ll have an irrefutable defence: “At least I didn’t put instant f***ng coffee in it.”

Junk food for thought

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Tom Wheeler

This week’s episode of “No Shit, Sherlock” is brought to you by the consumer group Which?, whose analysis of the worthy-looking sandwiches and pasta salads we buy for our lunch indicates that they can can be as unhealthy as so-called junk food.

Today’s Guardian, in its analysis of the analysis, notes that “Caffè Nero’s brie and bacon panini was highlighted as having more calories (624) than a McDonald’s quarter-pounder with cheese (518)”.

All that surprises me about this is that we’re expected to find it surprising in the first place. Break down the two sandwiches into their constituent parts – bread, red meat and cheese – and there’s no meaningful difference. So what would possess anyone to imagine that the brie and bacon panini – or panino, for all you Italian grammar pedants out there – would be somehow healthier than a burger comprising much the same stuff?

Other findings reported in the Guardian article are similarly illuminating. Mayonnaise – a mixture of a little egg and vinegar and an awful lot of oil – is quite high in fat. Adding a packet of crisps and a bottle of Coke to your lunch will increase its calorie count.

The Which? report, and the fact that it appears to qualify as news, say little we didn’t already know about packaged food, but a great deal more about our relationship with brands. To be fair to Caffè Nero, I’m not sure they’ve ever advertised the offending panini as some kind of healthy option. But if you perceive McDonald’s as representing the very worst of everything, it’s only logical that you’d imagine anything with an M&S or Pret a Manger logo to be less bad for your physical and moral well-being.

The only problem with this is that it’s patent nonsense, and always has been. If we accept the vices and virtues of capitalism in all its other aspects, why would food be the exception? Everyone in the business of selling food, be it McDonald’s, Caffè Nero or your local kebab shop, wants you to buy their wares. Within the scope of the brands they’ve defined for themselves, they’ll try to sell you what you’re most likely to buy. And they don’t much care if you get fat, develop type 2 diabetes or die; unless, of course, their brands become widely associated with those things, which might affect their sales.

We overconsume certain types of food – meat, salt, fat, refined sugars and starches – because we like the way they taste. So it’s hardly surprising that our convenience foods, from the Big Mac to the mayo-laden chicken pasta salad, are packed with these food types. Any food vendor could change the composition of its products tomorrow to include less of any or all of them. But we’d enjoy them less, so we’d be less inclined to buy them; and so it would be commercial suicide.

Of course, the holy grail of food marketers is to convince us that we’re eating better when in fact we’re doing nothing of the sort. And if we really are willing to believe that one red meat and cheese sandwich is fundamentally healthier than another, it looks like they’re on to a winner. But if we pause for even a moment to assess what we’re about to eat, we can work out that the difference exists purely in our imagination.

Which? executive director Richard Lloyd has stated that he wants “all manufacturers to adopt traffic-light nutrition labelling […] so consumers can see exactly what products contain.” And who knows, maybe that would have some impact on what we buy; but I have my doubts. What I can say with rather more certainty is that the big vendors would do as they’ve done with all previous legislation to give us improved information about the food we buy: first, they’d resist it, then they’d circumvent it. (For a longer and more considered view on this particular topic, see this piece I published last year.)

Ultimately, if we genuinely do want to eat better – and I’m yet to be convinced we really do – the solution will be found not on food labels but through our senses, thoughts and actions. You don’t really need to be told that Subway bread is chock-full of sugar; you can taste it. (If you walk within a few yards of one of their outlets, you can even smell it.) Nor should you need a Which? report or Guardian article to tell you that most processed food contains a lot of not-so-good stuff; buying it will always represent an act of blind faith, even if the labels end up 90% covered in nutritional information.

As was always the case, the best way to be confident in what you’re eating is to buy unprocessed (or less processed) food and prepare it yourself. Your lunchtime pasta salad might contain almost anything; an orange, labelled or otherwise, is still an orange.

How much importance you place on all this is, of course, entirely up to you. Few of us have the time or inclination to eat the “right” thing all the time. And I’m certainly not averse to the odd double cheeseburger. But if you’re as surprised by today’s news as Which? seem to expect you to be, it might be time for a little more lateral thinking and a little less brand loyalty.

Labelled with Lies

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Tom Wheeler

“By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourselves.”

I don’t take quite such a hard line as Bill Hicks on marketing and advertising – like it or not, any product demands some degree of marketing, even if it’s as basic and innocent as telling a few friends about the existence of your blog – but I do have a certain sympathy with some aspects of his rant, if not with the ruthlessness of his solution.

So perhaps it’s a kindness of sorts that Hicks died so tragically young; because in the twenty years since his passing, marketers and advertisers have assumed an ever-growing and increasingly intrusive role in our lives.

TV commercial breaks have got longer, just as the bits of programming in between the ads have been opened up to legitimised product placement. Facebook and Google, among many others, tailor their advertising based on the information we’ve consciously or unwittingly provided about ourselves.

And on a less obviously sinister note, the continuing trend towards packaged food has created millions of additional canvases, all ready to receive the varyingly sophisticated daubings of the latest generation of marketers.

These range from the endearingly gormless – I recently saw a pack of fresh mint that extolled the product’s virtues as “an essential ingredient in mint sauce” – to more blatantly cynical spin around the relative healthiness of foodstuffs.

We’d all like to imagine we’re too smart to fall for the old “99% fat-free” trick, but if we were, no company would bother doing it. In practice, we tend to gloss over the second digit of the percentage figure, meaning that we don’t perceive much difference between products that are labelled as 99% and 95% fat free, even though one contains five times as much fat as the other. (And as this piece on the BS Health website points out – albeit rather shoutily – we’re even less likely to realise that if a food contains 5% fat by weight, that doesn’t equate to 5% of its calorific value: the true calories-from-fat percentage is more than twice that.)

Moreover, products that have been largely stripped of fat will often contain higher levels of salt and/or sugar, by way of taste compensation. This is why you’ll often read claims about processed foods being low in fat or sugar or salt; but rarely more than one of those, and almost never all three. (Professor Sandra Jones, of the University of Wollongong, usefully demystifies this and other food labelling tricks here.)

Similar examples of selective labelling are there to see on every supermarket shelf; but we only really notice the more amateurish and desperate efforts. A packet of crisps carries the boast of “no artificial colours”; but on brief reflection, we could have guessed at that – because they’re crisps, and they aren’t blue. There’s no equivalent claim around artificial flavours, and with extremely good reason.

Perhaps most insidious are the vices presented as virtues. The large majority of steaks now sold in supermarkets are vacuum packed soon after slaughter, thus minimising weight and water loss before sale and maximising profits for the retailer. They’ll still shed that excess water eventually, but not until you cook them; so ultimately you get less meat for your money.

Sitting in a bath of their own moisture, the steaks will still tenderise somewhat over time, but will be less tender and tasty than properly hung meat, because the tenderising effect of the meat’s natural enzymes is arrested by the vac-packing, and there’s no moisture loss to concentrate the flavours.

Nonetheless, because we’ve (correctly) come to perceive aged beef as good beef, the packaging will still carry the boast that the meat is “21 day matured”. The only problem is that most of those 21 days have been spent not hanging in a well-aired cooler, but sitting in an airless plastic wrap on the shelf of a fridge. It’s only marginally more appealing than the idea of 21 day matured milk.

Should we wish to buy properly aged beef – “dry-aged”, to use the new vernacular – we’ll pay heftily for the privilege. It’s almost certainly worth it; but it’s still galling to see a centuries-old method of meat preparation being presented to us as a luxury.

When you finally come to fry the steaks, there’s one last opportunity for misinformation: the cooking instructions on the packet. These take me back into my favourite “no recipe” territory; because if you allow a standardised prescription to take precedence over your own senses and judgement, you’re almost certainly destined for a disappointing meal.

Here are the cooking instructions for a Tesco fillet steak (source here):

Remove all packaging. Allow the meat to sit at room temperature for 10 minutes. Lightly brush each side of the steak with oil and season with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Fry in a very hot dry heavy based pan over a high heat for 2 minutes on each side to seal in the juices. Reduce to a medium heat and continue to cook for a further 9-11 minutes (rare), 11-13 minutes (medium) or 15-17 minutes (well done), turning once. Remove the steak from the pan and allow to rest in a warm place for 3-5 minutes. Add a knob of butter to the pan and allow to melt. Pour the cooking juices and butter over the steak and serve immediately.

Like any bad recipe, this is a prime example of too little information being worse than no information at all. One steak might be significantly thicker than the next, meaning that it’ll take longer to cook through to the middle; but there’s no place for such nuances in these standardised directions. And without any definition of what “high” or “medium” heat represents, the cook is left to guess what is meant, and the timings become essentially meaningless. (That said, even a thick fillet steak, cooked for a total of 15 minutes, will be a long way from rare; but then, your litigation-fearing retailer would much rather you ate a “safe” steak than a pleasant one.)

Furthermore, doing the initial frying over a high heat doesn’t actually “seal in the juices”; instead, it produces a charred exterior that greatly enhances the flavour. So there’s absolutely no point in setting your kitchen timer and giving the steak precisely two minutes on each side at the high heat; instead, your aim should be to get the meat well browned on all surfaces, as quickly as you safely can.

Not everything about the instructions is wrong-headed. As I’ve said, the initial high-temperature cooking is a good thing – just not for the reason specified – as is giving the steaks time to come towards room temperature before cooking (though ten minutes won’t make a lot of difference). But anyone who’s tempted to use them as a definitive guide would be far better doing an internet search for “how to cook steaks”, spending ten minutes reading over the results, and never again having to bother with the directions on the packet.

(As a further option, you could buy one of those purpose-built contraptions that claim to “take the guesswork out of cooking steaks”. Better still, you could use a simpler, cheaper and more traditional cooking tool: your hand.)

In fairness to Tesco, it’s not as if they’re any worse than their competitors when it comes to ludicrous cooking instructions. And unlike the “21 day matured” label, this is an example of the inadequacies of recipes generally, not of cynical marketing.

But just occasionally, the worlds of shabby marketing and false prescriptions come together in perfect disharmony. The outstanding example I’ve seen – “the crowning turd in the water pipe”, to borrow from General Melchett – can be found on packs of Waitrose minced beef.

At least this particular instruction is nice and straightforward:

Simply pan-fry for just 24-26 minutes.

