Cooking With Richard

The old saw is that you should always check your oven temperature with an oven thermometer because oven settings themselves are very inaccurate. This is true, but if you buy an oven thermometer, how do you know it’s accurate either?

I went out and bought a very cheap (£10) oven thermometer. This one uses a bi-metalic strip and so it works the same way as the thermostat in the oven itself.

It’s not too accurate either.

If you take the reading on the oven thermometer and the oven’s own dial, they agree to within 10-15°C, at least between 60 and 140°C where I did my testing. Unfortunately when I added a small glass of water to an oven which was supposedly at 130140°C and left it there for 30 minutes, the water didn’t do very much. So either I have found some magical water which can be super-heated, or else both my oven and my oven thermometer are wildly inaccurate.

This is not just theoretical. I was hoping to cook a chicken tomorrow for 4½ hours at 60°C to obtain a succulent “perfect chicken”, but that’s not too clever if all my guests get food poisoning. (Chicken has to be raised to 60°C for 15 minutes or so to guarantee to kill nasties like salmonella. If the temperature is less than that, the salmonella have a little party).

Companies which sell oven thermometers compete, it seems, on two things: price and the supposed range of temperatures (eg. “our oven thermometer costs just £4 and covers 50-350°C!). Great. Well no, not great. I want to know how accurate the thermometer is, and that doesn’t just mean that it tells me the temperature is 123.45, but that it really is. The nearest degree would be fine — I don’t need to know about the point-four-five.

I don’t really have an answer to this. Is this £80 digital thermometer worth 80 quid? Perhaps I should spend £60 instead. Or is £15 enough?

How do I tell?

Edit

That photo is for real, no GIMP, really!

Leftovers from the past few days — celeriac mash from last night, a solitary lamb shank from Saturday, roasted, and gravy.

Celeriac:

Potato … eh!?

Organic salmon.

Why organic? Salmon is farmed in huge cages on the rivers and lochs, with ordinary river water flowing through them. The farmers add medicines to the feed, including pesticides, fungicides and antibiotics, and these leach into the water and damage the surrounding ecosystem in the loch. Organic fish farmers, on the other hand, don’t use these damaging chemicals. (By the way, wild salmon are now endangered – avoid).

Because of the lower stocking densities, organic farmed salmon is expensive, so for me salmon is now a rare treat.

(I didn’t make this by the way. It’s the wife’s lovely creation)

Ras-El-Hanout is a key ingredient.

You can see how complex it is to work in my kitchen, because nothing is labelled in English:

The penguin is always there to scare you …

A stuffed acorn squash and butternut squash. I stuffed these with gorgonzola cheese, pancetta, pine nuts, pumpkin nuts and parmesan.

In the background, Jacqueline du Pre plays Elgar’s Cello Concerto.

The swans are cold and hungry today. They rush up to you and expect feeding.

Toad in the Hole is a British classic meant to use up dairy products in the larder rather like the traditional Easter classic of pancakes. The basic recipe is simple: sausages or meat balls (the “toad”) covered in batter. In this case I’m using a simple flour-milk-eggs batter with parsley and nutmeg:

To top off the recipe, I made an onion gravy with onion rings cooked in milk, creme fraiche and chicken stock:

The onions and sausages are covered with batter and cooked rather like a Yorkshire pudding. Like Yorkshire pudding it’s important to make sure everything is hot in the oven before the batter is poured over the top:

The finished English dish:

Newsnight just interviewed someone calling himself an “intelligent” designer, “Professor Andy McIntosh”. But who is this “Professor”?

He’s a creationist, someone who thinks the world was created 6,000 years ago. In other words, he doesn’t believe in the processes of science and technology, and therefore presumably has difficulty using computers or flying in planes. He does of course believe in the “Big Sky Daddy”.

A little Google research turns up a variety of creationism links:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22prof+andy+mcintosh%22

• www.bible-sermons.org.uk/preachers/36-Andy-McIntosh
• csm.org.uk/shop/shop.php?author=1 csm = Creation “Science” movement
• www.c-r-t.co.uk/events.htm crt = Creation Resources Trust
• www.evangelical-times.org/articles/dec03/dec03a08.htm

etc.

It appears that Mr McIntosh is a “professor” of Thermodynamics and Combustion Theory, Fuel and Energy Department at the university of Leeds, that’s according to bible-sermons.org.uk anyhow, and that leads to perhaps a strange former life before he found the Big Sky Daddy as a legit combustion researcher.

