I’m at Whatley manor for a third week and I’m having a great time. I have seen new things and learnt some stuff, the food is a lot different than the sort of food I am used to cooking but still there are lots of similarities to be found.
I have never worked with Asian ingredients and Niall worked at a restaurant in America called Benu, a 3 michelin star establishment in San Francisco. Benu is mainly focused on korean flavors as the head chef Corey Lee is Korean. Its really great to be shown new things at my age! They use a lot of seaweed, dried mushrooms called cloud mushrooms I hadn’t seen before also some paste’s from Korea which have amazing flavours of hot peppers but fermented I think so have a real depth of flavour and umami. Different types of soy sauce of which I thought there were only light and dark turns out there is more!
They have bamboo, Korean chilli flakes (which are hot!) Dried tuna flakes, kombu seaweed sheets. Shrimp paste… and they make dashi which is a beautifully simple stock but yet carries a great depth of flavour and can be adapted into a smoked eel dashi or a lobster dashi or I guess any dashi?!
They ferment a few things which is not new to me but they do it slightly differently so again it’s very interesting, they simply add salt and sugar to a dry product like a carrot or a kolrabi (2 or 3%) then vac pac it with a herb or a favouring like chilli and leave in a warm spot for 4 days, done!
Today I’ve been cutting tiny leaves out of big oyster leaves and cutting the petals off nasturtiums, snipping the tiny inner leaves from purple shizo. Soaking dates briefly in hot water enough to help me ease the skin off them, then remove the stones and place them in the freezer for a hour to firm them up enough so I can carefully remove the white stringy seed husk from the inside to leave only pure date, too then weight out 1.2g of it to then ball into perfect little amber balls of sweetness!
I love it! I love the really small things that may seen tedious or pointless but I see it as necessary. I remember working at The Fat Duck almost 13 years ago now and being told to break a grapefruit down into it’s cells… I had no idea what the cell of a grapefruit was! If you take a grapefruit and cut it in half take a segment and pull it open and then peel the skin off that segment you will see it’s made of tiny teardrop shaped cells and very carefully u can pull then off and break them apart (but don’t burst them) into individual tear drops. This job of doing that to 3 grapefruits everyday became or is quite an infamous job, chefs ask if you ever did the grapefruit at the duck… now it could be seen as a job you would want to avoid but I always saw any job I did there including the grapefruit cells as a job that meant 80 people that day would eat a 3 michelin star meal! That’s exciting, just to be apart of it at all because at that time The Fat Duck was the number 1 restaurant in the world so I knew I was making each diner enjoy the best meal they might ever eat. It took me a while to get it, bagging up individual slices of foie gras is not very exciting but without it happening then the service can’t happen so if it’s not me doing it then someone else will. Heston has a saying that “perfection is lots of small things done well”. It means that no dish is perfect without all of its components being done right. It’s a saying that I have told my chefs for years now. I love it, it’s means every small or “shitty” job you get given makes a massive difference and that if a head chef lays into you for doing something like cutting chives badly and you don’t know why it’s such a big deal then that reminds you it does. Everything matters if your want to make the perfect dish. Not just a well cooked piece of turbot. So yes making 100 balls of date flesh is a ball ache and takes fucking ages! But it means that 30 guests to Whatley manor that night will eat 1 star michelin food because of something I did.
Jonascooks 