Many a tweeter would envy the sheer quantity of nonsense Waitrose have managed to pack into 37 characters there – or, should I say, into “just 36-38 characters”. So let’s subject it to a little analysis.

Maintaining the Blackadder theme, it’s rather like the Prince Regent‘s definition of the word “a”: “It doesn’t really mean anything, does it?”

It doesn’t tell us the form in which we should “simply pan-fry” the mince: in burgers (in which case, how thick?); as meatballs (how big?); in some other moulded shape; or as it comes. It doesn’t tell us how much heat to apply. It doesn’t tell us whether, or how, to season or otherwise flavour the meat. If we took the advice at face value, we’d be left with a plate of bland, chewy mince. So, while I’m all in favour of simplicity, I’m not sure this guidance will quite do the trick on its own.

Best of all is the direction to cook the meat for “24-26 minutes”. Presumably, Waitrose began by plucking an arbitrary cooking time – 25 minutes – out of thin air; then, in a token acceptance of the falseness of that premise, expanded it by a minute either way. If that’s supposed to encourage us to exercise discretion, it’s not inviting us to use very much of it.

In practice, depending on what you’re making with the mince, you might end up cooking it for anything from 5 minutes – for a thin burger, say – to 5 hours, after which a Bolognese sauce, simmered very gently, will have come to no harm at all. If you cooked these dishes for 24 minutes each – or 26 for that matter – the burger would be cremated, and you’d be chewing the Bolognese as a dog would a slipper.

So all the instructions really succeed in doing is offering essentially bad cooking advice, on false pretexts of simplicity and speed. They are, in the specifically Scottish sense of the word, pure mince.

But fear not; because just underneath, we find a second option.

Try Heston’s chilli con carne with spiced butter for a smooth finish.

That’s quite a logical leap, isn’t it? If the instruction to “pan-fry for 24-26 minutes” inexplicably fails to produce delicious results, you might as well give up trying to think for yourself and slavishly copy Heston Blumenthal’s recipe instead – which, I’d note in passing, stipulates rather less than 24 minutes’ “pan-frying” and upwards of an hour’s simmering – and which will improve your cooking as assuredly as using a Michelangelo-endorsed paintbrush will pep up your frescos.

Somewhere in between the two presented options, we might insert an alternative, far more meaningful set of cooking instructions:

Fry the meat until you’re happy with the colour. Add vegetables, aromatics, some appropriate liquid and whatever else you fancy, until you’re happy with the flavour. Simmer until you’re happy with the texture. Bask in the pleasure of having thought for yourself and invented your own dish. Eat and enjoy.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s the same as the moral to most of my other stories: that the person best placed to decide what to buy, what to cook and how to cook it, is you. Not Heston; not some advertising executive; and certainly not a beleaguered supermarket staff writer charged with filling the space beneath the words “cooking instructions”.

The No Reci-Pie Man

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Posted on May 16, 2014 by Tom Wheeler

Last Saturday afternoon, I was a proud guest at the marriage of my great friends Eilidh and Carl. In the evening, I fed 160 people at their wedding ceilidh. What’s more, I didn’t cock it up.

Here’s how I did it.

First things first. Why am I bothering to tell you all this, other than for the anatomically improbable purpose of blowing smoke up my own arse? (Actually, a length of hosepipe and a firm shove would probably do the trick, but let’s not go there.)

I’m telling you about it for a few reasons. Firstly, I’d never previously cooked for more than about 30 people. So my story might be of some help to you, if ever you find yourself catering for larger numbers than you’d ever imagined.

Secondly, I don’t always find it straightforward to explain what I mean by “no-recipe cooking”. Many people, understandably, presume I’m advocating a “throw it all in and hope for the best” approach. I’m not. But between that ill-advised method and its ultra-cautious opposite – measuring everything to the gram, millilitre or minute – there’s a vast middle ground. And that’s what I’d like to encourage all cooks to explore, whether they’re cooking for two or 200.

And thirdly, the reason I set up this blog in the first place was to encourage more people to cook the way I do: with imagination, with freedom, with the senses – and without recipes. I’m pretty much evangelistic about this, because I’ve done it, I’ve eaten the results, and I know it works. But if you haven’t, you’ll probably need some convincing. If I can’t do that by cooking for you in person, then this is probably the best example I can give you of the no-recipe method in action.

I hope it’s helpful, and I hope you enjoy reading it.

The background

I’ve never organised a wedding. But I’ve spoken to plenty of people who have. And of all the many stresses associated with the day, the catering has to be one of the greatest. You want every aspect of the day to be happy and memorable, including the food. You want to be able to feed all your guests, whatever their dietary requirements. But you don’t want to spend weeks trailing around potential caterers, shelling out two months’ wages to the only one that turns out to be available, then staring forlornly at a load of uninspiring, unwanted curled-up sandwiches at the end of the night.

Against that background, I can see why Carl and Eilidh turned to me. They’d eaten my food before, and they knew it was pretty good. They knew I wouldn’t charge the earth (in fact, I was more than happy to give my time for free, by way of a wedding present). And they knew, I hope, that I’d do everything in my power not to let them down.

But to look at it another way, they must either have been desperate or stark, staring mad. I’d never done anything approaching professional catering in my life. And while I’d fed them pleasant enough meals in the past, I hadn’t always done so at the appointed time – not always within an hour of the appointed time, in fact. If I couldn’t serve a meal for four at roughly the time I said I would, what chance did I have with 160? They haven’t said as much to me, but as the day approached, they must have woken in a cold sweat more than once at the prospect of the food turning up halfway through Auld Lang Syne.

Still, desperate or otherwise, they asked me, and at once I said yes. From that moment, I was obliged to indulge in a pastime I usually prefer to avoid.

Planning.

The plan

I was fortunate to be given free rein on what food to serve. But at the same time, there were several qualities that the meal had to have.

Most obviously, it had to be tasty. As noted above, it had to be prompt. It had to be varied enough to cater for a range of tastes, appetites and diets. As it would be served from a single buffet table, it had to be portable. It had to be a one-person job – particularly once I’d established that my flatmate and potential co-chef would be away in Portugal at the time of the wedding. Out of consideration for Eilidh and Carl’s budget, it had to be affordable. And taking all those other factors into account – it had to be doable.

All of which appeared to rule out my originally intended centrepiece for the meal: pies, and lots of them. But just as I was about to resign myself to this, I stumbled upon the company that would make the whole thing possible again: the DIY Scotch Pie Company.

The DIY Scotch Pie Company, I discovered, is a small and recently established business in Fife that makes empty Scotch pie shells and sells them by mail order. In other words: my saviour.

A few emails later, I was the proud owner of 240 mini Scotch pie shells. A “doh” moment of realisation after that, I was on a train to Kirkcaldy to pick up some vegetarian pie shells as well. And after some welcome words of advice and support from the company founder, Martin Burns, and a reassuring look at the large Combi oven that would allow me to bake four large trays of pies at a time, I was ready to write the menu.

The menu

I’d never written a menu before. And as those who know me would testify, marketing isn’t exactly my natural calling. But I’m not completely oblivious to the importance of good presentation, both of the menu and the food itself. With this in mind, I took the basic ideas I’d had for soups, stews and pie fillings, and set to work on giving them some extra allure.

For instance, as one of the vegetarian options, I wanted to make a cheese, onion and potato pie. I knew it would taste nice enough; but it didn’t sound particularly appetising. The solution: to take each constituent element and tart it up a bit. Bog-standard “cheese” became “mature cheddar”; onions were replaced by shallots; and as they’d just come into season, I decided my potato of choice would be the Jersey Royal. “Mature cheddar, Jersey Royals and shallots”: yep, that sounded a whole lot better. For a few pence per pie, and with no extra effort, I’d enhanced both the quality of my pies and – almost as importantly – their appeal.

Similar This Morning-style makeovers were applied to other parts of the menu. Broccoli and Stilton soup is cheap and easy to make, and justifiably popular, so I decided early on that it should make an appearance – but it all sounded a little familiar and dull. But if one blue cheese would work, why not another? Scotland produces some spectacular blue cheeses of its own, so I chose to go local. The soup would be not broccoli and Stilton, but broccoli and Dunsyre Blue.

On a more practical note, I planned where possible to work on multiple dishes at once. So the curry pies – one meat, one vegetarian – would come from the same onion and spice base, before being separated for the meat and vegetable additions and finishing touches. And the filling for the beef and ale pies would, with the addition of boiled potatoes, fried mushrooms and a little thyme, become the basis for one of the stews.

The other determining factor of the menu takes me back to my “no recipe” principles. Wherever possible, I like to cook without unnecessary restrictions: so if I can avoid using scales, measuring jugs and timers, I will. Precision cooking is all well and good; but imprecision cooking is so much less stressful.

The most obvious pitfall of this approach is the potential for losing track – especially with four or five giant cooking pots on the go at one time. (How long has that stew been cooking? An hour? Two hours? A week?) But if the pitfall is obvious, so too is the path around it: choose ingredients that will readily forgive a spot of inattention.

Look through the menu and you’ll see that everything on it is oversight-friendly.

The soups were to be blended, not chunky; so it’d hardly matter if I cooked the vegetables for far too long (which I did). Shin of beef takes a good three hours to become tender, and several hours longer to fall apart. (I’ve no idea how long I ended up simmering it, but the chunks of meat stayed happily intact.) The flesh of a chicken is more delicate; but by using thigh meat instead of breast, and with plenty of chorizo to donate flavour and lubricating fat, even this would stand up to a fair bit of careless cooking.

The shopping

With the menu finalised, it was time to shop.

Actually, when I say “finalised”, that isn’t quite true. Yes, I’d given names to each of the dishes; but I didn’t know exactly what they’d comprise. I hadn’t worked out which vegetables and spices would find their way into the vegetable curry (in the end, I went for sweet potato, peppers and marrow), or how tomato-ey I’d make the chicken stew.

I did toy briefly with the idea of doing a trial run of the meal in advance of the wedding, to give me a better idea of quantities and proportions, but decided against it for a couple of good reasons.

Firstly, producing a small-scale version of the wedding meal wouldn’t have come close to replicating the challenges of the real thing, for reasons I’ll come to in a moment.

Secondly – and far more significantly – I couldn’t be arsed.

