Being on Masterchef

Those of you who know me and have worked with me know that a few years back I made my television cookery debut on Masterchef the professionals, and I didn’t do too bad. However it wasn’t the highlight of my luck favoured career but something I’m still proud of all the same and I want to share it with you, burns and all.

I received an email at work whilst I was head chef of The Old Ship hotel in Brighton inviting me to apply to compete in the first ever series of Masterchef, but with the twist of it being a new format, professional chefs. I don’t know what made me but I filled in the painstaking 45 minute application and sent it off, thinking “fuck it, what’s the worst that can happen?” Fast forward 4 months and I’m sitting in a changing room shitting myself, with freshly shaved goatee beard (being a nervous dickhead I thought it would look smarter than my normal heavy stubble beard) alongside two equally rabbit in a headlight chefs.

The first twist was to become my immediate disadvantage, we were informed that it wouldn’t be the usual host judges, but instead the inclusion of a Michelin starred chef, as soon as I walked into the kitchen to begin the first timed event and introductions my stomach and genitals completed several laps of my body at the stature of Michel Roux Jnr standing in front of me, what disadvantage? The other two chefs had no idea who he was??? And I had just pissed my pants.

I cooked (I thought) quite well in the creativity test, I was wrong. I made stupid rookie mistakes, too many flavour combinations that were confusing and nerves got the better of me, and they let me know that. The time allocation was 40 minutes but you have to allow for interview time during that and what you completely forget watching it on TV is that this is a real completion and the judging standards reflect this, its unequivocally nerve racking the first time out! Being filmed you have different distractions to deal with, most obviously cameras everywhere. Having to shout “oven” every time you open the door to the oven, so they can get a camera in there, and in your way, whilst you complete the basic task of removing something cooked from a hot box. Chopping becomes harder whilst you have a bloke standing on a chair over you pointing a massive camera at your hands! Don’t believe me? Next time you are walking down the street look in someone’s eyes and then down at their feet, they instinctively walk like a div because they know you are watching their feet, it’s weird but very true. Then came the next alien thing to me…….Having put up substandard food that wasn’t to the best of my ability I knew there were some harsh words to be spoken in my direction, and I was prepared. What I wasn’t prepared for was being chewed out and then for someone to say “Sorry sound interference, can you say that again please Michel” Ouch!

After the first test it was anyone’s game but I had relaxed, next up, classic recipe challenge. Boom, this is mine, classically trained at catering college and then again at a classic French 3 rosette restaurant both on the stove and on pastry, my face lit up in hearing “you will need to produce a ballotine of guinea fowl and a puff pastry mille feuille” I cooked with confidence and far more relaxed and produced some nice dishes, being told if I had have run my ballotine through foaming butter it would be perfection. Glancing across at the other dishes produced (plates of harverster abortion) I knew I was through. Although standing in front of Michel and Greg you always think, what if? Whilst waiting for the announcement, guess what? More sound interference, but what you don’t get to see sitting on the sofa, is a rare break in stiff standards and a very welcome joke by Greg helping us all relax. And then the result…….. Bonjour le next round! I had one my heat and my date was set for the filming of the next round, amazing. Cameras appeared in my face and people saying “how do you feel?” I was a bit overwhelmed and muttered something about being delighted, but being TV they wanted more, prodding and poking me to say something to show my ecstasy at winning, and then came the line that my friends still rip me with to this day………”it’s so, so special!” CRINGE! I have waited for the episodes to be removed from you tube to write this, so it’s not worth looking. I do however own a dvd copy and do take bribes.

Why be a chef

As chefs we work in a unique environment of extreme temperature, limited fresh air, intense adrenaline and the constant threat of physical harm. Working an average of 13 hours a day, although it is not unheard of to exceed 16 in a day, in fact scrap that.

It’s actually quite common to work a 16 hour day, unwind with a beer after work with your beaten colleagues whilst you disperse the remaining adrenaline before heading home and watching nonsense on telly having another beer and falling into an exhausted slumber for 4 hours. Now your alarm is going off telling you to get in early today, because its Sunday and you’re going to get beasted at lunch! If you don’t follow your after-service ritual you will not sleep, and if you do it’s a guarantee that you are going to be dreaming about still being in service, so when you wake up its like you never left the stove.

