Announcing They Go Really Well Together #18 - Plum And Blue Cheese

I'm delighted to host round 18 of They Go Really Well Together, better known as TGRWT. Launched in April 2007 by Martin of blog.khymos.org, TGRWT is all about unusual flavour pairings - combining culinary ingredients in ways that we aren't familiar with from classical cooking. The scientific hypothesis behind these experiments is that if two foods have one or more key odorants in common, they might go well together and perhaps even complement and enhance each other. With the advent of modern analysis tools and the establishment of the Volatile Compounds in Food Database, this research has become much easier to undertake. But, as they say, the proof of the pudding...

I wrote an article on this topic for the Word Of Mouth blog in March 2008, in which I discussed flavour combinations drawn from Martin's research, the work of Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal and my own humble experimentation. Examples include chocolate & salt, cocoa & garlic, strawberry & coriander, trout & peppermint, mango & pine, liver & jasmine, carrot & violet, banana & parsley, harissa & apricot and saffron & beetroot. Several of these have been investigated in earlier rounds of TGRWT - with varying degrees of success.

For this round of TGRWT, running through the month of August, I've chosen plum and blue cheese. Your plums could be anything from Victoria to Mirabelle (or even greengages) and the cheese could be anything from Gippsland Blue to Dolcelatte to Roquefort. It's entirely up to you. So, what do you need to do to take part in TGRWT 18?

1.	Prepare a dish combining plum with blue cheese (plus any other ingredients of your choosing). You can use an existing recipe (if you can find one), or come up with your own idea.
2.	Take a picture of the dish and write an entry in your blog by September 1st with TGRWT #18 in the title and a link back to here. Readers will be particularly interested to discover how the flavour pairing worked out, so make an attempt at describing the taste and aroma and whether you liked it or not. Don't be shy if things didn't work out the way you'd hoped. Only from the experience of failures do triumphs eventually surface!
3.	A round-up will be posted here in mid-September, with pictures and credits. Please email trig[dot]chef[at]gmail[dot]com with the following details: Your name, URL of your blog, URL of your TGRWT #18 post and a picture of your dish (in .png or .bmp format and at least 400px wide). If you don't have a blog, email me your name, location, recipe, photo and a brief description of how it worked out and I'll be glad to include you in the final round-up.

Lots of luck with your cooking - I'm looking forward to some creative and original submissions. Something extra to round off the meal

As per the usual rules, you can produce either a sweet or a savoury dish to test this pairing and appear in the round-up. I've chosen ingredients that will allow either. But I'm a pastry chef, with a passion for balanced food that makes good use of the flavour spectrum. So I'm running a competition for the entrant who most impresses me with a plate that: 1. Is a dessert dish (you can push the envelope a long way, but venison & plum cheesecake would be too far even for me!). 2. Incorporates at least two flavours from the following options: salty, sour, bitter, umami, pungent, astringent. Being a dessert, your dish will probably also have a sweet dimension, but if you can pull off a successful dessert without the sweetness dominating, I'll be even more impressed.

Remember, you don't have to take part in this extra bit of fun, but if you are having a go then please make that clear in your email. The prize for the winning submission is that I'll develop a fine dining restaurant level version of your creation, with your name built into the title of the dish, and I'll try to have it incorporated into my menu at work. I can't promise to achieve this, but I'll do my very best.

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Recommunicado

Blogging is an interactive activity - you need to read, comment and engage with others as well as write about yourself. Over the past few weeks I've hardly managed to write about my own ups and downs, let alone communicate regularly with the family of food bloggers. In short, I've been incommunicado. It's time for me to offer my cyber-friends out there an apology and some sort of explanation.

Firstly, as I hinted in an earlier post, I was a bit surprised to find myself requested not to publish any specific information about the restaurant at which I'm working. I can see the logic behind such a ban, just as I can see an equally strong case for the opposite approach. My problem as a blogger is that I wasn't expecting to face restrictions in what I can write about what I've been doing - and it hasn't exactly made it easy for me to publish a blog about my real-life development from catering student to professional chef. That said, I must stress that my career comes first and the blog second - and my career is chef/restaurateur, not journalist. So risking my job for the thrill of a good story is not something I would consider. In any case when I give my word I stick to it, so I have no intention of breaking that confidentiality agreement.