Instead, I worked out – very roughly – how much of each meat I’d need, along with the other main (i.e. advertised) ingredients such as cheese and broccoli. That was as far as I intended to dabble in weights and measures. Beyond that, I decided simply to buy a shedload of the flavouring and bulking ingredients that would find their way into several of the dishes (carrots, onions, potatoes, tomatoes), along with plenty of the extras that would allow me to adjust, boost and balance the flavours at the last minute: not just the obligatory salt and pepper, but sweeteners (sugar, honey, mango chutney) and sharpeners (lemon, vinegar) as well.

And I had no shame at all in buying a selection of “lazy” ingredients: stock cubes (good ones, mind you), curry pastes, minced ginger, tinned beans as opposed to dried. My bad. I promise to do better next time – if you agree to provide me with an army of sous-chefs. Otherwise, I won’t. [Gratuitous plug: for a more extensive take on so-called “cheating” at cooking, beg or borrow a copy of Fire and Knives issue 12 and read my article in that. Gratuitous plug ends.]

In short, I tried to make everything about the meal preparations, from shopping to serving, as “normal” as possible. In my day-to-day life, I don’t make minutely detailed shopping lists, turn my nose up at “cheaty” ingredients, weigh ingredients to the nearest gram or time my cooking to the minute. So why do things differently here? Adopting a load of new habits would only make a tough task tougher.

In retrospect, this was the best single decision I made during my first attempt at mass catering: that I would do it the no-recipe way.

The day before

All of this sounded great in theory. But as a catering novice, I still had no real idea how well it would work in practice. At around 4pm on Friday, on being handed the key to the kitchen, it was time to find out.

As others set to work decorating the hall – stunningly, as it turned out – I plugged in my iPod and speakers and tried to work out where to start.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I already knew where to start: in the logical place. My soups, stews and pie fillings would all take different amounts of time to cook: three hours (ish) for the beef, two for the lamb, barely an hour for the chicken, and even less for the various veggie options. So that, roughly speaking, would be the order of events.

So, having sliced 4 kilos of beef into what Fergus Henderson describes as “pie-sized chunks” – now there’s a man who appreciates that there’s a time for specifics and a time for common sense – I was ready to cook.

I mentioned a little earlier that I saw little point in doing a scaled-down dry run of the meal, and here’s why. Had I been making this stew for three or four people, I’d have done a lot of things differently – and, to be honest, better. I’d have dusted the meat with seasoned flour and seared it in small batches, maybe 200g at a time, so that the browning flavours (and colours) would dissolve into and enhance the sauce. But with 4 kilos of meat, that would have equated to 20 batches. Sod that.

Instead, the browning phase became more of a token effort – three big batches, as I recall – giving the meat a bit of colour, but not much. Where I’d ordinarily have softened the onions slowly to release their sweetness, here they received little more than a cursory shoogle-about in the pan. And while I’d have liked to have made a rich beef stock to enhance the gravy, there just wasn’t the time or space here. So I’d have to look elsewhere for my flavour boosts.

“Elsewhere”, in this case, refers to a few good beef stock cubes, plus a couple of big bones, bought for 50p each from the butcher’s freezer and left to simmer away with the rest of the meat.

So this wasn’t going to be my dream stew, then; but under the circumstances, it would more than do.

Similar short cuts applied to just about everything on the menu. Any spare bones were added to the appropriate pots – I’d bought the lamb and chicken on the bone for this exact purpose – and my powders and pastes were thrown into the curries with something approaching abandon.

While the stews bubbled away, it occurred to me that the whole operation was, so far, proving remarkably serene; and so, for the time being, it continued. A quick sample indicated that the chicken was cooked, so I added the last-minute ingredients (olives from a jar, haricot beans from a tin), adjusted the sweet/sour/salt balance (in this case, with sugar, balsamic vinegar and just a little salt, as the chorizo already contained plenty), then, after a final taste to confirm that all was as it should be, took the stew off the heat. One dish down, seven to go.

The same pattern applied to each dish: check for cooked-ness; add any final ingredients; adjust the seasoning with appropriate sweeteners and sharpeners (redcurrant jelly and red wine vinegar for the beef; mango chutney and white wine vinegar for the curries); and leave to cool. Where the stews needed thickening, I used cornflour dissolved in a little water. Perhaps wheat flour would have been preferable in some cases; but the risk of filling my stews with little gluey lumps was too great for me to take.

As more dishes were completed and more hobs freed up, I caught up with some of the remaining jobs: boiling spuds, wilting spinach, starting out on the soups. I kept half an eye on the clock, but only for selfish reasons: I was determined to make it to the pub in time for last orders. Beyond that, I had little reason to worry about timings at this stage; that was an issue for the following day.

The night before

Whatever job you happen to be doing, it’s important to take time out to unwind. Arguably, I did this to a fault: a quick pint before last orders turned into a trip to an impromptu house gig featuring the wonderful Viking Moses. My state at the end of the evening is summed up by this video (warning – contains strong language and gratuitous close-up beardage).

(Some context might be useful here. Just before I left, I was discussing the following day’s pie plans with the illustrious DJ, video editor and occasional guest star of this blog, Dylan Matthews. Dylan was patiently explaining to me that it didn’t matter how much meat or gravy I put into my pies, as long as I put a lot of love into them. Understandably alarmed, Tom Youll suggested strongly that I should avoid putting any love into them at all – hence the “love pies”/”no love pies” debate.)

The wedding day

Fuzzy-headed as I was, I hadn’t completely lost sight of what remained to be done. And unlike the day before, the success of Saturday – well, my part of it, at least – would all be in the timing.

The ceremony would take place at 1pm. At 5pm, after the first of the post-wedding feeds (this one, mercifully, not my responsibility), I’d be free to return to the kitchen. The ceilidh would begin at 7, and I’d be serving food at 9.

I’d left myself a couple of jobs for the morning – making the broccoli soup and finishing off the veg curry – so I popped into the kitchen to complete these before donning my gladrags and making my way to the wedding, which, as you can see on the Darroch Photography blog, was bloody fantastic.

All of this meant that, come 5pm, I was exactly at the point I’d hoped to be: everything cooked and ready to reheat, with only one job left to complete. One job; but it was a biggie.

Making the pies.

This was the point at which, to use a highly technical piece of chef’s terminology, I began to shite it. Every task I’d done up to this point had felt familiar, even if the scale didn’t. But this was new territory, and the doubts began to appear.

How long would it take me to make, roll and cut the pastry for around 200 pie tops? Were the DIY cases as good as the online testimonies suggested, or would I open the boxes to find hundreds of mouldy and/or shattered shells? Would I just end up panicking and running out of the kitchen, jumping on a train to the Highlands and living out the rest of my days in a bothy?

Well, no, I wouldn’t. I’d like to make this bit sound more dramatic than it was, but as soon as I started up my pie production line, I realised it was all going to be OK. With an hour and a half to go until service, I was feeling in control again, and my kitchen looked like this:

And with a bit of welcome assistance in transporting the food to the buffet table, the guests were happily slurping and chomping away by 9pm. (OK then, 9.05pm.)

Not everything went exactly as planned, of course. Without the benefit of properly browned meat, the beef looked rather more like dog food than I’d have liked; though it still tasted bloody good. And I didn’t have time to make quite as many pies as I’d hoped – though 168 isn’t half bad – so I’ve been left with rather a lot of spare shells. But that’s hardly a disaster: it just means I’m going to have to eat an awful lot of pies over the next few weeks. Life’s a bitch, eh?

Importantly, everyone seemed to enjoy the food. At least two people told me that these were the best pies I’d ever eaten – and one of them wasn’t even visibly drunk. Vegetarians, vegans and gluten-free-ers stopped to thank me for thinking of them while planning the menu: many of them hadn’t expected to find anything they’d be able to eat.

And most of all, Eilidh and Carl loved it: the food, the dancing, the music – everything. So my last words are to them: many, many congratulations, all my very best wishes for the future, and thanks for inviting me to be part of the day.

It was a crazy idea, but somehow it worked.

[All photos by kind permission of Darroch Photography, apart from the blurry and rubbish one, which is my own.]

With provenance to guide us

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Posted on April 23, 2014 by Tom Wheeler

Another week, another we’re-not-eating-quite-what-we-thought-we-were story. This time, it’s the news that 24 of 60 takeaway meals sampled by Which? contained meat other than the advertised lamb.

Of these, twelve included cheaper meats in addition to lamb; seven contained no lamb whatsoever; and five had been so heavily processed that the scientists were unable to identify what meat(s) they contained. In other words, we can decipher the human genome, but not the doner kebab.

Granted, none of this is very pleasant. It’s undoubtedly fraudulent. Depending on what the mystery meat turns out to be, it could be stomach-turning. (The Mail, with characteristic restraint, took the discovery of the “UNIDENTIFIED” meat as its cue to ask, “Is there rat in your kebab?”)

But is it surprising? Hardly.

As long as there are humans, there will be fraud. And while we tend to think of fraud in purely financial terms, it occurs in relation to any tradeable commodity, from fine art to fishcakes. As such, every government devotes resources to combating it.

But not every form of fraud is pursued with equal vigour, or with equal success. Tax fraud might cost the UK 16 times as much as benefit fraud, but you’d hardly know it from reading the papers or listening to Government ministers. And food fraud, no matter that it has existed for as long as food trading, barely enters our consciousness until a particular scandal happens to capture the attention of the media and the public.

The inevitable consequence of such a scandal is that we get terribly worked up about one particular symptom, with no great attention paid to the others (let alone their causes). Such was the backlash to last year’s revelations, it’s unlikely we’ll find much horse in our burgers for the foreseeable future. But that’s no indication that the fraudsters have gone straight. And as public investment in food safety analysis continues to be cut, we’d be impossibly naïve to imagine that the situation is destined to improve.

But then, we are impossibly naïve; and what’s more, it suits us to remain that way, because our chief expectations around food are fundamentally incompatible.

We expect to take pleasure from the food we eat; but at the same time, we expect to pay as little as possible for the privilege. And achieving both of those things at once depends to a great extent on the questions we choose not to ask, and the truths we don’t much care to think about.

When we eat a £1.99 portion of fried chicken and chips, it doesn’t suit us to consider the conditions in which the birds lived, or the drugs with which they were pumped in order to survive them. Deep down, we might have a fair idea of the grim reality; but at the moment of consumption, the truth would impinge unacceptably on the pleasure.