I mean, he’s even researched beetle’s self-explosions.

He is a professor. It seems that some universities have low standards, or perhaps no way to get rid of people who have claimed to believe in scientific falsifiablity but who turned out to have tricked them.

Links to the Department of Fuel and Energy (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/fuel/fuel.html) now redirect to http://www.engineering.leeds.ac.uk/speme/. Finally amongst the creationist and god-nonsense I found a link to his page here: Professor Andrew C. McIntosh, Creationist.

More links:

• Truth in Science directors
• http://www.dunelmsystems.co.uk/mcintosh
• http://www.icr.org/research/index/research_physci_mcintosh/
• http://www.bible-sermons.org.uk/preachers/36-Andy-McIntosh
• Godless Dawkins blah blah blah
• Publications
• ’nuff said

Smallest exhibition in the world?

Here’s a report in Pravda erm I mean the respected People’s Daily:

The exhibition will showcase China’s achievements in regards to human rights. [...] It will also promote the development of China’s human rights record and exchange and cooperation on international human rights issues.

Heston Blumenthal’s perfect fish and chips. The fish is done in a beer, vodka and honey batter. (Yes, really vodka). The chips are cooked in three stages over a period of about 3 hours. Served with an Opie’s Pickled Walnut.

Update

The whole house smells like a chippy this morning!

Chicken Kiev starts with the classic filling of butter, garlic, parsley, salt and pepper. Here I wrapped it in cling film and chilled it:

I breaded it twice as recommended in Hugh’s recipe:

Cooked for 18 minutes (too long as it turns out — it needs just 15 minutes):

Chicken kiev. Not too good to be honest because I didn’t get the cuts for the filling right, and it was overcooked …

The gazpacho is based on this recipe but is heavily altered by me. The centre is fish (“crab”) sticks mashed up with a little mayonnaise. The basic concept of crab sticks surrounded by a green gazpacho soup comes from a starter on Le Mercury’s menu.

Last time I went to Japan I spent some time looking for squeezy Maneki-neko. Unfortunately all the maneki-nekos in Japan are made of pottery which isn’t much fun. Anyhow I was glad to find out that in the US “squeezy” is written as “plush” so searching for a maneki-neko plush turned up this rather lovely thing in this case from this ebay seller:

Looks a bit like coco?

We spent this weekend at my brother’s house. His fiancee made a couple of lovely meals. First up, home made pasta:

Next day, stew and dumplings:

An honourable mention should go to the apple and bramble crumble that my brother served up afterwards, but unfortunately I don’t have a photo of that.

I look very serious there but it’s supposed to be a joke !?

We had just one lamb shank left over from the tagine on Sunday so I improvised a lamb shank in wine sauce.

I started by treating the shank as if it were a whole leg, and stuffing it with garlic, anchovies and rosemary. I then roasted it at 220C for 15 minutes to brown it, and another 2 hours at just 100C. (The lamb turned out great).　After the first 15 minutes I added wine, chicken stock and thyme. After resting the lamb for another 20 minutes and at the same time dealing with the gravy (deglazing, sweetening, reducing), I served with sweet potatoes and carrots. There are obvious problems with the presentation – mashing the potatoes might have been a good plan, and it could have done with some bread to soak up the amazing gravy.

Butternut squash is a kind of pumpkin with a sweet, nutty flesh. This recipe for stuffed butternut squash comes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

After scraping out the seeds, I added a knob of butter and some garlic, brushed with olive oil, a sprinkle of pepper and baked for one hour:

This is the stuffing — the baked flesh of the squash, blue cheese, walnuts and pine nuts:

Stuff and bake again for another 15 minutes:

The verdict — very rich.

Lamb shank tagine — I made this for おサルさん because she’s not eaten this before.

This needed more sweetness — it was noticably absent compared to the previous versions. I might have added more of our organic honey, made with honey from bees paid a fair wage (or some such nonsense). It’s more likely that I’m just getting a bit bored with making lamb tagine, and I need to stretch myself and start experimenting again. Heston Blumenthal’s current TV series is providing plenty of inspiration.

I followed this with ice cream with white chocolate buttons and smarties.

Blumenthal preparing aerated chocolate using a JML space bag.