the_nomad

I thought that Egulleters might be interested in this - it's a repost of a blog post over at Kamikaze Cookery, where we've been testing celebrity chef recipes to see whether they're usable by the average person. After trying Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, our latest attempt was with Johnnie, a normal, geeky guy who cooks a bit, trying to cook Gordon Ramsay's Brussels Sprout and Goat Cheese Souffle. (original recipe here. It didn't go so well, although I'm told that the episode we made of it is hilarous. Anyway, various people told us that novices shouldn't be trying to make hard recipes, and so we asked one of our viewers, who certainly isn't a novice cook by any stretch of the imagination, to try making the recipe himself. And this is what happened, which I thought Egulleters might find entertaining, both for a lovely description of a cooking adventure and in light of the ongoing debate about whether celebrity chefs actually write useful recipes or just serve up "food porn"... --- My name is Stu, and I can cook. And you should know from the start that I don't like Gordon Ramsay. I think he's a massive prick. Now, cookery is manly. It helps you survive, and that's manly. It helps support your loved ones, and that's manly too. And I'm pretty manly. I go to the gym a lot, and lift weights in a manly way. I have a pretty geeky job — I'm a science and technology writer — and geekiness is manly. In the kitchen, I wield a massive, wickedly sharp Japanese knife with swirly patterns on it. That's manly. However, I freely admit that I'm not as manly as Gordon Ramsay. He's so manly, his face is actually turning into a scrotum. He swears more than me, which I don't really object to, but he insults and victimises people, which I do object to. He is, as I said, a massive prick, and you can't get much more manly than that. I also think his recipes are lousy. I tried his 'easy watercress soup' recipe once, and it didn't work. I was quietly satisfied when Hugh and Co demonstrated that his recipe for "goat's cheese and brussels sprout soufflé":http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/recipes/article3263942.ece was pretty much impossible for a cooking novice to follow. Chatting to Hugh on Facebook this afternoon, I happened to mention that I was quite tempted to have a go at it, just For Science. Go on then, said Hugh. And tell us how you did it, in a way that anybody could understand. Now, as I said, I cook, and I do it quite a lot. I'm good at it. Individual cheese soufflés, however, are pretty high on the list of things I wouldn't normally cook. For a start, they're very high in fat and salt, and I'm diabetic; I really shouldn't eat that sort of food. Also, they're very faffy and fiddly; what I normally call stunt cookery. It gets loads of pans and bowls dirty. And cheese is expensive (rightly so, when it's good — cheese-making is a skillful process which involves keeping animals, and it has to be stored under the right conditions before it can be sold) and I don't think making it into a soufflé actually improves it; I'd rather just have the cheese. But this was a Challenge. And it was For Science. How could I refuse? So, the first thing you have to do with a recipe you haven't used before is read it. All of it, not just the ingredients. That way, if there's anything in there which you don't understand, you've got time to check it out before you get stuck with a pan boiling over and no idea what to do. Looking at Ramsay's recipe, it's obvious that it's badly written. For a start, it doesn't tell you why you'd cook these things. They're a starter, and a fairly rich one; you'd cook them for a dinner party with a fairly light main course. If you like that sort of thing. There are also undefined technical terms, like scalding (heat to boiling point then take off the heat immediately) and season (add salt and pepper), plus some unexplained processes (how to beat egg whites and fold them in). And some of it is frankly bizarre. That bit with the mashing together flour and butter? That's a classical French technique called beurre manié, but it's for thickening stews and pan sauces, where you've cooked something in a liquid which doesn't thicken as it cooks. You mix it in just before serving to thicken it up and make it shiny. You don't use it for thickening a white sauce, which is basically what we're doing here. So I'll be using another fat-and-flour technique called a roux instead. Sod you, scrotum-face. Also, it's a very annoying recipe. You have to keep leaving things to cool. Who can be bothered? Like I said, it's faffy. A challenge is a challenge, though. So. It's 8.10pm, and I'm making a start. First off, we need to infuse the milk. We could cook the sprouts at the same time, but that'll get two pans dirty and I can't be arsed. I'm halving the quantities, so we need to chop a quarter of an onion — it needs to be fairly fine, to extract the maximum amount of flavour — and chuck that into a pan with 100ml of milk, half a bayleaf, half a star anise and two cloves. Then heat that to just boiling and whip it off the heat, pour it into a bowl and leave it to cool and infuse. 