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Tim Hayward

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Everything posted by Tim Hayward

  1. That bugged me too. After years of reading slavering articles about 'fine' chocolates... how I'm supposed to demand 95% cocoa, single estate beans and Christ knows what all else, how filthy, disgusting, shop bought chocolate bars are sometimes adulterated..... WITH VEGETABLE FAT (Bleeeeechhh!!!!) I was truly shocked. Otherwise, it was an interesting structure to a show... 1. Here is the filthy, machine/factory made version of a great classic 2. Here's the fantastic handmade original version 3. Great chef uses techniques of 1. to create 2. ...totally fucks with my head on so many levels. What did stand out though, was that even counting for the amount of filling going on (What other show begins with a six minute recap of what you haven't seen yet - short of footage perhaps?) it was refreshing to watch a programme where someone spent so much time actually doing something with food. It made me realise that most cookery shows these days involve sleb interviews, sleb chef gurning at camera, sleb chef interviewing entirely wooden civilian about 'flavour' of product and shots of civilians tasting food and remarking how flavour a 'cuts through' flavour b. Anything but the guy cooking. In 87 hours of Gordon 'Fucking' Ramsey last month, I'm trying to remember when I last saw him do anything but sponge the edge of a plate.
  2. Just heard HB on Desert Island Discs and am now, more than ever, convinced that he's a jolly nice bloke and a great cook with his heart in the right place. Which just makes it even sadder that the show is a cock-up. I'm heartily sick of seeing good cooks ruined by going on TV. I hope this show fills his pension pot so they won't be able to persuade him to do another.
  3. Paul Rankin did that on the tele years ago as a tip to prevent bbq'd sausages being burnt on the outside and raw in the middle. ← Now you come to mention it, Ainsley Harriot did a lot of work with dry ice in the early 90's. I think he was playing Abanaza at the Doncaster Playhouse. ← RAOTF,SIH,ISDOVUHOS (Rolls About On The Floor, Shrieking In Hysterics, In Serious Danger Of Vomiting Up His Own Spleen)
  4. I thought that actually made some sense. I've always held (with Nazi zeal) to the notion that sausages should be poached in oil. Though it looks terrifying and might possibly cause your arteries to clog by sympathetic magic, it cooks the centre just like the water poaching while browning the outside just like the frying stage. As long as the skin isn't broached by anything as criminally stupid as pricking with a fork, the 'juices' (read 'fats') stay inside the sausage and no extra fat can get in. I felt Blumenthal's technique made loads of sense for anyone pusillanimous enough to fear fat - which frankly seems to be everyone these days. I also felt it required rather less nicety of temperature control than oil poaching which rather undermined his 'scientific' approach. Oh Hell.... I should give the guy a break.... it must be tough to find something really innovative to do with a sausage that will fill 1'45" of airtime
  5. ...and watching a genius make a public arse of himself is is humiliating to both genius and viewer.
  6. Heston has worked with most of the remaining university physics and chemistry departments in the UK according to his profiles. It's unsurprising that Reading gave him an honorary doctorate - he's the only person doing anything amusing to popularise science in the UK. Blumenthal currently constitutes pretty much the total media coverage of English physics. I notice that Shane Warne got one last month too. Other distinguished holders of this academic accolade have been Rod Hull and Basil Brush. Though many things make me proud to be British, the parlous state of our University Science departments is not one of them. As it happens, Heston Blumenthal does make me proud to be British - mainly because he is a brilliant self-taught cook, a passionate educator and an innovator. I think he probably deserves the doctorate. He definitely deserves the OBE. The tragedy is that he's been tarred with the 'soy paint' of 'Molecular Gastronomy' and is clearly aware that, if he doesn't do something about it quickly he will be destroyed in the inevitable backlash against it (remember how vituperative everybody got about the fatuous culinary excesses of 'Nouvelle Cuisine'). My point about Wall's was aimed at MG in general. Even the dimmest punter is starting to question whether a 'maize foam matrix, stabilized in hot air blast and powdered with freeze dried farmhouse cheddar' isn't just a Cheesy Wotsit. Using the techniques of industrial food producers to create new textures is an interesting parlour trick... but lets face it, it's limited. When you try to apply it to the sort of food that constitutes the Great British Favourites you get a ludicrously recursive argument. A British banger is, to most people, an industrial product. When Blumenthal comes to the conclusion that the authentic taste can only be obtained by the use of sweeteners, over processed meat and fillers, he's getting dangerously close to the question, "Why the fuck would I bother?" When he experiments to prove that a tart, which has always been made with a packaged by-product of industrial sugar refining, tastes most authentic when made with.... a packaged by-product of industrial sugar refining, the same question arises "Why the fuck would I bother?" I'd hazard that the makers of this programme found this question coming up a lot during testing - that's why they had to cut it to death. I think Blumenthal is possibly a genius. I think he and Harold McGee have done absolutely brilliant work in bringing scientific understanding to cooking. If proof were needed, I think this programme shows that Molecular Gastronomy - if it ever was a food movement - is disappearing up it's own arse. It's little short of a tragedy that, at a time when one of our nation's best chefs is trying to distance himself from it, he's been sucked back in.
