Mise en Place
Setting up for service - an introduction to Le Cordon Bong
Amuse-Bouche
Welcome, and a huge thank you to everyone who has already subscribed.
This is just a little set up post, a mise en place if you will, for Le Cordon Bong. I’ll be aiming to put out a weekly newsletter centred around a recipe from a fancy Michelin cookbook each week.
Starters
I’m currently working through The Hand & Flowers Cookbook by acclaimed British chef Tom Kerridge. The Hand & Flowers is a two Michelin star pub in Marlow, which garnered its first star in 2006 within a year of its opening, and achieved the feat of becoming the first ever two star pub in 2011.
The dishes are predominantly British gastropub fare by concept - think salt cod scotch egg, chicken liver parfait, fish and chips, braised leg of rabbit, roast hog - but the techniques and stylings are quite French, which is unsurprising given Kerridge’s background (The Capital under Philip Britten, The Square under Gary Rhodes, Odettes, Monsieur Max).
Main Courses
Recipes in the book span a broad range of technical difficulty. A handful of dishes, such as the smoked haddock omelette, or moules marinière can be whipped up fairly painlessly in a couple of hours, but others are multi-day beasts with upwards of 10 individual components, some of which are entire dishes unto themselves. At time of publishing, I’ve cooked 5 recipes from the book, mostly from the ‘easier’ end of the difficulty spectrum.
Take the chicken in beer & malt, for instance (pictured above). This dish centres around a half-chicken that has been brined and cooked sous vide in a beer and hops liquor. It’s accompanied with (1) oak sauce, (2) confit garlic, (3) mushroom tuiles (garnished with (4) malt glaze and (5) a mix of sourdough crumbs and dehydrated pork skin), (6) vanilla mayonnaise, (7) celery jam, (8) celeriac royale, (9) salt-baked celeriac, (10) crispy chicken skins, and (11) deep-fried thyme sprigs.
Equipment
A considerable number of dishes require specialist (and sometimes very expensive) equipment, such as:
Thermomix - £1,149 for the Thermomix TM6 (see note 1 below)
Pacojet - £3,240 for the Pacojet Junior; £5,382 for the Pacojet 2 (see note 2 below)
a sous vide immersion circulator - reasonable at £129 for an Anova Nano; knockoffs can be as cheap as £40. In any case, I consider a sous vide to be essential equipment for any good kitchen - I have an old first generation Anova that’s 6 or 7 years old.
a vacuum sealer - these are relatively inexpensive at £20-40
a dehydrator - decent ones run around £50, restaurant grade models around £140, but I’m reluctant to get one because they’re so bulky
a stand mixer, food processor, jug blender, and hand blender - these aren’t specialist, per se, but I appreciate many people don’t have them, especially in smaller kitchens. There’s a huge range of price points, but in my experience, it’s usually worth paying up in these categories of appliances, because the knockoffs have weak motors that won’t deliver a perfectly smooth purée or successfully knead a tough bread dough. I have a Kenwood kMix (as featured in previous seasons of The Great British Bake Off) and an old Kenwood Multipro Classic. Neither are amazing, but they were cheap and get the job done. I also have a terrible Bosch hand blender in need of an upgrade.
Ingredients
In addition to the usual Michelin tropes of caviar and truffles, there are also a bunch of specialist ingredients common in molecular gastronomy - various antioxidants (to maintain colour), gelling agents, stabilisers, and glues. I’ll be expanding on these in much more detail in my recipe write-ups.
Desserts
That’s probably enough for a first post, and I’ll be publishing my first write-up later this week. I’m looking forward to sharing these recipes and my cook-alongs with you. In the meantime, feel free to hit subscribe below!
Petit Fours (aka the footnotes)
(1) A note on the Thermomix
The Thermomix is an odd piece of equipment, in that it has a highly bifurcated target audience - (1) people like my mother and her friends who got suckered into buying fancy food processors (comes with 17 attachments!) in the mid-90s; (2) professional chefs in high-end kitchens.
Built by Vorwerk, it’s marketed as the ultimate kitchen gadget to replace every appliance in your kitchen - it can sear, sous vide, ferment, slow cook, steam, blend, chop, puree, you name it. It’s also ‘smart’ in that you can press a few buttons to set a cooking program, chuck the ingredients in, and it will pretty much make your meal for you.
In the H&F cookbook, however, it’s primarily used for its ability to cook at high, precise temperatures while simultaneously blending, in order to produce custards and purées.
There’s a fairly robust second hand market for the Thermomix (likely due to Group 1 above) and I’m strongly considering picking up a previous gen TM5 on eBay or Gumtree for £400-500.
(2) A note on the Pacojet
Unlike the Thermomix, the Pacojet falls firmly within the realm of professional chefs and true home cooking fanatics, given the price point (although I have occasionally seen used Pacojet 2s going for £2,500-3,000 online).
The Pacojet is an ingenious system where you freeze the mixture you want to turn into a mousse, sorbet, or ice cream in a beaker until it is rock solid. An extremely powerful motor then slowly drives a set of spinning blades, shaving off microscopic layers from the frozen beaker, and churning them together. The frozen crystals are so tiny that you end up with an impossibly smooth and creamy ice cream-like texture, even when there is no dairy in the mixture.
Here’s a great video demonstration of how this all works: