Author Archives: chriswardpress

Recipe: How to cook

18 Monday Aug 2014

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OK, hands in the air, this isn’t really it’s a recipe. It’s how to cook any recipe from any cook book. Anything.Well, most of them anyway.Look. I was a terrible cook who thought I was OK, but I wasn’t. You may be a great cook, I don’t know, but most people aren’t and know it. And many who think they are, aren’t, but won’t admit it.The single most important lesson I learned becoming a professional cook was, “Everything you know is wrong.”Everything.That is not how you peel an onion.That is not how you wash up.That is, above all, NOT how you organise yourself.And it’s that last one I’ll address here (peel onions quickly taking away the top layer; scrape and rinse everything first before putting it in the dishwasher – there, bonus!)The real secret to working in a professional kitchen or giving a good dinner party is planning in advance – well in advance.Say, for example, you want to give a dinner party this evening. You want nibbles, a cold starter (don’t torture yourself here), a hot main, cheese and a whimsical pudding. OK.First, work out what time you’ll be sitting down to eat. Say, 8pm. Your cold starter needs to be ready, therefore, by 8pm. Your hot main course, say, 8.30pm, your cheese for 9pm and your whimsical pudding for 9.30 (we’re serving the courses in the civilised, French order today – not the heathen English version).Let’s say your starter is a gazpacho of roast peppers and tomatoes, since it’s easy and I know how to do that. Your main course is poached fish in sauce bonne femme (see Chapter 7) with steamed new potatoes and French beans (topping and tailing details in Chapter 1…). Cheese is cheese, just remember to take it out of the fridge at about 6pm.And your pudding is, I dunno, creme brulée.So, first tip: start yesterday. Or early this morning at the latest. Yesterday is best. Make your gazpacho – roast the tomatoes and peppers with a little olive oil, peel the skins off, de-seed the peppers and, if you want, the tomatoes, blend together in your needlessly expensive blender (I recommend the €9.99 stick blenders from Lidl personally). Done. Slice up a baguette or two, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with herbes de Provence, bake at 180C for about a quarter of an hour, voila. Croutons.If you did this yesterday you can think about your main course and pudding today. Well, make your creme brulées first. Get them baked this morning and pop them in the fridge, then all you have to do is brulée them with that expensive blowtorch you treated yourself to from that smart cookery shop. Lidl does them too, €9.99.So now it’s 11am and you have all day left to do your main course. If you’re up to it, buy your fish whole and fillet them yourself; if not, buy them whole and get your fishmonger to fillet them and give you the bones. Most fishmongers will be happy to give you a few other bones lying around too, so get enough to make your fish stock and get that made – see the recipe after Chapter 6.This, with a couple of finely diced carrots and onion, will be your fish poaching stock. You’ll need just enough to cover your fillets sitting in a shallow baking tray, a litre or so. You can add water if you don’t have enough.And, if you’ve bought new potatoes all you have to do is top and tail your french beans and you’re good to go this evening.So, 6pm. Take the cheese out of the fridge and put it where the cat can’t get at it. You could, if you’re a masochist, make your croutons at this point so the house smells like you’ve been working hard cooking all day, instead of lying in your garden hammock drinking rosé and reading the latest bonkbuster.Set the table if your lazy, idle partner’s too lazy and idle to do it properly.Have a glass of rosé.Do your kitchen mise en place. This means, get everything out of the fridge you’re going to need to be warm, make sure you have all the utensils and pans prepared and the oven turned on.7.30pm. Put your fish stock in a saucepan with your GA (garniture aromatique – carrots and onions) handy already in the poaching pan with the fish. Cover to keep the cat out of it. Boil the kettle and put your potatoes and beans in the steamer, ready.In between welcoming your guests, turn on the oven so it’s nice and warm. When you pop into the kitchen to collect the gazpacho from the fridge, set the stock to boil, then cover the fish with it and pop it into the oven when you’re clearing the starter bowls. Put the boiling water in the steamer to cook the vegetables.Depending on the thickness of your fillets they’ll take between 5 and 10 minutes to cook. Check after 3-7 – it’s easy to put them back in, not easy to un-cook them. You want them slightly underdone.Take them out of the stock, put them in a warm place (NOT back in the oven!) and put the cooking juice into the original saucepan to boil it like mad – see the sauce bonne femme recipe after Chapter 7 for the details on making the sauce. You can flavour this sauce with, say, some chopped chives, dill or chervil – add the herbs at the very last moment just before napping the fish.Whilst everything’s boiling and steaming you can spend another five minutes with your guests, just so they don’t get to finish off your rosé all to themselves.Back in the kitchen spread the WARMED plates out (put them in the oven when you take the fish out), pop a fillet on each plate, nap on the sauce, add the strained vegetables attractively (towering displays are out this year, very 2007, as is smearing and foaming), serve.Then the cheese.Then brulée the puddings.Planning and preparing in advance – write your timings down is a good piece of advice, I had to do it for my professional exam – is the way to go. Make sure you have everything to hand BEFORE starting any recipe or plating, too.What could go wrong?

