Oh Broth Where Art Thou?

As soon as I stopped working, the tiredness set in and the chest infection that had been brewing turned into full-blown gammon flu (it started off as swine flu, but then I got cured).

I lay in bed wheezing, flicking through the latest cookery books. All the celebrity chefs had Christmas books out - 101 recipes for Brussels sprouts, and all that useful advice about how turkey leg meat takes longer than breast meat. Masterchef’s John Torode even had one just on beef or something. It was already half price.

Then I got a text message from Jules, saying the "air had been cleared with Graham" whatever that meant, and I could return to work. I didn't really want to go back to the heat, stress and long hours, but I missed it somehow, and besides I couldn't think of anything else to do with my life.

When I walked through the kitchen door, half expecting a punch from Graham, I glanced over to my station and spotted Marcus making mash - using my special sieve. He had a smarmy look about him too.

“I’m on veg now,” he said.

It had all been decided in my absence. I was to move onto starters under the guidance of Stewie, and then after a couple of weeks take over the section myself. Graham was being moved to sauce, cooking the meat and fish for mains.

I looked over to where Marcus was trimming broccoli into florets, and asked whether he’d remembered the parsnip chips. I knew that section inside out.

Graham turned up the next morning, and we were shoved together and made to shake hands. Something had changed - he appeared less arrogant than usual. He barely spoke for the rest of the day. Running the grill was new territory for him, and he was nervous about messing things up.

One night, I gave Stewie a lift home, and we chatted about how I was finding it on starters. He looked at me and smiled.

“You know, now Graham's learning something new...and in the same boat as you...”

He let the sentence float. I frowned, trying to read him for clues.

“If you get fast at it, I mean, well, after all the things he’s said and done to you…

I still didn't know what he was burbling on about.

"For fuck's sake," he said finally. "You can really BURN HIM! Churn out the starters! Force him to ask you to slow down – that’s when you’ll really know you’ve got him. He said the same thing to me when I started on sauce; he said ‘I’m gonna BURN you!’ But there was no way he was going to get me on sauce! But, now’s your chance...”

From that day, I made it my mission to get as fast as I could. Everything would still look good – I’d only take the short-cuts I could get away with – but the dishes would fly out as fast as those waitresses could carry them.

To make my job harder, the starters changed after the first week. Out went the boudin blanc (no doubt a throwback to the AA visit), the goat's cheese wontons, the scallops with pea veloute and white truffle oil, the confit duck terrine, and sun-dried tomato risotto.

In came tuna nicoise, scallops with vierge sauce, home-made gravlax with buckwheat blinis, smoked salmon salad, goat’s cheese parcels with sweet chilli relish, game terrine, confit duck spring rolls, and a butternut squash soup with curry oil and vegetable samosa garnish.

The restaurant was half-empty - most of our trade had gone up the road to the Rosie - so to drum up business we started offering a two-course specials menu for £12. The owner, worried about the £5 credit crunch lunch down at the Eel, wanted to cut the price to £9.95 and include dishes like sausage and mash. But Jules convinced him we’d lose our precious Rosette if we went down that route.

I had some control over the menus. There were three starters and three mains on the specials, and they had to be cheap to make. And pretty soon they were all I was making - gravlax, confit chicken terrine, smoked salmon salad, confit duck risotto, goat’s cheese parcels, and always a soup.

The soup varied between game consommé (made from the pheasant carcasses) with tagliatelle of yellow and orange carrot; mushroom soup with a morel-infused cappuccino foam; and cauliflower and smoked garlic soup with herb oil. The most popular was a tomato soup I made out of red onions and tinned tomatoes. It was described on the menu as roasted tomato soup, even though it hadn't been near an oven.

I would make enough of each soup to fill two four-litre containers. I’d start by simmering a white mirepoix of onions, celery, garlic and leeks (white parts only) over a low heat for 30 minutes. Then I’d add three or four bay leaves, and water. Once it was simmering, the relevant vegetable went in - broccoli, cauliflower, or butternut squash - then I’d remove from the heat as soon as the vegetables were cooked.

Once cooled, I fished out the bay leaves, whizzed the soup in a blender, and poured the puree through a fine sieve. I always asked to use Marcus’s secret sieve for that, knowing how much he feared to lose it.

I was told to season the soup at the end. I’d add a pinch or two of salt and black pepper, and then repeat until just right. Adding salt in gradual stages has a peculiar effect on a soup – it suddenly turns from an amalgam of lost tastes, to a clear flavour in just a few granules of salt. (If you're interested, there is a section on it in Herve This's book Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavour. He did an experiment with salt by giving people seasoned and unseasoned soups. Without the salt, they found it difficult identifying the dominant soup flavour.)

I'd then make the garnishes. For the mushroom soup, you infused three or four dried morels in hot milk, whisked it up, and spooned white foam over the soup to get a cappuccino effect. Then you sprinkled it with mushroom dust, made by drying wild mushroom stalks under the lights. For the broccoli soup garnish, you made a smooth paste of Roquefort cheese and lemon juice, and spread it over a crouton. For the cauliflower, you deep-fried a basil leaf and laid it on top in a circle of herb oil.

But the prettiest by far was the game consommé. You put a small ball of spinach in the middle of a wide, shallow soup bowl, stuck a ball of yellow and orange carrot tagliattelle on top, and carefully poured the soup round it.

