Monthly Archives: November 2011

Cooking is about failure

Jamie Oliver's Beetroot cake

A beetroot cake that was completely inedible - all of this went in the bin

Cook from recipes, and you will fail. Probably not all the time, but at least some of the time. This is what no one wants to say. Recipes are an archaic format, the agreed upon least-worst option for print, but they can’t tell the whole story. Cooking is a craft, and we fool ourselves if we think that everything that needs to be said can be conveyed in a 300 word recipe.

The illusion of the printed recipe, and of the celebrity chef, is that as long as you have the recipe, you should be able to perfectly recreate the dish. Anyone who has cooked knows that this isn’t the case. You can follow a recipe absolutely to the letter and still not produce what was intended.

Julian Barnes conveyed some of this frustration in ‘The Pedant in the Kitchen‘. “How big is a lump?”, he asks. But it is not just jargon that we need to look out for. Some basic techniques have to be assumed; if everything was described in the detail necessary for an absolute beginner, then every recipe would run to five pages.

Beyond the vagaries of language, we seem to find it hard to accept the idea that cooking is a craft, and the skill is in the hands of the cook. Cooking, by its nature, is varied and improvisational. If I cook your recipe, in your kitchen, with your pan, I will still produce something that is different to yours. Just as one blacksmith or one carpenter will not produce the same product as another, so cooking ultimately depends upon the cook. And some parts of cooking can only be learned by experience, by looking, feeling, tasting and smelling at each stage, and building up a set of memories to refer back to.

That is the pleasure of cooking as well as its frustration – it’s never the same twice, no matter what you do. The only way to learn is to cook, from books, with a teacher, with an app or from a TV show. I think we can go beyond recipes and offer help in all sorts of formats to those learning something new, or improving their cooking. Ultimately, you should do as Julia Child did: “no matter what happens in the kitchen, never apologise … learn how to cook – try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!”

10 tips for baking from American blogs in the UK

I lived and cooked in the States, in Palo Alto, for a little over a year. Many things about it frustrated me to tears – although that was partly my fault for being determined to make mince pies and Christmas cake in a fit of homesickness. But that was where I learned to really cook over  six months at Tante Marie’s cooking school in San Francisco. It gave me a huge affection for American food writers, restaurants and recipes.

There are many differences in the ingredients and equipment available in the UK compared to the US. Although we share a language (just), many aspects of American life are completely foreign to us. US food bloggers had a head start on us Brits, and many of the very best blogs are by American writers, so it’s a shame to avoid them because the recipes are hard to tackle. With a few tips, its very easy to adapt US recipes to make in the UK – and some bloggers, such as Smitten Kitchen, have become such converts to using a scale, they provide gram measures as well as cups.

The first thing to know about American baking is that almost no publisher or blogger can assume that a home baker owns a scale – a very small proportion of homes own them, so most will only provide cup measures. Where they do provide weights, it is likely to be in ounces (the US being almost the only country on the planet still sticking to the Imperial system of weights).

I have put together a list of the key differences to be aware of when using American recipes, particularly in baking, with suggestions on how to convert and appropriate substitutions. I hope you find this helpful, and try to tackle a few more recipes from the huge array of inspiring American bloggers.

  1. A stick of butter weighs 4 ounces (110g) and is the same as half a cup. American butter has more water than European butter – it’s usually around 80 per cent fat, compared to 85% or more in the UK. This won’t make a difference for most recipes, but is worth bearing in mind if something turns out overly heavy or greasy.
  2. While we’re at it, 1 cup = 8 fluid ounces and 1 fluid ounce = 2 tablespoons. You will sometimes see references to tablespoons of butter – you can assume that 1 tablespoon of butter weighs half an ounce.
  3. American granulated sugar is somewhere between caster sugar and UK granulated sugar in the size of the grains. Superfine sugar means something similar to caster sugar and confectioners sugar refers to icing sugar.
  4. A cup of all-purpose flour is somewhere between 4oz and 5oz – there is no standard weight, it all depends on the cook. I generally start with 130g per cup and adjust if the texture seems wrong.
  5. All-purpose flour is slightly higher in protein than British plain flour, but most of the time you can substitute without any problems. If the recipe is particularly delicate, you can reproduce a similar protein content by using half plain flour and half strong white flour. Cake flour in the US is very low in protein, and usually bleached, a process which is outlawed in Europe. This makes it very hard to reproduce the superfine sponge used for American layer cakes.
  6. Golden raisins are the same as sultanas. When it comes to other dried fruit, you almost never see currants, candied peel or glace cherries in America, so you won’t often find them in recipes.
  7. Molasses is a dark syrup, much like black treacle, but usually more liquid. I will usually substitute about two-thirds black treacle and one-third golden syrup if molasses is called for.
  8. Kosher salt is not Jewish salt – it simply means a flaky salt, used for koshering meat. Kosher salt is widely available in the US, and isn’t as expensive as sea salt here. It is best approximated with a fine sea salt, or with about half the volume of fine-grained table salt.
  9. American baking often makes use of buttermilk, which can be bought in any grocery store in quart cartons like the milk. I usually substitute a mixture of two-thirds plain yoghurt and one-third semi-skimmed milk, which works well.
  10. American cream is a sad thing, and their heavy cream (the thickest) never gets past the fat content of our whipping cream. So feel sorry for them, but bear in mind that when using cream, they are dealing with much less fat. Half and half is more or less what it says: half (whole) milk and half cream – single cream let down with a little milk would be about right.