  7. You noticed that too. Also, when the dry ice was at -200 he was slopping it about with bare hands and no eye protection. Back in the studio it was apparently at -80 but he was suddenly wearing all the kit. I also picked up on Matthew's observation on the potatoes upthread I was intrigued by the large number of continuity errors so I called a mate who's a foodie and an editor. Production teams move heaven and earth to avoid even the smallest continuity break so, he reckons, a show only looks like that when an enormous amount of work has been done in the editing suite after the fact. The amount of error in this show is consistent with it having been entirely recut, a supposition borne out by it's extraordinarily last minute scheduling. I'd hazard a guess that the first version of this show tested appallingly and had to be substantially remade.
  8. Just watched the show. If I hear that little audio sting (four breathless queens on crack singing "Digga ding ding dingggg, ding ding" in four part harmony) I will fucking scream. It's worth noting that, in a series like this they don't actually choose the running order till they've shot the whole thing - then usual practice is to run with the best show first. In which case - God help us. The sausage thing was fun but the notion of adding toast water (The toast must be absolutely dry... right the way through) was just bollocks - a visual filler every bit as pointless as the culinary one. The mash from roast spuds trick was as old as the ice cream performance and did we really need Heston to take ten minutes out of his busy schedule to work out that the best treacle for a traditional tasting treacle tart was Tate & Lyle's Golden Syrup? On the upside, I loved the title sequence. Digga ding ding dingggg, ding ding I interviewed the man a few weeks ago and he was, as noted upthread, keen to distance himself from the whole 'Molecular' farrago. The sausage sequence shows why. By the time he's liquidised the meat, blended in smoke flavoured fat and topped it up with carefully balanced rusk and syrup, any half intelligent foodie is going to realise he's doing exactly what Wall's are doing in their better equipped labs. There is also, of course, the problem of all TV cheffery. It doesn't matter how far the poor bastard wants to distance himself from broad stroke cartoons of himself - that's exactly what the producers want. Consequently we get the whole 'nutty professor' shtick which Blumenthal himself doesn't believe in enough to carry off. Some people have been justifiably baffled at the fact that BBC2 have promoted the show as part of their exciting autumn offering but buried it in the schedule without cross promotion. To my mind this is because they knew the show itself was going to be a mess, although the concept was a big seller. That's why we've seen a lot of the beautiful titles and none of the show itself up till now. As it happens, I think he's a good presenter and an inspiring enthusiast - it's just a shame that he's been railroaded into presenting a self parody. Digga ding ding dingggg, ding ding
  9. This is the article that provoked so much bitter debate on various foodboards. It speaks volumes for the quality of research the Independent is putting into a piece like this if it can be entirely undermined by Jay's interview which, as far as I can tell, was not primarily intended to be a financial/investigatory piece. How the Hell did the Indy do this? Half an hour on Wikipedia?
  10. Is there an emoticon for jaw-dropping amazement? I'm going to check back in a week. If you haven't booked, I'm going to march you over there myself... ...and buy you chitterlins.
  11. Now you have me fascinated.... it's on order.
  12. Nicola Humble's Culinary Pleasures has a load of stuff on cookbooks of the period and you should easily get a working menu out of it. It might also be amusing to try to replicate one of Anatole's (Aunt Dahlia's Chef) menus from the Jeeves and Wooster books. Bizarrely, I've only been able to track it down on an Italian website (perhaps someone here could help out with translation.... Sherry Welsh Rarebit Filetti di Sogliola alla Princesse Asparagi con Maionese Anatroccoli agli aromi Patatine arrosto Torta di ribes con crema Amaretto di Saronno per lei Goccetto di Porto "a seguire" per lui To be accurate, the Welsh Rabbit (Dammit, Dear Boy!) should come at the end. I've got a few cookbooks of the period but unfortunately the lot is sealed in plastic while the room's being redecorated so I won't be able to get at them for a week or so. If time isn't too pressing I'll see what else I can find.
