A line cook's history of humiliation
And a recipe for a very cheeky granola-crunch chocolate cake.
Hello and welcome once again to The Recovering Line Cook.
After a few of the more hectic work weeks of my life, what a joy it is to be writing this newsletter for you again.
Today, I have a recipe for you I’ve wanted to share a while and some thoughts on coming up with new ideas in the kitchen.
I hope you enjoy it and that you’re doing really well.
Wil
“If it were really a great idea, someone else would have thought of it by now…”
I used to be very easy to embarrass.
When I was 7, Andy Scammell told me I had bad breath just before Mrs Goodwin’s Tuesday morning Maths class. I was so ashamed I hid from him for the rest of the school year.
Along with moderately better dental hygiene, I hope I’ve learnt to get over such embarrassment as I’ve got older. Though I know I haven’t ridden myself of it entirely. I remember at culinary school, a decade ago now, we were having a lecture/Q and A with one of Britain’s great cooks: a man called Henry Harris.
At one point he asked us if anyone had eaten anywhere/thing good recently. I told him about a dish of scallop “skirts” (the membrane-y bit of the scallop that normally gets thrown away) I’d had at a trendy pop-up recently. To be honest, I thought those scallop skirts had been a bit chewy, but I was excited about impressing the great chef with the adventurous dish I’d eaten by an up-and-coming cook.
Henry Harris spent the next ten minutes denigrating pretentious young chefs who were more interested in being “different for the sake of different” than genuinely great food.
The idea of scallop skirts, in particular, didn’t sound appealing to him in the slightest.
It was not the congratulations I’d been hoping for regarding how much of a culinary sophisticate I was.
Maybe Henry was harsh but I know what he means. My tastes have grown ever simpler as I’ve got older, both in what I eat and enjoy cooking. I’m as interested in coming up with this generation’s bacon and egg ice cream as I am learning how to play backgammon or how to actually spell ryhthm.
Give me a perfectly fried piece of Dover sole with lemon, butter and parsley any day over a version of it cooked, I dunno, sous-vide in toasted yeast.
Is anyone with me here or am I just turning into a miserable traditionalist who’s going to wake up afraid of hot honey one day soon?
How to start finding new ideas
There’s always a “but”, of course.
Because there’s also a big part of me that finds so much fun in trying out random shit in the kitchen from time to time.
Within reason, of course.
It was this mindset of “meh, I’ll give it a go” that brought this burnt cabbage butter into the world.
I don’t think someone looking to improve their cooking needs to spend much time worrying about being original and coming up with surprising new ideas. But if you are interested in developing that, might we say, “exploratory” aspect of your cooking, I recommend following similar advice as to that given to budding writers.
As well as actually writing, the best thing a writer can do is simply read. But the key is to do their reading with an active critical eye. The idea is to give thought to how words and phrases work together while reading, not just enjoying the words.
I’d say if you want to work on teaching yourself how flavours work together then a similar thing should be done when you eat. Don’t make do with enjoying the flavours, but actively think about the aromatic notes when you taste something. Does anything in them remind you of something else, something surprising and subtle, that might suggest it could work with another flavour?
For example, when roasted, caramelised and rendered down until particularly dark and nutty, I think pork fat can smell really rather like coconut. Could a coconut cake textured with deeply crisp pork skin be something to try?
(Maybe I’m the only one who thinks that, but if wine connoisseurs can get mushrooms from wine, maybe I can have pork and coconut.)
Recently, I accidentally licked some marmalade off a knife that I’d earlier used with marmite (not familiar with marmite? It’s a thick black paste British people enjoy on toast.) The reaction I had was by no means one of disgust though. Instead, the intense sweetness and deep salty-savouriness really rather worked together. I’m sure of it. I wonder if it’s not dissimilar to how well miso works with sweet desserts.
One final tip if you want to stretch your experimental cooking muscles is to start with desserts. Ice cream and sorbet is a great canvas to start with new flavour ideas, as are cakes.
And with that in mind…
A recipe for pumpkin granola-topped kladdkaka (Swedish chocolate cake)
I’ve shared a couple of versions of kladdkaka on this newsletter. All of them make use of miso to give a really very special boost of flavour. This new version might be my favourite yet and moves in a slightly different direction by adding more texture to lighten this very dense Swedish chocolate cake.
The idea came during an evening shift in a restaurant kitchen not long ago. We had recently put some pumpkin soup topped with spicy pumpkin granola on the menu and, being that kind of person, I wondered what said granola would taste like together with the brownie we had on dessert.
The granola is sweet with pumpkin and spiced with chili and cinnamon. I thought it would be a great way of adding texture and, in doing so, a little lightness to my much-loved miso kladdkaka.
The result is absolutely great.
This week I’m sharing the kladdkaka recipe again, my version of the granola recipe, and how to bake them together into something great for any celebration meal you might have in the next few weeks.
I hope you like it.