So it is with our “lamb” curry. We choose to believe it’s full of good-quality diced lamb, of the kind we see in our local butcher’s or supermarket – though when we compare the price of fresh lamb with that of the curry, it’s hard to see where the takeaway is making its money. But anyway, the meat looks like lamb – though admittedly it’s taken on the colour of its surroundings – and even though its flavour is overwhelmed by the curry spices, we’re still reasonably certain it tastes like lamb. But as a few of the Guardian’s writers recently discovered, our palates and expectations frequently conspire to hoodwink us. And so the opportunities for substitution and dishonesty are far greater than we’d care to admit.

What allows us consistently to enjoy the cheap food we eat is the same thing that lets us engage with a far-fetched book or film: our capacity to suspend disbelief. Our empathy with the heroic space warrior, taking down alien after alien with his trusty plasma gun, is contingent on our suppressing what we know perfectly well: that the entire scenario is utterly implausible.

This suspension of disbelief doesn’t only apply to the ethics of the fried chicken meal or the authenticity of the lamb curry; it applies to every aspect of food processing, from farm, to factory, to retailer, to restaurant. Every time our food passes through a different pair of hands, another opportunity arises for fraud, adulteration or corner-cutting to take place. And at every stage, we take great pains not to think about it.

Even when the “fraud” is entirely inconsequential, we choose to pretend it doesn’t happen, then become indignant when confronted with the reality. Anything that compromises our fantasy of what goes on in a professional kitchen – for instance, the common and harmless practice of food being prepared off-site and heated up on the premises – is sufficient to provoke our largely directionless outrage.

This is ludicrous. Face it: everyone involved in your food’s journey from origin to plate needs to make a living, legitimately or otherwise. And the more steps this journey involves, the more people need to get paid. Even if the final product seems remarkably cheap, they all have to make their money somehow. So the only way you’ll make actual rather than perceived savings, while reassuring yourself that nothing untoward has gone on, is by taking the various jobs on yourself.

The trouble is, not many of us are in a position to grow our own vegetables, catch our own fish, raise our own animals or even cook all of our own meals. So what are the alternatives?

At one extreme, we have the option of saying “sod it”. Buy whatever’s cheap and tasty, and simply accept the fact that we could be eating almost anything. To a large extent, this is what most of us do already; but when we do, we should at least have the balls to admit it, and not get affronted when we find out that our 3am kebab might contain something other than prime lamb.

At the other end of the spectrum, we can go all out to establish the provenance of our food – if we have the time and money. The simplest way to do this is to go organic: not particularly because of any inherent superiority, but because organic producers are required to submit to a regime of scrutiny, testing and animal welfare that goes way beyond any Government-imposed standards. (Tacitly, we appear to believe organic food to be more trustworthy, judging by the way we feed our children: organic produce accounts for only around 2% of overall UK food and drink sales, but the figure for baby food is a startling 54%.)

Between these two extremes, of course, there’s a substantial middle ground: it isn’t a straight choice between doing everything or nothing.

The more we cook for ourselves using fresh, unprocessed (or, at least, less processed) ingredients, the less risk we run of eating something unsafe or unexpected. The broader the range of foods we learn to cook, the better placed we are to eat with the seasons, enjoying ingredients when they’re plentiful and inexpensive (ironically enough, lamb is cheap as chips at the moment…).

The more we learn to use up spare or leftover food creatively, the less food and money we waste, allowing us to spend the savings on better quality ingredients.

And the more pressure we put on our politicians to invest in food testing and supply chain monitoring, the more chance we have of actually finding lamb in our lamb curry.

Beef and pea soup, anyone?

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Tom Wheeler

I’m all in favour of a spot of innovation in cooking. It’s pretty much what this blog is all about.

But there’s a fine line between innovation and total weirdness. And even when you’re eating the results of your most recent brainwave, it can be hard to be certain which side of the line you’ve fallen.

My friend Dylan, who was born and raised in a pub – what a fine grounding in life – told me a story recently that illustrated this neatly. He was on duty one Monday afternoon, and precisely nothing was occurring: no customers, no sign of any customers, and no apparent threat of any customers in the foreseeable future. Then the door opened, and a hiker walked in, exhausted and in search of something hot and sustaining.

“What’s the soup of the day?” asked the hungry hiker.

“Just a moment,” replied Dylan, thinking on his feet. “I’ll just go and ask the chef.”

Of course, there was no chef, save for Dylan himself. He went to the kitchen and checked the fridge to find it entirely bare, save for some scant leftovers from Sunday lunch: a few cooked garden peas, and a jug of beef gravy. Inspiration – of sorts – struck. He returned to the bar.

“I’ve had a word with the chef, and the soup of the day is…er…beef and pea.”

There was a brief pause as the hiker processed this presumably unexpected news and weighed the pros and cons in his mind. Eventually, hunger got the better of trepidation, the “soup” was duly ordered, and Dylan went back to the kitchen to assemble what may be the world’s first and only portion of beef and pea soup.

Dylan watched closely as the hiker sat by the window and worked his way through his creation. His expression veered between curiosity, suspicion and satisfaction; but ultimately he finished up, and rather enjoyed, his bowl of improbable soup-gravy.

And in retrospect, why wouldn’t he have? After all, it was unusual only in what it lacked. If you were nearing the end of your Sunday roast and had only a pool of gravy and a few peas remaining, you’d think nothing of grabbing a spoon and slurping them all up. But put the same ingredients in a bowl and call it soup, and for some reason it becomes weird.

Of course, some other combinations seem weird for a simpler reason: because they actually are weird.

My own low point occurred in my late teens, at a holiday cottage in beautiful Bamburgh, when much beer had been consumed but very few ingredients purchased. The outcome of these circumstances – spam curry with “inside-out rice” (inexplicably soggy in the middle and crunchy on the outside) – still causes those who consumed it to shudder at the memory.

But even here, there’s some crossover with the beef-and-pea example, in that much (though certainly not all) of its perceived oddness lay in its unexpectedness. It’s true that spam is pretty horrible stuff – apologies to any devotees who might be reading, but you’re wrong – but my logic at the time was that its taste would be suitably obliterated by the power of the curry sauce.

And in a way, I was right: it wasn’t that the taste was so troubling but the texture. Accustomed to eating meat curries of various kinds, we’d become used to the chewy resistance of the chunks of lamb or chicken. Replacing these with the oddly textureless spam meant that the whole experience was simply too unfamiliar to enjoy (leaving aside – as we assuredly did – the science-defyingly unpleasant rice).

So what – if any – are the lessons of these two examples?

Well, to take my own experience first, the most obvious learning point is “don’t cook with spam”. Or rather, if you do decide to cook with spam, be alive to its bizarre texture and address this in the way you cook it. There’s a reason why the fritter is one of the more enduring (and less nasty) ways to serve spam: it’s because the crisp batter provides a degree of textural interest that is singularly lacking in the meat itself.

As for the beef and pea soup – well, given that it was, ultimately, something of an unexpected success, maybe we just need to be a bit less prescriptive about what we see as viable combinations.

But I’m far from certain about that, because those same prejudices can be surprisingly useful when it comes to cooking inventively but non-disastrously. Granted, some of the world’s finest chefs have made their names through playing with our expectations of flavour and texture – Heston Blumenthal’s bacon and egg ice cream being a celebrated case in point. But for the less eminent among us, it’s probably best to rein in the innovations just a little – otherwise you might just find yourself with another spam curry on your hands.

But that’s not to say that you need to revert completely to the tried and trusted. Assuming your stores aren’t quite as bare as Dylan’s fridge and our Bamburgh cupboards, you’ve always got the opportunity to take the “million things” approach discussed at the beginning of this article.

Treat your main “ballast” ingredient – pasta, rice, potatoes, a roasted butternut squash, whatever – as your blank canvas. Then it’s time to start “painting”. Add your more flavourful ingredients one at a time (naturally taking account of how long they need to cook) until you’re happy with the combination. Stop and think before each addition, and you’re unlikely to go far wrong. As I’ve said before, you’re well capable of doing this when you’re inventing pizza toppings in a takeaway, so why not when you’re cooking at home?

And to refer you to more of my previous musings, a spot of Gran logic never hurts. Throw half a dozen ingredients together at random, and the chances are it won’t turn out too well. But select your ingredients with particular goals in mind – combinations of taste (sweet, sour, salt) and texture (crunch versus give) that at once complement and contrast with one another – and I’d give you a much better chance.

What’s more, you don’t need a wealth of cooking training or experience to identify these combinations; all you need is to think a little about what you’ve eaten and enjoyed over the years, and what it was you liked about them. If you’d like a case in point, section 1 of this piece will give you the idea.

After all, cooking lessons take time and cost money. But you can have a free eating lesson every time you pick up a knife and fork.

The State I Am In

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Posted on December 31, 2013 by Tom Wheeler

With the near-inevitability of drunken late-night attempts at cooking and/or the need for a restorative New Year breakfast, it seems as good a time as any to post this – a guide to cooking for the pissed, hung over or otherwise damaged.

It’s the second edited extract from my book, The No Recipe Manifesto, which will finally see the light of day in 2014. (In case you missed it, here’s the first extract).

Lastly for 2013, thanks for following the blog, and for the likes, shares, retweets and comments – they mean a lot.

Have a good, and well-fed, New Year.

It’s perfectly possible that much of this advice will be of little relevance to you, because you’ve never been in the position of needing to feed yourself, and potentially others, while dealing with the immediate or residual effects of the demon drink.

But if you have, I suspect that my experience – depressingly extensive as it is – may be of some use. And even if you haven’t, you may yet be able to find a point of reference, if ever you find yourself afflicted by a lack of motivation, coordination or both.

Floyd

I can’t be certain who was the first TV chef I ever saw – not because I was drunk, I should point out, but because I was young – but since we’re talking about the mid-1980s here, I can be reasonably confident that it was either Delia Smith or Keith Floyd.

In case you didn’t have the pleasure of witnessing the great man in action, I’d better provide a bit of context. Keith Floyd was a fine cook, a funny and charismatic communicator – and, on the telly at least, permanently pissed.

I can’t recall ever seeing him cook without a large glass of wine within easy reach, which he would slug merrily in between tasks (and, I’m quite sure, in between takes as well). I’ve certainly followed his estimable example as regards wine consumption; so it would make sense that I would also take his lead when it comes to drunken cooking too. But, oddly enough, I don’t.