  13. That's so weird. I just spent the morning making puff pastry to Django then segueing seamlessly into Hot Club of Cowtown for the assembly of crab pasties. (For our American friends, this is a small, semi-circular pie, not something a crustacean pole-dancer glues on to her nipples). Last night I came over all nerdy and started compiling a playlist of all the songs on my pod that mentioned food and cooking. So far it looks like this... A Chicken Ain't Nothin' But a Bird. Cab Calloway All That Meat & No Potatoes. Fats Waller Banana Split for My Baby. Louis Prima Beans & Cornbread. Louis Jordan Boogie Woogie Blue Plate. Louis Jordan Cake. B-52s Chicken. The Cramps Chop Suey, Chow Mein. Louis Prima & Keely Smith Do Fries Go With That Shake? George Clinton Downstairs at Danny's All Star Joint. Rickie Lee Jones Everybody Eats when they come to My House. Cab Calloway Feed Me. Lambert, Hendricks and Ross Frim Fram Sauce. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong Gimme a Pigfoot. Bessie Smith Green Onions. Booker T & the Mgs Hot Tamale Baby. Clifton Chenier I Need A Little Sugar in My Bowl. Bessie Smith Java Jive. The Ink Spots Mashed Potato, USA. James Brown Matzoh Balls. Slim Gaillard Memphis Soul Stew. King Curtis Quiche Lorraine. The B-52's Red Beans and Rice. Booker T & the Mgs Saturday Night Fish Fry. Louis Jordan Seafood Mama. The Andrews Sisters That Chick's Too Young to Fry. Louis Jordan Watermelon Man. Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan Can you suggest anything I should add to my collection?
  14. Whether advances in photographic technology can be said to 'improve' pictures is debateable - most pictures that still make my jaw drop were shot on some pretty elderly kit - but they do change the opportunities to take pictures. If you compare Fenton's pictures of the American Civil War with any of the photojournalistic coverage of Vietnam you can see how light, portable 35mm cameras with faster lenses made it possible to be inside the events rather than viewing the aftermath. In a similar way (as Dan points out upthread) the new digital technology puts the camera in a new place. It goes into the hands of experts in other fields, it goes into the kitchen, the studio and the workshop. And lets's not forget that where film-based photography was about making pictures, digital photography has moved beyond and now encompasses publication. The combination of digital camera and computer now gives the picture maker access to an audience. I would argue that this is the real stepchange in the technology - it's like whipping the film back off your Hasselblad and replacing it with a publisher, a printer, a distributor and a chain of bookstores. There will still be great photographers who shoot pictures and get them published in books and magazines. Many of them will shoot digital and, one could argue, the technology is irrelevant to them. The really exciting area is this new kind of communicative, democratised photography/publishing where vastly broader audiences can exchange ideas and are now able to include imagery. A string of illustrated postings in which a brilliant chef teaches an adoring audience how to, let us say, make a phenomenal pork pie is an entirely new phenomenon in communication. It sits between lesson, book, correspondence, lecture, article and photo-essay. That it should be available to a global audience of thousands of self-selecting interested parties who have the ability to interact is, frankly, such a paradigm shift in communication models as to be nearly incomprehensible - it certainly is to the old-media. Will digital help everyone shoot like Irving Penn? No. But if it enables a chef to behave like a cross between Channel 4 and Conran Octopus publishing in the space between his shifts it will have achieved a greater good. Brillat Savaran said that the discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star. If that's true then a technology which enables a man to improve the pork pie making skills of thousands is truly the wonder of the age.
  15. I think I could happily have St John's soft roes on toast for breakfast and a Bubba's sandwich for lunch every day for the rest of my life. I regularly eat at either alone. In fact, on the day, you may well see me. I'll be the bloke in the corner wearing a tinfoil hat and talking to the ketchup. You are indeed fortunate to be lunching near Liverpool St.
