If They’d Only Used Pomelos At The Fat Duck

I bought a huge, grapefruit-like fruit the other day that had thick seeds the size of pumpkin seeds, and thick, leathery skin. It was a pomelo – a fruit that tastes slightly less bitter than the smaller, common grapefruit (which is actually a cross between a pomelo and a sweet orange) but gives up its pearls much more easily.

And it made me think of the stage I did at the Fat Duck a few years ago, and all those pointless hours of slavery, prepping endless grapefruit pearls to garnish the salmon poached in liquorice gel dish (pic below). Even the chefs at the Hinds Head, Heston Blumenthal’s pub next door, knew about the grapefruits. The chore summed up the fastidiousness and downright ludicrousness of three-star Michelin cooking.

You had to carefully peel each fruit, without bruising or cutting the flesh. Then even more carefully, you’d take the white pithy globe and tease it into segments. Then with a paring knife, you’d pick out any pips and carefully peel away the white, and lay the pink flesh on towelling paper to soak up the juice.

Then the real work began. You picked each segment, flicking off tiny, juice-filled pearls on to another piece of towelling. The work was fiddly in the extreme. Even the slightest pressure would burst them. Once we had covered one piece of towelling with grapefruit pearls, we’d begin on another...

But there was none of that as I sat there on the riverbank in Phnom Penh, easily separating the pomelo into segments, and seeing the pearls fall unbroken into the bag, without the need of towelling to soften their fall. I realised that all that torture could have been saved if they’d only used pomelos instead of pink grapefruits from the Waitrose store up the road in Maidenhead.

Even with my rusty shovels, the pearls were falling away into such bundles that it would have caused envy in even the most skilled, starry-eyed Fat Duck chef. One cook could have done a whole day’s worth in an hour, saving his colleagues from hours of unspeakable drudgery.

I began to think about why Blumenthal, in his exploratory, pre-Fat Duck days, hadn’t widened his trawl of world foods, rather than spending every holiday in France eating at Michelin-starred restaurants.

But then, maybe he had. Maybe he knew all about the pomelo and had long discounted any possible alchemy that might come from it. We often used to joke during the long hours cutting thousands of pistachio nuts in half, whether the celebrity chef lay in bed at night devising ever more devilish recipes for his slaves to cook.

I was still experimenting with how easily the unbruised pearls fell away from the casing, and hadn’t really eaten any of the pomelo, when a man in a wheelchair, pushed by an older man, approached me for the second time that morning.

I’d given them some money just 20 minutes earlier, but they obviously didn’t recognise me. I mumbled a few words, patting my pocket, and pointing at them, but the man in the wheelchair just pointed at my pomelo and then his mouth. I handed the fruit over, and they smiled, then slowly headed northwards along the river in search of the next barang.

I wandered over to the plush tourist information centre, which had a plaque outside saying the toilet facilities had been donated by someone called Mr Toilet, whose mission in life had been to improve toilet sanitation across the world, starting with Cambodia presumably, which was probably as good a place to start as any.

The plush lavatories – donated by the late Mr Toilet’s South Korean-based World Toilet Association - certainly were a shiny affair, looking more like something you’d get in an upmarket casino rather than a tourist office. Not that I’d seen toilets in a tourist office before.

Compared with some of the more basic powder rooms I’d come across on my travels through Cambodia, it was certainly a welcome change. But it did seem an odd choice of mission, making sure visiting South Koreans have decent toilets to perch on, given the widespread, grinding poverty in Cambodia, where many villagers struggle to get by on $2 a day. What did they expect travelling to a third world country?

It seemed as absurd as the noticeboard outside the North Korean embassy, adorned with pictures of their Elvis-loving leader Kim Jong II. In one, he was standing in a factory wearing sunglasses, pointing at an egg with a confused look on his face. The caption underneath said: “The leader Kim Jong II provides on-the-spot guidance at the 927 Chicken Farm.”

I wandered back north and soon caught up with the man in the wheelchair, who was sitting in the shade eating my pomelo. I smiled at him but he didn’t recognise me. Buddhists were queuing outside a small shrine near the Royal Palace to receive a blessing from a white-clad monk. Three well-heeled pensioners emerged with small cups of sacred water and headed towards a group of women holding cages full of tiny birds.

They said a few words as they sprinkled the birds with water. The birds clearly thought it was raining, and huddled down on their perches. Then the worshippers opened the cages and let them free in batches, saying a prayer to Buddha as they did so.

One of the pensioners then stood on the riverside and gazed down into the green water. For a moment I thought he might topple. Overcome with emotion, he said another prayer and wiped his brow with the last of the water. Then they handed bundles of riel to the women holding the empty cages and wandered off with their police escort.

I sat there for a while, as the birds slowly returned to their cages ready for the next customers to release, and thought again about the stagiers locked away day after day in that prep room in Bray.

Week Two In The Fat Duck House

Somehow I got through the first week of my stage at the Fat Duck, and slept most of the Sunday and Monday. The alarm went off at 7am on the Tuesday morning, and it felt like I hadn’t slept at all. I forced the stone coffin off my chest and got out of bed, struggling against the temptation of snuggling back under the sheets, and forgetting all about the crazy idea of becoming a chef.

I had come a long way over the past two months. But working at the Fat Duck had only highlighted how much hard graft goes into three Michelin star cooking. I wanted to be somewhere with a far simpler menu and less hours.

Being on my feet 15-plus hours a day was soul-blanching tedium at best, however much I convinced myself that I loved cooking. The fact that I was both the oldest and crappest chef in the kitchen by a country mile made it all the more unbearable.

There was no doubt about it - those friends who had thought I was out of my mind for even attempting to get into cheffing had been right all along. It was indeed a young man’s game, and that became clearer every day as the pain in my feet, knees and back got worse. But something made me get up and face the long week ahead. It was not an in-built passion or love for the job - the buzz by then had become asthmatic to say the least - it was just I didn’t know what else to do with my life. And I couldn’t suffer the ridicule of going back to the paper. Not yet anyway.

I got in a few minutes late, panicking about whether the clocks had gone forward. My first job was shifting the boxes of veg piled up outside the prep room door. Danny, the fat Canadian, was in charge and slunk against the wall giving orders. Then he got us carrying stock across the road, tackling the fearsome assault course of vacuum cleaners, plastic bags and waiters.

We chatted to take our minds off the grapefruit, but none of the chefs had done much over the weekend – they were all too tired. I didn’t tell them I’d spent mine with my hands smeared in manuka honey to help heal the oyster wounds.

:: 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...