A culinary masterclass from a master chef

Sweetbread, almond, pear

Back in December, a whole fortnight before Christmas, we ended up at the Gilbert Scott for my birthday meal, after a salutary lesson in just how far in advance you need to book for certain restaurants.

Not, I hasten to add, that The Gilbert Scott is in any way a culinary let down.

But within a few days, I’d suggested to The Other Half that we try to book well advance for his birthday, which fell this weekend just gone.

It paid off – thanks to very helpful staff – and we found ourselves with a reservation for lunch at Marcus, Marcus Wareing’s eponymous eatery at the Berkley Hotel in Knightsbridge.

Having quaffed a late-but-light breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast – as much to get the systems going as anything – we dressed and headed out into Saturday’s gloom.

To begin with, the bus was slow. Then, after getting to King’s Cross, the tannoy blared out the news that a signal failure had stalled all Piccadilly line trains – just as we’d found our way to the platform.

I’ll just say at this point: King’s Cross was always bad, but it now simply seems bigger and more crowded than ever, even if shiner and newer. It’s a nightmare to navigate around.

We thought about hopping onto the nearby Victoria line and changing – only to see that there are no stations where you can change to the Piccadilly.

We’d given ourselves more than enough time – more than recommended by Transport for London – but with less than half an hour left before we were due to take our seats, we hopped a cab and I rang the restaurant to let them know we would be a little late – which didn’t worry them in the least.

Eventually, we made it across London just 15 minutes beyond our appointed time, but nonetheless feeling slightly harried.

Anjou pigeon, celeriac, bean, blackberry

Moving through the tea room and into the restaurant provided almost instant tension relief.

At a comfortable spacious table, we started to unwind with the menus, a welcome glass of fizz and small, doughy balls with a Parmesan salty kick inside that really lengthened the taste experience.

Marcus is one of those establishments that uses very simple menu descriptions, but frankly, I don’t know why some people find it disconcerting: for me, it’s a nice way to highlight the key flavours and ingredients.

So, while The Other Half started with “sea bass, sweet potato, saffron, sorrel”, I opted for “veal sweetbread, almond, pear”.

Sweetbread is one of those hugely misunderstood cuts: yes, it can be testicles, but it can also be several other things – not least, thymus.

These were blissfully sweet and tender, with a texture that was not unreminiscent of foie gras, and with a gloriously caramelized top providing a wonderful contrast.

The pear came in at least two ways: two segments that, our waiter explained, had been given the sous vide treatment, which firmed them up at the same time as keeping them juicy. The cut edges had a filigree of black on it – a little like charcoal, I thought.

And indeed, that would work perfectly, given the wine I had.

We’d decided to rely on the sommelier for recommendations, and for this course, mine was a French white – Chardonnay ‘Vieilles vignes’, Seguela, Côtes Catalanes, 2013 – with a distinctly burnt toast taste that worked really well as a compliment to the sweetness of the meat and the pear.

There was also a pear crisp that was wafer thin and simply melted in the mouth, plus slivered almonds and a purée to add further textures.

It was divine.

For a main, The Other Half picked “venison, chestnut, cranberry, black pudding”, while I took on “Anjou pigeon, celeriac, bean, blackberry”.

Again, two very happy diners.

The pigeon was wonderful: superbly cooked, with a single leg roasted to the point of being sticky with it’s own juices, and served in a tiny bowl of bread sauce and with a water bowl alongside. There’s something almost divinely nefarious about sitting in a two-Michelin-starred restaurant and eating with your fingers.

Rhubarb, custard, thyme, ginger

The blackberries, I suspect, had also been in the sous vide for the same reason as the pear – intensified flavor and firmness – while the celeriac came in both tiny, sautéed dice and little roundels. The beans added yet more texture.

Wine this time was an earthy red – a Châteauneuf-du-Pape, ‘Clos des Brusquieres’ from the Rhône, 2010.

