A Line Cook's Rant About This One Sous Chef from a Decade Ago...

On prep kitchens, cerulean sweaters, and the new popcorn McFlurry

Unlike the other sous chefs, Eddie never worked the line if he wasn’t running the pass.

Instead, he’d always choose to work downstairs in the prep kitchen. There, in that hot and stuffy Central London basement, the single window of which we were forbidden from opening lest the mice get in, Eddie would complete the more interesting prep jobs he’d set aside for himself. Things like slicing razor clams from their long, tubular shells, or removing the digestive tract from langoustine. He did this by inserting a toothpick at just the right angle in the tail, pivoting it just so, then pulling the entire black intestinal thread out with a single, deft move. He was the real deal, was Eddie. I was the commis of the team at the time, which meant my place was down in the prep kitchen, too. Those services doing prep alongside him, learning by watching, I remember fondly almost a decade on.

His always choosing to take prep work when someone else was in charge of service did reinforce a feeling I had about Eddie, though. He was a bit of a Johnnie Big Potatoes. He was a patient teacher, he was great fun to work with, but he also made a point of sitting on the pass after service to tend his Instagram page while the rest of us were scrubbing the floor. He was only a sous chef, but he was pretty much his own boss. A head chef in waiting. It seemed his public image couldn’t quite accommodate taking orders on the line during someone else’s service.

He did eventually become head chef of that restaurant, a place called Portland Restaurant a short walk from Oxford Circus. As the boss, Eddie kept the Michelin Star they’d won just months after opening, and he introduced their first tasting menu, elevating their food to ever greater heights. I’ve not seen Eddie in years, but the success he’s achieved since we worked together couldn’t be more deserved.

Even if he did never help with the floor.

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As well as doing interesting prep jobs, Eddie used that time away from service to work on those elegant dishes of his. They were fancy things, his creations. Portland was, is, a “fine dining” place, but the food he made wasn’t fine for its own sake. It wasn’t designed to impress other cooks or restaurant critics. First and foremost, it was designed to be delicious. Really fucking delicious.

One little snack he came up with (“snacks” being the dainty amuse-bouche served before the starters at Portland) was a perfectly hollowed-out and crisp roasted jerusalem artichoke shell. The soft artichoke insides, which commis chefs like me had laboriously scooped out, were mixed with a puree of slow-cooked roscoff onions. The crispy shells were then re-filled with this before being topped with small pieces of cured and salty pork. Together, it was the Platonic ideal of roasted artichoke. Sweet and earthy and creamy and lung-emptyingly good.

Eddie was, is, a hell of a cook.

Even if he did never help with the floor.

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Eddie also introduced me to what I think is the world’s greatest ice cream flavour: popcorn. I’d never seen popcorn, something I’d hitherto considered worthwhile largely because it was easy to ignore during movies while still remaining orally gratifying, used as a flavouring ingredient. And yet his popcorn ice cream had such a deep flavour. Malty and pervasive and, in its novelty, so satisfying.

Eddie served the ice cream in an achingly fancy-schmancy/finey-diney form by aerating it in a siphon of laughing gas and freezing it in dry-ice. It was delicious, even though the owners did take it off the menu pretty quickly because that huge canister of liquid nitrogen used to create it was just so expensive.

He was the kind of chef that balanced such high-end wankiness with genuine, smack in the gob, shut the front door tastiness.

Even if he did never help with the floor.

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For all the eye-rolling things I have seen, and continue to see, in my fine dining experiences, food such as that Eddie created reminds me why such restaurants can be so valuable.

That artichoke of his. The hours it took me to scoop the innards out of them all to make the crispy shells and concentrated innards. But what a bite of food it created. And that use of popcorn. No, I’m not saying Eddie was the first to make ice cream with popcorn. That’s not my point at all. But a decade ago, Eddie’s was the first popcorn ice cream I’d ever had. I’m sure it was the first many of our guests at Portland had had as well.

It’s a huge flaw in the system that the economic class of person that creates fine-dining food is so different to the type of person who ends up eating it. I certainly couldn’t afford to eat at half the restaurants I cooked at. When I did, it was only because a one-off meal was included as a perk of employment.

That was a rare perk though.

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I’ve been thinking about Eddie’s popcorn ice cream a lot recently. This summer I’ve seen popcorn “pop” up everywhere. First it was the flavouring in a new Magnum ice cream bar. Then I saw popcorn used as the flavour in a Finnish chocolate bar called Tupla. Both of these were wonderful.

And then, the proof popcorn, and popcorn ice cream, had really gone mainstream, the popcorn McFlurry.

In The Devil Wears Prada there’s this long, satisfying, monologue Meryl Streep’s character gives about how a cerulean sweater picked up in a cheap, off the shelf store was really, step by step, the end product of a high end fashion show by Oscar de la Renta years earlier.

I have always regretted how so much of my professional cooking only benefited the super-wealthy, the economically privileged.

To see on sale for 2,95 popcorn McFlurries, a flavour I associate with a very special, Michelin restaurant I worked at a decade ago, was deeply pleasing to me. I loved the way it made me think that the greatest ideas, the most delicious novelties, born or developed in restaurants too expensive for most of us to enjoy, might eventually make their way to more people.