The thing is, Floyd would guzzle wine as the rest of us might drink tea. It wasn’t that the food he was making was somehow appropriate for the inebriated; just that he happened to be so. In fact, many of the tasks he undertook while under the influence were among the last things you’d want to replicate if you found yourself in a similar state: chopping, slicing, sautéing and flambéing.

Without the presence of a well-prepared camera crew, no doubt armed with first aid kits and fire extinguishers, I’d have worried for his well-being. If I tried anything similar myself, I’d be even more worried for my own.

As a consequence, my advice on alcohol-influenced cooking is quite unlike Floyd’s, with rather more emphasis on personal capability and safety.

(I’m pretty sure this is the sort of thing they mean when they talk about “responsible drinking”.)

Soaked cuisine

The first question to ask yourself when drunk and hungry is the same one you’d ask yourself when sober and hungry: “What sort of thing would I like to eat?” (Admittedly, it may sound more like “whassorrhing waaaaliyyaeeee?”, but let’s not split hairs.)

The pissed answer to that question, though, is likely to be different from the non-pissed one, and not just in its pronunciation. All five senses are impaired as a result of drinking alcohol; so a meal that would smell and taste just fine to your sober self may well seem rather bland once you’ve had a few jars. As a consequence, you’re likely to seek out, and be able to cope with, more potent flavours than you normally would.

You’re also more likely to crave fatty foods. Scientific opinion is divided as to the primary cause of this: some believe that it is caused by an alcohol-induced change in the balance of brain chemicals; others argue that we are naturally programmed to seek out the highest energy (i.e. fattiest) foods, but that our rational minds are capable of overriding this instinct when we’re sober. From the drinker’s point of view, it hardly matters which theory is nearer the mark, because the outcome is the same.

And lastly, you’re likely to want – or rather need – some starchy ballast to soak up some of the booze.

Now, having decided roughly what you’d like to eat, it’s time to ask yourself a further question: “What am I capable of doing?”

This is a trickier one, because the answer you produce will most likely be optimistic going on ludicrous. Mercifully, though, such optimism will rapidly dissipate once you work out what you can actually be arsed to do, so you should be reasonably content to rein in your initial ambitions.

Nonetheless, it’s probably worth drawing up a few house rules. Anything requiring elaborate knife skills, precision timing or significant quantities of hot fat is best avoided. (As is flambéing – sorry Keith.)

Put all those criteria together, and you may well find yourself being led in the direction of rice and spice.

Rice and spice

Unless you’re in a desperate hurry – in which case you’d probably have stopped for chips on the way home anyway – rice is a near-guaranteed winner. Whether you use the microwave or stove-top absorption method, it takes a matter of moments to assemble.

My microwave rice prescription, incidentally, is this: Put three parts water to two parts rice – unrinsed, and not the easy-cook kind, which is the rice equivalent of UHT milk – into a microwaveable thingy, cover it with cling film, pierce the film a couple of times and microwave until all the water has been absorbed. Even if you’ve overdone the bevvy quite severely, it ought to be within your powers. If it isn’t, I’d respectfully suggest you rethink your cooking plans.

How you accompany your rice will probably depend on what you have in your fridge, because you’re unlikely to have planned your food shopping with drunken cookery in mind. But on the off-chance that you have, the ideal ingredients are those that require no chopping, no frying and next to no attention.

Chicken thighs or drumsticks (bone and skin on), duck legs (ditto) and pork ribs will all satisfy your meaty cravings, and can simply be coated in your chosen sauce or spices, covered in foil and bunged in a low to medium oven for an hour or so. If you feel confident in your capacity to pay sufficient attention, you can always remove the foil and turn up the heat at the end for a spot of browning.

Some of my favourite drunken combos include: sweet chilli and soy (good for ribs); curry powder, honey and soy (particularly with chicken); and five spice, chilli powder, salt and a pinch of sugar (ideal for duck legs, as the absence of added liquid allows the skin to crisp up).

Accompany any of these combinations with a pile of lovingly microwaved rice and you’ve got a hefty and powerfully-flavoured meal on the table – or, far more likely, on your knees in front of the telly – in about an hour, without using a single hob, knife or chopping board.

Tasty though these simple, spicy dishes are, they’re conspicuously vegetable-free. You may not care about this in the slightest; but if you do, and if you reckon you can cope with a small amount of chopping, some sliced onion and peppers, and perhaps some fresh chilli, can be scattered over your saucy meat before it goes into the oven.

Alternatively, if you feel more confident about using a hob than a knife, one of those handy supermarket packs of stir-fry vegetables (fresh or – whisper it – frozen) will allow you to introduce a modest dose of vitamins to your meal without having to handle any sharp implements.

Lastly, the benefits of textural contrasts in a meal are, if anything, increased after a few drinks – think of the salad on your late-night burger or kebab – so a healthy stash of peanuts or cashews is worth maintaining for garnishing as well as snacking purposes.

Or, with a little lateral thinking, you might be able to find a less obvious source of crunch in your fridge or freezer. I’ve had surprising success with breadcrumbed scampi, cooked in the oven as directed, and mixed into a spicy, saucy concoction at the very last minute. It might be a rather low-rent version of the crispy chilli dishes I frequently order from Chinese takeaways; but I don’t see anything too much the matter with that.

Pasta

It takes quite a lot to persuade me away from the rice and spice route after a night out. If it happens, the compelling reason is normally a lack of suitable ingredients: plain rice and curry sauce doesn’t quite do it for me these days.

But if I’m out of fresh meat, I try to make sure I haven’t exhausted my stash of the cured stuff. Bacon is a reliable staple – and can, of course, be turned into save-the-day sandwiches to render all “what to eat” discussions redundant – but if I’m craving something more varied and substantial than a bacon sarnie, they’ll find their way into a dead simple tomato sauce.

If I feel capable of using a knife, some onion and garlic will never go amiss. Nor, especially in a post-pub state, will a good dose of chilli (fresh, dried or powdered). But if I conclude that I shouldn’t be messing around with sharp implements, a pair of scissors will suffice for snipping the rashers into the oiled pan. With the addition of a tin of chopped tomatoes, followed by some enthusiastic bubbling and stirring to conduct a controlled evaporation on the excess liquid, it should be done by the time the pasta is. I’ll normally finish it off with an extra swirl of oil, just for luck.

Potential variations are pretty much endless. Replace the bacon with fat slices of chorizo, salami or other spicy sausage. Or, if the fridge is looking bare, it’s always worth scanning the shelves for suitable tins and jars. I’m not a fan of tuna in tomato sauces – it always seems to degenerate into a pink, visually and texturally unappealing sludge. But olives, anchovies and capers are all favourites of mine; used all together, along with tomato and chilli, they form a puttanesca sauce that veers remarkably close to southern Italian authenticity.

One further thing: in your weakened, fat-craving state, you’ll probably want to top your meal with cheese. Lots of cheese. All the cheese. Parmesan is all well and good, but I’ve a none-too-guilty fondness for cheap, plastic cheese strewn all over my 2am pasta. I’m usually too drunk to remember the ensuing nightmares anyway.

Oh, and one further further thing: if any wine (red or white) has survived the evening thus far, use it to enliven the sauce. You might thank yourself in the morning.

Bread

As well as the ever-welcome bacon, there are plenty of late night candidates for slapping between two slices of bread. Leftover roast meat – refried if you like, and can be arsed – is an ideal candidate if you happen to have some in the fridge. Failing that, if you can’t squish some mince into a vaguely burger-like shape, it’s a poor show indeed. And if you feel like jazzing it up with some cumin, chilli or whatever else, that’s probably within your powers too; but remember to avoid any liquid additions, as they’ll take away the natural binding qualities of the minced meat.

With either of the above examples, there’s a good case for using your alcohol-fuelled creative streak to invent a fancy mayonnaise of some kind (and by “invent”, of course I mean stirring your preferred powders and unctions into a blob of bought mayo). Stick to what’s familiar by all means – tomato ketchup and mayo for a no-frills variation on thousand island dressing, or mayonnaise and curry powder for a basic Coronation-style sauce – but you’ll probably end up being rather more imaginative than that.

Fortunately, if the mixture turns out to be indescribably, inedibly awful, even in your less than discerning state, you can find this out from a quick taste before you slather it on your sarnie, so you shouldn’t be faced with that of “Christmas is cancelled” moment that occurs when you arse up the seasoning of a lovingly-cooked stew.

Best of all, as far as I’m concerned, is that an enhanced mayonnaise – or, for that matter, an unenhanced one – effectively removes the requirement to butter the bread. Much as I love butter, the task of spreading it, rock hard from the fridge, on to soft white bread is one I can rarely manage successfully at the best of times, so I’ve got no chance after a few bevvies.

And finally, my friend Emma’s excellent rule of thumb – that any sandwich is improved by the addition of crisps – becomes even more accurate, and more relevant, with respect to the drunken sarnie.

The morning after

For many of us, hung over eating means one thing: the fry-up.

I’m an avowed fan too; though I confess that its regenerative effects seem to be diminishing as I get older. These days, when I’m looking to extinguish the raging inferno in my head and body, I’m more likely to turn to a spicy, salty noodle soup.

Having sworn by this for some years, I was pleased but not too surprised to find that this approach appears to have some basis in science.

Dr. Alyson E. Mitchell, a professor of food chemistry at the University of California, recently presented research findings indicating that “Yak-a-mein” – a highly spiced beef and noodle broth from New Orleans, known to locals as “Old Sober” – is one of the best hangover remedies going. The soy sauce in the broth restores salts lost from the body as a result of alcohol’s diuretic properties. Vitamin B1, found in the beef, helps to prevent the buildup of glutarate, a substance thought to contribute to the headache part of the hangover.

The broth also contains sliced hard-boiled egg, which I’m not sure I could stomach when feeling queasy, but apparently I’d do well to: eggs are a good source of cysteine, which breaks down the toxic substance (acetaldehyde) produced when alcohol is broken down by the liver.

With or without the egg, I can certainly vouch for the overall feeling of well-being, or at least slightly-better-than-before-being, conferred by a salty, spicy soup. It’s also reassuringly easy to make: boiling water, noodles, a good beef stock cube, seasonings (including plenty of soy) and some fresh chilli, and you’re just about there, though some chopped spring onions and fresh coriander will never go amiss either. Should I wish to add meat – and let’s be honest, I probably will – I’ll try to stop my hands shaking for long enough to slice it finely, so that a couple of minutes’ poaching in the stock will be enough to cook it through.