8.26, and that's done. I chucked it back into the jug I'd used to measure the milk, then washed up the pan and put it back on the heat with some water for the sprouts, which I'd peeled and halved while the milk came to the boil. No point leaving them whole when we want to purée them anyway and we want them to cook evenly. Now, let's cook them and see how long it takes for the milk to go cold, shall we? 8.37, and the sprouts are cooked and puréed. I did not 'refresh in ice-cold water', I just ran them under the cold tap for 30sec, which is far more efficient. And I don't have a food processor — I used to, but I hardly ever used it — so I used the little blending cup that came with my Braun stick blender (you know, the sort the KKC boys tried out a few weeks ago) and that did the job fine. So now I have some sprout purée, some funny smelling milk which isn't cold yet, and some washing up. I'll go separate some eggs while I wait. 8.45. Well, that was a deeply unpleasant egg-sperience. One of the eggs had gone off, and it was the second one I separated, so I had to get rid of both whites and wash the bowl, then separate another two. Urgh. Also, the milk still isn't cold. And I've buttered the ramekins, too. 9.15, and the base is done. This is how you make the roux: put the amount of butter specified in the recipe into a small pan, melt it, then add the flour and stir with a wooden spoon over medium heat until it goes a shade darker. You need to do that to cook the flour, otherwise it tastes floury. Then strain the milk into the pan and whisk hard until it thickens, which only takes seconds. The Worcester sauce, parmesan, goat's cheese and egg yolks are added, and it's been seasoned (salt and white pepper). And the puréed sprouts are in. It's now cooling in a large bowl (ANOTHER one), and I've tasted it: slightly odd, and not entirely pleasant. Also, it looks like there's too much for my two ramekins. I've also done some washing up and put the kettle on, and the oven is heating. Christ on a bike, this is an annoying recipe. 9.30, and now I’m getting really grumpy. The egg-whites are now beaten. Here’s what Ramsay doesn’t tell you. You need a deep glass or metal bowl, which must be absolutely dry and absolutely clean. Your whites must have no trace of yolk in them. Beat them until it’s expanded a great deal in volume, and so that the whites around the whisk are billowy. When you take the whisk out, the whites should hold their shape in soft peaks but not stand up stiff and dry-looking. The observant among you will have noticed that the recipe uses three eggs and I’m halving it. This isn’t a problem with the yolks, because a bit of extra yolk won’t hurt it. But you don’t want too much white, so just wash a big tablespoon of the stuff down the sink. Now the folding in. You have to do this with a metal spoon, because you’re trying to keep in all the air you’ve added and a wooden spoon will knock it out. You’ll end up with a rubbery soufflé, and nobody wants that. So you loosen the base mixture by folding in a spoonful of whites — scoop it up from the bottom and cut across it to mix — then add that to the rest of the whites and keep folding until it’s all mixed in but it still looks foamy. It doesn’t look promising. Hugh and Johnnie’s description of it is right: it’s mostly yellow, with green flecks, and it looks like something the cat threw up. Maybe Scrote-face Ramsay actually hates Times readers, and this is some sort of manly revenge? Is he standing over my shoulder, heaping insults on me? Or is this just a lousy recipe? My girlfriend just came home, wrinkled her nose, and asked what the hell I was doing. I told her it was Hugh’s fault, and she could blame him when she had to taste the stuff. She asked me why I was doing it. I explained it was a Challenge, and For Science, and she sighed and said 'Men!' See? Manly. In the meanwhile, the soufflés are in the oven. There was almost twice as much mixture as I needed to fill two ramekins. Currently, I am not inclined to keep the excess. There is washing-up debris all over my kitchen. I notice Gordon does not tell me what they’re supposed to look like once they’re cooked for half an hour. Thanks, Gordon. 9.55, and they’re out of the oven. They actually smell quite nice, in that baked-cheesy sort of way. They’ve risen hugely and cracked on top, so they look sorta like foamy yellow cheese-flowers with browned edges. As soon as they’re out of the hot water, they start to collapse, but they’re twice-baked souffles and they’re supposed to collapse. Scrote-face didn’t tell us that, did he? So now we wait for them to cool down. Again. For God’s sake. 10.55, and they’re finally done. Left them to cool down while I watched Heroes - so it turns out it's good for something after all - then turned them out into individual oven-proof dishes (yeah, I know, they were left over from some ready meal thing), grated some gruyere on top, drizzled some cream around them, baked. And they actually taste quite pleasant, although what they mostly taste of is toasted gruyere. No hint of sproutiness, or for that matter goat’s cheesiness, although the texture was quite nice. ‘If it was served to me for a starter,’ my girlfriend said, ‘I certain wouldn’t complain, but I wouldn’t be in raptures either.’ It took us less than three minutes to eat them. There we go. An experienced cook took well over two and a half hours to cook this and found it very annoying. It created a huge heap of washing-up, used expensive ingredients, and was... well, OK. So basically, Gordon Ramsay’s idea of a good time is to spend ages faffing around, stopping at irregular and frustrating intervals, at the end of which he probably feels very smug at showing off his technique, but doesn’t really satisfy his partner, and doesn’t do her much good either. It’s Mrs Ramsay I feel sorry for.