The butternut squash soup went on the a la carte menu and was more complicated. It came with a miniature vegetable samosa and curry oil. You put a dab of filling - curried onion and mashed potato - on one end of a strip of spring roll wrapper, and folded it into a triangle.

You made the curry oil by toasting, then grinding coriander seeds, cumin seeds, a piece of cinnamon stick, mace, turmeric, cayenne pepper and curry powder. It came out a vibrant yellow colour.

Like the herb, lemon, port, and balsamic reductions I used for other garnishes, it was kept in a squeezy bottle. A gastro-pub isn’t anything without doodles on plates. That was the difference between us and the £5 lunches at the Eel -a few pence of oil thrown on by some cack-handed Banksy.

'Ready Steady Twat' In Chef Attack

I never thought I’d find myself agreeing with Antony Worrall Thompson.

True, I’ve always found him a pretty decent bloke, happy to share a fag out the back with lowly chefs, rather than ponce about with PRs, plus-fours and fake plummy accents like Marco Pierre White for instance.

But I’ve always considered him as someone who’s gone a long way on very little talent.

And he did little to ingratiate himself when he shut down part of his business empire only to open again months later still owing angry creditors thousands.

So imagine my surprise when I found myself whole-heartedly agreeing with his spiteful comments about fellow TV chefs Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal being overrated.

Now we know about his long-standing spat with Ramsay – who described him as a “squashed Bee Gee”, and my favourite, “Ready Steady Twat”.

And I don’t want to waste any further words on the former World Cup-winning footballer, who I think gets more than his fair share of attention already.

But I can see what Wozza means when he calls him a “one-trick pony” without "any depth".

"If it hasn't got an F in it, it doesn't feature in his show," he snipes.

I’m far more interested in his words about Blumenthal, who usually manages to duck out of celebrity chef spats by being nice about everyone in his tediously bland way.

"Heston loves his food, don't get me wrong,” says AWT (and you know there’s a but coming...there’s always a but...)

“But some of those egg-and-bacon ice creams, beetroot jellies where it's coloured orange...it's a gimmick. It's theatrics.

"Everyone will look back in ten years' time and be horrified – even Heston to some extent."

Sadly, I know it will take more than a German chef blowing his hands off to spell the end of molecular gastronomy and nitrogen cooking, or a rant by a squashed Bee Gee. But that’s exactly how I feel...as I’ve blogged about in the past...click here for more.

But one final note. Why can’t Heston - a kick-boxing, former debt collector apparently named after a motorway service station (yeah right) – emerge from Ramsay’s protective cape and put the boot in for once?

Childish, I know, but I can’t wait for someone to call him Willy Wanker.

Stool Pigeons And The Fat Duck

We finished the day doing the worst job on the prep list – cutting pistachio kernels in half. There were thousands of them, and even before we were a quarter-way through, my fingers were numb with exhaustion. Every time I looked at the bag it seemed to get bigger. It was soul-destroying work, and luckily one that only had to be done once a week or so.

The halved-kernels were caramelised as a garnish for the pigeon dish of poached breast pancetta, and pastilla of confit leg meat with cocoa and quatre-epices. There was a photo of the dish on the prep room wall, and it showed the hellish green kernels next to the pastilla – so much effort for such a small part of the meal.

“Why the hell do we have to cut them in half?” I snapped, trying to stifle the urge to run to my car and drive off in a hail of gravel and forgotten tortures.

“Probably for the colour. Huh?” said Paul.

He’d perked up a bit. He was off to the Hinds Head the next day, and let us know all about it.

A new stagier called Eric had joined that day, and looked incredulously at the ever-growing bag of pistachios in front of him. I could tell he was finding it as hard keeping it together as I was. Occasionally, he would let off near-silent moans and sighs.

Eric worked mainly as a private chef, cooking for Russian billionaires on yachts in Antibes. He was full of stories of wealth and vicarious glamour. He talked endlessly about how rich his clients were, and it just made me feel more pitiful about my own existence.

I should be the one lounging on those yachts, drinking cocktails and munching lobster. And here I was, working for nothing; cutting mountains of pistachios in half.

I know it was all supposed to be for something, so I could put ‘Fat Duck-trained chef’ on my CV (no-one would ever find out it had been mostly grunt work), but no restaurant of mine was ever going to use halved pistachios. Not unless someone else was doing the chopping.

I tried veering Eric away from yachts and Zadora timepieces, and on to less irritating subjects. But he’d be back on it whenever he could. Later that afternoon, he told us a story about the worst thing he’d ever seen in a kitchen. He was working in a burger bar at the time, getting himself through college.

“This dude came in for a job,” Eric began. “He was about 17, and had never worked in a kitchen before, and they put him on the fryer. He was wearing this elaborate watch – I couldn’t see what it was, maybe a MontBlanc or Rolex, but it looked more like one of those expensive German makes or something...

“And I said to him, ‘Buddy, you wanna lose that watch, buddy you DON’T wanna wear that in the kitchen!’

“And he says something like, ‘it was given to me by my grandfather’ or something, and carries on wearing it. And then half-way through service, the watch slips off into the hot fat...and without thinking he puts his arm in to get it out...

“It was like a reflex action, man. You could see the flesh disappearing on his arm like cooked meat. He said something like ‘hey guys’ and went down like a tonne of fucking mash! Man, that was gruesome! Worst thing I ever saw...”

:: 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...