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.

Tom Daley's dating a bloke: this is why it's news

At the beginning of the week, the ‘news’ broke that English diver Tom Daley was in a relationship with another man.

It really shouldn’t be news at all, but this morning, Daley was still trending in the UK on Twitter, which social media factoid suggests that it is.

Even before last year’s Olympics, a major question for some journalists was whether or not he had a girlfriend.

I do sometimes wonder if the mass media in the UK will ever grow up – or is it just a reflection of huge swathes of the public? Chicken, egg …

It shouldn’t be anyone else’s business who someone dates. It shouldn’t matter – but yet it still does, apparently.

A glance at some newspaper forums over the last couple of days offered a clear answer of why, with a fairly high number of comments in some places revealing a staggering level of ignorance and intolerance.

Then there are other questions. After Scottish cyclist Graeme Obree came out in 2011, at the age of 46, he found that sponsorship deals “suddenly disappeared”.

And while it might be relatively easy to be out of the closet in the UK and the rest of the Western world, it’s far from easy everywhere else.

In Russia, for instance, where the Sochi Winter Olympics will be held next February, legislation has been enacted to stop ‘homosexual propaganda’ – at the same time as passing a bill imposing sentences of up to three years in prison for offending religious believers.

Since theDuma passed the bill, there have been increased reports of attacks on LGBT people. These things are not meaningless.

A recent poll found that nearly half of Russians believe that gays and lesbians should not enjoy the same rights as other citizens.

There have been calls to boycott the Games – but there’s something rather pleasing about knowing that commentator Clare Balding will be sitting in a studio in Russia, an openly gay woman, going about her business of commenting on sport.

It’s a bit of a finger to the bigots, at the very least.

Daley revealed his relationship status in a YouTube video – which meant that he could scoop any gossipy newspaper, and let people know on and in his own terms.

He refused to put a label on himself, and noted that he still fancied girls.

Not that that stopped the speculating.

James Ingham, a “showbiz columinist” at the Daily Star, tweeted: “Hope @TomDaley1994 gets the respect & admiration he deserves for coming out & not any abuse from either side of the fence! #gay #proud”.

Fine as it goes, but why apply a label via the hashtag?

I pointed out: “@JAMESINREHAB He has used no label, but since he still fancies girls, apparently, perhaps it’s more a case of #bi than #gay.”

To which he responded: “We shall see. Pretty much every gay man comes out as ‘bi’ and says they still fancy girls but very few actually are or do ;)”

What will we see and how? Does a married man have to actually have sex with another woman to prove he still fancies women in a general way and is, therefore, heterosexual? Would Daley have to do something similar to ‘prove’ what he has said?

And at the end of the day – why?

One of the things that that illustrates is how, even if we’ve come a long way on sexuality issues in the UK – and other parts of the Western world – people still get confused by bisexuality.

Indeed, as one particular poster on the Telegraph blogs continued to assert: bisexuality is merely an illustration of confusion. It was, so they appeared to think, impossible not to simply be able to choose – as though sexuality has ever been a matter of choice.

Oddly, some heterosexuals, who still claim that to be the case, never seem able toexplain when they personally opted for heterosexuality or how anyone simplychooses who to fancy.

Another poster squealed about the “violent” behavior of the ‘pro-gay lobby’.

Amazingly, when I asked for examples of this violence, nobody could answer – but several people marked my comment down.

Well folks, when you can find examples of heterosexuals who have been bullied or beaten or murdered, by those nasty gays, just for being straight, then perhaps you can waffle on about ‘violence’.

Until then, perhaps you should stop trying to use language inaccurately in order to justify your own attitudes. And just remember: the sky hasn’t fallen in on any country that has legislated for equal marriage.

Although of course, the inbred nutters at Westboro Baptists were quick to take to Twitter to blame last weekend’s Glasgow helicopter crash on just that.

Also on Twitter, human rights activist Peter Tatchell is currently challenging Yusuf Chambers – a young Irishman who converted to Islam and is now a preacher and has been reported as saying that homosexuals should die – to say that in fact he opposes the “Sharia death penalty for adultery and homosexuality”.

Thus far (Wednesday 4 December), Chambers has refused to agree with such a statement.

This isn’t just some obscure philosophical point – there are countries, such as Iran, that execute people for their sexuality and plenty more that imprison people for the same reason.