You can probably get some of the more common "molecular gastronomy" products from local health food stores, if you know of any. Soy Lecithin and Xanthan Gum are both available from most health food shops. You can probably buy lecithin at nutritional supplement shops too. Agar-agar is commonly used in Chinese cooking, so try a Chinese supermarket if you have access to one. That's all I've got! Anyone else?

My impressions of the book have echoed Douglas's, as well as some of the other commenters here. It's very interesting to read how Keller uses sous-vide, but some of the information in the book is, erm, a little surprising. The total lack of mention of cooking times varying by thickness of cut is a major omission, for example, and like Douglas, I was very irritated by discussion of the "danger zone". I was interested by the descriptions of and instructions for cook-chill, but given the scientific omissions in the book, I'm frankly not sure how much I trust them, especially in a home environment. Anyone? So far, the section of the book I've used most often has been the lengthy table of cooking temperatures at the back - which also contains cooking times, which I've been totally ignoring. (I'd be worried that a total novice to sous-vide might pick the book up and decide to, for example, cook a bone-in chicken leg for an hour at 64 degrees, which would probably leave the inside under temperature, but I may be being paranoid there.) Just about every recipe includes liquid in the bag, meaning that you'll need a ($2,000) chamber vacuum sealer to try a lot of them. Having said that, as other commenters have mentioned, a lot of the liquids are freezable. My impression was that some of the recipes required the liquids to be prepared or added into the bag in rather specific ways, but I haven't checked thoroughly enough to be sure whether there are any total dealbreaker recipes for us poor people with FoodSavers. Having said that, there's a lot of good stuff to be said about "Under Pressure". Its descriptions of the uses of sous-vide to cook various types of food, and the advantages therof, are really fascinating reading. The aforementioned multi-page table is a great resource (and has produced fantastic results with everything I've tried). And the recipes are wonderful inspiration for the variety of things that sous-vide makes possible. But the gap in the market for a home sous-vide cookbook is still open.

Woo! It does have contents! Fantastic. Now, there doesn't happen to be a button somewhere on it to shrink it until it's easily liftable, does there?

Interesting - thanks, everyone. It appears I've accidentally happened upon the Blender Of The Gods... (For reference - we've got the 160 Watt Wand mixer.)

Just wondering if any of you guys use Bamix wand mixers? We picked one up for the Blenders test episode of Kamikaze Cookery (warning - crap blenders and some truly spectacular splashing featured, plus quite a lot of swearing...) and ended up recommending it pretty much unreservedly. Best foam-making hand blender I've ever seen. But in my experience very few things do exactly what they claim. It's really impressive so far, but are there any gotchas with the Bamix experience? Also - anything you'd recommend instead?

My copy of the Fat Duck cookbook arrived today. My god, it's gigantic. To put it in perspective - I can barely straight-arm lift the damn thing with one hand. And I'm not a small nor a non-active guy. I've had a quick skim - 1) No table of contents. This is going to be a colossal pain in the ass for someone who actually wants to cook from it - there's no list of recipes I can find. I'm going to make my own, and probably put it up here. 2) Really, it's very big indeed. I had pain in my lower back after bending over reading and holding it at an odd angle for a couple of minutes. It's really damn big. 3) It looks gorgeous. Absolutely stunning. It's also INCREDIBLY long, with each recipe probably taking up as much space as they did - including discussion - in the Perfection books, and there's a lot more of them. £60 is pretty darn reasonable for the quantity of top-class content. 4) The appendices, where Heston discusses food science, are probably worth the price of admission on their own. Well-illustrated and look like they're well-explained at the level of On Food And Cooking. 5) Despite the size, and probably because of the page quality (this is a really, really nice book) it sits open very easily, which will make cooking from it... more possible. Having said that, it'll also take up half my countertop. 6) Did I mention it's absolutely bloody huge? I have no idea where I'm going to put it - it won't fit on my bookshelves and will probably break my cookbook shelf. 7) Initial impressions are that the recipes are pretty doable, if very, very complex. Quite a few don't even seem to need much complex equipment. I'm looking forward to reading it, although I fear I may need special equipment to do so.

If you want an absolute ton of iSi compatible recipes, Khymos's free Hydrocolloids book is the way to go. http://blog.khymos.org/2008/06/25/hydrocol...collection-v21/ Seriously amazing free resource.

"No Reservations" - seconded. That was a much-underrated movie - in particular, Catherine Zeta Jones' chef character, with her compulsive cooking for her shrink, was really well-drawn. And Aaron Eckhart was great as always. The script's a little windy, but it has some really fine moments. "Ratotouille" is of course just brilliant. How can you not like an animated film where Thomas Keller was their food consultant? I understand he actually created the ratotuille dish seen at the end.

I tend to think that anything involving minced meat depends entirely on your source. A good pork pie is stunning, a bad one invites epic fail on a spectacular scale - and with a good, traceably-sourced one, you know you're not eating Unfortunate Pig Bits too. FWIW, if you're in Scotland ever, North Country Lass at the Edinburgh Farmer's Market does a beautiful pie, and an equally stunning cornish pastie. They have sausage rolls, too (yep, that's sausage meat in pastry in a roll form), but I've not tried them.

Would the unused space be vertical or horizontal? Provided you've got a lid on it, excess vertical space shouldn't be a huge problem, I don't think - you'll get minimal loss of temperature upward from the increased space. Horizontal space is more of an issue, though - given that water's high specific heat capacity means it's an absolute bugger to heat, comparatively, you'll end up wasting a lot of energy you don't need, and I suppose depending on what you're poaching in you could end up diluting the flavour too. I've never really had a problem using mildly overlarge pots, though - in my experience, mildly oversmall pots are more of a problem. I guess it comes down to whether you'll need a larger pot for anything else you cook, and if you have enough money and space to buy both if necessary.

