Busman's Holiday

 A perk of my job is that I get to take my days off in the week.  Of course, this is something younger chefs find difficult. The demands of the industry are such that we are forced to work weekends, bank holidays and such. While the rest of the world is enjoying a long weekend or going out for after work drinks, service industry at its most pressed. No doubt it is the shock of long hours and curtailed social life that leads so many new recruits to the realisation that this is not something they want to stick at.  On the other hand, I very much enjoy the opportunity to get out and about while the ordinary world is at work. The streets are not thronged with tourists, the queues at the bar are short or non existent, and best of all, I can always get a table in a restaurant.

I'm quite happy to eat alone. Now that so many people can be seen sharing a table, yet ignoring each other whilst staring at their electronic devices, I think the stigma of eating by oneself can be well and truly put to rest. Anyhow, this is far from being my point. What I am driving at is that at least one day a week, I try and get out of Sheffield, and ideally visit somewhere I have never been before. I recently ended up in Hull on a whim, after a points failure and subsequent delay made me despair of seeing out the rest of the journey to Beverley. Thankfully, I was able to call on the advice of a friend who directed me to Princess Avenue, where I found a coctail bar that served fish and chips. The girl behind the bar wanted me to have a fruity strawberry and vodka number, because it was a new recipe shed just learned. The guy up a ladder doing the sign writing asked me what I'd ordered, and was genuinely interested if I liked it. Just as he was finishing his work on the new restaurant, his mates turned up in their white van. A couple of them asked if I liked the food, and said they'd just been for a calzone at a place down the road, but that they'd eaten here before and really liked it. 

 Every city, every large grouping together of peoples is bound to throw up plenty of good places to eat, but for the ignorant traveller, they can be hard to find. This is probably more so the case for a visitor to Sheffield, than it is to a city of comparable size. Sheffield is more centrifugal than most cities for loads of reasons I won't go into here, but imagine being a first time visitor, fresh off the train and deposited by a skillfully wrought, but heavy handed, urban planning scheme, via the Millenium Garries, to the Peace Gardens. What are the chances that you're going to discover the joys of London Road, the boutique gastronomy of  Rafters or Peppercorn, or top notch burger and pizza at Kelham Island, not to mention decent pubs? So I thought I should do a quick rundown of places where the gastronomically sentient traveller on a tight budget should visit.

Gusto on Chapel Walk. Quite pricey, but to my mind the only actual 'restaurant' in Central Sheffield. Run by a fantastic couple (she cooks, he manages the floor),  properly Italian.

Noodle Inn Centro on Westfield Terrace. One of my favourite places to eat in the world. The food is never outstanding, it doesn't take your breath away. Once or twice, it's made mistakes. David Chan's Noodle Inn places are almost a chain, and every time they open a new place, the staff change and the food at each of his kitchens might experience a wobble. I'm more than willing to forgive these teething troubles, because when on point, as they usually are, his chefs turn out the nuts and bolts of some fantastic classical Sichuanese dishes and dim sum.

Other places in town (other than me) are Eten, down by the cathedral, run by my first head chef, the astonishingly capable Lee Vintin, and various other places I haven't eaten in enough to judge, Lucky Fox (decent down home Americana) and Seafayre. You can do a lot worse than wander round the back of John Lewis and get some Fish and Chips, but if not, you're in the right place to go down the road and get a burrito from Street Food Chef or an edible falafel from Fanoush. 

If you're willing to travel the short distance into the burbs, then all sorts of joy waits you in the form of Urban Choola, Two Steps - for mystical reasons our best chippy, and Made by Jonty. Resident of Sharrow Vale, not content with the best kebabs (Elif) and a world class chip shop, have a competent bakery in the form of Seven Hills, independent butchers and fishmongers, people making their own pasta, and soon, an Urban Quarter burger restaurant, I'm the last person in the world to get excited about meat disks, but these people have got it right.

Like so many things about our city, you have to get out of the middle to properly appreciate it. I only hope that this is of some use to visitors, and maybe to natives also. 

Why do 'We Want Plates'?

