So, I rocked up bright and early, hating the universe and surviving mainly due to a combination of Irn Bru and residual drunkenness – note to self, do not drink heavily before an early Sunday appointment in a warm kitchen. Having spent several weeks claiming that The Cookery School was in Borough I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t, and was actually conveniently located somewhere that I knew. The kitchen filled quickly, although there as at first no sign of Kang, my partner in crime for the day. Email based silence had convinced me that he had died in some freak spaghetti related incident and images of various kinds of horrific death filled my fairly muddled brain until he wandered through the door and did some grinning – laid low by illness, work and internet drama he had fallen behind on life, but was now back in the saddle and ready to cook.

The Law was laid down – 90 minutes to buy ingredients; 2.5 hours to cook and plate; judging would then commence. A shopping list was made, a list of store cupboard ingredients wrangled from the list and handed to the staff, and we were off. Luckily the combination of my iPhone and a half remembered memory of La Fromagerie kicked us in the right direction, and Kang and I wandered Marylebone High Street-wards, bonding over the joys of Sushi Hiro, while I gushed about my hero worship of St Heston of Bray. We arrived at the market and consulted the list of powah:

Menu (as submitted to NomNomNom)

• Starter: Game Salad (or something else if we can’t find any game. Maybe scallops or something)
• Main: Roast Beef with a number of items that are sometimes known as trimmings
• Dessert: A Trio of Granita

We had been given a mission of trying to make our food as seasonal and sustainably sourced as possible, with an extra caveat that one course must be entirely uncooked, hence our menu, with handwavy extensions to the course titles in case of unavailability, and its focus on simple and easy to find seasonal food, with a uncooked frozen dessert.

We entered the market, AKA the Waitrose carpark, and started our trawl. First up on the list was our trimmings. Other than roast potatoes (Romano pots obtained on the advice of the potato man) and Yorkshire Pud (cf my experimentation) we needed some veggies to accompany the main. Our initial plan of asparagus was thrown out as it seems we missed the season by a week, so after grabbing our other planned veg, peas and carrots, we kept an eye out for something interesting. Kicking that mission to the side we turned to salad, finding radishes and a stall entirely filled with leaves. The nice man let us do some tasting and we ended up with a mixed bag of wild rocket (very peppery), sorrel (nicely lemony) and land cress (like a super-watercress with a big punchy flavour) to accompany our game. We put the market behind us for a bit, with a planned focus on Waitrose for our tropical fruit for the granitas and additional vegetable, and wandered up to the Ginger Pig.

Confronted by racks of hanging cow I was slightly overawed as Kang nipped around shooting pictures. I lost my place in the queue and by the time I spoke to the butcher I had regained my composure. My request for a rump roast was met with disapproving shakes of the head and I was recommended instead a nice looking bit of topside, a plan that I thoroughly endorse.

Next on the list was some cheese to top our salad. We were thinking of something similar to parmesan, but put the decision into the hands of the man at La Fromagerie, who pointed us towards a Sardinian Pecorino of rather excellent quality, a slice of which quickly went into our bag ready for later crumbling.

We jogged round the corner to Waitrose, my toxin addled brain thinking we had a mere 15 minutes remaining, rather than the 45 we actually did, to find it closed. A rethink occurred and we mosied back to the market, only for Kang to point out my foolishness when he looked at his watch rather than relying on my broken time sense. However, the return to the market gave us the two remaining pieces of our menu – our game and fruit.

We couldn’t find any game, so after a short conversation with one of the stallholders we came up with enough justification for some ducks being referred to as game and bought a smoked duck breast to accompany our seasonal salad starter. Fruit-wise the plan changed when we saw what was on the stalls – punnets of strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, gooseberries and cherries everywhere. We settled in the end on raspberries, blackcurrants and gooseberries for the colour contrast, loaded up our bags and trudged back to the Cookery School, with a quick detour to Waitrose for some mint, purple sprouting broccoli and a lemon, ready for the start.