Now that's *very* interesting indeed. Hmm. Don't suppose you'd be willing to name names? I shall mention that on the Kamikaze Cookery blog. Thanks.

I must admit, I avoid Mark Peter White books just because his personal style makes me want to - well, suffice it to say I'd be extremely and proactively unhappy if anyone threw a knife at me, under any circumstances. I may overcome that and check out one of his cookbooks. Heston Blumenthal, on the other hand, kicks ass. I'm actually intending to try and recreate the tasting meal I had at the Fat Duck some time later this year, once the courier actually manages to deliver the Big Fat Duck Cookbook. And yes, it will probably be on film. I've cooked his chilli, his low-temperature chicken and his spag bol in the past, all of which were stunning, and the techniques we used on Kamikaze Cookery Episode 1 (The Perfect Steak) were heavily inspired by his Perfect Steak (which, frankly, was almost certainly better). Nigella - we actually test a Nigella recipe under similar circumstances later on in the series. I'll be sure to post about it! Interestingly, Nigella is getting rave reviews on our discussion thread about the Jamie episode from all sorts of people - I'd never realised she was that highly thought of. Jamie's Italy - interesting. I thought he'd heavily adapted a lot of them. We may have to shoot a Return To Jamie episode in the next series, then...

Huh - in the US too? I'm waiting for mine in the UK right now, and again, it's been delayed. Lots of popularity or a delay in printing?

I'd certainly say that Bourdain had hit "sleb chef" status at this point, yeah. Interesting - I'd kinda assumed his book might be great fun, but wouldn't be very cookable. At risk of being horribly ignorant, who's Rocco? I fear I don't know of him, and I rapidly discovered that Googling his name was not likely to lead me to culinary marvels in the most literal sense (very, very NSFW if you do it). (And I had to look up Jaques Pepin. I had no idea that the list of celebrity chefs was so different in the US. Do you guys get our lot? I mean, I believe you get Ramsey and Oliver, but Nigella, for example? Ken Hom?) Actually, thinking about it. Ken Hom's pretty darn good.

That's very interesting, yeah. It's been one of the things I've learned from the series, actually - as you mention, there are two skills in writing a cookbook, and just because you can cook doesn't imply you can also tell someone else how to do so. I wonder if there needs to be a guide to technical writing for recipe writers out there? On the other hand, there are also examples of the problem the other way around - with Jamie Oliver's recipe, we found it fairly easy to follow, but it just wasn't that good - the ragu was distinctly unsophisticated (no celery, no carrots, no star anise, no milk, nothing but meat, tomatoes, onions and garlic), for example. I'm going to add my favourite celeb chef - Heston Blumenthal can not only cook, he also writes great cookbooks. There's a reason that his recipes are six pages long, and that reason is that he actually explains all the steps!

Just wondering - of the "celebrity chef" crowd, are there any that people actually really rate here? We've shot a short series over at Kamikaze Cookery where we get "normal people" to test celebrity chef recipes - we did one with Jamie Oliver's Pici Con Ragu (which is available now at http://www.kamikazecookery.com/films/5 ), one with a Gordon Ramsey souffle, and one with a Delia Smith pie. (If you're wondering, one came out great, one was ok-ish, and one failed utterly and spectacularly. You'll have to watch to see which one is which!). But the thing we found was that there was virtually no relation between the expectations we had of the cook and the quality of the recipe. Some of them were really badly written from a technical standpoint - it was fascinating to watch people who aren't as foodie as us trying to follow what we suddenly realised were jargon-filled, poorly-worded recipes. So - are there any "celebrity" chef cookbooks that you think avoid this? There are certainly some great, well-written cookbooks around, but I can't think of any that combine that feature with the "give it to your Gran and she'll have heard of the guy cooking" nature of someone like Jamie or Delia. Of course, we're UK-centric - is it better or worse in the US? Alton Brown's shows are pretty good - does he give good cookbook too?

Hey, all! I wonder if I can request the wit and wisdom of Egullet? I've spent the last 6 months working on a new web video cookery show, called "Kamikaze Cookery". It goes live today, with our very first episode, and we're also blogging daily. Basically, it's Top Gear meets Mythbusters, meets a cookery show. We're exploring all kinds of culinary topics, mostly with the aim of explaining the science behind cooking and how you can use it, but in an entertaining way. With flames and sweary stick figures. Episode 1, entitled "The Perfect Steak", is HERE, in which we talk about the science of cooking meat, and demonstrate the world's most jury-rigged sous-vide setup ever. The trailer for the whole series is HERE if you want to get a glimpse before committing your time. So, I have two questions... 1) What do you think? What do you like? What do you hate? What would you like to see more of? Would you recommend us to your friends? And so on. 2) We're going to be doing a second mini-video on Monday - more of a video blog than a full episode (the next one of which comes out on Wednesday 15th). What would you like to see in it? I'd be really interested in hearing if there's stuff you think we should explore more - do you want to hear about using jury-rigged sous-vide for something else? Or would you like to hear more about the practical details? Or hear us respond to some criticisms? We're really serious about making this a must-watch for foodies on the 'net, so I really, really want to hear anything and everything you have to say!

Joining the shameful self-promotion bandwagon - we're blogging daily over at Kamikazecookery.com . All sorts of food-related ranting there.