So why do we do it? Why do we put our bodies and sanity through it? Why do we turn up again the next day to steam our faces over boiling pans of water, score red lines on our forearms with the grill or oven shelves, and toughen further the callous on our knife hand index finger?

Because secretly we love it! Each chef has a certain sadistic element to their personality, ask a chef when he returns to work after his week off “good break” and most will reply “Yeah I needed it, but I’m glad to be back!” We miss it.

We miss being creative, turning raw ingredients into something special and devising new ideas and concepts, challenging ourselves and constantly asking the question “can this be done?” Only one way to find out, get creative. We miss the pressure and the violent time restraints, we’re too used to living off a little amount of sleep, if we have too much it freaks us out and we simply cannot function properly the next day. It is possible to be tired from too much sleep. We miss the friend standing next to you on the stove or pass that we share so many hours, jokes and banter.

Each day is different for a chef, nothing is ever mundane and every-day is rewarding. We learn and teach, and constantly share ideas. We create and design and put smiles on your faces and leave you asking “how do they do that?” We enjoy our day and make the most of it, we’re all friends, we work hard and at the end of each day we know that we have earned that cold beer to bring us back to “your” reality with a huge sense of achievement and customer satisfaction. That’s why we do it and we wouldn’t change it for anything.

Would you rather?

One thing is constant in the workplace and that is camaraderie and a touch of fun, I mean who doesn’t want to have a touch of fun at work? We are there more than we are awake at home and for more days a week then we aren’t! We share experiences, hours, passion, ideas, problems and always a touch of fun and laughter. However that said, the language and extent of that boisterous humour is never more evident than in a kitchen or vocational workplace, where creativity and being unique excel rather than normality and fitting in.

I can only talk of my experience of kitchens but I’m pretty sure that most kitchens share a similar vocabulary skill set and intent to shock as I have experienced and in most cases have spear-headed! If you are easily offended by grotesque situations, language and very dark minded situations I suggest that you hit the “X” in the top corner of your screen and stop reading immediately as I am about to share some of these conversations and desires to shock each other with you, and I am certain you will hate/report me.

You will never offend a chef in the kitchen attacking their family, we have become accustom to this and have thick skin, its common practise to call each other’s mums, nans or sisters something disgusting but actually more fun be more creative with it, we are after all creative personality’s, so for example instead of “your nan is a slag” how about “your nan has gambling debts from her days playing fruties at Ladbrokes, and has to support these by sucking off pissed up wrong-ens’ outside chicken cottage before begging for scraps” or “your mum is so rank from burns after falling asleep in her gin soaked, piss stinking armchair in her council flat with a cutters choice roll up hanging from her mouth high on ketamine that she stole from the vets, that she has to go out of the house in a crash helmet else people will chase her with pitch forks.”

My personal favourite is the game of “would you rather?” a very well heard of game although reached to new levels in the kitchen, I searched the internet for the most disgusting examples of these, but none come close to what I have heard and created in the kitchen, or have previously been to dark to publish? So here are some examples of some of the most shocking, again be warned!….

Be gang raped every Christmas day by tramps down an alley dressed as santa? or join in with your parents having sex once?
Shit and fart out of your mouth? (imagine if you go to India) or sweat baby sick?
Have all of your friends and family in a church hall and you are led out on stage and fucked by an Alsatian or lick out a tramp with aids?
Rape a woman? or punch a baby to death in-front of its parents?
Or how about this for the question to end all questions? Your best friend is going to be murdered along with his family and you can save his life by raping him, but he can never know why you have done it! What do you do?

Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Young chefs think they are the shit already!

Working in the industry I see a lot of young chefs come into the kitchen and I know within an hour (normally much less) whether they are going to be a life-long member of the culinary club or crash and burn complaining about the long hours and poor pay. There are some people that just stumble into cooking because they didn’t want to go into further education, because you need no qualifications or because they didn’t really know what to do and “chefing” seemed appealing, and then you have the people that have always wanted to be creative and the misfit camaraderie suits their personality.

