Fat Duck: Sacrifice To The God Of Aero

We started work in the Fat Duck prep house at 8am. After three hours working like devils, we were herded over the road to gobble down food for five minutes. At 6pm, we stopped again for a quick meal break, and usually managed to get away by 10pm.

A 14-hour day with no pay, and the work was relentless. There was no time to rest or slope off for a cigarette. If you were spotted standing idle for more than a few seconds, a job was thrown at you.

The only way to have a smoke was to cram down your food and light-up while the others finished their meals. Smoking was frowned upon - we hid away near the bins at the far end of the garden. Only the waiters were quite brazen about it.

The prep room bins were emptied several times a day with the steady stream of pigeon carcasses, vegetable trimmings and other scraps. It felt criminal throwing so much good food away.

One of our jobs was prepping the potatoes for the lamb hot pot. First you cut them on the slicer to ensure they were all the same thickness, then gouged out 200 walnut-sized discs. The off-cuts looked like hunks of Emmental cheese. Barely half the potato was used.

For the baby turnips, you trimmed the green stalk, and then scored a circle around the stalk before slicing off the root and scraping off the first layer of skin. Once you had a shiny white moon, you shaved it until it was perfectly smooth, then vac-packed the turnips in a water-filled bag for service.

The savoy cabbage was sliced into uniform strips. You pulled off the outer layers of the cabbage until you had the right shade of green, and then used the middle leaves, chucking away the yellow inner-head. Once you had a pile of usable leaves, you cut out the stalk, and sliced each side of the leaf into rectangles, and then into strips. You used scarcely a quarter of the vegetable.

At one point, I was told to prep 5kg of tomato concasse (skinning and deseeding them, then cutting the flesh into dice). I’ve no idea how long it took me, but it was hours. Mid-way through, I asked Laurent what they were for, and he shrugged. All he knew was they were on the prep sheet, and needed doing. A few minutes later, I heard him on the phone to the kitchen. They didn’t know either.

:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow. You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...

Fat Duck: The Dreaded Grapefruit

After we finished the wrapping, Graham, the Fat Duck’s sous chef, appeared and thumbed a few sweets. Then he led us over the road to the prep room, which would be our prison for the next month.

It was 100 yards or so away from the restaurant, in an old building perched on the side of a car park. The prep room was downstairs - and Heston’s famous laboratory upstairs. I wondered what sorcery was going on up there, and for some reason thought about the Soup Dragon in the Clangers. But there were no tours to be had, or soup for that matter, and they quickly got us to work.

A young chef called Laurent ran the prep room. At first I thought he was French – he had a unique blend of Gallic arrogance and nonchalance – but it turned out he was Swedish.

My first job was measuring out the venison and frankincense tea into 65g portions. It was probably the easiest job in the kitchen, but I managed to mess it up. I had to pour the broth into small plastic bags and vac-pack them. But a couple of bags exploded, and I’d clean the vacuum packing machine down and start again. They could tell I was a novice – it wasn’t just the Tesco bag containing my two blunt knives that gave me away.

I spent the rest of the morning prepping asparagus spears for the ‘salmon poached in liquorice gel’ dish on the taster menu (see photo above). Each one had to be perfect. You cut a circle just below the bud, and peeled the stalk into a slender white arrow.

Eighty were needed for service, and the amount of waste was shocking. Handfuls of perfectly good trimmings, glistening like slimy green tagliatelle, were thrown in the bin. And so much for that sleb chef guff about seasonality and local produce – it was March, and the stuff was from Peru. But it was hard to knock Heston Blumenthal for food miles when some of his customers flew thousands of miles just to eat there. Some of them had carbon footprints bigger than Wales.

The jobs kept rotating and quickly became brain-numbingly dull. One minute we’d be slicing exquisite Joselito ham into julienne strips for the snail porridge, the next we’d be cutting onions on the slicer. It reminded me of those factory lines I’d worked on as a student. It was the sort of humdrum work that I’d always promised myself I’d never do again.

:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow. You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...