After posting my menu and diaries I have a considerable waiting list for the next one...

Thanks for the compliments, everyone! I'll definitely write future projects like this up on here too. Re agar: essentially, you chill oil in the freezer for a few hours, mix the agar and the liquid you want to spherify at high temperature (so that the agar will dissolve), then drip the agar liquid into the cold oil using a syringe or whatever else you want. The drops hit the oil, and the agar solidifies, forming a sphere. Neat, huh?

I've just checked, and it's 20% by vol - so pretty alcoholic.

Time - we started at 18:00, and finished eating around 1:45! So, about 8 hours. (Not actually massively longer than the Fat Duck tasting menu, actually, which was about 5.5 hours when I went there.) Agar - I suspect the alcohol may have been screwing the process up, or it might be that the C de C is actually close to saturation and won't dissolve the agar. Interesting stuff. Did you say you'd managed to get Ribena to spherify OK?

And so, the time has come... for the writeup. Before the meal Saturday was something of a blur. I got up at 9am (early for me) to rush out to the Edinburgh Farmer's Market, where half the suppliers I'd expected to turn up hadn't. No dairy, no mushrooms, no apple juice, and chickens that had clearly been investing in Edinburgh property prices, since given their cost I'd have expected to get a small one-bedroom flat for them as packaging. I swooped around, grabbed the rest of the stuff I'd come for (incredible organic asparagus, a bit dark but with a taste to die for, fresh-caught scallops and salmon, the Best Tomatoes In the World, and a few other things), then set off with a few ideas of where I might get the rest of the necessary foodstuffs. Hint - don't do that. Phone first. Also, have a map, because your vague memory that "oh, the butcher's is just over this hill" may be off by, ooh, say, two miles. On a very hot day. Carrying heavy shopping. The walk along the river was very nice, but I rather wish it hadn't been contemporary with the point I was meant to be making a frozen foam. Eventually, I got back and started on my frenzy of preparation. Cut cheese, drain, put starter culture into mozarella, fail to find starter culture which I'd clearly put somewhere "safe", panic, substitute lemon juice, adjust heat on sous-vide cooker, notice that the mozarella wasn't working, add more rennet, stick everything in the dishwasher, realise I needed half the things I'd just stuck in the dishwasher, notice that the cheese still wasn't working, go to Plan B and just drain the curds I had... It wasn't until I hit the "prepare agar spheres of Creme de Cassis" section of my to-do list that things really ground to a halt. I'd decided to use agar spheres rather than more fragile and annoying sodium alginate spheres after some experimentation on Friday - however, and this is important, I hadn't checked that the agar spherification process actually works with Creme de Cassis. Hint - don't do that either. Cold oil? Check. Agar dissolved in C de C? Check. Mild high from vapour-state alcohol? Check. Agar forms into spheres when dropped into the cold oil? Not on your proverbial nelly. I tried more agar. I tried less agar. I tried colder oil. I tried not to think how much the C de C cost per bottle. It would appear that, like everything else I'd ordered that week, my shipment of FAIL had arrived right on schedule. By now, guests were starting to arrive. Hoping to distract them, I put them to work setting out the table. I may have mentioned before that I hate sodium alginate. Let me clarify that - I, to use a Ramseyism, really f---ing hate sodium alginate. It's incredibly annoying to work with, it sticks to everything in sight and refuses to dissolve without begging, pleading and swearing, and it has all sorts of mysterious pH requirements that I don't have the lab equipment to master. However, with D-day having actually passed, and no agar spheres forming, it was time to resort to desperate measures. I got the El Bulli Sferification kit out, and got to work... The Courses Kir Molecular The prep: Confused. I've made this using alginate spheres before, but I'd forgotten quite how much of a pain they were to get working. Basically, alginate hates you, and after a bit of working with it, you'll hate it right back. After two or three adjustments of quantities, I ended up with about 1.5g of Sodium Citrate and about 2.7 - 2.8g of Sodium Alginate in 250ml of 50% Creme de Cassis, with 7.5g of Calcium Chloride dissolved in a 1l water bath. Dropping the C de C into the waterbath using a syringe, the spheres that were forming were very, very fragile, with a distinct tendancy to leak and combine into what looked like Creme de Cassis frogspawn. It was as I poured the last few spheres into the last glass that I realised that leaving the slotted spoon in the solution to begin with and dropping the spheres straight on to it vastly reduced the number of spheres that broke. Live and learn. The verdict: Yep, people liked 'em. Oddly, the spheres being extremely fragile seemed to help the taste - last time I made this, the taste of the spheres was very muted, whereas here it was much clearer. The "lava lamp" effect of the spheres gradually accreting bubbles was as cool as always, and overall, as a first course, this was a fairly significant success, after all the swearing. Deconstructed Breakfast My camerawoman didn't get an image of this one, sorry! The prep: This is a modified version of the poached duck eggs recipe in the Essence cookbook - I'd dumped the Chorizo sauce, which really hadn't worked for me the last time I tried it, gone to chicken's rather than duck's eggs, and substituted fried shittake mushrooms for the tomato compote of the original. The recipe's fairly simple - you bake three slices of parma ham until they're crispy (and utterly gorgeous - highly recommended), poach the eggs, one per