  16. Brilliant!! Jean Baptiste.... my culinary idol.
  17. Surely that's the fundamental flaw in the show format. How can you possibly have a legitimate 'judging' procedure over something as subjective as food. When Masterchef began I was still working in TV. If you wanted to get a show greenlighted back then, it had to be in some sort of gameshow format. These days, of course, you can screen anything as long as it contains heartwrenching scenes of entirely staged self-revelation and some half-baked 'life-coach' who's shite-awful attempts at cod psychology reduce the poor idiot punter to weeping. Masterchef's format is a relic of its time To my mind it was always pointless taking the judging seriously. We watched the show to see people cooking, not because we felt the elevation of a particular amateur to notional primacy did anything for us or for cooking. Of course, without the pretence of a national competition you have no reason to have amateurs cooking on TV (leave Ainsley Harriot out of it) and without judges attempting to describe the food (Hmmm, the lemon really cuts through the richness - Oh God, kill me now) the viewer just has to stare at a picture. So the competition has to be there even though it's absurd. After seeing Vic Reeves' sketch parodying the show, I felt he should always present it and that it could be radically improved if at least one contestant each week was a random psychotic self-harmer.
  18. But this applies to every photograph, the moment you frame it in the viewfinder. I used to spend a great deal of time arranging things for the camera, and now I consciously make the effort not to. But the result now is sill a kind of artifice, just less laboured. Point taken. Absolutely Aah! To be in that lucky position I have to threaten to break legs to get just one fee out of them. A couple of reasons. Firstly, I don't regard it strictly as a blog. Though I use blog software to publish I'm not really involved in the blogging community and I don't invite comments or online input. The model I originally set out to follow was a Creative Commons licensed online column. As I was trying to develop a profile as a food writer, it seemed sensible to publish the column that nobody had commissioned me for yet. I use it as a portfolio of spec pieces, a promotional tool and as the archive for the HTML newsletter. I chose to do the free subscription route for the newsletter so I could track my audience (too many years in marketing). Second reason. I stopped taking pictures seriously at least fifteen years ago when I went to the dark side in ad agencies. I only started shooting again recently (inspired, I have to admit, by the examples of Alastair and yourself) and always on the medium-format, film kit that I understood. Now Nikon have finally brought out a camera that will accept my extensive collection of fine old Nikkor glass, I've been able to go digital so I hope I'll have some stuff up soon.
  19. Agreed completely. Though the phenomenon has spread away from blogs and back into the print media. I've noticed many stylists have felt able to make the leap into taking their own food pictures and both yourself and Alastair Hendy are now making a great job of writing, cooking, styling and shooting your own books. I would argue that that convergence of skills is very much a post digital phenomenon - though I have to confess that the assertion is based on feeling rather than any objective data. Someone being able to do all those things well, being a sound investment for publishers and having the profile and personality to hang it all together feels like a very modern development. By coincidence I was looking at Freson's Taste of France last night while listening to the podcast. Though the photography is lovely the really noticeable difference is that his pictures are 'still lives'. The viewer is complicit in the belief that this is an artificial and aesthetically agreeable arrangement of objects by an artist. If I ever see a 'still life', in that sense, in a modern book or magazine, it seems false. Does that make modern viewers more sophisticated or just more cynical?
  20. Jesus... I had that on the underside of my stairs. I had a guy come in to spray it.... Seriously. My envy knows no bounds. That's the first photo I've seen on eG that I can actually smell.
  21. Restaurant? Is this somewhere we might be able to do a bit of comparative sampling? Right now I can't find anywhere that admits to doing it where I can try it out.
  22. OK. I'm hearing salmon, I'm getting strong suspicions about belly pork. Sorry to use you as an unpaid researcher but what else works well? I need to hit my McGee.
  23. So all this belly pork I've been having recently is SV? I was wondering where that suddenly sprang from. In the last year or so it's been everywhere. Does this means that last year's lamb shanks were SV too?
  24. That's what I'm driving at. Surely, after 16 years one could expect some sort of concensus about whether it's a good or bad thing. Will there always be an adverse reaction to it from chefs (because it undermines their role)? How have punters reacted to it - can anyone tell the difference? I mean, being logical, it's a technology that could bring better quality food to more people - most of whom probably can't tell even if there is a difference. But if chefs are never going to like it and, I'm guessing, it's not going to be popular with food media either, then it's always going to be a 'debate'. Is it god's gift to diners but a thorn in the side of the culinary establishment - or is it just boil-in-the-bag?
  25. I'm researching an article on 'The Sous Vide Debate'. I know it's been argued on many boards and it seems, frankly, to provoke random schism and ferocious namecalling. I'm writing for regular punters here, not chefs or deep foodies, and I'm really struggling to get an honest take on it. I mean, surely this is just boil-in-the bag, not the bloody Albigensian Heresy. Save my sanity. Help me 1) understand it and 2) understand why it pisses people off so much.
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