The Fat Duck And Food Poisoning Scares

The producer told me it would be weeks before I knew whether I’d been picked for Masterchef, so I started looking for cooking jobs again.

Then I got an email. I’d applied for stage placements (a cheffing term for unpaid work experience, or slavery) at a few of London’s top restaurants. And I’d pretty much forgotten all about them.

I stared at the words, wondering whether it was some cruel joke from one of those bastards at the paper. It was from the human resources manager at the Fat Duck, a three-star Michelin restaurant renowned for concoctions like snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream – but perhaps more famous now for the mystery outbreak that has struck down up to 400 diners.

“Further to our recent communications, please find attached confirmation of your stage placement here at The Fat Duck.”

I couldn’t believe it. My luck really was changing.

I was going to find out how to cook with liquid nitrogen, ice baths, dehydrators, vacuum pumps, and all manner of weird science in the gastro-wizard’s lair. Secrets from the great culinary alchemist Heston Blumenthal himself. Crumbs from the table of the Mad Hatter’s tea party. I was so excited I could barely sleep. It felt like I’d just ripped open a wrapper and found a golden ticket for a one-day tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Of course, the work was unpaid, and there was a rather disconcerting mention that my “actual” hours of work would be shown on the departmental rota when I got there. But how many people could say they’d worked at the Fat Duck? It would be something to tell the grandchildren – even if it was only as a slave.

Sardine on toast sorbet, salmon poached with liquorice, hot and iced tea, chocolate wine – the man was clearly insane, and that’s what I liked most about him...that and him being an entirely self-taught chef, who’d only managed a week in a professional kitchen before opening his own restaurant.

:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow. You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...

Something Fishy About Masterchef

The dish I decided on for the Masterchef audition was tuna tartare with cucumber and wasabi soup. Don’t ask me why. I’d seen it made in a restaurant somewhere and decided to copy it. It was piss-easy to make, but it looked good. And, after all, as Egg and Toad liked to point out - you eat with your eyes...

You dice sashimi-grade, raw tuna and salmon, and do the same with an avocado. Then mix sesame oil, salt, pepper, lime juice and soy sauce in a bowl, and stir in the fish and avocado cubes. Leave it to marinade, and cut a peeled cucumber in half lengthways and remove the seeds by running a spoon down the middle. Blitz the chopped cucumber flesh with chicken stock, cream, wasabi, Worcester sauce and Tabasco, then strain and chill.

You plate the dish by putting a chef’s ring (oiled on the inside) in the middle of a soup bowl, and fill with layers of marinated salmon, tuna and avocado. Take off the ring, pour the chilled soup round the tartare tower, and garnish with a sprig of chervil and a few salmon eggs.

And here was the problem. I couldn’t get salmon eggs anywhere in London. Every shop had either sold out, or didn’t know what I was talking about. After a few hours traipsing around, I realised I had more chance of getting my hands on a fucking Dodo egg.

The last place I tried was a Japanese fishmonger called Atari-Ya hidden away in the suburbs of West Acton. They didn’t have any salmon eggs either, so fobbed me off with red and green tobiko, or flying fish roe. I bought a chiller bag, and a thermos flask to carry the soup in, and thought about the next day. I practised the dish a few times and went to bed.

The Masterchef narrator’s husky voice begins...

“After everything he’s learned, can Lennie deliver a faultless dish? He’s attempted a delicate combination of tuna tartare with a cucumber and wasabi soup...”

Toad destroys my tower like a spiteful child in a sandpit. The plate looks a fucking mess. He picks up a spoonful and sniffs the raw fish before sticking it in his gob.

“I think your flavours are good. You’ve got the rich oiliness of the fish; you’ve got the sweetness of the soup...”

Egg holds up a napkin to stop soup dripping down his Armani.

“That is deep! It’s well seasoned - both the salmon and the tuna are cooked perfectly...”

What would I do? Tell the ignorant bastard the fish was raw?

The alarm clock went off and I jumped out of bed.

:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow. You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...