Photo by Kang

Final instructions were given, and we were off. We started with preparing our granitas, as they would potentially take all of the cooking time to freeze. Luckily, as detailed in my post on the matter, there was a blast chiller hidden under the work surface and all was well. We then started on preparing the veg, shelling peas, trimming broccoli, chopping carrots and peeling potatoes. The potatoes went into some salted water for a quick parboil and at the same time a tray of oil for them went into the oven at 250degC to heat up. Everything else was pushed to the side and we prepared the beef – there wasn’t much to do apart from season it and stick it in the oven, accompanied the potatoes, which had been added to their hot oily tray and tossed around a bit with a quick sprinkle of salt. While they cooked we mixed up our Yorkshire Pudding batter and when we turned the oven down after 25 minutes the puds went in.

With most things on the go, the carrots went into a pan of butter on a very low heat, to slowly poach away and turn into items of pure awesome (a recipe courtesy of Le Blumenthal – the easiest in any of his books) and we turned to salad tests. Having not made our salad before and also having been confronted by one of the most flavoursome bags of salad leaves I have encountered, Kang made the sacrifice of trying out some variations of our salad to see how it should go. In the end a balance was reached – a lemony balsamic dressing with a small pile of leaves, thinly sliced radishes sprinkled on top and a crumbling of pecorino. After a bit of confused sniffing, asking of opinions and tasting it was decided that our smoked duck breast, to a mild annoyance, didn’t need cookin,g giving us a tasty sliceable item to be served up cold with the leaves.

It was at this point that things got busy.

The beef came out, the peas went on, the broccoli went on top of the boiling pan in a colander to steam. The meat went to rest, the pan got deglazed and I started trying to construct a gravy. Kang started plating, dropping the granitas into shot glasses and arranging salad and duck on a plate ready to go upstairs to the judges. A brown liquid that looked vaguely gravy-like sat in a pan and I carved a few slices of beef onto our serving plate. I decanted some peas and broccoli onto the plate and reached for the carrots. They were raw. Raw, warm and covered in butter – not a bad situation, all things considered, but not the silky soft buttery carrots that we intended. It seems that my lack of experience using anything but a gas hob meant that I’d got the temperature wrong and thus would be sending the judges some ‘al dente’ carrots. This was noted in the report on our food… Kang rushed up the stairs and after applying a drizzle of gravy I turned to follow, only to be called back to the kitchen by Marcella, the fantastic kitchen assistant who threw pots, pans, spoons and knives in my direction whenever I needed them during the day. She pointed to the ovens containing not only my rather excellent roast potatoes, but also Kang’s impressively risen yorkshire pud. Disaster averted, the plating was completed and the food presented to the judges:

Picture by Chris Osburn

We didn’t win, although I heard that our beef went down well, with the remains disappearing alarmingly quickly when the rest of the food was arranged for us mere participants to sample. Food was eaten, wines (courtesy of NakedWines and Nathan McLellan, who selected a rather nice Ocasa Bonada Syrah to accompany our menu) were drunk, goodie bags given out and, after a bit of prize giving, we adjourned to the Match Bar, were I got thoroughly pissed.

As a followup there’s a charity raffle, in aid of Action Against Hunger, with a pile of the prizes that they didn’t let near the winners up for grabs. There is also a viewer’s choice award with voting open to you, the lovely people who are reading this. Tell your friends! Vote Cowfish and Eater! For glorious victory!

The centrepiece of our meal was quickly decided to be a joint of beef that we would cook and surround with seasonal trimmings. However, being me I started looking ways that I could try and show-off with some outlandish cooking method that would mark me out as The New Saviour Of Amateur Cooks. Luckily the 2.5hour limit to our cooking time meant that St Heston’s low temperature/long time cooking methods were out of my clammy reach, but I did look towards my favourite piece of “scientific” preperation that I’ve dabbled with – cooking sous-vide.

Isn’t it great how using french when talking about cooking makes things sounds posher and more impressive?

Sous-vide cooking is all about cooking an item to a specific temperature under vacuum, generally achieved by sealing the item in vac-bag and placing it in a waterbath that is then kept at the correct temperature. However, for those of us without the space/inclination/etc to obtain such a spangly piece of kit (although I’m tempted to find one having read this week’s Alinea at Home post…) the low tech version is a ziploc bag with the air squeezed out and a pan of water at the correct temperature in an oven at the correct temperature. If done correctly you will end up with a piece of food cooked perfectly all the way through at the temperature you have selected (and not riddled with deadly botulism). In the case of meat this helps reduce the temperature gradient issue whereby you can have a perfectly done steak right in the middle with a fantastically browned outside, but will also have a transition between the two through the rest of the meat – if done correctly you can have a steak done perfectly all the way through that is just seared on the outside.