Recipe: Hollandaise sauce

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Ingredients4 egg yolks25ml cold water250g butterJuice of half a lemonSaltCayenne pepperMethodHollandaise, as I learned at school, is a sauce émulsionnée instable chaude – an unstable hot emulsified sauce. Which means, basically, whisk it lots and eat it quick.So, cut your butter into small chunks and clarify it in a bain marie if you’re a wuss, directly on the heat if you’re a manly man’s chef. ‘Clarify’, let’s clarify, means separate out the good oily buttery bit from the nasty milk solids. So you heat it gently without stirring, then skim off any scum from the surface and decant the good, clear, yellow stuff off the top and leave the white nasty bits behind.Separate your egg yolks – don’t faff around with half egg shells or squeeze bottles, just crack it and strain it through your fingers, all right?Put the yolks into a shallow saucepan and add the cold water and either on a fairly gentle heat (manly man) or bain marie (wussy wimp) whisk energetically in a figure of 8 with a supple sauce whisk (the kind that’s about 30 cms long top to bottom). Keep doing this until your mixture is, in the words of my textbook, ‘unctuous and mousse-like’.In practice this means for much, much longer than you’d think necessary. The mixture should be at around 60C – enough to make you go ‘Ouch!’ when you test it with a finger – and each stroke of the whisk should leave a VERY clear trail across the bottom of the pan. Add a little warm water – drop by drop – if you think it’s too thick. Take my word for it, you’ll get the hand of this after your first two or three hundred litres of the stuff. How hot? My restaurant chef’s tip was: Hold your hand on the side of the pan whilst whisking; when you smell burning flesh, it’s too hot.Add in the lemon juice and then the WARM butter drop by drop, whisking furiously all the time. You can add the lemon at the end if you prefer, along with a pinch of cayenne pepper.Again, a few drops of warm water will help if you think it’s too thick.And there you go; ready for your Eggs Benedict (beurck) or to be transformed into mustard sauce, mousse line, Maltaise (blood orange) or Mikado (mandarin orange) sauce.Seriously, this isn’t the difficult sauce to make that many fear – put all your ingredients in place and do this last just before serving the appropriate dish (you can keep it if you can maintain a bain marie at 60C but hey…) and you’ll be fine.Then again that’s easy for me to say, 250 practise litres ahead of you….