person, and prepare a white onion soup, which is a pretty simple process. The chicken stock, despite all the faffing about the night before, turned out to be absolutely fantastic, and incredibly strongly flavoured with the chicken. The poaching of the eggs, ah, didn't quite approach professional standards - my usual mass of cloudy white ensued. But it seemed to work fine in the dish. I plated the dish in small glass bowls, with the egg in the center, the ham slice resting on the side, a half-ladle of soup poured over, and shittake mushrooms scattered around for colour. The verdict: People loved it. Several of my guests don't normally eat seperated eggs at all, but still really enjoyed the overall presentation. The baked ham came in for particular praise - unsurprisingly, because it's sensational. Overall, the first real course, and it had gone perfectly. I was also rather pleased with my plating, which did look marvellous, if I say so myself. Later comments suggested that the dish needed something else - various people suggested some kind of toast, or a tattie (potato) scone. I'll experiment for future servings. Still, by now I was relaxing a lot. The first dish had gone down a storm, after the various disasters, and we were sailing into something I was very confident about... Pea And Coconut Veloute with Coconut Foam The Prep: I love this dish. It's the signature on the front of the Essence cookbook, it looks stunning, it tastes amazing, and it's really, really simple. Now, smart-eyed readers may have noticed that this was meant to be served before the Breakfast. A brilliant substitution by a cook working on instinct? Erm, not so much. More, a cock-up by a cook who forgot about an entire course until he saw the peas sitting in his fridge. Still, the prep itself went like clockwork. Fry some onions and garlic in butter, add stock and coconut milk, leave to cook for 10 minutes or so whilst I actually got to chat to my guests (whilst getting them to shell peas for me, natch), add the peas, get another small saucepan of stock, coconut milk and lecethin going, and ask a guest to whip me up a foam whilst I blended and drained the soup. Simple. The Verdict: They loved it. And I love it. It was a whole big love thing. The colour came out much more pastel than intended (my photographer notes that "it looked much better at the table"), probably due to a slight pea shortfall and the fact we were using fresh and quite young peas, but the taste was incredible - a warm, sweet, meaty taste contrasted beautifully by the foam on top. Stonking. Now, though, we were into the courses that I'd come up with myself. Yikes... Scallops with Apple Foam and Asparagus The Prep: I'd served this dish before and screwed it up, so I was nervous, but had some ideas. First up, I roped my photographer in to prepare the apple foam - last time I tried this, I was attempting to prep the foam myself at the same time as cooking the scallops and asparagus, and it wasn't long before I heard the familiar foghorn of the FAILboat. Secondly, I'd looked up the internal temperatures for scallops, and was checking them carefully and repeatedly with a digital thermometer - as always, a bloody good idea. So, in essence, this one was simple. Heat 500ml of top-quality apple juice, dissolve 2g of lecithin in it to stabilise the foam, stir until the leci-thing actually dissolved properly, then hand over to my photographer to whip me up a bowl of foam. Then, get a pan hot and water boiling, before cutting and dropping the asparagus in the water and as quickly as possible sticking the scallops on the pan. Flip them after a minute or so, and keep checking texture (should be slightly bouncy) and internal temperature (let it go over 60 at your peril) until they're done. Heat plates in oven whilst you're doing that, because cold plates and hot scallops don't mix well at parties. Plate, spoon over foam, slap on some vinaigrette, and serve. The Verdict: Best described as "rapturous". Given that my guests included someone who wasn't very keen on asparagus, someone who didn't much like seafood, and a couple of people who really, really did like seafood and were very picky about it, the unanimous and extremely enthused praise was great. And indeed, it did taste stunning. The contrast of the apple foam, which I had enough of to use quite a generous dollop, and the perfectly-cooked (if I say so myself) scallop was just awesome. The scallops themslelves were fantastic, and the contrast with the asparagus - well. Win. Blood Orange Foam The Prep: Not Complicated. Mix 500ml of Tropicana orange juice with 1g of Xanthan Gum, possibly my favourite hydrocolloid ever for its ease of use and reliability (it takes seconds to mix into a liquid), then stick the results in an iSi creamer, shake, and serve. I was trying to show people as much as I could of the preparation, since most of my guests were very interested in molecular gastronomy techniques, so I squirted the foam out at the table - always looks impressive. The Verdict: It wasn't quite as stiff as I'd have liked, probably because I hadn't chilled it or left it to mix for a bit. However, the acid taste and creamy texture were as wonderful as always. My guests really liked it - however, they did note that you only wanted a single bowl of the stuff before the taste became overwhelming. Various people suggested serving it as a side to the Deconstructed Breakfast, which sounds like an excellent idea - orange juice with your cooked breakfast. Mutton Risotto The Prep: 24 hours in a sous-vide cooker, basically. The mutton I'd aquired the day before, trimmed the fat off it, and vacuum-sealed before putting it in my adapted slow-cooker with PID controller at 70 degrees centigrade. I'd tried this before, but not with a piece of meat that large. Just before starting the risotto, I hauled the meat out of the SV and showed it to my guests - who, I must say, aquired a certain amount of The Fear at that