I really enjoy having a young, able and willing-to-learn chef around in the kitchen. It’s nice to teach and refreshing the energy and enthusiasm they bring, and a lot of the time I can learn from them, because as any chef reading this will nod their head knowingly, cooking is ever learning industry where you can never know everything. That cautiously said there now seems to be too much ego floating around young chefs in many cases. Chefs that finish college, or work in one good place or merit for 6 months and they think they are the absolute bollocks and that Escoffier didn’t know what he was talking about. They expect to be 20 year old sous chefs earning 25k a year or in some demented cases head chefs!

My first real job was at a three rosette restaurant in Brighton, it was Brighton’s best at the time (now unfortunately closed) and the only way I got a job there was the right attitude and persistence. I put a cv through the door when I turned up on a Monday whilst the restaurant was closed, waited a few days and after hearing nothing went back and asked for a job, this time to the chef and in person. My CV wasn’t good enough to be considered for a position at this restaurant and the chef very openly told me this and denied me the opportunity of being taught by him. Tail between my legs and my nose disjointed I returned a few days later and asked for a job again, this time being allowed to join the chef in his office, he put my CV in the bin whilst and watched and told me if I wanted to work I was to forget everything I had ever been taught and learn from scratch again, and I did. They were the most influential and career shaping of my career because being a good chef is not only about being about able to cook well. It’s everything! Being on time, working clean, listening, working efficiently, exceptional stamina and dedication, once you have this creativity will flow, but only then will it be allowed to and be taken seriously.

Young chefs seem to forget this and think creative talent puts them a step above everyone else but here is my warning. I would pick the chef with passion that loves to learn, doesn’t care about the money and wants to work with me to learn any day above the chef that thinks they already are the “mustard” you my friend will not succeed.

Suppliers

As chefs we always seek to work with the best in produce, taking care where it has come from, with so many more people now getting on board with the sustainable and local aspect of consuming, which is a brilliant thing and also soon becoming a necessity. So it poses the question. Where do we buy our produce from? And how do we select our suppliers?

A supplier to a chef is more than someone that drops off food from the other side of a late night answerphone message. They are specialists in their produce field, aware of local seasonality with a constant line of communication with the chef. What’s good at the market, what’s starting to appear, what to avoid. We have a relationship with our suppliers and we don’t just jump into that with anybody. My suppliers are also a good source of gossip, they tell me about who’s unhappy at what restaurant, who’s struggling (not paying their bills) and job prospects!

There is a vetting process that a chef will go through with any new supplier, we want to see their produce, we need to understand their knowledge of what they are selling, we need to know frequency of arriving at our kitchen back door, are they going to be easy to work with and are they going to ensure that we get the best produce!
We don’t just jump into bed with anybody that walks through the door to supply us, were not that slutty. A supplier like the restaurant it buys for has a reputation. They come to us through recommendation, or because we have worked with them before or because they really are the absolute specialist in their trade, so its not unusual for a restaurant to have two meat suppliers, two fish, a veg supplier, a specialist product supplier, a forager, a dry product supplier, a dairy, a cheese supplier, stationary, cleaning products…..the list can be endless but ensures we can compete for the best products among them, and keep prices competitive.
I call it a relationship because we are in constant communication with our suppliers, we will receive early morning texts from the market with any problems or issues, receiving phone calls to tell us no fishing boats are going out due to poor weather conditions and we will quite honestly tell them when what they have supplied is just not good enough. It most definitely is a two-way street, if you work with them, they will work with you and make sure that you are getting the best among the other 12 or so restaurants they also supply.

For a chef the suppliers are not as close as his team but equally important and so we take our time to work with, develop that relationship and for them to gain our trust, it’s a cut throat industry and there is always someone knocking at the door saying they can do better, that said we are loyal old dogs!