Recipe: Fondue de tomates

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Ingredients100g shallots500g confit tomatoes2-3 garlic bulbs250 ml veal stock (optional)SaltHerbes de ProvenceOlive oilA few pinches of sugar (optional)MethodThis is nothing like a meat fondue where you dip chunks of meat into boiling oil; nor is it a sauce tomato, one of Escoffier’s five Sauces meres, mother sauces.It’s more like a tomato jam which you can use as a base for savoury tarts, or spread on croutons for a cocktail snack, or anywhere you fancy a smear of tomato-ey goodness.Begin by confiting your tomatoes. Confit means preserve, usually in this case by drying them. Except you don’t want to completely dry your tomatoes, just get rid of some of the water from them. So, cut out the hard stalk base and then cut them in half horizontally and using your finger tips, scoop out the seeds and as much juice as you can. Put them cut-side up, salt them and sprinkle lightly with mixed herbs from Provence (dried basil, thyme, rosemary, whatever – it’s all good). Fresh is fine too if you prefer. Pop them into a low (80C) oven for two or three hours, until they look somewhat shriveled but not completely dried up.Turn them over and pinch the skins between your thumb and forefinger and you’ll find the skins should just pull off. If they won’t come off you’ve not cooked them for long enough, so cook them a bit more. This avoids you having non-chewable bits of tomato skin in your sauce. Proper cooks do this by ‘monder’-ing their tomatoes – dunk them for a few seconds in boiling water, then into iced water, then peeling off the skin, then cutting them in half and removing the seeds. This is best attempted when you have that vital piece of kitchen equipment a ‘stagiaire’ – a work experience kid or intern.So. Chop your shallots up finely and put them to sweat in a little olive oil in a hot pan. Oh, a tip here: put your pan on to heat first then, when it’s hot, add your oil. Do this so the pan is already thoroughly hot before heating the oil – otherwise the pan will have cold spots which will cool down the food you add, and you don’t want that. Even cooking is what we’re looking for.While your shallots are sweating roughly chop up the tomatoes and add them to the pan. Sweat them whilst hacking them into smaller bits with with the edge of your wooden spatula.Or you can cut out all the complicated bits above and use a tin of tomatoes. Your choice.Add the sugar at the end if the sauce doesn’t taste sweet enough.You can also add the veal stock if you like to give your fondue more body. This also works well for a sauce, e.g. Tomato sauce for a bolognaise. If you do add the stock, add it a ladleful at a time, reducing each ladleful down to almost nothing before adding another. This improves the flavour by not drowning the tomatoes and boiling them inside the stock.You reduce the whole thing down until it’s the consistency you’re looking for – a bit more runny for a tart, perhaps, stickier for a spreading constituency. Up to you.

Recipe: Sauce Bonne Femme

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Ingredients250ml fish stockSplash of Noilly Prat200ml thick cream100g unsalted butterMethodThis is a good example of where your preparation and mise en place come into their own. Having previously made your fumet de poisson, fish stock – see Chapter 6’s recipe – you simply reduce some of it down and then thicken it with cream and/or butter.This is, in fact, a prime tenet of nouvelle cuisine as originally championed back in the 1950s by Fernand Point. He, rebelling against the Age d’Or cookery of Escoffier which had dominated the first half of the century, refused to thicken sauces with flour. “Beurre, toujours du beurre…Butter, always butter” he said, shortly before dying of a heart attack a plump, middle-aged man.So. Take a suitable quantity of your fish stock – for four people think a quarter of a litre.After cooking your fish – say, pan-frying some filets of rouget, red mullet – deglaze the pan with a little vermouth – Noilly Prat is the French cook’s weapon of choice here. Deglazing means splashing in a little liquid, barely enough to cover the bottom of the pan over a high heat and then scraping furiously at bottom of said pan with a wooden scraper to dislodge all the nice bits stuck to it. Nice bits caused by the famous Maillard Reactions, which have nothing to do with a duck.Once you’ve deglazed you add your stock and reduce it as quickly as possible to a syrupy consistency. Don’t faff around here, boil it like mad. Then, add 200 ml of thick cream, reduce the whole by half or more until it’s nice and thick. Then whisk in your butter in small cubes straight from fridge, away from the heat. Serve immediately spooned over your fish fillets.