point... But I was confident, in spite of the greenish-looking bits on the mutton. I left the meat to rest for 15 minutes, fried up some onions, garlic and mushrooms (actually, this started during the prep of the previous course), added the rice, added a bunch of stock, sliced open the mutton, picked it up with tongs to blowtorch the outside - And the meat literally fell apart. A quick taste taste had me staggering around the kitchen in ecstasy. Just. Incredible. Rich, meaty, ludicrously tender, moistened just enough with fat. I blasted the meat as best I could, sliced it as best I could (even with a super-sharp folded steel knife, the meat fell apart before I could really cut it), and added it and, importantly, the juices from the Sous-Vide bag to the risotto, waited for the Time to be Right, and plated it with a generous grating of parmesan from my Enormous Block of Cheese (cf West Wing) over the top. The Verdict: People were more than a bit dubious about this one, a state that lasted a good three seconds after it arrived on the table. The verdict was... esctatic. (Don't worry, people who are getting sick of me saying how well this all went - a couple of things go pear-shaped in a bit). People raved. They wouldn't shut up. The meat was absolutely sensational - far better than I'd expected - and the risotto rice itself, with the meaty mushrooms and the strong, clear mutton taste, balanced by some very, very nice parmesan, was just superb. At this point I was pretty much walking on air. And not because of Floyd-like wine imbibing whilst cooking - because I wanted to concentrate, and because I was just so damn busy, I'd barely drunk a drop. We pause for a shot of cheese: Low-Temperature Chicken Thigh Dinner The Prep: The chicken thigh here had rolled and been sitting at 62 degrees Centigrade in the sous-vide machine for about 4 hours by the time it was served, which was frankly a bit long. I'd crisped the skin before putting it in, but didn't crisp it again coming out, which was an Error. The potatoes were simply boiled, then sauted for a few minutes with rosemary - I was intending to then roast them, but the taste of rosemary was strong enough and the lovely slightly charred patches looked good enough that I just plated them on the spot. I reduced the liquid from the SV bag with some wine, steamed some broccoli florets, and we were ready to go. The Verdict: Hear that "thunk" sound? That's the sound of my audience dividing. On the one hand, the thigh had a tremendously concentrated chicken flavour. On the other, it had a rather slimy, overly-wet texture, and the skin, whilst tasting nice, had a texture best described in Scots vernacular as "minging". The potatoes kicked ass, but let's face it, no-one's looking at them. This was the first course that not everyone finished - a bunch of piles of chicken skin were left by the side of the plate. I know what I did wrong here. The meal that had inspired me to make this one was a chicken *breast* cooked Sous-Vide at the same temperature - and whilst that was fantastic, all my experimentation with chicken tends to strongly imply that thigh needs a higher-temperature cook. I've had some excellent 75 degree thigh, as it happens. Whoops. Garlic Confit Salmon with Strawberry/Balsamic/Coriander foam The Prep: Doesn't it look awesome? That's the result of getting one of my guests in to help with the plating - she's tremendously gifted at the presentation of food, which is why this one looked so damn cool. (She's a bloody good cook, too.) Anyway - this one was, frankly, quite the pain in the ass. To start with, I'd asked one of my guests to spend an hour or so accompanying me in the kitchen earlier on, heating oil to 110 centigrade with five cloves of fresh garlic in it, to infuse the oil. Then, I'd reserved that oil, and about the time I started the risotto I'd slid the salmon steak into it and set it heating very gently on the hob. Then, for the next hour and a half, I was constantly moving it on and off the heat, attempting to keep the oil more or less in the 40-45 centigrade range. Like I say, PITA. Still, the result was worth it - tremendously tender salmon. So tender, in fact, that it wouldn't cut across the grain, and flaked instead, giving me a rather messy prep - for future reference, cut it before you cook it. The foam, meanwhile, was a direct steal from Khymos. I'd tried his experimental strawberry foam before, and absolutely bloody adored it. The prep's over on that page - the only item of note was that I didn't bother whipping it, since after merely blending it for a bit it had a fantastic thick, airy texture. Oh, and the taste. Dear god, the taste. We were still sneaking spoonfuls of the stuff three courses later. Just incredible. Last but not least, the roe was just "salmon caviar" from Waitrose - a pain to get, but a boon for simplicity of serving, along with the fresh rocket. The Verdict: Opinions were mostly positive, but a bit divided. A couple of people felt that the salmon was too tender, possibly again due to a slightly extended cooking time. The foam, everyone agreed, was incredible, but seemed to slightly overpower the salmon - however, a bit of experimentation from everyone revealed that the roe, which very few people liked on its own, tasted marvellous when eaten with the salmon and the foam together, giving a salty, fishy punch to the bite. It was a huge kick, it must be said, to see my friends experimenting with and discussing a dish I'd prepared in the same way that we've all discussed food at incredibly top restaurants. Made it all worth it. And at the same time, several people afterward said that one of their favourite things about the entire meal was the way it made them think about and discuss their food. So, so happy. The Home-Made Cheese Course Oh, dear. The Prep I'd read "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" a while ago, and become incredibly excited at the thought of making my own