So, I planned to expand my experiments of cooking steaks sous-vide to encompass a whole joint. It was here I hit on my first problem – I didn’t have a pan at home deep enough to fully submerse a large enough joint. There was also the small issue of not knowing how long it would take to warm up the whole piece of meat to an appropriate temperature – medium rare is about 55degC and while a steak doesn’t take long to heat, up a 6inch cube of beefy goodness is going to take a bit longer. I suspected that it would take most of, if not more than, our 2.5 hours which would somewhat scupper the whole deal. However, here was the nascent plan:

Ingredients:

• Beef roast (probably a rump roast of some kind)
• Seasoning
• Zip loc bag
• Blow torch

How: Season beef, although not with salt (I don’t want to extract moisture from the meat at this stage, although what the effect of salting before cooking is something I need to look into more), and stick it in the zip loc bag. Squeeze out the air and submerse in a heavy pan of water at about 65degC. Measure temperature and add hot water until the temperature is about 55degC (as it will drop in temperature when you stick in the cool beef). Place in and oven set to 55degC for as long as you can (I need to read some more, but the amount of change in the meat due to staying at 55degC over a period of time seems to be a bit contested – Heston Blumenthal likes to cook things for a very long time, other people don’t see it as making much difference). Remove from the oven, water and bag, and pat dry. Season and then blowtorch the outside until nice and crispy and brown. Slice, serve. I don’t think resting it should have any effect after the blowtorching, but if I had the gear I would have happily experimented – I like eating roast beef.

In the end we just went for a “normal” roast beef, a decision which I think was very wise. The meat came from the rather excellent Ginger Pig and the butchers advised me to go for some topside rather than the rump roasts I had used to practise. We got a 1.2kg piece of meat which was then seasoned with salt and pepper and put in a hot oven (the dial said 250degC, the lovely Marcella at the Cookery School reckoned it was probably closer to 230) for 25 minutes, at which time we turned it down to 150ish (170 in the dial, so maybe as low as 140) for a further 30 minutes. This is based on the cooking times from the most well thumbed page in my copy of the River Cottage Meat Book – based on the evidence of that book, Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall certainly knows how to roast an animal: 25 minute hot ’sizzle’ then 10-12 minutes per pound (I went for the higher end as the joint was quite thick and even). The meat was taken out 15 minutes before carving and left to rest under some foil. Unfortunately my ability at carving meat is fairly minimal, especially when under pressure to deliver a plate of food to a group of judges, one of whom you have just discovered is Tom Aikens, and presentation left something to be desired. However, the rest of the joint disappeared rather quickly when we contestants sat down to tuck-in and, to blow my own trumpet a bit, it was pretty special.

Picture by Kang from his post about NomNomNom.

As with the rest of our menu we made sure that the description was as hand wavy as possible, listing our dessert simply as ‘A Trio of Granitas’. So, this is where my experimentation came in – what type of granita can I make that will be both nice and also not need any cooking.

Making granita is a fairly simple process – get a flavoured liquid, freeze it, smash the forming ice crystals up from time to time until it is frozen enough to eat rather than drink. Texture-wise I’m divided – I rather like chunky granitas but also like smooth sorbet like ones, so I needed to throw a bit of that into the experimentation to see how things went.

Firstly I started with a coffee one, mainly for the reason that I got home one evening and remembered that I hadn’t finished the pot of coffee that I’d made that morning. Unfortunately this experiment didn’t go all that well, with me forgetting about the quickly freezing liquid in the freezer while I watched TV and I ended smashing up the now solid block of brown ice before eating – it was refreshing, distinctly coffee and pretty good in chunky bits, looking like cold crystals of dark sugar. However, the ‘food should be seasonal’ caveat in the NomNomNom instructions kicked in as well as the ‘raw’ stipulation and I decided to leave the coffee idea to one side.