Another reason for my cyber-silence has been the effort involved in taking up my new responsibilities. Every change of role brings with it a new set of strains and stresses, and my appointment to the position of Pastry Chef is no exception. In the early days it's often hard to find any spare time between working and sleeping during the week - that goes with the territory. But weekends offer a chance to relax and catch up with a bit of writing. Or at least that would be the case, were it not for a few communications problems I've had recently.

The main reason for my communications difficulties has been logistical. It's a sad excuse, but I'm a real city boy. London, where I was born and raised, is a city. Barcelona, where I've been living, is a city. Banyeres de Mariola, where I've been living for the past few weeks, is defined in Wikipedia as "a settlement". In non-Chaucerian language, it's a village. It's over 6km walk in the blazing sun to the nearest settlement in all directions, at least half that distance from my isolated place of work and the public omnibus runs once a day, if you're lucky. So when you meet a patch of diesel on a bend in the road and drive your car into a ditch, destroying the front bumper, lights and offside wheel... you've got a major logistical problem.

No doubt some eagle-eyed petrol head will point out that the car in the picture above, no matter how bad the lighting conditions, cannot possibly be my bright red Renault Clio. All I can say is, as with the accident itself, mea culpa. I took a stock photo from the web. When the accident happened I just didn't think to take a photo, although I did think about getting something to eat. That's exactly why I'm building a career as a chef/restaurateur and not as a journalist.

Mind you, road transport problems aren't half as problematic as when you discover that the inhabitants of the beautiful historic village of Banyeres de Mariola are blissfully unfamiliar with the term "broadband". Or leastways that they appear to be fully conversant with internet technology when it comes to equipping villas for wealthy summer visitors, but give you the right royal Spanish equivalent of a Gallic shrug when you enquire on behalf of student chefs. So I have to drive (when my car isn't in the local garage) into the nearest town and visit the library, or sit outside the station hotel sipping iced tea and taking advantage of the establishment's WIFI hot spot. Either that, or borrow my Catalan flatmate's 3G mobile internet router in the middle of the night and try to get a cell connection from the nearest hill-top.

Or that's how it worked when things were going well. You're beginning to get the picture now, aren't you?

First off, the owners of El Hotel L'Estacio conducted a profitability analysis and concluded that my internet bandwidth usage costs exceeded the profit on a can of Lipton Ice. All of a sudden, my hot spot became very cold. I realised that the library wasn't going to be an ideal alternative when the librarian proudly pointed out that their PCs were supplied by that clever man with the British TV programme "The Apprentice" and enquired as to whether I supported Tottingham Hotaspurs. And my flatmate met a girl in a far off town and decided to impress her by spending several consecutive weekends demonstrating the potency of his 3G mobile and its internet modem. I was, in the technical idiom, stuffed.

So that's why I've been incommunicado for the past few weeks. When a solution eventually came, it was from an unexpected quarter. One consequence of my appointment to a paid post was that I lost my right to the free accommodation provided by the restaurant for its stagières. Which meant I had to find myself somewhere new to live. And on Tuesday I relocated myself to a house-share with a friend - a house WITH BROADBAND ACCESS - and became... recommunicado! I may move again in a few weeks, but it will also be to a fully-equipped pad. So from now on I should be back to normal communications with everyone. Just as long, of course, as I'm able to keep all four wheels firmly on the tarmac.

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Monsieur Le Pâtissier

C'etait la fin des haricots. Les carottes ont été cuites. J'étais dans un beau pétrin. Mais je n'ai pas mis tous mes oeufs dans le même panier. Je n'ai pas eu le coeur d'un petit artichaut. J'ai appuyé sur le champignon. Et maintenant je suis le coq du village*. No, I haven't gone gaga - I'm just practising my French food-related clichés. Why? Because an Anglo-Spanish-speaking pastry chef somehow just doesn't sound right. At that's important, now that I'm a professional pastry chef.

