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Anybody who has dismantled a car or a motorbike will have had this feeling. You reassemble it and end up with a box of extraneous nuts and bolts.
Sometimes a similar thing happens with recipes. You assemble all the ingredients listed and methodically go through the recipe only to have several left over. Or something just doesn’t seem right. I won’t list them all here but this one of Gordon Ramsay’s comes to mind although funnily enough the problem is the opposite to the left over nuts.
Having eaten a carefully prepared a salad of seared tuna with a sauté of treviso from my signed copy of Gordon Ramsay’s Secrets, I and my neighbours felt something should have been left over. Out of the six to eight tablespoons of cracked black pepper perhaps about four to six tablespoons.
Now I like hot food as much as the next person. I want to weep over my green curries and beef vindaloo. But eight tablespoons of freshly cracked pepper coating four tuna steaks is too much. My brow is beaded with sweat. My neighbours I thought may drown. Certainly the flavours of the first three wines mentioned in the previous article were (I know, we should have gone for the really big boofy ones).
Anyway, if you dare this is what to do. Take two tablespoons Dijon mustard, 1 teaspoon clear honey and 2 teaspoons soy sauce and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Mix and smear over four tuna steaks. Dip the steaks in the cracked pepper and cook in a frying pan.
Meanwhile, the treviso is almost perfect. Split four heads in half and griddle, coating with iceing sugar. The bitter mixes with the sweet…if you can get through the peppercorns.
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April 10th, 2006 at 7:28 am
Quelle horreur! I am so with you on this. It has led me to NEVER cook anything for company out of AGT, for example, without a dummy run first. A few months back they had a ‘perfect scrambled egg’ recipe, serves 12, with 2 eggs in the ingredients list. Yeah, right. Serves 12 what? Supermodels?
April 10th, 2006 at 9:43 am
I know. Thre re so many. We need to hold them accountable.
April 10th, 2006 at 9:57 pm
I find AGT’s recipes pretty uneven … the weekend just gone I cooked the rhubarb spice cake which appeared earlier this year - and it wasn’t a problem, but a few weeks ago I cooked the salt crusted prawns and it was a disaster! I’ve never tasted anything so salty!
I usually find things go wrong when I don’t exercise my better judgement. For example - I cooked a Delia Smith apple crumble the other week and the spice mix was loaded with ground clove and I actually thought … ‘that’s rather a lot’ but went ahead … it was rather hot and spicy!
As for Gordon Ramsay - I haven’t cooked enough of his stuff to have an opinion but his cherry clafoutis, using almond meal, is fantastic!
April 13th, 2006 at 1:24 am
I love clafoutis and must try it. I reckon recipe mistakes should be a regular blog event.
April 13th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Must say I’m a bit of a Gordon Ramsey fan… So what he says generally goes. I’ve made quite a few of his dishes out of the “Kitchen Heaven” book he put out after his TV series. The chocolate of toffee fondant recipe was indulgent to say the least. I what i thought was enough for 4 people, and soon realised that even I (he of the iron gut) would battle to get through a third. I pity the supermodel to tackle a full serving of that dessert… So i guess it goes both ways.
April 14th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Matt, I’m a big fan of Gordon Ramsay’s too, especially he fuck off management style. But portion sizes are another thing. I think food bloggers should speak up on it and hold cookbook authors to account.