was that even with a basic thing like chicken stock, there’d be major variations from one recipe to the next. Why did one chef make it by roasting chicken wings, then simmering them in water with flavourings for four hours, while another covered raw carcasses and giblets with water, added flavourings and then simmered for only an hour and a half? With a vanilla ice-cream base, why did different recipes choose to use whipping cream, double cream, crème fraiche or powdered milk? Once you know the answers to such questions, you’re no longer simply a slave to a recipe, you can play around with it, or take its principles and apply them to a different dish – in short, you can really experiment and begin to let rip in the kitchen. The habit of questioning everything that I picked up while teaching myself to cook became the normal way of doing things at the Fat Duck. Constantly challenging the orthodoxy has led to many surprising discoveries that have helped shape the way I cook – like the fact that searing meat doesn’t hold in its juices, or that cooking asparagus in water loses a lot of the flavour, or that unrefined sugar caramelizes quicker than refined, so you can brown it on the top of a crème brûlée without overcooking the custard beneath. This know-how underpins the recipes in this book. Try carving meat against the grain to make it more tender, or searing a steak by flipping it regularly and frequently, or adding salt to counteract bitterness, or browning onions with star anise to boost the meaty notes. I guarantee you’ll be amazed by the results and make them part of your kitchen repertoire. And, when you read about the difference between taste and flavour, it’ll change the way you think about cooking.
knife, liquidizer or fridge, these are just tools to make the cooking easier and more accurate, or to create flavours and textures that would otherwise be difficult. A pressure cooker will make a stock with exceptional depth of flavour. A water-bath will cook fish to exactly the right temperature. Dry ice will make ice-cream that’s unbelievably smooth. Technology is a part of cuisine that should be embraced rather than shunned. I’ve kept the specialist kit to a minimum, but there are a few things that will make a huge difference to your cooking. A digital probe, for example, might seem a bit space-age, but using one removes the doubt about whether food is cooked or not. Probe a piece of meat or fish and, if the readout shows the required temperature, it’s done. This kind of accuracy is, it seems to me, far more helpful to the home cook than vague, subjective comments about the right colour or texture. At the Fat Duck, we use technology to help ensure that we consistently produce dishes that are perfectly cooked. If you want to cook these dishes the way I do, precise measuring and careful probing will help you achieve that goal.
Some of the techniques I’ve developed depend on modern technology. Often people find this daunting, or think that using probes and digital scales and water-baths somehow takes the romance out of cooking. But, like a sharp
However, I don’t want talk of technology to obscure the fact that, in the end, cooking is about intuition and emotion, about going into the kitchen and following your instincts, trying things out, having fun. Much of the pleasure of eating comes from the flavours, textures and aromas you coax out of the ingredients – and the pages in this book will help you with that – but a lot comes from the memories and associations and nostalgia that food evokes. Great and memorable meals come from somehow tapping into these feelings and capturing them in the food you put on the table. The key to cooking is thinking about what excites you and working with that. These recipes are the ones that excite me. I hope that they inspire you to go into the kitchen and create something extraordinary.
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