My food memories

Being a chef is about so many things, being creative, providing enjoyment, mastering a craft but for me it’s the pleasure of creating a memory. Food evokes memories, a reminder of something from your past that really hits home from your childhood or creating a new memory or experience, which led me to think, what are my earliest memories of food? And how have they shaped me into a chef?
My prime memory evoking years were the 90’s between the ages of 7 and 17 for me, the years that directed and shaped my pallet (worryingly when I was recalling foods for this!) and as any sweet tooth sugar monster a lot of my clearer memories are of sweets!

I was born and raised in Brighton and my local sweet shop was called “Goachers” It was run by a woman called Ann, I always remember she had disgusting feet bursting out of once white flip flops with talons, lumps and bumps and used to be a constant talking point between me and my friends whilst in the wonderland of tooth decay. Penny sweets were a penny and were distributed from behind a glass counter top in red plastic square containers that had to be shuffled according to your pick like one of those sliding picture puzzles with one square missing. But it was the everlasting gobstoppers, the toffee crumble (sold by the quarter) and woppa bars both spearmint and cola which stick fast in my memory, the woppa’s also doubled as currency in the playground, mostly for bribing friends to fill in my filo fax, because it seemed so time consuming when there was good football matches with a tennis ball to be had.

School lunches are a vague memory to me but I do remember starting on school dinners and soon losing interest with the exception of the caramel shortbread and sticky toffee with bright yellow bird’s custard, but I soon moved onto packed lunches I think because school dinners were expensive. I always remember feeling hard done by because my friends had nice bread that was the perfect white vessel to support a delicious filling, whereas I had this massive cut “tiger bread” that was more the showstopper than the thin layer of flavour through the centre of this bread that had looked like it had been sliced with a spade, and absorbed all the moisture from inside the sandwich, tomato was the worst! Resulting in a film of sludge bread or disintegration upon tackling this tin foil wrapped beast. I always remember nick sitting opposite me with his face in a bag of salt and vinegar chipsticks, in a one handed technique that involved putting his mouth inside the bag, much like a horse with a feed bag, and chewing, inevitably resulting in sores around his broken lips, not aided by his addiction to everlasting gobstoppers from Ann and her manky feet.

Depending if you are northern or southern evening meal was called tea or dinner, I had dinner at half 6 every day and it was compulsory to sit at the pull out table that had to be laid for each meal and then disassembled afterwards. with the exception of Thursdays when we would get fish and chips on the way home from visiting my Aunty Bettys and as reward for enduring the vocabulary punishment of being made to speak the queen’s English by my uncle Arthur, the continual repetition of saying “Forty thousand feathers on a thrushes throat” with particular attention to pronouncing the “TH” (it never worked.) it was a routine in our home, Sundays were always a sausage meat casserole made using balls of sausage meat rolled in seasoned flour or Wednesdays sausage, chips and eggs. I would always leave the white because I hated the texture. and when it was liver day, I was excused of eating offal (ironically loving it present day) I was given a dinner of mash potato, beans and tuna, sounds disgusting but I urge you to give it a go! It’s surprisingly tasty. Spaghetti bolognaise was never served with the exotic garlic covered bread and always had carrots and mushrooms, the latter I would pick out and now again love, I’m seeing a pattern here! We always had a small pudding my favourite being a tin of fruit cocktail with butterscotch angel delight. I was always allowed to drink the syrup decanted from the tin and placed in a tumbler. Although it would be a travesty to forget the still semi frozen Victoria sponge cake with strawberry jam and cream centre or the simplicity of a slice of brick vanilla ice cream in blue cardboard!

To this day I haven’t been able to replicate that sausage casserole but I’m now on a personal mission to recreate this Sunday delight for my grandad, and who knows I may even open a tin of fruit cocktail and whip up some angel delight!

Switching off!

its currently 2.17am in the morning and I have been home from work for a couple of hours now, after finishing a very smooth service, creating a nice fish dish involving spherification of soy sauce for a teriyaki salmon special, having a well deserved unwinding pint with my best friend, also a chef, and sharing the trials and challenges of our days. I’m having one of those all too familiar “cant switch off” moments.

