Cooking’s big shots are turning up the heat with the Smoking Gun
and other new gadgets
If your inner Clint
Eastwood needs a little culinary boost, help is at hand. The latest gadget to
make the crossover from the professional kitchen to the domestic worktop is a
gun – a Smoking Gun, to be precise.
It’s part of a rash of
chef’s toys making that transition (helped by star roles on cookery programmes
such as MasterChef). And boy, do those guys love their gizmos. Jason Atherton,
whose Pollen Street Social restaurant was recently voted the second best
restaurant in the UK (only Tom Kerridge’s Hand and Flowers in Marlow kept him
from the top spot), recently named the Smoking Gun as one of his top five
gadgets.
That’s quite an
endorsement. Atherton is one of the biggest stars in the foodie firmament right
now, with a reputation for exquisite, creative food and absolute consistency.
But are these gadgets really worth their place on our work surfaces? I tried
four to find out which would make my day.
The “gun” is like a
small hairdryer, with a recess at the top where you put a pinch of woodchips
and light them with a match. Pop your chosen food in a pan or plastic box and
switch on the gun, so that air blows out of the narrow nozzle, bringing with it
gusts of smoke. Ideally, you’ll already be pointing it into your box or pan,
holding the lid so it can be slammed down to keep the smoke in.
Even so, you’ll
probably smell afterwards like you’re on 60 a day – but the effect on the food
is delicious. Leave it in the smoky environment of the box or pan for just two
minutes and it will take on an amazing smokehouse flavour. It’s that simple –
and although your food won’t get the lacquered effect you’d get on a
traditionally smoked ham or a kipper, say, the advantage (apart from the speed)
is that foods like butter, which would melt in a hot smoker, can get the
treatment.
Canny cooks such as
Brett Graham at The Ledbury restaurant in London know that you can dispense
with the gun and get a similar effect by popping a pinch of smouldering hay
(pet shops are a good source) in a pan with the food. But you won’t have the
fun of playing with the different flavours of hickory or apple wood – or get to
hold a smoking gun.
sousvidetools.com,
£59.99
2
Thermomix
There will be few
high-end kitchens that don’t have at least one of these German-made
self-heating blenders – Heston Blumenthal is said to have nine at the Fat Duck.
But domestically they are much more popular in Spain, where they are a wedding
list standard, than they are here. UK sales are on the rise even though you
can’t buy one in the shops – instead, a demonstrator comes to your house to
hold a sort of mechanised Tupperware party.
The price, admittedly,
is shudderingly high at just shy of £900. To see if it was worth it, I put one
through its paces and found it to be a hugely effective liquidiser, pulverising
frozen fruit to sorbet in seconds and making silkily smooth hummus – in another
class from my regular food processor and liquidiser. I liked the weighing
capability, too, allowing you to add ingredients straight to the
stainless-steel jug without messing around with scales.
I was less sold on the
heating function. It might be handy for tricky sauces such as crème anglaise as
you can set the precise temperature, thus removing the risk of overcooking the
eggs, while the blades keep the mixture moving. But an everyday dish such as
soup I’d rather cook in a pan, keeping an eye on it and even, yes, stirring it
myself, than lock it away in a machine and trust to the timings in a booklet –
where’s the fun in that? þþþþ
ukthermomix.com,
£885
3
Chadwick pizza oven (main picture, top)
A beautiful piece of
British design and manufacture, this stainless-steel contraption heats up on a
gas stove (electric or induction won’t work), has a pizza stone that reaches a
massive heat and cooks delectable thin-crust pizzas that give wood-burning oven
pizzas – the purist’s preferred version – a run for their money.
But it is a lot of
money — £360. The friend who demonstrated hers to me admitted: “I’ve probably
used it three times in the last year – so that’s £100 a pop. You could probably
fly them in from Naples for less.” Would she be without it? “Absolutely not. I
like my pizza hot.”
chadwickoven.com,
£360
These British-made
digital probe thermometers are standard issue in many smart kitchens, where the
accurate readings they provide take away a lot of guesswork. Use to check if a
steak is perfectly cooked – just jab it in and read the internal temperature –
or to monitor tricky egg-based sauces so they get to the optimum heat to kill
salmonella, or to check if a dish is cool enough to safely refrigerate.
thermapen.co.uk, from £57.60
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