If you are reading this, then I assume you are a hip and funky gastronaut, technically savvy, with your sticky donut finger in the eye of the storm of the culinary zeitgeist. It's the same finger you're currently using to swipe through this post on your iPhone whilst ignoring the person you're supposed to be having lunch with. It's ok. They are doing the same, and I doubt they're reading anything as lucid and edgy as this. Carry on. 

Now, as someone who likes to keep abreast of developments in the foodsphere, your knowledge of social media will have brought you into contact with the account 'We Want Plates'. Like its contemporary 'Get In The Sea', it exists to puncture the pretentious wankiness of the way in which much modern food is served. I've no doubt that there are a good few chefs actively trying to figure out the most preposterous way of serving a portion of chips, just so they can get their food featured on this account. I've considered buying a load of child size Wellington boots, so you can have that one for free. It's all good fun, to point and laugh, after all, it's just a bit of fun, and what's wrong with injecting levity into meal times?

We could stop there, but I think it is interesting to wonder how we ended up with this current state of affairs. Chefs have always done silly things with food. We cook when we are not hungry, or at least we cook to satisfy needs that go beyond the bounds of mere sustenance, and in an effort to get noticed, otherwise sensible and able cooks sometimes do ridiculous things, such as serve bread in a flat cap. Undoubtedly, what has fed this tidal wave of pretentious gimmickry is the ever growing dependence of the foodbiz to be visually appealing. 

We've been here before. When browsing cookbooks in Waterstones, how often do we stop to read the recipes? More likely than not, we flip through and check the pictures. Now celebrating it's silver anniversary, who can doubt that Bob Carlos Clarke's enigmatic monochrome photography is the primary selling point of White Heat? The colour studio shots of Marco Pierre White's immaculately composed dishes are still stunning however, but to modern eyes they seem oddly stiff and dated. Where is the microcress? Where are the edible flowers and and smears?

The truly ridiculous thing is that fashion controls the way chefs put food on plates as surely as it dictates the waistline of their designer denims, and it's a treadmill in which we are all complicit. The primacy placed on food's visual appeal, despite the decrease in popularity of 'fayn daynin' is now stronger than ever, and the major catalyst for this has been the growth of social media. A picture speaks a thousand words, but those words take time to read, and sometimes they are about boring things, like ingredients and technique.

I'm as guilty as the next person in relying on photography to give me an instant hit. Go to a chef or restaurant's website, or more likely Twitter feed, and the first thing you do is check the gallery, or swipe through the photos, because it's so much easier to take in at a glance. I'm also culpable in using food photography in my quest for self promotion, and more importantly, to push the public perception of what our kitchen is capable of. On the whole, I don't think food photography is a bad thing, but (I can hear the cliché counter clocking up), we've well and truly put the cart before the horse. It's this self perpetuating treadmill of presentation that is in danger of occluding what really matters.

I ate once in a restaurant which we might refer to as a serial offender. A young couple were out on a date at the table next to me. The bread came out in a flat cap. Whilst the young chap popped to the loo, she took a photo with her phone. When laddo returned, the process was repeated. Everyone smiled. The problem is, as long as gastronomic success is predicated on theatrical bullshit, we will continue to miss what really matters. Those boring things like craft, knowledge, ingredients and technique will continue to take a back seat as long as chefs and restaurants cater to the basic needs keeping up with fashion. It's time for a rethink. Yes, we want plates, but it's time we also started calling for substance over style, ability over trickery. Everything else can get in the sea.

I never set out to write this blog in order to critique meals I'd eaten, or to recommend or damn places you might consider going to. My main reason for this is that there are plenty of people doing this already. If that wasn't reason enough, I might also add there are people doing that particular job very well. I haven't the inclination to go to new restaurants, to follow their PR statements, and to queue around the block for the latest burger joint, and besides, I don't live in Manchester. Sheffield is already a small enough pond with competent noise on social media telling you where to eat, and if you're into 'fine dining' then there are plenty of people with more experience than me of such establishments who are willing to ruin an expensive evening by taking a camera phone along. It just so happens I went to a good restaurant tonight by mistake.

