The Good Cook: In front of the camera

8:02 PM |

The very idea that I am to be featured as a cook on television - and on BBC One no less - is a bit surreal to me. I had always said, “no - never! I just can't look into that terrible black hole!” (the camera lens), addressing bewildered folk who thought I might be quite good at this kind of carry on, and quietly reassuring myself that no one with any sense would ever approach me anyway.

Then, quite suddenly, it was April 2010 and I was in a meeting with the BBC and I talked for England. The TV folk couldn't get a word in edgeways. I find I tend to do just that when asked to talk about food. I can sprout forth with much enthusiasm - and rude opinion, let it be said - on the subject which is closest to my heart. And so, it began... The Good Cook series starts this Friday.

Although I am still involved in the restaurant Bibendum where I was the inaugural chef in 1987, I hung up my apron for the final time in 1995, and haven't toiled in a professional kitchen since then. Quite simply, I like to cook and I like to cook well. I do it every day at home, often just for me and, occasionally, for one or two lunch guests. I never cook dinner parties, nor do I enjoy going out to them. There are one or two exceptions, but I will usually help with the cooking or take a dish I have made at home. When I stay with close friends in Kent, and also in Somerset, both of whom have especially nice kitchens, I always cook a lot. This is not expected; I just enjoy making something delicious for my hosts.
I will also shop anywhere. I know there are certain things I rely on at my local supermarket (boned and rolled breast of lamb for example; it’s tasty and cheap), or at my Saturday farmers' market (fabulous, untreated Guernsey cream). I also love my very local Thai shop, not-quite-so local Iranian stores and a huge, very expensive organic emporium (extraordinarily delicious Italian butter in tins).

What I really wanted to achieve from this television series was to show how it can be so enjoyable and worthwhile spending a little time on cooking. As an end result you produce something utterly delicious. Making good food is not necessarily always easy (this has never fooled me!), and practice will always make perfect. You'll find a mixture of recipes drawn from my childhood, my restaurant career, and my most memorable meals - from coq au vin and baked pappardelle with pancetta and porcini to sticky toffee pudding and everyone's favourite, chocolate pot [coming to the website soon]. But I would be quite happy if just an occasional dish may catch your eye and cause you to think, “yes, I think I would like to cook that too.”

Cooking is my life. It is what I do. And you know what? I had a ball staring into that terrible black hole. I look forward to hearing what you think of the series and recipes.

Simon Hopkinson is a food writer and presenter of The Good Cook

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The trouble with trans-fats

8:01 PM |

This week’s edition of The Food Programme investigates the issue of trans-fats in our food (artificial fats which are formed during a process called hydrogenation, which turns liquid oil into solid fat). A key part of the government’s public health policies are the Responsibility Deals - voluntary agreements with the food industry on the ‘healthiness’ of their products. Partners include a wide range of big companies, including KFC, Pepsi, Coca Cola, Pret A Manger and McDonalds. One of their aims is to get rid of trans fatty acids in their foods by the end of the year. But is that decision sufficient to get rid of a substance that, according to Professor Simon Capewell on this week’s The Food Programme, kills 35 people in the UK every two days? 
Vegetable oils are turned into solids or semi-solids by pumping them with hydrogen. The process creates artificial trans fatty acids. It’s a technique invented over a century ago, but these fats didn’t become a big part of the mainstream diet until after World War Two. It then really took off in the 1970s when they were promoted as the answer to Health for All: margarines and spreads = good; butter = bad. And the food processing industry loved them - they were cheap, produced foods with a long shelf-life and anything made with them could be sold with the golden glow of healthiness.

There were always farsighted sceptics, but the heavy duty evidence about the dangers of trans-fats didn’t begin to surface until about 20 years ago. Now they’re directly linked to heart attacks, the World Health Organization calls them toxic and several countries have banned them. Evidence is also accumulating on the way they promote general inflammation in the body and on their damaging effect on the brain.

That’s enough evidence for many scientists and public health specialists to demand a total ban in the UK. A ban needed, they say, because, as we saw recording on one of the main streets in West Bromwich with public health director Dr John Middleton, voluntary agreements don’t cover thousands of takeaways and food shops in the poorer parts of Britain. There, and in similar streets all over the country, cheapness is what sells - and there are no fats quite as cheap as industrial trans-fats.