Recipe: Fish stock

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Unlike veal or beef stock, fish stock needs hardly any cooking. Even less than chicken stock in fact, and that only takes an hour.Ingredients600 grammes fish bones – flat fish are great (sole, turbot), also cod, halibut, that sort of thing. Don’t use bones from oily fish like salmon or mackerel – they make oily stock, which you don’t want at all.150 grammes mixed diced carrots, onions, bits of mushrooms, herb stalks for a Garniture Aromatique (GA)1 litre water100 ml white wineA splash of Noilly Prat or some other vermouth.Cracked pepperMethodBreak up the carcasses a bit and leave them in a bowl under running water until you’ve removed any blood. Rinse thoroughly. Simmer your GA in a little butter, add the fish bones and sweat them for a few minutes. Cover with the water and the (optional) alcohol.Bring it to a boil and allow it to simmer VERY gently for 20-25 minutes, skimming off the scum from the surface regularly. Add the pepper a few minutes before the end.Pass through a fine sieve or muslin cloth, cool quickly.

Vignette: Skills I never had before

18 Monday Aug 2014

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I’ve been marvelling at myself recently, marvelling at the skills I have now that I simply didn’t have years ago. Last night, for example, I sliced up some home-smoked salmon with which to make some smoked salmon and dill-cream lasagnes (long story about how I got to the point of making salmon lasagne in the evening to follow one day) and was amazed to see how thinly I can now slice a filet of smoked salmon.Ditto slicing up juliennes of red pepper to decorate a salad, or a brunoise of lemon peel. So actually I suppose it’s my knife skills that are impressing me most right now, even though I have always been easily impressed.Where did these skills come from? From all those years of working in professional kitchens, obviously, earning my living doing what I like doing.Before, if I didn’t buy smoked salmon ready-sliced it was going to be served in chunks, and the nearest thing I’d heard of to julienne of red peppers was probably Julian Clary. Now I can do both myself, and make a cracking beurre blanc, cook your steak bleu, à point or, if you insist, bien cuit and serve 55 people their starters inside an hour. Blimey.But I still love writing, which is why I’m here at 7 in the morning trying to crank out some book chapters. Or rather, here avoiding cranking out some book chapters by pretending that this diary is a way to earn money when it really isn’t.Ciao