I had planned to go to Yankees, a place that did burgers and fries on the Sundays when, as a child, my parents couldn't be bothered to cook. I'd recently returned from an American holiday where, because I'd spent a week in Vegas spending every available cent on the dinner table as opposed to the roulette, I simplistically thought a dose of meaty Americana would fill the yawning gap in my soul. I'd already heard of Smith & Baker. It occupies the same premises where an earlier version of the Richard Smith business model had attempted eastern no frills and sticky fingers Yankee trash with equal measures of failure. I've already mentioned that gastronomically, Sheffield is a small pond. Clinging to this watery analogy, Smithy is a big fish. 

I don't mean this to come across as faint praise. Few people have stood the test of time in same way, which is in all likelihood down to a mixture of business savvy and being a damn good cook. Most of Sheffield's restaurateurs fall at both hurdles. After a pretty good run, with its pitfalls and failures, it seems to me as though here is a chef who wants to open a small scale bistro style quality restaurant with a small number of diners with an emphasis on fresh gear, a constantly changing menu and solid technique. 

My favourite thing about this place is that it is so hard to say what makes it good. It is not one thing, but it is many things. I can't remember who it was, I think it was Bill Bruffort quoting Paul Bocuse when he said ' it's easy to be a chef, you just have to be perfect and fast'. It's just as easy to run a restaurant, you just have to second guess all your customers, anticipate what they want, serve them with courtesy and be in seven places at once. Easy. I have no idea if the staff at Smith &Baker are capable of this, because it was pretty quiet when I went, but I give them a good chance. Anywhere that has clearly got enough of the details right isn't  likely to fall down when it comes to service, but as I plan to go back, I'll let you know.

As it happens, despite not meaning to go there, I accidentally spent fifty quid on my dinner. I consider this to be a very good sign. I also didn't know that I'd been there for nigh in two hours. For me,the mark of a really good meal is that you forget things. You forget how long you've been there, you forget where you were supposed to be instead. You forget to stop spending money. By far the most endearing thing, certainly for me, is when people forget their table manners. It's a rare kind of joy when you can pick up you soup bowl and drink loudly with liquid running over your chin, or lick your Sunday dinner plate clean. Never trust someone who won't gnaw a pork chop from its bone or eat the fat.

What does this have to do with somewhere I had a good dinner? Well, practically nothing, except this is that sort of place that despite its pricey(ish) menu and decent cocktail list, it's not somewhere you should feel bad about licking butter off the knife, but then again, the more I'm paying, the more entitled I feel to lick the cutlery. Did I mention the cooking? It's really very accomplished. A very good  assiette of raw salmon terrine, accompanied by a very lightly cured gravadlax, with salmon roe and something that looked like caviare (but can't be been)  atop three perfectly cut slices of radish and two very thinly sliced and just al dente slices of pink beetroot. This is the sort of trick only a kitchen on its mettle can turn out.

There was only one glaring error, actually the sort of schoolboy mistake you wouldn't expect from such a menu. On a set prix fixee of three courses, the vegetarian starter and main featured Jerusalem artichoke as a main ingredient. This is cruel and wrong, because I like to order vegetarian things when I know they'll be properly cooked. Delicious as they may be, Jerusalem artichokes (which have about as much to do with Jerusalem as they are artichokes) are a worry to the digestive system at the best of times.  Despite my hatred of this pretender to the vegetable kingdom, it's pathetic pretence, this is still an excellent menu. It's the type of cooking I most admire. Simple bistro cooking with enough bells and whistles, but essentially technically sound execution and flawless service. I couldn't ask more from a restaurant.

Coming to Terms with Tofu

'Village Style' tofu preparations, substituting mushrooms

for pork.

 Like many a lazy little Englander, I grew up with the received notion that tofu was for health freaks. The sort of people who got up early by choice, and ate weird tasteless discs made of bran fortified with fairy dust. This sort of health masochism fares well in Britain. It is the obverse of the national tendency to debase ourselves with kebabs, abattoir effluent sausages, reconstituted frozen meat-like kiddie nuggets, Rustlers Burgers and 'hot' curries. Now that we no longer wear sack cloth and ashes, or self flagellate in public, we choose to cleanse ourselves with a new type of suffering. Witness the preposterous rise of Raw Food Veganism for instance. Anyhow, it is understandable how anyone growing up in such a climate might come to see the favoured foodstuffs of the movement with some disdain. The foodbiz, and this is not particular to veggies or healthies, is ruled by simplistic faddishness. Like tofu, the sandals and yoga crowd adopted quinoa in absentia of recipes or cultural baggage. Nowardays, pretty much everyone has pocketed pulled pork, without taking much of a second glance at the cuisines of barbecue, smoke pit, and southern states creole.