I'm delighted to confirm that I signed a contract last week and have already taken on the full-time role of pastry chef here at Restaurante Ferrero. With my three month stage due to finish in a few weeks time, Head Chef asked me to join his team and I've been thrilled to accept the offer. There is a point to my attempt at humour above, of course. Most lay people visualise a pastry chef as a cheerful, pompous, distinctly French character with a figure like Napoleon on a bad day, outsized headwear, an onion-seller's moustache and arms permanently outstretched to display trays of freshly baked croissants. This may be true in an ordinary hotel pastry department, but not in a modern gastronomic restaurant. So what exactly is my role as pastry chef? Let me explain.

When most people think of a pastry chef, they think of baking. A classic pastry chef is responsible for the production of the baked goods in a kitchen - pastries, pies, cakes, tarts, cheesecakes, quiches, petit fours, flans, breads, etc. But in the modern fine dining environment, the pastry section only retains that title by habit. What is meant by pastry is the desserts section, or postres as it is known here in Spain. The job has much more to do with ice creams, sorbets and gelées than with bread or cakes, and I use far more gelatine sheets and inverted sugar than bags of flour and baker's yeast. As someone whose goal is to make sous chef and eventually head chef of a top-class fine dining restaurant before ultimately opening my own place, this is a fantastic opportunity. Whether or not I continue to specialise as a pastry chef in the longer term, working in pastry now will be invaluable in giving me the breadth of experience needed to make a good sous chef in the future. So I intend to take this opportunity very seriously and put everything I've got into making it as successful as I possibly can. It's been two weeks since I last posted and I've also been very remiss in not visiting other food blogs or replying to emails recently. Why? All will be revealed in my next post, so watch this space.

*

Literally: It was the end of the beans. The carrots were cooked. I was in a beautiful kneader. But I didn't put all my eggs in one basket. I didn't have the heart of a small artichoke. I stepped on the mushroom. And now I am the village cockerel. Figuratively: It was the last straw. I'd had it. I was in a right mess. But I covered my bets. I stuck my ground. I increased my effort. And now I'm very proud.

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So You Thought It Was Easy, Eh?

It's not often that I get an opportunity to give you a glimpse inside the world of the professional kitchen. I've yet to experience a Head Chef inviting me to bring my Fuji to work so he can take snaps of me enjoying my daily routine, let alone encouraging me to bring in a friend with a shoulder-mounted Panasonic to follow me round shooting video clips. At some top restaurants, including the one in which I'm currently working, the publication of photographs and comments about dishes and their preparation is expressly forbidden as a condition of employment. So I was excited the other day when I found some serious footage of life in a Spanish Michelin-starred kitchen. Well, I say serious footage...

Yes, I'm afraid you're right. It's a reality TV programme about cooking in a Michelin-starred kitchen rather than the real thing. I did, after all, say "a glimpse inside the world of the professional kitchen" in my introduction. The reason I've made the effort to bring you the clips below is that they convey something of the sheer terror experienced by an amateur cook in a professional kitchen. It's a feeling I well remember from my own first tentative steps into the world of fine dining. What makes it worse is that the victim in this instance is no ordinary, shy, home cook. Nadia Sawalha is an actress and presenter, well used to being thrown into hot spots. Moreover, she won Celebrity Masterchef 2007, so she knows a thing or two about cooking. Or does she..?

Before you enjoy the video I should explain the context. Nadia's task has been set by Jean-Christophe Novelli, although she doesn't know this at the outset. She only discovers his identity when she eventually cooks his lunch at Restaurante Tragabuches in Ronda, Andalucía. So when, at the start, she says to camera: "I bet you wish you had my job", she's referring to being in fabulous, sunny southern Spain - not waiting hand and foot on Jean-Christophe's every pleasure. Mind you... Here's my insider's guide to the clips. Feel free to ignore my comments and move straight to the action.