And then, of course, dessert.

Both of us, having seen Wareing himself present Masterchef: The Professionals late last year, were aware of his love for the dishes his grandmother cooked in his native Lancashire.

So on seeing a listing for “rhubarb, custard, thyme, ginger,” neither of us bothered with a second thought, given that the Yorkshire Triangle’s forced rhubarb season is just underway.

Not, of course, that this was any old rhubarb and custard.

The custard came as feather-light set discs, flavoured with vanilla and thyme.

With that, there was a sticky rhubarb smear, a quenelle of rhubarb ice cream, pieces of rhubarb (probably from the sous vide, because it was ‘cooked’ yet firm) with dots of foam and thyme, ribbons of stewed rhubarb and strings of ginger.

With the restaurant out of banyuls, I tried a digestif from Spain: a Moscatel Dorado, Bodegas César Florido, Jerez, which was full of prune sweetness and sunshine.

There were Tahiti vanilla and milk chocolate truffles and banana ganache with yuzu gel squares to complete the meal.

We that, we headed home, both sated and soothed.

People sometimes question whether fine dining is worth the lay out.

Truffles and ganache

I know I’ve said it before, but yes, it really does.

This was flawless cooking; not a single false note. Superb ingredients, with flavours that were robust yet combined with great subtlety, and all presented quite beautifully.

Having the wine selected for you by an expert really adds to the experience: when matched like this, it becomes even more an integral part of the meal than if you simply selected a single bottle to cover all courses.

Service was exemplary – friendly yet formal at the same time: the perfect way to illustrate this was that the junior sommelier happily agreed to give me a list of the wines we’d had, and did so in a beautifully hand-written list before we left.

And in the interests of completeness, the setting combines comfort and elegance.

This was a wonderful meal – and a perfect way to spend an afternoon.

Food as fuel – and a Yorkshire pudding challenge

Now that's what a proper Yorkie pudding looks like

The subject of food seems to bring out some very strange attitudes in people – and it’s no different when the context is television and food.

As the finals week began on Monday, the Telegraph managed to publish three articles on the subject of Masterchef The Professionals, all with the chance for readers to comment.

Some of the comments were quite absurd, but also rather revealing.

“There should be less of this daft adulation of chefs, women or men. Period,” stated one reader emphatically.

“It makes me laugh. All they do is cook food and you would somehow think they were performing open heart surgery such is the importance they place on themselves,” said another.

“What amazes me is that people actually watch these programmes ........ it’s only food, and it’s always been perfectly obvious, the more you do to it the less appetising it becomes, and the more expensive!”

“Food as God, another form of self-worship!”

As a little experiment, just try to imagine any of these comments being about, say, art and artists or composers and music. You can’t really, can you?

Equally, can you imagine those comments being made in France?

Masterchef The Professionals remains one of the least dumbed-down programmes on TV; one that celebrates and showcases serious skills, and encourages those on it, without being shouty – and yet some people actually object to that because it’s related to food.

The “adulation” comment received 11 likes: “all they do is cook food” received six.

“… the more you do to it the less appetising it becomes, and the more expensive!” suggests that somebody doesn’t understand what can go on in some high-end restaurants and probably hasn’t actually eaten in one either – certainly none of the ones I’ve had the fortune to dine in.

But “it’s only food” and “all they do is cook food” suggest people who really don’t get the pleasure of good food – or perhaps they merely don’t approve of it. It’s the food-as-fuel argument all over again.

In recent years, new-build flats in the UK have sometimes been designed and built with no kitchen, but just the space for a microwave. The assumption is that people don’t want to cook properly, but only consume ‘ping’ food or eat out.

Also in the UK, sales of dining tables have declined.

As Joanna Blythman noted in Bad Food Britain, when one developer built some holiday homes, they had a problem once visitors from abroad started staying – those visitors wanted and expected rather more than a microwave with which to cook, so the developer had to start installing proper kitchens.