'Ma Po' tofu and rice.

Whilst bean curd is itself vegan, the problem for vegetarians is that pretty much all the best recipes are meat or fish based. In much domestic Chinese cooking for instance, very little meat is used for reasons of economy, but tofu rice and noodles are used in addition, not as a substitute. It would be all too simple to put this type of domestic oriental cuisine on a pedestal, especially as the growing problem of feeding the world's population means that we all need to start figuring out how to eat fewer animals and fast. I personally find restaurant meals, which tend to be skewed in favour of animal protein less satisfying than my home cooking. As an aside, asking China for the answers might not be the best idea. The booming middle class in a country of billions, now demands to eat like the rich, and native land, thick with industrial pollutants cannot sustain the growing population, and besides, if you think the rights of the human animal are meagre, the treatment of livestock would chill any bunny cuddler.

Notwithstanding, I live in Sheffield in the early twenty first century, and if you eat out as often as I do, the chances are you're going to eat a lot of rice and noodles. As luck would have it, Sheffield has cultural links with the capital of Sichuan, Chengdu, a city which has it's own Sheffield United. I promise I'm not making this up: the Chengdu Blades. The important thing is that Chengdu is one of the gastronomic capitals of the East, of a cuisine as reliant on fragrant pepper and fermented chilli as southernmost France is with duck fat. The more I became obsessed by this style of cooking, it became apparent that I was going to have to learn to love certain things. Duck's tongues I can take or leave, and I must learn to appreciate preserved eggs, but it soon became apparent that my childish misapprehensions about tofu couldn't have been more wrong.

One of the finest dishes of the classical repertoire is the fabulous MaPo Tofu, named for the smallpox scarred street vendor who've her name to this particular preparation, now served across the world, albeit often in bastardised forms. Although it is now typical for cooks to use pork, the base is a few grams of minced beef cooked to flavour the oil in the wok, which is then infused with a great dollop of fermented broad bean and chilli paste. This is available in all oriental marts (Hong yo du ban). Buy it. Even if you don't make this recipe, and I implore you to do so), buy it anyway. Put it in soup, beans, burgers, chillis, everything. Once the beef and paste are sizzling away, it's simply a case of adding some stock, spring onions and ground Sichuan pepper, and then letting your cubed tofu simmer and absorb the flavours. Because the bean paste is not particularly hot, chilli powder or oil, or extra pepper allows for tweaking of the flavours to suit your desire for chilli sweats. I haven't given this as an exact recipe because it's something that should come naturally and is easily made in a few minutes while your rice is boiling. Rice cooking water can be substituted for stock, though leftover gravy adds a serious boost. You can eliminate the meat altogether, though I feel this lacks something, so if you want a totally vegan version, start with a good quantity of chopped mushrooms, or better still dried shiitakes, porcini, or such, with a tablespoon of 'olive vegetable' for extra depth of flavour.

These adaptations are unashamedly inauthentic, but then authenticity in food is an ambiguous idea. What matters, with all cooking, is that we have to delve into the past if we want to learn how to do things right. Repeat what others have done before you, and then repeat yourself, again, and again, and again. Jumping aboard the bandwagon of the latest 'super food' may be all the rage, but there is more pleasure and craft to be learned from tradition, and that is how I came to terms with tofu.