Dead right...	Nadia's first task is to sit and taste the food that she is about to cook. I can't stress the importance of this enough. Before I apply for a new post, I always visit first to sample the food. Professional chefs don't cook by recipe but by instinct and palate. The running order is passion, art, technique. In these clips you see what happens when all three of these let you down just a little bit. Combine all three and you have a truly great dish.
Just for UK television...	"Spain's very own, no-nonsense, in-your-face answer to Gordon Ramsay." If it doesn't effing mention effing Ramsay, it ain't effing British TV cooking.
Sing us another one...	"[Head Chef]... has something different to anybody else. He's got a little bit of a temper... Benito doesn't take any prisoners." Actually, Benito Gómez was brought back to introduce a degree of calmness and stability back to Tragabuches in 2005 after wünderkind Dani García (now at the brilliant Restaurante Calima) reputedly started to impersonate Scott Hastings in Strictly Ballroom and introduce more and more unorthodox ideas into his art. Every Head Chef has "a little bit of a temper" and Benito is no exception, but I'm sure he's far from the worst. Toughness goes with the territory.
Yes, it really is true...	Pro kitchens are sometimes even smaller than this one. How does everyone work in such a small space? Not easy, but you get used to it. And compactness helps when several chefs are simultaneously plating up a dish while also looking after those on their own sections.
Pastry cheffing is bloody hard...	Poor Nadia. If her ice cream is too cold it won't scoop. If it's too warm it will destroy the texture of her crispy pineapple crackling. It's a bitch.
Timing is everything...	1. Perfect execution + late delivery = bin. 2. "It's 7am and already Benito is lying in wait for Nadia. She's five minutes late." Bad idea.
Everyone stops to watch...	Other chefs only stop work when you're Nadia Sawalha and they are enjoying watching you trying your damndest but ultimately failing to get the dishes the way they should be.
So that's what they were for...	You didn't believe me when I wrote about my tweezers and cut-throat razor, did you? Slice the tomato with the cut-throat and pluck the hake bones with the tweezers. Perfecto!
For a ha'porth of tar...	Just one crystal of Maldon salt - but what an important component to forget! The tomato soup dish requires such complexity and perfection of execution, yet is totally transformed by that one crystal. Just like my favourite Catalan dish of chocolate, olive oil and salt.
You're never alone...	"To be able to walk into a kitchen like this and to be able to have responsibility for making dishes by yourself...Bravo!". Actually, although as a chef de partie you have responsibility for all your section's dishes, it's rare for any individual to contribute every single element of a dish. Cooking at this level is a collaborative effort and you need to be a team player. Also, you're unlikely to find yourself working on starters, mains and desserts on the same service. But that's TV licence... and, on the BBC, that's something we pay for!
Enjoy it...	"If I've got a bit of advice to give to Nadia it's very simple - enjoy it". No, this is not Jean-Christophe's chat-up line but his advice that, as in most fields of endeavour, good work and stress are incompatible. "Air-lift me out of here, right now!" Relax, girl. And try not to set fire to the place.

As with all TV celebrity cooking programmes, the reality is that some poor sod had to leave his own section every two minutes to help out, while still delivering his own orders. If it wasn't for that unsung hero, Nadia's output would probably have been a disaster. Still, at least he presumably got the Equity walk-on, non-speaking, TV supporting artist's rate of £83.80 plus repeat fees. Whereas someone like me can look forward to a 14-hour working day on contract for about €35 a day, or absolutely nothing if employed on a training stage. But then who said this profession was well-paid? Oh, yes. I knew there was something I forgot to mention. In the real world we don't just serve dishes like these one at a time. I've had groups of up to 25 customers ordering a menú degustación... and that means plating up 25 identical dishes in parallel - and then repeating the exercise for the other courses on the menu for which I'm responsible. And some tasting menus have 12 or more dishes. I thought I'd throw that in, just in case you were getting over-confident. But I don't want to sound arrogant. I also f**k up from time to time and Nadia did really well, help or no help. Very few amateurs would do better. But then who said this profession was easy?

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