Next I decided to go for some tropical fruits – banana, passion fruit and physalis. I mashed the banana, scooped out the passion fruit, and halved and squished the physalis, sticking the skins in some water and squishing them to extract as much flavour from them as I could. I watered down my fruit pulps (with the water the skins were soaking in for the physalis) and on tasting found them a bit sour. Not wanting to do any heating I sweetened them up a bit with some watered down honey and then stuck them in the freezer, stirring them up every 10-20 minutes for about 2 hours. Results were mixed: the passion fruit was nice, looked very pretty with the black seeds contrasting against the orange of the ice, although the seeds were a bit crunchy; The banana was a write-off, tasting like mashed banana and not watery enough to be anything other than frozen mashed banana; the physalis was great – just sweet enough and very tasty.

The plan was set – physalis and passion fruit with another fruit to be chosen on the day. All nice and easy. Until the day arrived and we decided to go for something totally different – blackcurrant, raspberry and gooseberry. We saw the fruit in the market and it looked rather good, so plans were dumped and new ones made.

I treated the gooseberries similar to the physalis, squidging them out of the skins and then soaking and squeezing said skins to get as much from them as possible, while Kang passed the raspberries and blackcurrants through a sieve to give us some rather nice fruit purees. We watered them to a desired concentration and sweetened them up with some honey before discovering that The Cookery School has a blast chiller and that the urgency which we had to get them into the freezer was not quite as urgent as we had thought. Every 15-20 minutes Kang or I would drag them out of the freezer and smash them about with a fork for a few minutes to keep the ice crystals smallish. We kept this up until they were starting to hold their shape, at which point we transferred them to the normal freezer so as not to ‘cook’ too much. Also in the freezer went some wet shot glasses  to get frosty ready to serve the ices in. With moments to go before time ran out Kang remembered the granitas and got them prepped ready to go upstairs.

The finished products were a mixed bag: they would all have been improved with some more sweetness, and the gooseberry one also needed both some more watering down and a proper pulping of the insides, rather than just a quick squish with my thumb. They ended up quite smooth – the quick action of the blast chiller meant that they formed quickly but with our obsessive smashing up of the ice the crystals were quite small. In the end the flavour of the fruit won through and I ended up drinking the warmed remains of the blackcurrant granita from a wine glass – tart, fresh and tasty.

So experiment #1 is a dish that I have never cooked before, and one that after specific contemplation I’ve decided that I don’t like on an intellectual level, but after eating have discovered I actually do. The food – the humble Yorkshire Pud.

It’s eggs, flour, water and milk, fried/roasted in the oven. It should taste of fried wallpaper paste, but for some reason it tastes of Sunday Roast and Good. Somehow I’ve managed to avoid cooking it before so I thought I’d have a few goes before NomNomNom.

However, one question stuck in my mind – how do I make a yorkshire nice and light and fluffy, rather than the usual sunk in the middle slightly sad looking pudding, and do I actually want to?

Hooray for chemical leavening agents! Baking powder makes everything light and fluffy!

I based both of my pud experiments on The Evil Queen’s recipe, which is rather simple. Here’s what I did:

Ingredients:

• 3oz Plain Flour (+2 small tsps of baking powder for experiment #2)
• 3fl.oz. Milk
• 2fl.oz. Water
• 1 Egg
• Seasoning
• Oil (Delia says beef dripping, I used veggie oil because I haven’t dripped any beefs recently)

How: Put the flour in a bowl, make a well in the middle and break the egg into it. Beat the egg and gradually incorporate the flour. Add the milk, mix and add the water. Season. Pour a good chunk of oil into some kind of dish (I used a 9″ pie tin) that will survive being put on a stovetop and stick it into the oven at about 250degC (the temp that I do the initial cooking of roast beef). Wait until the oil is really hot and then take out the dish, stick it on the stove to keep warm and pour in the batter (which will fry on the outside). Stick back in the oven, turn down to 150degC after about 10 mins and then cook for a further 40-45 minutes (to match up with 20 minute sizzley cook, 35 minute cooler roast and 10 minute rest I did for my beef). Eat.

The pud without baking powder was a classic yorkshire pud – it rose nicely, went crispy on the outside and sank in the middle the moment I took it out of the oven. It was good and crunchy as well as a little bit soft in the middle – although only in a thin layer. Yorkshires are much easier than I thought, and if I make a good gravy one day then I think I’ll be making old skool yorkshire again.