If I decide to go breakfasty instead, this will take one of two forms: a full-on fry-up; or a ridiculously proportioned “Scooby snack” style sandwich, with a slice of toast in the middle as part of a token, doomed attempt to hold the thing together.

When it comes to fried breakfasts, there are only three pieces of advice I can usefully give. The first – which is dependent on having sufficient patience – is that good sausages respond wonderfully well to a very slow fry, over up to an hour if you can bear to wait that long. Any fat and gristle lurking within, which will have been broken down to some degree by the mincer, will become more tender still during a long, slow cook.

Secondly, it’s worth yet another reminder that a low oven provides a more than handy store for anything that’s ready ahead of time. My policy these days is to get the meaty parts of the meal ready first, so that the last few minutes can be spent on the more time-critical tasks of cooking eggs and making toast.

Thirdly and finally, if you’re as hopeless at frying eggs as I am, may I recommend what an old university friend of mine called “flat egg”. This is basically a thin omelette; or, if you prefer, fried beaten egg. You don’t have to worry about breaking the egg yolk, because you’ve done this on purpose at the outset. And for sandwiches in particular, I find it works at least as well as a regular fried egg. You’ll miss out on the arguable joys of runny egg yolk running down your chin and on to your jumper; but you’ll probably find you can live with that.

Sober uselessness

Even if you’ve never had a drink in your life, some of the above advice may yet prove useful.

The qualities that make these meals appropriate for stumbling drunks – minimum hassle, little or no chopping, forgiving ingredients – also make them suitable for the sober but listless. After all, being unable to face the washing up is by no means the sole preserve of the hung over.

Without the effects of alcohol, the cravings for fat, spice and stodge may not apply; but on the other hand, a number of “easy” ingredients that are a little too worthy for the intoxicated eater can come back into the mix.

For instance, if you want an even simpler equivalent to the pasta dishes described in this chapter, make the sauce in the same way but add a drained tin of pulses – white beans or chickpeas, say – at the end. The pulses take the place of the pasta, allowing you to create a genuine one-pot meal – a handy thing when you really can’t be arsed to wash up. For an added touch of piousness, not to mention crispness, you might even choose to accompany it with a green salad.

On the very odd occasion, I’ve been known to whip up such noble and healthy meals myself.

The trouble is, I always seem to want a pint afterwards.

Chicken à la Gran

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Posted on December 20, 2013 by Tom Wheeler

At what point would you begin to describe yourself as a good cook?

Is there a particular rite of passage involved? Does it happen when you first cook something that wouldn’t be out of place at a half-decent restaurant? When you host a successful dinner party? The first time you make a proper pie from scratch?

In the absence of an agreed definition, here’s my take on the subject.

I started to believe I was a decent cook when I realised that, instead of thinking “how do I make this dish?”, I found myself thinking, “what shall I make with these ingredients?”

As with most life changes, I’d struggle to pinpoint exactly when this shift of perspective took place. But at a conservative estimate, I’d say it took me ten years of regular cooking, and quite possibly more. And if I’m honest, I’m still learning.

Looking back, this probably isn’t surprising. Learning my cooking skills in the 1990s through reading books, watching TV and following recipes, I was in thrall to the celebrity chefs who were just beginning to take over our tellies. I’d go round to my Gran’s house and watch Ready Steady Cook with her; and as the likes of James Martin came up with fabulous-looking meals on the hoof, I’d wonder aloud how exactly they managed to do that.

As I recall, my Gran didn’t say much, if anything, in response. But on reflection, I’m sure she must have been smiling to herself. She knew exactly how they did it, because she used to do the same thing herself, every day.

By my definition of “good” cooking, my generation are indisputably lesser cooks than our grandparents – or, in most cases, our grandmothers – were. We might be able to produce pleasant enough meals. But because we’ve grown up in a time of plenty – plenty of choice, at least, if not necessarily plenty of money – we simply haven’t learned to innovate.

In the cases of my grandmother and her contemporaries, innovation was born of necessity. Bringing up four children during post-war rationing, the ability to conjur a meal from whatever happened to be around was an essential survival skill, not a lifestyle choice.

Moreover, it was a skill she had to develop swiftly. By her own admission, when she got married, she couldn’t even boil an egg. (Though as I’ve mentioned before, I have some sympathy with that.)

When I came to sample her cooking, some forty years on, it reflected the good habits she’d taught herself as a young mother. She had a seemingly miraculous ability to expand a meal to serve twice the number, or deal with an excess of a particular ingredient without wastage or over-repetition.

(That last point, incidentally, is more fundamental than it might seem. As the ever-excellent Amy Fleming explains in the Guardian this week, the urge to avoid eating the same thing over and over again is more than mere fussiness: it’s hard-wired into us for our own survival and well-being.)

So my interest in – OK then, obsession with – creative, resourceful cooking can be traced directly back to my Gran. In fact, I can see her influence in almost all of the principles I’ve discussed on this blog.

For instance, she had a tremendous appreciation of flavour and texture; and in particular, how to create contrasts of flavour and texture in order to enhance a meal. She saw any foodstuff as a potential ingredient, if the circumstances were right; to the point that various unlikely foods – crisps, biscuits, breakfast cereals – found their way into her creations, to remarkably good effect.

And while she enjoyed cooking, she saw no point in toiling away for hours for the sake of it – especially when the wine was flowing freely in the other room. So she would happily use tinned or otherwise prepared ingredients when it made sense to do so. Some might see this as cheating; to her, it was merely common sense.

These traits were captured in one particularly memorable meal – a spicy, creamy chicken casserole containing, among many other things: a tin of Campbell’s condensed mushroom soup; tinned artichoke hearts (why go through the palaver of preparing fresh ones if they’re going to spend an hour or more in a stew?); and a crunchy topping made from…Phileas Fogg corn chips.

Memorable it may have been – to the point that my sister and I still talk about it in awed tones – but like anything she cooked, it was never to be repeated in exactly the same form. There was no point asking her to recreate a dish, because she wouldn’t be able to tell you how she’d made it. In any case, the contents of the fridge and cupboards would never be exactly the same as the previous time; so the resulting meal would be different too.

As you’ll gather from the Ready Steady Cook example, I didn’t give all this a lot of thought at the time. Only in her later years, when she was too unwell to cook and I could no longer enjoy her creations, did I realise that one of my greatest ambitions – in fact, one of my only clear ambitions – was to be able to cook like my Gran.

It was, and remains, a worthy ambition, if a relatively uncommon one. Her skills, if not altogether lost, are far rarer these days, because we have so much more choice in what and how to eat than she did when she was feeding her family.

To reiterate, I’m not ignoring or denying the fact that millions of people are living below the poverty line. But in 2013, we’re presented with a huge selection of available ingredients, as well as countless cheap if not exactly nutritious alternatives to resourceful home cooking.

Under such circumstances, how do we get people cooking as my Gran did? And do we really need to?

To answer the second question first: yes we do. Even if we accept regular food scares as an inevitable by-product of our pursuit of cheap food, there’s a limit to how far costs can be trimmed. Food prices are rising overall, and will continue to do so, with the consequence that even the nastiest reformed-meat horror shows will take an increasing chunk from already tight household incomes. And if we continue to throw away the best part of half the food we produce, rather than teaching ourselves the skills and thought processes that will allow us to make use of it, the problem will only get worse.

Back to the first question, then. How do we learn – or relearn – to cook?

I don’t believe it has to be a massive undertaking. A collective lack of confidence, combined with a bewildering array of cooking and eating options, might have led us to fall out of the habit of thinking creatively; but that doesn’t mean we’ve lost the capacity to do so.

As I’ve written before, we all know more about food and cooking than we realise. Everything we’ve ever eaten has the potential to teach us something about cooking, if we only stop to think about it.

My Gran certainly understood this. Her wartime service in Italy introduced her to a range of ingredients and flavours she’d never have encountered at home. She didn’t actually do any cooking while she was there; but years later, when the relevant ingredients became available in Britain, she was able to introduce them to her meals. (On reflection, this would explain why much of what she cooked was so magnificently garlicky.)

As you’ve probably gathered, I could talk all day about my Gran and her cooking. But it wouldn’t get us all that far; and she certainly wouldn’t have appreciated an extended public tribute. So instead, here’s a real life, practical example of how cooking like my Gran – or, more specifically, thinking like her – remains as useful and relevant as ever.

Cooking “Gran-style” – a case study

Recently, I bought a chicken.

My decision to buy it was a relatively straightforward one. First of all, I wanted to eat some chicken. Second of all, the choice of free range chicken in the supermarket was typically depressing: a few whole birds for about 7 quid apiece, or countless twin packs of breast fillets for a fiver. The bits I really wanted to buy – whole legs or thighs – were nowhere to be seen. Not for the first time, looking across shelf after shelf of identical breast fillets, I found myself wondering where all the chicken legs actually go.

Anyway, I worked out that if two breasts cost £5 on their own, and if the whole chickens would almost certainly boast two breasts apiece, all I needed to work out was whether the remainder of the bird – comprising (to my mind) all the best meat, plus the skin and bones that would make a fabulous stock – was worth two quid of my money. Not a difficult decision.

So I bought a whole free range bird. As chickens go, this one wasn’t huge. But it was still more than my flatmate and I would be able to manage in a single sitting.

This left me with a few options. The first, and the simplest, was to roast the chicken whole, eat what we wanted, then think of a way to use up the leftovers.

Contrary to popular cliché, however, the simplest ideas aren’t always the best. Had I taken this option, I know exactly what would have happened. We’d both have gorged on our favourite bits – the legs, the wings, the little nuggets of juicy meat next to the backbone – and left the dry, pale breasts untouched, condemned to a future of distinctly unappetising chicken sarnies. Once we’d worked our joyless way through those, hopefully I’d have found time to make the carcass into stock before it began to smell a bit iffy. But I have to confess, my record on that is some way short of 100%.

An alternative possibility was to take the meat off the chicken before cooking. On the face of it, this had several advantages. It would have provided enough meat for two separate meals – one made with the breasts, the other with the rest – thus reducing the scope for unappealing leftovers, as well as sidestepping the problem of cooking the breast and leg meat together, when the former requires much less time to cook. It would have allowed me to make the stock that same day, and to use some of it to make tasty sauces for the two dishes. And best of all, it would have given me the opportunity to announce, “I’m just off to bone the chicken”, before bursting into fits of schoolboy giggles.