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The Tale of Cider Pig

'Cider Pig' is not so much a recipe as a process. It came about during a weekend of unseasonable warmth, which coupled with a cider festival, meant that the pub and somewhat optimistically named beer garden were at full capacity, and I found myself at the end of a busy Saturday with a pork shoulder sitting untouched in the fridge that had to find its way onto the board the next morning. The obvious and simple solution was to use a few pints of the abundant cider, and slowly braise the shoulder overnight. Here's how:

Based on approximate 3kg piece of meat,

Pork shoulder, ideally on the bone (for flavour), skin removed for crackling

A couple of pints of medium to sweetish cider, the more 'farmyardy' the better

An onion and head of garlic, halved

Some or all of the following: star anis, cinnamon bark, black cardamom, sage, thyme, rosemary, oregano

Heat a tray just large enough to hold the meat to a searing intensity, and rub the pork with a little oil and plenty of salt. Lay the meat in the tray, and let it sizzle and brown, turning carefully to ensure as much colour as possible. This not only gives the sauce it's rich dark colour, it gives a roasted flavour to what is essentially a slow braise, and a few nubs of blackened char are ideal. Charring the cut faces of the onion at the same time also helps, but is not essential. 

Once everything is glistening, browned, and smelling delicious, tip in the cider. The shoulder should be partially submerged, with whatever aromatic ingredients you've selected bobbing alongside. To borrow Fergus Henderson's analogy, like an 'alligator in a swamp'. Cover everything tightly in foil, and place in a very low oven, for six to eight hours. This is a recipe that is perfectly suited for the slow cooker, which will achieve the same results.

When the pork is cooked, it should be soft enough to push a wooden spoon through, so carefully lift it from the liquid and allow to cool sufficiently to remove the bone, which should already be falling out. Sieve the liquid, and push the gloopy innards of the garlic through the sieve like a paste.  You will need to skim quite a bit of fat, and the best way to do this is to boil the liquid off centre on a burner, so that it bubbles on one side, and the fat collects adjacent to the convection current. You can then reduce the liquid, and/or thicken it with corn flour, arrowroot, or even gravy granules. There is no shame in adding commercial gravy to a liquid, so long as that liquid is not water. 

That is basically it. We roll the pork and set it in cling film, to make presentation and portioning easier, but this is by no means essential. Simmered in its braising liquid, it is an easy way to do pork sandwiches for numerous guests, and has the added benefit of making its own gravy. It can be used as much as a meat ragu for pasta, as for a Sunday lunch. Use wine instead of cider, add tomatoes and leeks; as I said, this is more a process than a recipe, and if I had one meal that I thought could convince home cooks to purchase a slow cooker, this would be it.

Creme Brûlée the Easy Way

'Burnt Cream' doesn't sound particularly appetising, which explains why this classic dessert prefers to be known in French translation, despite considerable evidence that we can claim it for our own. In this way, it mirrors the fate of ordinary custard, which must go by the francophone 'crime anglaise' in order to distinguish itself from the mainstream corn flour derivative. Although it is possible to caremelise the sugar with a powerful grill, a blowtorch is really the only extra tool the average cook needs to knock up this dessert in minutes.

You will need, a bowl, a whisk, six egg yolks, 4oz/200g sugar, half a pint/500ml thick cream, and the extracted innards of half a vanilla pod. You will also need a fridge and a microwave. Lets deal with that elephant in the room. There is a lot of anti-microwave snobbery out there, the reason for which is simple to explain. Like a television, which it superficially resembles, ninety nine per cent of its output is absolute garbage. The microwave itself however, is no more to blame for the Rustlers Burger than TV is to blame for Top Gear, it simply makes cold things hot, which is what we're after here.

Start by beating the yolks, sugar and vanilla gubbins until thoroughly incorporated, now add the cream and give a good thwacking so that all is combined. Now insert the bowl into your microwave, and ping it at full power in one minute, then at thirty second intervals until the magic happens. Resist the urge to keep stirring, and watch as the custard thickens and then, when the egg yolk can take no more, splits and creates what looks like very runny scrambled eggs. At this point, take your whisk, and beat wildly until homogenisation is once more acheived. If you have a hand blender, this can be acheived with a few seconds of zuzzing. And that's it. Pop the finished custard into ramekins/ teacups/ eggcups or whatever you have to hand, and fridge for a couple of hours. The result is a perfectly smooth, evenly set creme that is superior to the potentially overcooked and uneven results of the traditional water bath method. Top with white sugar and a couple of drops of water to aid the caramelisation, and shoot fire at the top until it melts, browns and sets. Now whack the sugar with the back of your spoon, and savour the sensation of hard bitter sugar and soft custard, and the self satisfaction that you did it so easily.