Experiment 2 was quite different. It looked different while cooking and, as expected, rose a lot more than experiment 1. I didn’t cook it quite as long as before (I was hungry and there was duck involved) but that didn’t seem to matter much – the outside was crunchy as before but the middle was thicker, soft and puddingy – just thing to mop up gravy. I liked it, but it wasn’t a trad pud – too thick and spongy.

Experiment 2

We made both at NomNomNom – a bit of a hedged bet as well as a chance for me to have a munch again. In the end we went with experiment #1 for the judges – it rose magestically (causing the staff of The Cookery School to grab me and excitedly point at it through the oven door) while #2 stayed resolutely low (although it was rather tasty, if slightly overseasoned, and had the bungey texture of kimchee pancake, without the kimchee, that I liked so much in my experimental version).

The judged one seemed to work rather well:

Photo by Kang from his post about NomNomNom.

Either way, more pud with more seasoning than just salt and pepper is on my list for the future.

I’ve teamed up (well, been teamed up with thanks to the matchmaking skills of the ever present Annie Mole) with Kang, the London Eater, and between my ability to cook food that doesn’t kill people and his to eat food that doesn’t kill him we are certain to romp home to victorious victory.

I’ve started my preparations: I’ve checked my camera; lost my SD card reader; found the cable that plugs my camera into my computer; recorded a voice memo on my shiny new iPhone detailing our menu as I stomped around the house in a coffee induced fugue state; listened to the memo and realised that it made no sense and that I should really lay off the coffee; used semi-colons in a blog post in a potentially incorrect fashion; drunk some tea; made a spreadsheet with times in; accidentally deleted the spreadsheet with times in; made a new spreadsheet with just about the same times in; and taken the above picture, which I reckon is just about the right level of cliched cheesiness to top a post about getting ready to play at being a food blogger for a day.

Our menu is set (until such a time as we get to the farmers market and find that we can’t get the things that we need [although there is a Waitrose nearby for all of my Physalis needs]), I know where The Cookery School is (although that is only a recent occurrence, as I’ve been telling people it’s in Southwark for the last few weeks) and I’ve narrowed down which geeky t-shirt I’m going to wear to only 10 or so.

Wish me luck.

After last week’s jelly experimentation I decided that Sunday afternoon cooking SCIENCE! is something that I should repeat – hence this week’s activities:

Deep fried blackcurrant battered sausage, with blackcurrant jam and vegetable crisps.

At the end of last week, shortly after chomping my way through a small bag of hot cross buns filled with cheese, I noted to the mighty twitterverse that I felt that cheesy hot cross buns were, apart from chocolate covered pretzels and doner kebab meat pizza, the ultimate food. A then random flickr user fired me back a quick response:

Thus inspired, I decided that this would give me the perfect excuse to also learn how to deep fry things, and if I could get a coating of jam around a bit of sausage before deep frying it then I could even claim a pretentiousness factor that would make it all worthwhile.

It didn’t quite work.

The jam stuck to the raw sausage, but also mixed with the batter, no matter how thick or thin I made it. I suspect I need two things:

1. A deeper batter container – a shallow bowl meant a lot of rolling around without full immersion
2. To ‘jam’ the sausages and then put them in the fridge to firm up the coating a little prior to batter and frying.

My batter did go a pretty shade of purple though.

As for the vegetable crisps, they were not in the original plan but after I was bullied into buying a mandoline (by Dave, the man who lives vicariously through the kitchen purchases of others) they slotted nicely into place. After slicing up a small baking potato, a carrot and a parsnip I had enough super thin vegetable slices to feed a small army and I experimented with cooking them for different lengths of time at different temperatures and in differing quantities. In the end the parsnips (which were the dryest slices) worked the best, crisping up quite quickly at pretty much any temperature around 185degC and I’ll be taking a small sack of those into work to snack on today. The carrots were a bit disappointing and floppy and the potatoes were prone to burning – while I now know exactly how much of a potato goes into a single bag of crisps I also now know that cooking that tiny amount of potato isn’t all that easy…

Recipe:

Ingredients

• A sausage, cut into 1″ chunks (I used a herby pork sausage, as I liked the idea of the herbs with the blackcurrant. They worked quite well)
• Some blackcurrant jam (the original suggestion mentioned cherry jam but my local Tesco seems to have run out. My mum suggested Bon Maman cherry and berries jam, but despite having the rest of the Bon Maman range Mr Tesco ’s shelf was bare)
• A simple batter (flour and water mixed to a runnyish consistency – no idea on proportions, my experimental procedure only goes so far…)
• Thinly sliced (using the 1mm setting on my mandoline) root vegetables.
• A pan of oil, suitable for deep frying, half full of oil.

How?

Heat your oil to 185degC – I used my temperature probe (which is a bit cheap and slightly worse for wear) to measure it, but if you drop a bit of batter in then it should fizz and cook quite quickly when you’re at about the right temperature. Roll your sausage bits in jam, sticking whole black currants on to them if you want, dip them in batter and carefully place them in the oil. Make sure they don’t stick to each other or the bottom of the pan and take them out when they are a dark golden brown colour (the exact colour varies based on how much jam snuck its way into your batter). Drain on a paper towel and serve before the bottom batter has time to go soggy.

For the veggies I dumped them into the oil above and below 185degC in differing quantities and didn’t really get anywhere with deciding what’s best. For the parsnips, cooking a lot of them at a time at just over 185 worked quite well – I kept them moving in the oil and pulled them out when they’d shrivelled up a similar amount to the more successfull crisps from my previous experiments.

I’d serve the sausages with a bit of jam, although I might mix the jam with a bit of balsamic vinegar for a bit of bite if I do them again.

Now to find more things to slice very thinly. Apart from my fingers, I prefer them unsliced. And still attached.

I have been recently inspired to cook things again and St Heston’s current series is making me think of silly things. So, this weekend’s experiment was to make some jelly.

I don’t get on with gelatine. I’ve now tried three or four times to get ground up beefy bits make liquidy things go solid and every time, whether powdered or sheet, gelatine has not helped me along my way. I’ve had a proto-jelly wobble in a similar manner to water, rather than jelly, and the tasty surround of a pork pie work its way inevitably downwards through a crack in the pastry, as gravity often inspires, to puddle gloopily, but not set, upon the kitchen floor. So, I decided to expand my repertoire and use an alternative – our seaweedy friend, agar-agar.

Finding agar, outside of the mail order lists at the back of the posh cookbooks I am slowly racking up at home, is a little more difficult than I at first thought – I couldn’t find it on the shelves on my local Tesco and I was too lazy to get on my bike and ride the ten minutes down the road to Waitrose. Luckily for me we have a local hippy shop between Tesco and my house and a quick dart around to the ‘random food for people who thing they might have allergies’ aisle found me in the possession of a box of flaky agar goodness.

So, a recipe for my Creation above:

Ingredients:
Gin
Tonic
Sugar
Agar

How?:
Make a gin and tonic. Add some agar flakes (1tbsp per 200ml) and some sugar (to taste – mine was a bit sweet, I think about 1 tsp per 200ml might be okay), heat it to a simmer and stir until the flakes and sugar are dissolved. Pour into a mould and leave to cool before sticking it into the fridge to set.

To Serve:
The ‘plating’ above is deliberately poncey. I like poncey. Anyways, it is a cube of jelly topped with some sour sugar (scraped from a fizzy cola shoe lace because I couldn’t find Sour Mix – I need a box of malic acid to do this Properly), a lime segment and a single grain of salt. All the individual bite dishes seem to be topped with a grain of salt so I thought I’d see what the fuss was about. I did a bit more experimentation (as I did have 200ml of jelly to eat through) and my favourite combination so far is a bigger piece of jelly with a smaller piece of lime, without the rind (which over-powered the flavour of the G&T jelly), and a small sprinkle of sea salt.

I wanted to go for a fizzy effect, inspired by an article that got me even more into the sciencey side of cooking, but couldn’t find any pop-rocks locally so I still have work to do. My final creation will hopefully not only have a coating of malic acid and popping candy, for a sparky and sour outside, but will also have a piece of candied lime embedded in the middle.

And a single grain of sea-salt on top.