In terms of Europe at least, this attitude to food seems to be a particularly British thing, although it’s changing elsewhere too, with France, for instance, seeing an increase in some people working and eating lunches at desks and increasingly eating junk food.

The root of all this is the attitude toward food that views it simply as fuel, to which can be added a rather puritan distrust of taking pleasure in what you eat, as though this is something inherently bad – or even immoral.

It reminds me of my own mother intoning: “We don’t live to eat; we eat to live” as a warning against too much pleasure in what was on your plate. And equally, her attitude toward teaching me and my sister any cooking skills or any recipes, which boiled down to: ‘you’ll learn when you have to do it’.

It’s a quite extraordinary attitude that pretends there is little or no skill involved in the kitchen, and that there is no reason to spend time learning about it.

It’s an incredibly basic life skill, yet so many leave it to chance.

My mother also pulled me out of any cooking classes at school fairly rapidly, having decided that it was a waste of money.

Perhaps that’s why so many cookery books are sold in the UK each year – because nobody has a clue what they’re doing in the kitchen and they end up trying to use such tomes to fill that gap?

I was in exactly that category myself when I started living on my own. But however well you can read a recipe, if you don’t have those basic skills, you’ll come unstuck.

It’s all very well, for instance, to say: ‘brown the meat’, but how much is right? How hot do you need the fat first? What fat works best? And so on.

My mother’s approach was hardly unique. Survey after survey has shown that cooking skills are low in the UK – few people, for instance, can cook more than three meals without having a recipe in front of them.

A few years ago, Tesco – with no apparent understanding of its own role in this – published a survey that showed that only elderly people really know what to do with different cuts of meat and how to make traditional dishes such as Lancashire hot pot.

People in middle age know less and such knowledge declined even more in still younger people.

It’s as though our parents decided to stop cooking properly the moment that they could grab ready meals from the rapidly expanding supermarkets and with the advent of the microwave.

And this lack of knowledge seems to be repeated in other countries – New Zealand has similar survey results, for example. And these are also countries, like the UK, that have rising obesity.

But there’s not just the health implication – there’s a cultural one too. Do we really care so little about our culinary heritage that we don’t mind if that hot pot dies out altogether, as Tesco suggested could happen when it published that survey?

There are people who claim that British food has nothing to recommend it, but that’s nonsense.

There are plenty of classic British dishes that, cooked well, are superb. That hot pot is just one – it merits an individual entry in Larousse Gastronomique – but what about Yorkshire pudding as another example?

It’s difficult to imagine anything much easier: all you need is to mix together some plain flour, milk, water, an egg, then heat some fat in your oven, pour the batter into a dish and Bob’s your uncle, yet people spend far more than that little lot costs on frozen ones or even on a mix, the latter of which includes stacks of additives.

Here’s the ingredient list for Auntie Bessie’s Yorkie mix – 79p at Ocado for 128g, which makes 12:

“Wheatflour, Dried Egg, Skimmed Milk Powder, Raising Agents (Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Aluminium Phosphate), Salt, Sugar, Potato Starch, Emulsifiers (Mono- and Di-Glycerides of Fatty Acids, Lacto Glycerides, Propylene Glycol Esters of Fatty Acids), Dried Glucose Syrup, Maltodextrin, Stabiliser (Diphosphates)”

The marketing spiel says: “I’ve used only the best ingredients to create my perfect Yorkshire pudding mix. Now it’s over to you! Just add water and whisk to create a smooth batter and bake in the oven for irresistible Yorkshire puddings just the way you like them!”

Now there’s a challenge, Auntie.

Let’s try Delia’s recipe and using some seriously high-quality ingredients.

This is what we need and the prices are via Ocado (so essentially what I would have in and use):

1.5kg plain organic flour – £1.89;

Organic full-fat milk – £1.85 for 2 litres;

Organic, free range eggs £2.18 per 6;

Dripping – 72p for 500g.