So this plan had quite a lot going for it, and only one downside: I really, really couldn’t be arsed.

I’m sure an expert butcher could bone out a chicken in a couple of minutes. Well, I can’t. Experience has shown me that it takes me at least fifteen minutes, and sometimes more, to get a significant majority of the meat from a raw chicken. It’s a messy, fiddly job, and the kitchen always ends up looking like a Hammer horror set by the time I’ve finished.

So I’d ruled out one option because I didn’t much fancy the likely outcome, and another because it failed the all-important “arsedness test”. What to do?

Fortunately, there was a third option – a method I’d come up with a couple of years back, using my very best Gran logic.

Removing the meat from a whole chicken is messy and laborious; but removing the breast fillets is an absolute doddle. (If you’ve never done it before, there’s many a YouTube clip to show you how, such as this one.)

With the breast meat removed and set aside for a future stir-fry, all I do is cut away the breastbone with scissors, so that the chicken lies flat when placed upside down, and I’m left with an ideally proportioned two-person roast.

Cooked this way, what would have been the soggy underside of the bird instead crisps up nicely in the oven. And without the breast meat to worry about, it’s far easier to cook – or should I say, far more difficult to overcook – than a whole bird. Finally, the bones – both the roasted carcass and the raw breastbone – get turned into stock, either the next day or (my preference) overnight in the slow cooker.

So. I had my chicken. I had my plan. All was well with the world, and I imagined my Gran giving an approving nod at my resourcefulness. I got home, thoroughly pleased with myself, before remembering something rather important.

My flatmate was in Portugal.

Some swift replanning was required. A chicken that would comfortably have served four – or, as I’d originally envisaged, two people twice over – now had to serve one person. Repeatedly.

All of a sudden, many of the parameters had changed – but not quite all of them. I still couldn’t be bothered to bone the chicken – especially with no flatmate with whom to share my smutty jokes. But the roasting option, with its now-inevitable excess of leftovers, had to be ruled out. And with no freezer space going spare, my primary challenge was to find a way to get through the whole bird on my own, with enough variety to minimise the risk of chicken fatigue.

There was only one question to be asked at this point: “What Would Granny Do?”

After a moment’s reflection, I decided she’d probably have done this.

I cut away the breasts as usual, bunged the rest into a large saucepan along with a couple of onions, a carrot and a few peppercorns, and brought the pan to the gentlest possible simmer.

After an hour’s simmering, the chicken was cooked and the stock, enhanced by the presence of lean meat as well as the skin and bones, was starting to look and smell very tempting indeed. But I knew that, while the meat itself was cooked through, the skin and bones had plenty left to give.

I lifted the chicken out of its hot bath and left it on the worktop to cool for fifteen minutes or so. Once it had cooled enough to handle, I picked the just-cooked meat – easily two meals’ worth of it – away from the bones, which went back into the stock for another couple of hours, enhancing its colour and flavour even further.

Here, incidentally, is demonstrated the value of the “arsedness test” – which is firmly grounded in my Gran’s principles, even if the terminology is very much my own. Removing the meat from a raw chicken, as I’ve indicated, demands a lot of skilled knife work and even more patience. Removing it from a cooked, cold chicken is easier, but still requires a fair bit of cutting, prising and tugging as the cooled-down meat clings determinedly to the carcass. But with a moist, still-warm bird, the meat comes away in the fingers with minimal persuasion. In other words, it passes the arsedness test with flying colours.

Over the course of three hours – but only a few minutes’ actual work – my single whole chicken had turned into three ingredients, each of them full of potential: breast meat (raw); the meat from the legs and body (cooked, but not overcooked, and ripe for reuse in any number of dishes); and rich, tasty stock. Yes, I’d be eating chicken for a few days to come. But importantly, I wouldn’t have to eat the same thing twice.

So I turned half the stock into a broccoli and potato soup, using the veg I’d originally earmarked for the two person roast, and topped this off with a few shreds of the cooked meat. Over the following three days, I made a stir-fry that used up both breasts (a touch excessive to feed one, perhaps, but sod it) and two meals (a curry and a pasta sauce, as I recall) from the remaining meat. Each of these was enhanced with a little of the remaining stock. And all that – four quite different meals, one of them preposterously large – from a single free range chicken.

Of the tasks I’ve just described, there’s nothing you couldn’t do yourself, whether you’re an experienced cook or a novice. I had all the skills needed to do it myself while I was still in my teens. But it had simply never occurred to me to do it

In other words, it’s taken me twenty-odd years to think like my Gran – that is, to think in terms of resources rather than process, and to respond creatively to changes of circumstances. And most importantly of all, to understand there’s more than one way to skin a cat – or, in this case, divide up a chicken.

How to Boil an Egg

Posted on December 17, 2013 by Tom Wheeler

This is an edited extract from the book, The No Recipe Manifesto, to be published in 2014.

It will not tell you how to boil an egg. Sorry.

How long does it take to boil an egg? 3 minutes for soft-boiled, 4 minutes for “normal”? How long for hard-boiled?

The correct but boring answer is that I haven’t given you enough information to answer the question. Whether you’re aiming for soft-boiled, hard-boiled or something in between, the optimum timing will depend on the size, shape and temperature of the egg, the relative size of the yolk (which, of course, the cook has no realistic way of knowing), the starting temperature of the water and so on.

The differences might be relatively small in most cases, but nonetheless, the “perfect” timing will vary by a few seconds from egg to egg. The reason we’ve settled on round numbers for the task is that they provide a decent approximation of the time required for a cooking task that otherwise offers no useful information about how it’s progressing.

This is why I’ve always found it curious that boiling an egg is widely perceived as one of the most basic cooking skills, to the point that Delia was roundly and famously mocked for devoting an entire half-hour programme to the subject. I suppose it’s an important skill – especially if you like eating boiled eggs – but I certainly wouldn’t call it basic. How can it be, when there are multiple variables to consider, when no two cooks can agree on the best method, and when you can only judge the success of the operation by cracking the egg open? If that’s a basic skill, it’s little wonder so many people give up on cooking altogether.

When you cook, you normally have several sources of information on things are progressing. The clock is among them, but so are your eyes, ears, nose and fingers. However doubtful you are about your own cooking skills, you’ll be used to using at least some of these. If you see a saucepan about to boil over, that prompts you to turn it down. The sound and smell of a frying burger helps you to judge when to flip it over. And a jab with the tip of a knife will let you know whether boiled potatoes have softened enough to eat.

The boiling egg offers no such evidence. It will turn from underdone to overdone in the space of a minute or two; but all the information about its progress is hidden within the shell. (Unless you accidentally break it, in which case it’s ruined anyway.)

The only comparable ingredients I know are the lobster and the crab: each has that same combination of delicate contents concealed by an exoskeleton. Yet not many people would include boiling lobsters on their lists of cooking “basics”.

Fortunately, most foods are rather less secretive than eggs and crustacea, and offer plenty of clues to the cook, as well as a good deal of flexibility. The need for egg timers or their modern equivalents is much reduced, because your senses will inform you how the cooking process is going. This in turn allows you to vary the heat you apply in order to achieve the desired effects. And unlike boiling an egg, you don’t have to await the grand unveiling to establish whether you’ve overseen a triumph or a disaster.

Of course, if you’re going to remain in control of the cooking process, you’ll need a reasonably clear idea of what you’re looking to achieve. In most cases, one of your main aims will be to bring the food to eating temperature – normally around 70-75°C. If you manage to do that, you can at least be reasonably confident that you won’t poison yourself.

But bringing your ingredients up to temperature may only be part of the story. If you fry a slice of pork fillet over a high heat, it will be ready to eat by the time it‘s hot through to the centre. But a piece of shoulder meat from the same animal, given identical treatment, will still be unpalatably tough, and will need additional time to break down its tough sinews.

And if you’re cooking dried grains or pulses, getting them to eating temperature won’t be your focus; you need them to absorb sufficient liquid to be tender and palatable.

Alternatively, you might be looking for a more dramatic effect in your quest for “doneness”. If you’re frying a steak, you’ll want a certain amount of searing or burning at the surface of the meat. And roast potatoes aren’t really worthy of the name until they’ve crisped up on the outside.

So there’s a huge difference between bringing your ingredients gradually to eating temperature and ushering them there at a gallop. It’s a difference that you can see, hear and smell as the food cooks, and it’ll be just as apparent when you sample the finished dish.

If you’re not convinced, consider how a sliced carrot, boiled quickly to serve as a side vegetable, will be ready in a few minutes and horribly soggy in a few more; yet the same slices in a beef casserole will still be good to eat after two or three hours’ gentle simmering.

All of which begs the obvious question: how do you decide which approach to take?

As ever, the genuinely inquisitive question (“what do I want to happen here?”) is much preferable to the subservient one (“how long should I cook this for?”).

If you want to transform the food at its surface, as in the steak or roast potato examples, or when boiling pasta, then you’ll need to apply plenty of heat. If you want the ingredients to retain their shape and structure as far as possible, you’ll need to take things far more gently, allowing your ingredients to transform gradually, as if from the inside out.

And if you’re not sure what you want, go for a medium heat throughout – and prepare to be punished for your indecision.

Cutting out the middle man

The advantage of thinking in polarised terms is that it makes your chosen subject much easier to comprehend. Once you’ve determined that “x is good, y is bad”, it becomes straightforward to evaluate almost anything: all you have to do is decide whether it’s an x or a y. Right or wrong, City or United, Republican or Democrat: whatever the subject might be, if you can reduce it to a 50/50 choice, it becomes a whole lot simpler.

The disadvantage of this binary thinking, of course, is that it’s usually nonsense. Think about your topic for a little longer, and you soon realise that the options aren’t twofold, or even threefold, but infinite. At this point, you might feel reassured that you’ve developed a more realistic perspective on the subject, but you’re left with the knottier problem of working out what on earth to think.

In practice, what we often end up doing is using binary thinking at first, in order to get our heads round a topic, then developing our understanding into something less straightforward but altogether more meaningful.

If you’re trying to get to grips with intuitive cooking, this binary-first approach turns out to be a particularly useful one. When you’re deciding how to cook something, don’t allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the apparently huge range of possibilities. Narrow down your options: think “fast” or “slow”.