Epilogue: Afterwards

18 Monday Aug 2014

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After passing my exam I carried on working at Les Agassins until the season ended in October, and then went on to become Chef de Cuisine (and plongeur, sous-chef, restaurant manager, sommelier and commis de rang) at Chalet Bertie for the winter season in Morzine. This was the year when there was almost no snow anywhere in the French Alps – apart from Morzine. So, it was a busy season both in the chalet and on the slopes.I was responsible for everything to do with the kitchen, from menu writing, ordering and shopping to peeling the potatoes and serving the food. And taking the blame, although luckily there wasn’t much of that.It was a nice step up from Les Agassins. I’d made the move into Personal Service, as we call it, on the advice of Steve and Caroline, two great friends and chefs from my days as a computer technologist at The Times as Dr Keyboard.I had to do a number of trials and interviews, the first of which was very bizarre; when I got there it turned out there was already a chef in the job and the owner just wanted me to spy on him and work out if he was nicking stuff; the second one was for the job I accepted up in Morzine and was great – good people, unlimited food budget, I get to do what I want; the third trial was in a tiny flat near Chelsea Harbour for six, no seven, no make that 11 people. No we’re 10 now. Anyway, they loved the food and promised to get back in touch and let me know by the weekend. They never did, and nor did the agency which sent me up there – despite me sending them several e-mails. So don’t go looking at Alprecruit if you need a job.I do recommend Natives. They found me this job and presented me for several which pay decent money – it seems that most people work up in the Alps because they want to go skiing, not because they want to cook. Well, a little skiing now and then will be very welcome, but cooking is what I went for.After Morzine I worked in St Tropez in the Spring and then again in summer. For me, St Tropex is famous for traffic jams – one gigantic big one which just fills the town from end to end. I cooked for a private French family in their villa overlooking the town; mum, dad and a handful of kids, two other members of staff and a few visitors popping in here and there. Including the lady who’s now nanny to the children of Picasso’s grandson’s children. Which was kinda cool. And Jean-Jacques Goldman, who is World Famous in France. He sings, apparently.I cooked for an English family up in the hills near Grasse for a few weeks in between St Tropez stints but missed being at home in Avignon. I carried on in the same vein through the autumn and winter, including cooking other people’s Christmas, New Year and other festive meals in three different countries in 20 days.Then the next Spring came what promised to be a life-changing event and turned out to be just that, albeit in a different way than I’d hoped. I went to Ireland to work for a member of a very famous family – after a week cooking for an even more famous Irish dancer and his lunatic wife – on a trial, with the hope and expectation of it turning into a proper, full-time in-service job. I’d already done a weekend cooking for them after Christmas when they kindly flew not only me but Delphine, too, over to Dublin.I worked for six weeks until the end of April when, on the 31st, Delphine announced that she was about to go into labour with our first child. I jumped on the next plane, arriving at home at six in the evening on the 31st, just in time to drive her to the clinic in Avignon at 2 am the next morning. Scarlett was born at 2 pm on the 1st. Good job I didn’t wait a day for a flight.The next month was massive on many levels – new babies, it turns out, are pretty disruptive of your regular schedule. We were packing the house up to move back to Ireland, all three of us, when I found out that the old man’s staff weren’t actually planning on paying me any wages.I’d got on fine with him but he employed at least one plain and simple evil witch. I managed to work out that because he was going to spend at least six months a year abroad for tax purposes, I’d be paid only for the six months when he was in residence. And that car that came with the job? Nope. Not yours. Oh, and no house either. So no wages, no car, no house and you’re living up a mountain in the middle of nowhere with a wife who speaks little English and a one month old baby. OK?Erm, no. I had to sue them for the money they already owed me and travel back to Ireland for the hearing to get it. The lesson is, of course, Get It In Writing First, because other people simply don’t care about you and yours.So, not a great experience. But it did mean we got to go on living in Avignon, and I found a job without much difficulty as a Chef de Partie des Entrées in another restaurant in Avignon, albeit one not up to the level of Les Agassins. No jobs going there, unfortunately.That autumn we decided to move a hundred kilometres back west to be nearer Delphine’s family and landed in Sommieres, a really beautiful medieval town 45 minutes from the seaside. Finding a job turned out to be less easy this time, mainly I think because of my age and because I knew too much. But I was eventually hired as Second de Cuisine in the restaurant of a chain hotel in nearby Lunel, and that was OK. Apart from the mad chef, obviously. But hey. Goes with the territory.Then in 2010 my old carpal tunnel syndrome problems flared up really badly and I had to give up cooking all together. I was off sick for six months, completely unable to work, and the government Medecin de Travail, the Employment Doctor, declared me officially Unfit To Work in Restaurant Kitchens Ever Again.So, after a government-sponsored retraining and conversion process, I ended up teaching English. Now, I teach English and ‘Professional Culture’ to would-be hotel and restaurant managers at the world-class Vatel school in Nimes. It’s a great job and I love talking about the restaurant world to my students, who are studying for Bachelor and Masters Degrees in International Hotel and Business Management.Delphine and I have a second daughter, Roxanne who’s now 4 – Scarlett’s 6 – and the French life with a papa who still loves cooking suits them very well.Yes, I still cook. In fact I do all the cooking at home, and much of the washing up still. My favorite dish? One of the first I learned to make at Les Agassins all those years ago: a Trilogie – confit tomatoes, goat cheese and aubergines.Plus ça change; my life is now, as it was then, all Eat, Sleep, Cook and, of course, School!End.