For Delia’s measures, therefore:

75g plain flour – just under 10p;

1 egg – 36p;

75ml milk – so just over 7p;

Two tablespoons beef dripping – at 0.13g per spoon, that’s 0.26g of fat, coming in at 19.2p;

Water and seasoning – let’s assume you’ve got these in. You still need the former for the packet mix, but what would you realistically add for the best-quality salt and pepper? It’d still only be a penny at the most.

So that’s a total of 72.2p. In other words, using the really best, readily-available ingredients, it’s still cheaper than a box of pre-mixed powder.

There’s a lot more weight for your money too – 150g as opposed 128g, and that’s without adding the egg and water, which suggests that the 12 that the packet says it will make will be substantial enough for the feast in a doll’s house.

So even with top-quality ingredients, it’s cheaper to make your own Yorkshire pudding mix than buy it, and you also avoid additives.

You’ve still got to whisk up the packet mix, and measure the water out, so it’s hardly as though the packet mix it’s a whopping big time saver – and don’t tell me that measuring the flour and milk is staggeringly onerous, because it’s not.

People have been conned – utterly conned. And if you’re thinking that my example was only a difference of a few pennies, remember that for the sake of this post, it was all top-end ingredients, and remember that those pennies can mean a great deal in a climate where food costs are rising and wage are not.

But how much of this is down to a lack of basic cooking skills and a lack of confidence in the kitchen?

Nobody’s going to watch Masterchef The Professionals to learn cookery from scratch. But the idea that a serious celebration of culinary skills is over the top, and that cooking is “only food” are an indicator of the parlous state of affairs that exists in many British kitchens – and that’s not good for health or pockets.

And if we could only stop thinking of food as fuel, and learn to enjoy it – and why not, since we have to eat? – then how much would that improve the nation's health and wellbeing too?

* If you’re in the Wigan area and would like to learn more about cooking, and about food on a budget, Shirley Southworth at Food Positive can help.

In Liverpool, Can Cook and Happy Go Cooking can help.

In Cardiff, Communities First is involved in schemes to help people learn to cook – Bill King, who I interviewed in the summer, is involved in that scheme.

This year's Masterchef moment has arrived

Beat that drum sieve for good food

It’s ‘that’ time of year again: Masterchef The Professionals is entering the final stages and there’s already a new gadget in the kitchen.

It’s been a fascinating few weeks, with huge contrasts in culinary achievement.

Happily, the BBC seems to have realised just what a star Monica Galetti is and have given her more to do over a longer time in the series, including giving her the opportunity to demonstrate what to do on the infamous skills tests before the contestants try their hand.

And as for Michel Roux Jr’s demonstrations of classic French dishes – ‘oh my’, again and again. I most especially want to try Savoyard potato cake – a potato dish that’s made of grated spuds, mixed with onions and sweet sultanas and dates, and packed into wafer-thin bacon before being baked. Yummy.

Indeed, the variety of French potato dishes that have been seen on this series are mind boggling. I need to study my Escoffier and Robuchon books.

The Other Half had been observing, with a mutual friend, that it’s probably a good thing that they don’t make sous vide cookers for home use, and was horrified when I informed him that John Lewis sell exactly such a beast.

“No!” he responded, with something close to a roar that seemed to include panic.

I did point out that it wasn’t me that had discovered that JL stock such an item, but a colleague. Our mutual friend observed dryly: “Just because he’s daft doesn’t mean you have to be too”.

I must say, if I really did have a bigger kitchen, I’d be more than tempted. After all, it’s only about the size of a bread maker.

And anyway, what’s “daft” about serious cooking? With each passing series of Masterchef The Professionals I can see the value of cooking in a water bath, allowing you to cook thoroughly but without any risk of drying out something like pork loin, for instance.

There are, I hasten to add, cheats that can allow you to come close to the same method of cooking but with ordinary kitchen equipment.