Oh, the Iranian state might dress it up in language about ‘exploiting young people’, but the truth remains that the Iranian state – and others – murder people for being gay.

Tatchell’s efforts have also attracted a fair few others who are playing the offended game and suggesting he isn’t challenging extremism but being Islamophobic.

You may not like or agree with Tatchell, but he is utterly fair and consistent.

And after all, it shouldn’t be difficult to say that you don’t agree with stoning people to death, now should it?

As only a slight aside, the recent revelation that some UK universities are grovelling before religious fundamentalism by allowing meetings to have segregation of the sexes should be enough to warn people that the dangers of fundamentalisms are remarkably real, even in the UK, in the 21st century. Or so you’d hope.

But the fact that we apparently have people in the UK who probably applaud every time Iran hangs gay men for being gay is, along with all the things mentioned above, why Tom Daley’s video announcement is news, why making it was brave and why even in the UK, in the 21st century, coming out is still difficult for many.

No smoke without fire? Sleepwalking into censorship

Icon with a cigarette! Call the censors!

Back in the halcyon days of summer, Prime Minister David Cameron decided to indulge in a spot of populist rhetoric by calling for internet service providers to explore the possibility of imposing filters on their services.

These would mean that customers would have to opt out of the filter in order to be able to see a variety of materials.

The big media fuss has all been about blocking porn and Saving Our Children.

But as the Open Rights Group made clear in July, having spoken to ISPs, porn is hardly the only thing on a list that you’ll be expected to opt in to.

Their list was:

• pornography;

• violent material;

• extremist and terrorist-related content;

• anorexia and eating disorder websites;

• suicide-related websites;

• alcohol;

• smoking;

• web forums;

• esoteric material;

• web blocking circumvention tools.

One would have thought that “extremist and terrorist related content” was already covered – by being illegal.

What constitutes “violent material”? A film – or stills – of Titus Andronicus? Tom and Jerry? The Rumble in the Jungle?

Alcohol and smoking? Both entirely legal the last time I looked. And would that include stills of, say, Humphrey Bogart with a fag?

And “web forums”. Well, that’s mumsnet gone.

But perhaps the best is “esoteric”. So, material that is ‘intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialised knowledge or interest.’ So a specialised area of history, then?

One is left to wonder at all these categories, which one will have to opt in to rather than opt out of.

There is an idea that it will act on ‘nudge theory’ – that people will be less inclined to uncheck boxes and simply glide through the setting-up process.

If one doesn’t, will one be monitored? Who will monitor the monitors? The evidence for the latter question is: ‘nobody’.

It’s difficult to think that that is overly paranoid.

Only a couple of weeks ago it emerged that Tony Blair had allowed the US to spy on British citizens and store data about them. The US had then gone further than agreed.

The Conservative Party, in opposition, were – rightly – opposed to increased monitoring of British citizens, but the Parliamentary party has changed its view since taking office.

Given the Snowden revelations, is there really a government that you would trust to censor what people can and cannot access on the internet?

Yet even if you could trust this government – and any foreseeable ones – to make decisions for you on what you should and should not see, why would you?

Why would you want to hand over to any government any degree of control over what you could view?

Personally, I don’t buy the ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide’ line.

I might have nothing to ‘hide’ in terms of any criminal behaviour, but that doesn’t mean that I should not still value my privacy – my right, for instance, to exchange (legal) comments with any other individual without anyone else watching in.

What we do need is far better sex education for children and young people – sex education that includes issues around social media and the internet and, yes, porn, but not religiously-based sex education that teaches only guilt, which then becomes counterproductive.

What we do not need is giving power over what we view and read to politicians and the security services (whether of this country or any other) and unelected, unaccountable internet providers.

And if those arguments don’t convince you, then remember that one of the biggest cheerleaders for the ‘pornwall’ is the Daily Mail, which you could almost forget does not routinely use its website to pen creepy, sexualising comments about underage girls.

I’ve posted about the ‘porn panic’ before – and hopefully this brief post makes clearer why any filtering is a slippery road that should be opposed.

Everyone needs to really think before getting suckered in to censorship on the basis of cheap soundbites.

• Interesting piece on the ‘special relationship’ and spying.

• Sleepwalking into censorship from the Open Rights Group (25 July 2013)

• For more on sex education for today, visit Bish Training.