On reflection, I’m not even sure that this particular piece of binary thinking is all that simplistic. In fact, if I was asked to offer a single sentence of cooking advice that would bring the most benefit to the largest number of people, it would be this:

Cook fast food faster and slow food slower.

As I’ve hinted already, we go wrong most often by feeling our way tentatively towards the middle ground. If we go to check on a stew and see that it’s virtually motionless on the surface, it’s understandable that we should presume there’s not much going on under the surface either. So we turn the heat up – not all the way up, but enough for it to look like it’s actually cooking.

Understandable it may be, but this increase in the boiling rate from “negligible” to “moderate” can be enough to turn a potentially superb stew into a disappointing one.

Remember that your target temperature is eating temperature, usually around the 70-75°C mark. Even the gentlest, trembling simmer will be close to 100°C; so even if the contents of the pan are looking worryingly inactive, they’re still heading in the right direction.

It’s difficult to resist the instinct to turn up the heat and accelerate the process. Difficult it may be, but it’s also vital. Subjected to even a slightly more aggressive boil, both the meat and the vegetables in the stew will be broken down much more rapidly. After a couple of hours of this, the vegetables are likely to end up pale and soggy, and the chunks of meat will initially toughen, then eventually disintegrate into thousands of wispy strings.

The search for moderation can be equally damaging when we perceive that something is cooking too fast. Alarmed by the intensity of the sizzle when steaks first meet frying pan, our natural instinct is to turn the heat down. But the pan will also be cooled down significantly by the cold steaks themselves. This double cooling effect can end up halting the caramelising process almost entirely; the steaks take longer to lose the appearance of rawness and appear “ready”, and we end up with well-done but scarcely browned steaks.

To my mind at least, that represents the worst of both worlds.

Eschewing the elusive and largely meaningless “medium” heat actually gives you far more control over what you’re doing, because it increases the range of effects that you are able to create.

For instance, if you buy a whole chicken for roasting, the instructions on the packaging might direct you to roast it at 180°C for 90 minutes. This will certainly cook the chicken through, but the delicate breast meat is likely to end up horribly dry. But if you roast it at a high heat (say 210°C) for the first 20 minutes, then at a much gentler one (around 140°C) for the remaining cooking time, you’ll reach a much happier conclusion. The initial blast of heat will deliver the golden, crispy skin you’re after; then, by lowering the oven temperature significantly, you slow down the rate at which moisture is driven from the meat. The outcome is a chicken that is crisp on the outside but moist within, all thanks to a single twist of the temperature dial.

How fast is fast?

Or for that matter, how slow is slow?

Clearly, some basic parameters are needed here, and The No Recipe Manifesto has been designed to help you define and understand these.

For starters, though, you’ll need to consider the characteristics of the individual ingredients, as well as their sizes and shapes. After all, you don’t want to cook your “fast” food so rapidly that the outside burns to a bitter, blackened crisp before the centre is cooked to your liking. And an oven set to 80°C will bring its contents up to that temperature eventually, but it’ll probably take all day.

That said, if you happen to have the whole day to spare, it’s not necessarily something to rule out – but that, I think, is a topic for another time.

The Hunger Games

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Tom Wheeler

There’s a significant danger I won’t come out of this article with my credibility enhanced.

Not to worry. I was a geek before I was old enough to know what the word meant, so I shouldn’t really fret too much about flaunting my continued geekery on the web. So here goes.

It’s my strong belief that cooking should fit around the rest of your life, not the other way round. And if you agree with that mantra, it follows that what and how you cook will change depending on what else you’re up to.

This is hardly a ground-breaking observation, of course. Plenty of writers and TV chefs have offered cooking advice to suit particular situations: for instance, dinner party dishes that can be prepared in advance and require the minimum of last-minute activity from the host.

But what about all those times when you’re not hosting a dinner party? Shouldn’t cooking always be situation-specific, even when the occasion isn’t all that special?

Of course it should. But when it comes to everyday meals, there’s only so much assistance a cookbook can provide.

The dinner party example is a familiar one to most of us. Even if we don’t play host all that often, it’s useful to get some advice and reassurance when we do. But our daily cooking routines are less well suited to “catch-all” advice. We cook different things, at different times, on different budgets, for different numbers of people. So we’re never likely to find a “how-to” book that quite matches our particular situation.

If such bespoke cookbooks did exist, mine would be quite an unusual read.

Why? Because I’m a gamer.

I’ve been playing computer games since long before I knew how to cook. And my gaming preferences, established on a BBC Micro and green-screen Amstrad CPC, are the product of a different era. Not for us your snatched 2-minute game of Angry Birds. The computer games I played as a kid could take ten minutes or more to load from tape, if they decided to load at all. Having stared at the screen for most of that time, desperately willing the title screen to appear rather than yet another error message, I’d need to play it for at least an hour, and probably several, in order to justify the time and nervous energy I’d expended getting the bloody thing started in the first place.

Fortunately, this wasn’t a problem. Back then, if I could have played games all day, every day, I would have. Even now that I’m a grown-up – legally, at least – the urge hasn’t entirely left me. And while the demands of adult life aren’t really conducive to near-constant gaming, I still like to devote the occasional evening (or, exceptionally, an entire weekend) to the indulgent pleasures of my computer or console.

When I do, my cooking requirements are very specific. I still need to eat; and while it’s sometimes tempting to exercise the time-honoured gamer’s opt-out (phoning for a pizza), I’ve neither the money nor the inclination to do this every time I decide to have a Playstation session. But equally, I’ve no intention of putting a thrilling Mexican World Cup campaign on hold to peel a pound of spuds. And if my meticulously planned Polynesian invasion of Denmark reaches a pivotal stage just as the oven timer tells me that dinner’s ready, it’s the meal that will have to wait, not the march of the troops.

So my circumstances – or rather, my wishes – effectively lead me towards a certain way of cooking.

I want a meal that can be assembled in short bursts away from the screen, not in a single extended stint in the kitchen. It needs to be something I can safely put on hold – for an hour or more, potentially – when “urgent” matters intervene. And as I’ve no intention whatsoever of leaving the flat, it’s going to have to correspond with whatever I happen to have in the fridge and cupboards.

On the face of it, this is quite a restrictive set of requirements. But that suits me perfectly; because it prompts me to cook in a way that doesn’t just accommodate my gaming, but that I can approach as I would a video game.

Many of the games that have become enduring classics – the Grand Theft Auto series, say, or any number of strategy and exploration games from Elite to Skyrim – owe their longevity to a carefully judged balance of linear and non-linear activity. In other words, the ultimate goal of the game never changes, but the player can employ any number of routes to get there, and much of the stimulation and fun can be found in the journey, not the outcome.

Take away that overall aim, though, and a lazy but frequently heard criticism of computer games – that they’re fundamentally pointless – takes on a ring of truth, even to an unashamed gamer like me.

When you cook, the aim of the game should be self-evident: you’d really quite like to have something to eat. But how you go about achieving that – which individual missions you take on, and in what order – is up to you.

The other night, I had some chicken thighs that needed using up, and a range of other ingredients including pancetta and tinned tomatoes. In other circumstances, I might have taken time to remove the skin and bone from the chicken pieces, dice up the meat, brown it along with the pancetta, soften some onions and garlic, then allow the whole thing to simmer away while I cooked the accompanying pasta.

But this time, my flatmate and I had an important, evening-long appointment with Civilization V. Time, then, for a spot of gamer logic.

I declared the onions to be “optional” (that’s to say, fiddly) and decided to leave them out. The chicken went – skin, bones and all – into a medium-low oven, along with salt, pepper, a healthy splash of olive oil and a couple of crushed fat garlic cloves. A tin of tomatoes was emptied into a saucepan and placed on a very low hob to reduce. Two minutes. Back to the game.

Some time later – I’d guess around forty minutes, but I’ve no real idea – a trip to get a beer from the fridge afforded the opportunity for a quick check on proceedings. The tomatoes were beginning to thicken and darken nicely, to the point that they needed a spot of lubrication as well as flavour. So the seasoned, chickeny, garlicky oil went from the oven dish into the tomatoes, which immediately took on an alluring gloss, and the diced pancetta went in with the chicken. One minute. Back to the game.

The need for another beer prompted a further progress update. The skin of the chicken had crisped up nicely, as had the pancetta. The tomato sauce had, if anything, overreduced slightly, but that was easily rectified with the addition of a little white wine (red wine or water would have done different but perfectly good jobs). A quick taste, followed by an appropriate adjustment of the seasonings (in this case, a little sugar and the tiniest dash of white wine vinegar), and the sauce was done. Two minutes (at the most).

Five minutes’ work, spread across a thoroughly leisurely evening, and dinner was a pan of pasta away. But frankly, I was having far too much fun for that. Time to turn the oven into the trusty “holding pen”.

So I turned the oven down to 70°C, put a lid on the sauce and a loose foil covering on the chicken, put them both in the oven and carried on with my game. Only when the need to eat finally overcame the urge to keep playing did I take the final step of putting some macaroni on. And even then, once that was bubbling away cheerfully, I still managed to fit in a further few minutes’ world conquest before draining the pasta, tossing it in the sauce (itself given a final boost by the addition of the cooked pancetta), and topping it with the crispy chicken, haphazardly torn from the bones.

It was delicious – made all the more so by the self-imposed wait, and by the satisfaction that comes from making a tasty meal with minimal effort. With a lowish oven temperature, plus the protection afforded by its skin and bones, there was never any realistic chance that the chicken would end up overcooked and dry. And the tasks that would have required the most time – the chopping and the browning – were largely sidestepped, because my gamer’s instinct allowed me to find a suitable way round them.

If you’re not a gamer yourself, is all this actually of any relevance?

I’d argue that it is. The precise circumstances might be gamer-specific; but the broader situation is a relatively common one. There will always be times when you need to create a meal from what you happen to have in the house, or when you’re obliged to start cooking before you know exactly when mealtime will be. And even if you’ve never played a computer game in your life, and have no intention of starting now, there’ll be occasions when you have to cook but you’d much rather be doing something else.

Take a rigid approach to your cooking, with strict adherence to prescribed ingredients, timings and processes, and you’ll struggle to do any of these things successfully. What you decide to cook will determine what else you’re able to do, and when you’re able to do it.

But think creatively and laterally – in other words, like a gamer – and you come to realise what some of us have known for years: the game itself may never change; but there are infinite ways to complete it.

The No Recipe Man

Cooking, comedy, cartoons and codswallop

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