Watch this space.

In the meantime, this year’s Masterchef-inspired gadget is a drum sieve and blue scraper – just like you’ve seen contestants use on the programme.

And the weekend saw its first outings.

Vegetables purées, I have now convinced The Other Half – well actually, Michel, Monica and the contestants have done that – are not ‘baby food’.

They can add colour, texture and – of course – flavour to a dish.

What they also allow is, if you’re cutting down on complex carbs (the spuds, pasta or rice), an easy way to offer something to add another portion of veg instead.

One of the other great advantages is that you can do a purée in advance.

Saturday morning’s visit to Broadway Market had seen me return with a shopping basket that unexpectedly included a red and a yellow pepper, after Mark had decided that he was giving one of each to regular customers.

I don’t use a lot of peppers – The Other Half isn’t overly keen – and had nothing planned for such a fruit.

But then again, I thought, since Saturday’s fodder was set to be steak and chips, why not serve a pepper purée with that?

The first thing I did, therefore, was to roast the peppers: cut them in half, take out the seeds and pith, then pay them skin side up on a roasting tray and pop under a hot grill, about 10cm away from the heat.

They’ll needs about 10 minutes before they start charring, but when they’re ready, as soon as they’re cool enough to handle, peel away the skins.

Blitz in a blender and then press through a sieve if you have one, and reheat gently when ready.

Now, I added a dot of butter to this and checked the seasoning – it needed nothing of the latter – but it was never going to be thick enough to be a purée, but it was a very, very nice sauce and went perfectly well with the rest of the meal.

On a side note, my small deep fryer decided, on only its second outing, to play up: instead of 12-15 minutes to heat up, I was still waiting after half an hour and eventually resorted to a digital thermometer to check.

Bigger, plain white plates do help.

I know it was a cheap piece of kit, but that’s poor.

Yesterday’s meal was slated to be pan-fried duck breast with sautéed potatoes and a few sprouts, into which a purée of sweet potato seemed destined to fit perfectly. 

First, peel and chunk some sweet potato – one medium-sized one was more than adequate for the two of us – and toss thoroughly in olive oil with a good sprinkle of celery salt.

Then roast for approximately 30 minutes at 180˚C (fan). You will need to test and may find that an extra 10 minutes won’t go amiss.

Once again, blitz and then sieve.

That left a smooth but pretty solid mass. I left it in a clean pan covered in cling film to avoid it drying out.

For anyone wanting to know, the duck breasts were cut on the skin diagonally and salted, before being placed skin side down in a hot pan and the heat turned to medium.

They were given seven minutes like this, with the fat that came out of the skin being poured into a large frying pan on the next hob.

The duck was then turned and given a further seven minutes before being lifted out and covered loosely in foil on a plate in the oven, which was still warm from grilling the peppers.

For a sauce, drain off the last fat from the pan you’ve cooked the duck in and deglaze with a couple of tablespoons of raspberry vinegar. Add a tablespoon of redcurrant jelly to this and stir until it’s melted.

The potatoes had been boiled for 20 minutes in their skins, then placed in the oven with the door just ajar and left to dry off for 10 minutes (it was still warm from roasting the sweet potato). This helps to stop water getting into them, which you certainly don’t want for sautéing.

They were then skinned and sliced and added to the second pan with the hot duck fat, over a high heat and cooked until just golden on both sides.

But back to the purée.

To loosen the mixture, I added plenty of butter and stirred it in over a very low heat. Since it was still stiff, I also carefully added some boiling water – remember, you want it to be loose enough that you can make a bit of a swirl on the plate.

The final touch, though, is the crucial One: a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, which just takes the edge of the sweetness.

Such things are not displayed at their very best on small plates with bright coloured rims, but that apart, the taste was lovely.

Purées offer not only an opportunity to provide another texture on the plate, but also to experiment with flavours.

It won’t be long before the next one.