The survival of the yummiest.

For all the problems with fine-dining restaurants, and heavens to Betsy there’s enough of them, this is one thing I hold on to that reminds me of their worth:

Such restaurant kitchens are a home to people who want to create new and beautiful things. Things that haven’t been done before. They are laboratories where experiments are conducted by (frequently unusual) people obsessed with delicious ideas. Life in these kitchens isn’t run by laminated recipe sheets approved by head office. It’s run by blank paper. Before the guest, before the reviews, before profit, this freedom to create is what comes first. Ideas.

Maybe I’m naive, but seeing such ideas eventually picked up by McDonalds, yes even McDonalds, makes me smile. Who knows, maybe through an interesting piece of technology or app, those “unusual people” will be able to productise their ideas more widely themselves one day, and not wait for McDs and Magnum to do it for them.

An Amazon Print on Demand of food products where weird line cooks could make a few extra bucks selling the flavoured butter recipes they’ve come up with?

I like the sound of that.

Eddie’s nitro-frozen popcorn dessert at Portland Restaurant in London (2016).

portlandrestaurant

A post shared by @portlandrestaurant

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If you want to make a bad impression at your new restaurant kitchen job, talk about the way you did something where you previously cooked. I promise you, none of your new colleagues care about the way you did something where you previously cooked.

Recipes, techniques, even how to clean the fryers, every kitchen has their own way to do things. You might think you know better but, trust me, keep it to yourself in those early days of a new kitchen job.

In as much, I’ve lost count of the ways I’ve been asked to make ice cream during my cooking career. Some making use of such ingredients as cornflour, glucose, and glycerin, others requiring gelatin, Thermomixers, and Pacojets for the proper texture.

Some of these ice creams I admit have been heavenly. This black sesame ice cream is a particular favourite.

But at home I tend to do things the old fashioned way. And this is certainly the case when it comes to making ice cream, a thing I love to do without (alas) a Pacojet of my own or even, for that matter, an ice cream churner.

Here’s how I do it.

Making a traditional custard ice cream (flavoured with popcorn)

I start by popping my corn. About 2 tablespoons of unpopped corn will do for this recipe. What I want by the time it’s popped is a good 1 litre in volume to flavour my ice cream base.

Talking of which, to feed my two little ones, myself and my wife, I use 200ml of whole (full fat) milk and the same of cream. The cream we get here in Finland is 38% fat. Whatever cream you can find around that fat percentage will do.

I place the milk and cream onto a moderate heat and use a wooden spoon to stir it occasionally to keep it from catching on the bottom of the pan. In the meantime, I crack 4 eggs and mix the yellows of them with about 80 grams of sugar and a quarter teaspoon of flaky sea salt (such as Maldon). I always freeze the leftover egg whites when it comes to recipes such as this. Somewhere down the line I’ll use them to make this.

Once your milk and cream has started to steam and isn’t very far from boiling point, remove it from the heat. Slowly pour it into your eggy sugar while mixing to bring them together fully. Return this mixture to your pan and place it over a low/medium heat.

This particular way of making ice cream method is called the custard method. This is, as you can guess, because the ice cream base is very much a custard. What we want to see happen to our base is to heat it gently, stirring almost continuously, so it thickens smoothly, not as scrambled eggs.

I say almost continuously because occasional pauses in the stirring helps speed things up a little. It helps build up the heat at the base of the pan to get the thickening process nudged along a bit. But be careful not to leave it too long lest you end up with those scrambled eggs I mentioned. What we want to see is the milk and cream turn from watery to something thick and glossy that proudly coats the back of your wooden spoon, and a line traced with your finger across the back of said spoon remains distinct. This happens at about 180f/80c for those of you with a temperature probe.

Sieve this hot ice cream base into a bowl and add your 1 litre of popcorn. Let this infuse (close-covered with cling film) for anything up to 24 hours. Once it’s room temp keep it in the fridge.

Once it has infused and the ice cream base has taken on that very special popcorn flavour, sieve out the popcorn kernals. Be sure to use a fine sieve and really push out the last drop of ice cream base from them. Put the base in a plastic container and into the freezer.

When the ice cream is starting to firm up, remove from the freezer, cut into squares, and quickly blitz this in a food processor until smooth but not melted. The idea is to work quickly and break down the ice crystals that have formed from not using an ice cream churner. Then, once smooth, get it back in the container and back in the freezer. Repeat this process once it has firmed up again and return to freezer. At this point your ice cream will be entirely smooth and you’ll find yourself never longing for an ice cream churner again.

When you are ready to serve, let it sit in the fridge for 15 minutes to let it come to a more manageable temperature for scooping.

Not a popcorn fan? Swap out the popcorn for a handful of coffee beans. Or if you want to try something equally interesting, toast a few slices of brioche and let that infuse into your ice cream base. One of the most wonderful ice creams I’ve ever had on my prep list at work was a roast potato ice cream (this involved grating and roasting potato until it was golden and dry before flavouring the base with it). Ice cream is so much fun to experiment with. Use this base recipe to try out something of your own design, and feel free to drop any ideas in the comments and, if I can, I’ll be happy to share any thoughts and advice.

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Thanks for reading this week.

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See you next time,

Wil