cheese. So, with this meal coming up, obviously the only thing to do was to include some home-made cheese. Which I had no idea how to make. Which I'd never made before. Which I would be making for the first time with about an hour to go before serving. Whoops. I'm not going to bother going into detail on how I made the cheese, because, frankly, you shouldn't copy my example. Just note this: if you lose your mozarella starter, lemon juice does NOT make an adequate substitute. And it's rarely confidence-inspiring to discuss with your guests whether or not your cheesemaking was entirely hygenic. Nor to have them arrive and see the cheese hanging over the bath. At the same time, I'd also decided to serve some "essence of cheddar", made by heating, whipping and straining a mixture of cheddar and water (the same technique used to make parmesan air). Unfortunately, the last time I tried that, I drank very small sips of the stuff, hot. Cold, it, erm, solidified. The verdict: Well, worries about food poisoning aren't going to help any cheese course. But, frankly, the long-term curd cheese was a total, tasteless disaster. It tasted of very little more than yoghurt. The lemon-infused-was-meant-to-be-mozarella-if-it-had-worked cheese was better, but mostly because of the lemon juice. Thankfully, I'd also bought two very nice artisan cheeses and some superb pumpkin bread, so the course was rescued. I served the essence of cheddar in shot glasses at the end. One of my guests took a sip, spluttered, and promptly spat it out with a truly horrified expression. It turns out that I'd managed to exactly capture the aroma of the cauliflour cheese his mother used to cook as a child - which he hated and, sleeping next to the kitchen, could never, ever avoid. I'd just managed to give him a flashback to one of the bits of childhood he'd managed to forget. Well, evoking memories of childhood, win. Next time, let's try to evoke some good memories... Still, at least I'd managed to get my Top Gear reference in. "My cheese course: ambitious, but rubbish." Pina Colada Molecua The Prep: Otherwise known as "Pina Colada Espuma", from the iSi manual. Unfortunately, there was a small hitch. See, around Tuesday I'd run across the recipe for deconstructed pina colada, a la El Bulli. That sounded truly fantastic, and I promptly added all the ingredients onto my shopping list. Around Thursday when I was starting to panic I decided that I needed to make things simpler, and reverted back to the Espuma idea, removing the ingredients for the deconstructed version from my list. You've guessed what happened next, of course. I forgot to put the Espuma ingredients back on, aside, oddly, from the rum. So, you've got rum. You've got coconut milk, you've got an iSi whipper, and you've also got a blood alcohol level that's definitely too high for you to be allowed to operate heavy machinery. What do you do? You stick some lime juice, some wine which one of your guests has decreed "pineappley", and a couple of other things that you subsequently forget into your foam mix, whiz it up, and stick it in the foamer, then serve with slivers of dark chocolate. The Verdict: Which proceeds to make, somehow, something that tastes almost exactly like a Pina Colada Espuma. Served in cocktail glasses, it was rather nice, but everyone agreed it needed another taste to offset it. Chocolate Chantilly, Frozen Orange Foam, and Coffee Ravioli The Prep: It was about 1:30 am at this point, and prep was getting distinctly sketchy. I abandoned the idea of the coffee ravioli because I couldn't face my old enemy, sodium alginate, at this hour, and decided to simply whip up some chocolate chantilly. I've never had a problem with the stuff, and again, didn't here. Mix 200g of patissiere's chocolate with 200g of water, heat and stir until they mix, then stick the saucepan in another larger pan filled with ice water and whip until the chocolate mix starts forming dunes of pure chocolate. I'd slightly overheated the mix, thus meaning I had to change the ice a couple of times, but the chocolate chantilly emerged triumphant. Meanwhile, I'd had orange juice foam made with lecithin freezing for the past 8 hours or so. On emerging, it turned out to have collapsed a bit, but I served it anyway. The verdict:Everyone agreed on three things - the components were lovely, the chantilly needed different chocolate (as the stuff I had went distinctly grainy), and this wasn't a complete dish. The suggestion was made to try the Pina Colada with the chocolate chantilly - and indeed, it was bloody gorgeous. The foam was a fascinating texture on its own, but needed to be eaten quickly. Basically, I had good ideas at the end of the meal, but the actual dish assembly needed some work. Anyone recommend any good molecular deserts? So that's all, folks Thanks for reading this epic account! If you're thinking of doing something similar, I'll post some tips in a couple of days - there are definitely a fair number of things I've learned. But the most important question - was it worth it? Damn straight. I've felt so chilled out and happy for the last couple of days it's just unreal. This was something I've wanted to do for ages, and having it happen, and come out so well - best feeling in the world. OK, that's it! If you want to know more about anything I cooked, let me know! Sorry for the lack of prep pictures - it was all a bit frantic, and I didn't get that much of a chance to get the camera out...

I'd tend to say that a big bowl of ice water is pretty much a necessity - otherwise, thanks to the water's high specific heat capacity in the bowl, the chocolate/water mix will take forever to cool down, which can fool you into thinking it's not going to, and can also lead to some funky textures in the mixture. BTW - report will be coming as soon as I have the pictures from the evening. A friend of mine was taking them on her super-slick camera, and she's going to upload them soon!