As we heard in the programme, in a recording made for us by the BBC’s Asian Network, you don’t have to be poor to ruin your health with trans-fats. Thirty-something music producer Rishi Rich told the story of how he lived happily on takeaways until he found himself in hospital on stroke alert, diagnosed with the arteries of a 70-year-old. You can get up-to-date information about health and nutrition on contributor Dr Alex Richardson’s Food and Behaviour Research website.

The Food and Drink Federation says a ban would be a sledgehammer to crack a nut. What do you think? Is a voluntary agreement by the food industry enough? Or do you think trans-fats should be banned as they are in Denmark, New York, California, Switzerland and Austria?

Sheila Dillon is the presenter of Radio 4’s The Food Programme.

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The gluten-free kitchen

8:00 PM |

Most traditional baking and processed food relies on a natural protein called gluten in some form. Found in most baking flours and foods made from them, gluten helps foods stay solid without crumbling, keeps it soft, holds moisture, and adds chewiness to the texture. It’s essential to most baking recipes but a right pain if you’re allergic or intolerant to it.

If you have coeliac disease or have a problem with gluten, you know what I mean. But if you don't, just think of it this way: imagine you’re diagnosed with physical condition way beyond ‘fussy’ that meant that you couldn't eat most prepared food on sale, had to plan for every meal and not just casually wing-it, had to say no to most treats like birthday cakes and puddings, couldn't have most beers, and of course, never eat a slice of everyday bread.

To be honest, most of us eat way too much wheat flour in our diet compared to the energy we exert, so adding more fresh vegetables, meat, fish, beans and pulses to your diet is no bad thing. But it would be a grim life without the occasional cake or sandwich, so I’ve been spending time in my kitchen experimenting with ideas that making gluten-free baking that bit easier.

I’ve written a foolproof gluten-free bread recipe for the BBC Food website that should please even the most critical bread addicts. It’s dead-easy to make and bake. But it takes more than one recipe to turn a gluten-free life into a free and easy one, so here are my steps to easier baking:

Use the internet and seek out the experts as the recipes you need are just a few clicks away. My friends Shauna James Ahern's glutenfreegirl.com and Sarah Phillips' baking911.com will give you the practical help and inspiration to make it all the more trouble-free. (Many of the best recipes use US cups, so you might want to pour 240ml of water into a teacup, mark the outside, and use that to measure.)
Gluten-free really does mean just that, so don't be swayed by some of the myths out there and know what you're buying. Sourdough bread isn't gluten-free by nature of the process, though can be if made with gluten-free ingredients. Baking powder needs to be labelled ‘gluten-free’ otherwise it isn't, whereas bicarbonate of soda (called baking soda in the US) always is. Cornflour and icing sugar are safe, while suet might not be (check if it contains wheat flour).
Bookmark essential recipes. Some ideas to start with could be...
* That intense chocolate brownie: Karina Allrich at glutenfreegoddess.blogspot.com has a Belgian chocolate, rice flour and almond recipe that’s delicious.
* A classy thin gluten-free pancake recipe: this one by blogger Seamaiden from her site bookofyum.com did it for me.
* Shortbread: this recipe from Good Food Magazine’s CJ Jackson is both crisp and rich with butter. A little orange zest helps to lift the flavour.
When you're starting out, stick to recipes that use very little wheat flour, or don't require the flour to do very much except bind things like cookies, shortcrust pastry, pancakes and batters, brownies and any of the heavier tray-bake bars.
Prepare your expectations. Pastry made from gluten-free flour will feel crumblier and more fragile as you roll it: it will tear and fall apart but will patch together and bake just fine.
Work a little faster. Cornflour (cornstarch) typically makes up the bulk of the gluten-free flour mixes you buy, and it and most other gluten-free starches absorb moisture much faster than wheat flour. So mixtures need to be worked together a little more swiftly if you want them to be smooth and even-textured.
As a general rule, keep the flavours quite strong as cornflour, tapioca and rice flour have no flavour at all.
For most simple baking the prepared gluten-free flour mixes sold by some millers will do the trick but sometimes you will need to seek out specialist ingredients. Here are some that will help you tackle any baking challenge:
Try using linseed in place of xanthan gum in recipes. When ground or roasted then soaked in water, linseed (sometimes called flax seed) releases a gum that is very good at holding the texture of cookies and cakes together - as long as you don't mind brown specks in your baking.
For an extra moist crumb add tapioca starch. It’s typically found in most gluten-free flour mixes. It gives cookies and cakes a chewier texture, and stops them drying out too quickly. But use it sparingly, say 25g/1oz for every 200g/7oz cornflour or rice flour, as it swells up with moisture and can make cakes slightly gummy if overused.
One of the trickiest things to make is a wholemeal flour type result, as it's hard to find replacements for wheatgerm and bran. Brown rice flour is very helpful here, especially if combined with ground linseed. It has a slightly nutty flavour, important as so many of the main flours are flavourless.
Buckwheat flour, not actually a wheat but a type of seed, has a rich nutty flavour that's also useful for "wholemeal" style gluten-free baking, and using 25g/1oz for every 500g/1lb 2oz of rice flour or cornflour helps to make bread loaves bigger and softer.

