Cape Town - If hip hop heads get jiggy wid it, and diehard acid heads still get it on, bang a gong, get eet on (Marc Bolan fans, raise your hands), professional kitchen dudes get cheffy with it.
And in the hands of the right chef, it can be hot stuff.
I’m not sure what your average hip hop brudda knocks up in the kitchen. Something with yams, I guess (American for sweet potatoes), with a great pile of chilli (con carne to you and me) and grits on the side, not to forget plenty of hot sauce (pronounced haht saaaace, chilli-hot and a staple of any American kitchen).
Sixties and Seventies dopeheads (that’s those shuffling grey-bearded gentlemen you see in the street today) might not all necessarily still get it on very often in the Marvin Gaye sense, but in the kitchen it’s likely that most of them have long since moved on from dagga koekies to something involving balsamic vinegar and miso paste.
But a pro chef who is hot stuff behind a pan and wields a saucy wooden spoon can be a formidable thing. Browsing through chef Michael Broughton’s newly published tome, Terroir The Cookbook, highlighted all this. It’s seriously cheffy, far more so than I had thought at first glance. Some of it is daunting stuff, with single plates of food involving six or seven different stages, all assembled at the end.
My first response is to regard this in the way I generally regard almost any recipe: as only a starting point, or an idea, for something I might choose to make myself. I might pluck the confit method from his recipe for dodine (cold, stuffed poultry) of duck confit with autumn vegetables, foie gras and dried blueberries.
Just the instructions for stuffing and rolling the duck take up most of a page, and you still have to make your roasted baby onions, orange sauce, root vegetables, red wine duck jus, and garnishes of foie gras slices with a classic vinaigrette (recipe elsewhere in the book), confit garlic (recipe elsewhere), dried blueberries (method supplied), roasted and peeled hazelnuts, and hazelnut oil. Hoo boy.
This is not to knock the book. There’s so much in here that I will use, but not in Broughton’s order of things. But this he would encourage.
If I were to make one individual item (not entire recipe) a day for the next four weeks, by this time next month I’d be a better cook. And that is how some of us learnt to cook the way we do, by trying things and watching how the pros do it. Works for me, seeing as I’m about to go mad and go back to the Karoo and open a restaurant. How many times have I said that? And this, among my hundreds of other cookbooks, will be going with me, to be a source of ideas more than recipes as I build my own small daily menus.
Wading through Broughton’s challenging tome, I spotted a picture of a beautiful piece of glazed Norwegian salmon. His recipe is honey-seared Norwegian salmon with smoked celeriac cream and avocado carpaccio. The recipe also requires you to make yuzu vinaigrette (I may use that for a salad one day), yellow pepper paste (doesn’t interest me), apple brunoise, sesame crumble (all manner of possible uses) and, oh yes, how to cook the salmon.
That was the only part of the recipe I was interested in for now… because I was accompanying it not with any of the above but slices of fried brinjal, braised fennel and glazed baby carrots. This, by way of illustrating how you can pluck an appealing item from a really cheffy recipe and turn it into supper for the family. Which is what I did.
I’ve had varying levels of success (and not-quite-success) with fish down the years, and this turned out to be so astonishingly easy that I was gobsmacked – and it turned out perfectly, first time. It’s one of those recipes, then, that immediately becomes a new part of my repertoire, and already I’m thinking of ways to fiddle with it. Adding a teaspoon of smoked Spanish paprika, or a little toasted ground cumin. Or maybe finishing the salmon with a sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds.
Broughton advises using 120g portions of Norwegian or Scottish salmon, cleaned and skinned, pin bones removed, measuring 4cm to 5cm by 10cm. Okay, this is restaurant thinking, and will be based in part on costing, the need to make profit, and the habit du jour of not feeding restaurant patrons too much food.
The portion I cooked for myself (and incidentally I cooked my wife a portion of kingklip using the same recipe, as she does not like salmon) was more like 250g.
Season the salmon with salt and black pepper (to my surprise there was no use of flour). Broughton’s recipe calls for 45ml (3 tbs) each of olive oil and Champagne honey, and adding half this to a pre-heated pan. Instead, I mixed together the same quantities of olive oil and fynbos honey, and added half of it to the pan. Leave it to bubble and finish caramelising, add the pieces of fish you’re cooking, and cook on one side, turning very carefully after one minute. Cook for another minute and season again with salt and black pepper
“The fish,” Broughton advises, “should be scorched, shiny and well-caramelised on the outside but medium rare in the centre.”
Come on, admit it, that’s a precise description of my salmon in the above picture. It tasted bloody marvellous, moist and definitely one to keep. Salut, Michael.
Weekend Argus