Cookery Books

Before I got hot and cold running Internet plumbed in at home, my days off would often consist of wandering round Waterstones, flicking through whatever caught my eye and generally using it as a library. It has comfy chairs dotted around, and even an in store coffee shop, so this behaviour is encouraged. Obviously, a fair chunk of my time consisted of perusing the cookery section, which had clearly been arranged to fit into what book store's curatorial mindset envisaged to be the 'lifstyle and hobby' section of the first floor. There is always plenty of new product to be shifted in the food section, and this is in Sheffield where the availability is miserly compared with say, Nottingham's branch. New cook books tend to fall into one of two categories.

The first is the telly spin off. Every time a presenter or named chef has a new series on one of the major terrestrial channels, their publishing arm throws together an accompanying volume, containing usually next to no information you couldn't have gleaned watching the program in the first place. These books are photo-heavy, a trait which we will see has infected nearly all cookery writing. They also contain recipes. Telly cooking nowardays is almost completely bereft of recipes. An unspoken agreement between producer and viewer exists whereby neither is really fooled that they are being given any sort of culinary instruction. Instead it is all location shots and shaky cameras, intent concentration faces and, here we go again, 'passion'. With a few rare exceptions, no one cooks the stuff they see on telly. When it is finally reproduced in recipe form, with plenty of close up photographs of food stylists' trickery and screenshots from the series, next to no one cooks it then either. More often than not, they are bought as birthday and Christmas presents, for that person you know who is a bit into food. They thank you profusely, pore over the pictures, and then the tome is consigned to the shelf or coffee table to moulder in useless perpetuity. 

'Coffee Table Book' is a phrase rarely heard these days, but the idea persists. It is not the sole preserve of cooking, in fact it is a form better suited to visual media. Art, fashion and architecture are all ripe for coffe table bookishness because they are suited to lavish illustrative glossy reproduction. Unfortunately, the very same thing has happened to food. The second form that many new publications take, is the chef/restaurant book. Just as the telly spin off is designed to sell a programme's own advertising, so is the chef's/restaurant's book an excellent money spinner, whilst at the same time promoting that individual and the business they represent. Again, the same formula holds true, big glossy photos on heavy gauge pages designed to within an inch of their lives, accompanied here and there with recipes that no one is going to cook. 

If you accept that both types are of little practical use, then at least the second type is far more interesting, dense, and maybe, has a few practical tips and ideas if nothing else. I can think of three stand out examples of this form that deserve a place on the bookshelf of anyone who takes food seriously. The first is Thomas Keller's 'French Laundry Cookbook', now over a decade old, but still an absolute classic from a chef and restaurant that I don't feel silly to call legendary. Heston Blumenthal's 'The Fat Duck Cookbook' is an engrossing mix of narrative, science, unfathomaby complex recipes, mouthwatering food porn close ups, and the waywardly eccentric illustrations of Dave McKean. 'A Day at El Bulli' takes obsession with detail to a strange and dizzying place, an insight into the remarkable brain and working methods of the great Ferran Adria. It is the apogee of 'you're never going to cook this at home, but look at the pictures absorb the mythology and enjoy'. It is in this arena that cookery books that aren't going to teach you to cook really come into their own. This was also the point of Elizabeth David. Any inexperienced cook who picks up something like 'French Country Cooking' and expects an instruction manual is going to come unstuck. Her stuff, fantastic as it is, is closer to travelogue, and to journalism than it is to recipe- mongering. 

The sad thing is that there exist a good many books from which it is possible to derive an auto-didactic education, but they are seldom the most hyped, and rarely top the best seller list. The most important cookery book published in the English language is Lousette Bertholle, Simone Beck and Julia Child's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking'. I don't like the title either. It's not an art, and this book won't make you a master of it, but it is a fantastic, rigorous, concise, basic and yet thorough explanation of so many essential principles that I would go so far as to say the following: it is not the only book you need, but until you have read it from cover to cover, don't waste your time even thinking about buying anything else.