What have your gluten-free successes been? Or any recipes you've found trickier? I'll try and help. Do let us know if you've found a website that's been helpful, or if you know of some tricks to improve all our gluten-free baking.

Dan Lepard is a food writer and baking expert.

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The ultimate food hell: What's the world's worst food

7:58 PM |

I won’t beat about the bush: a lot of scrofulous old tat masquerading as food has passed my lips. You see, I’m happy to taste pretty much anything whether rotten, radioactive or simply unlikely. You may think that this is an unwise way to live your life, but I honestly relish the adventure of tasting something new and unusual - mainly because I have dedicated my life to discovering the next potato. Not literally the next potato, you understand – I believe they sell them down Tesco’s – but rather the next foodstuff that might support generations of people to come. I’m fascinated by the fact that when the potato first arrived in Europe it was viewed with great suspicion, but that some nutter persevered with it, and since then it has sustained billions of lives. I’d like to be that potato-discovering nutter, and that’s why I will taste anything – just in case it turns out to be the next potato. Or the next pasta. Or the next Wotsit, for that matter. Who knows what culinary revelations await the curious?
In my experience the worst foods on earth fall into several categories, and I’d like to share this important knowledge with you:

Badly named recipes
This is by far the most amusing category of ‘orrible food. Often the meal is pretty decent, but its name (lost in the murk of etymological dead-ends) makes it sounds repulsive: cow heel pie; bacon and cow heel pudding (actually, this one tastes pretty grim too); fitless cock (an oatmeal pudding made chicken-shaped); the dean’s cream (a sponge fool); wet nelly (suet roly-poly made with stale bread); slot (cod roe dumplings); Pope's posset (someone told me that this sounds a little gynaecological, but as female Popes are few and far between, I’m not sure I agree), clapshot (a delicious mash of potatoes and turnips).

Horrifying foods
These are foods that I often enjoy, but which I accept that others find bizarre or offensive (by the way, there’s a fair amount of video around of me eating these, much of it mildly amusing): yak’s penis, cane rat, palm weevils, radioactive soup, human cake, lambs’ testicles, fish bladders, desiccated frog tea and silk worm pupae…

Disgusting-tasting foods
Much as I love the adventure of ANY mouthful, I’d be obtuse if I didn’t acknowledge that sometimes the odd mouthful is horrendous - such as surströmming (Swedish rotten herring), liquorice (how you people can eat that filth, I don’t know), igunak (rotten walrus) and deer penis juice (that is, deer penis steeped in rice liquor).

Bad recipes
These are foods that often contain decent ingredients yet have been so badly and blindly constructed that they have been rendered disastrous in combination. Hasty pudding is THE WORST RECIPE EVER – made of all the odds and ends of starchy foods and stale rubbish swept from the bottom of your cupboards. I’ve tried to make this taste good and it’s impossible. I served it once to my friend Ewan, and he pronounced it ******* *********. He’s right.

Hopeful combinations
I accept that the path to culinary greatness is fraught with the corpses of recipes that have flown too close to the sun and cooks who have mixed their metaphors as badly as their ingredients. The following DO NOT WORK. I have tried them so you don’t have to: chocolate-covered olives (which is odd, seeing as chocolate-covered gherkins are actually pretty good), fizzy milk (as in milk with carbon dioxide added using a Sodastream), and garlic and corned beef ice cream.

Tat
This is simply rubbish food made gruesome by laziness, ineptitude, economic greed and ignorance. You know the offenders: flabby pizzas that are basically snotty melted cheese on toast, tasteless burgers containing onions fried too quickly, under-crusted bread, cold pasta salads, over-grilled fish, and above all green peppers. I know that they are the cornerstone of Creole cuisine but, like exclamation marks and herpes, no-one ever thanks you for giving them a green pepper.

So tell us - as James Martin asks every week on Saturday Kitchen - what’s your idea of food hell?

Stefan Gates is a BBC presenter and food writer.

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