Perhaps it’s the new grouse dish with smoking concept flying round in my head, it’s not the service, that was a smooth as it comes with a full restaurant, as usual, of satisfied and complimentary guests, or maybe it’s the three back to back episodes of Gordon Ramsays boiling point I have just watched for what seems like the 8 millionth time. Maybe the imminent hustle of a hospitality weekend a few hours away, either way and for whatever reason I have food on the mind, and not through hunger. Creativity and inspiration is ripe and it won’t let me sleep.

Unfortunately this situation is not unfamiliar to me, or any other chef that takes their profession and career seriously, and I’m very close to picking up my copy of “the French Laundry” or “Murgaritz” for a small browse but I know this will not aid my dilemma, only feed my enthusiasm further, so what do I do? I have completely updated myself on all things “twitter” and have concluded in finishing this, I’m either going to have a beer and watch some un-creative television, or count sheep! The beer wins.

An occupational hazard

Those words “occupational hazard” couldn’t ring truer to a chef, hazard doesn’t lend itself as a suitable description for the pain that we endure as chefs, people always assume it’s the knives that cause us the most injuries but in my experience it seems to be my knives are the only implements not hell bent on grievous bodily harm. It’s so rare for me to cut myself with my knives, it always seems to be ridiculously blunt random objects that slice my hands and arms open. not too long ago during a busy service I reached for my tongs, that I keep conveniently on the handle of the oven door, but the oven didn’t want to give them up this time around and they got caught as I pulled on them ensuring that my finger ran up the metal on the inside of the tongs opening up my finger quite nicely. I mean tongs! Who would have though it? I open up my hands lifting things out of fridges and dry stores as I catch my knuckle in a tight space or as I walk past a workbench, I even find cuts that I don’t remember doing? a grater or microplane are evil little fuckers, and I’m sure chefs would agree that where they are evil, the devil in the kitchen is the demonic mandolin, I often feel like I’m going to chop my hand off at the wrist using that beast, even more so than the soft and gentle meat slicer, my friend that would never lay a hand on me.

It will come as no surprise to chefs reading this that I burn myself everyday I’m in the kitchen, not because I’m a bumbling idiot with retarded hands and a simple mind but because almost everything is hotter than the sun in a professional kitchen and most of the time! hot fat spits on my arms and pops into my face and eyes, the slightest touch on the oven door or shelves inside with my forearm results in those all too common red lines on my arms and with my decision to always wear short sleeve jackets because it cooler this happens quite a lot. pans that come out of the oven I almost instantly plunge into the sink now leaving the meat or fish to rest out of the pan, but the amount of times that pan handle as just touched my arm whilst I’m plating up something else is ridiculous. My most recent burn came from blitzing a puree as the lid just lifted on the jug blender and splashed lava like puree up my arm and the surrounding walls. To confuse things even more in the kitchens I work in “hot” becomes “heavy” as in “fuck me! That pan was heavy” as the chef recoils in pain.

Add on top of these “hazards” the playful intention of trying to stitch each other up by planting hot spoons for your colleague to pick up or the occasional towel whip and the kitchen becomes more dangerous than Syria!

We dont call in sick!

As a chef there is a golden unspoken rule that we all follow. No other professional career seems to regard this as highly and it’s this simple. You don’t phone in sick, ever! That’s true to a point because there are two exceptions to this unspoken law.
1. You’re dead, and in this case a death certificate should be provided.
2. You have been arrested and in this instance you will need to provide your arrest warrant.
This is quite simply because you do not, other than these two circumstances let your team down.

Health and safety stipulates that if you have any symptoms of sickness or diarrhoea that you stay away from a food producing and serving industry for 48 hours after the plague has vanished. This may shock some of you, but this just does not happen. we can’t afford for this, sickness is a thorn in the side of a chef, an irritation that can potentially slow us down and just try to fuck us up, you go to work and you battle through doing whatever you can to stay afloat and not drop your team in the weeds, I have known chefs to run to the toilet several times during a single service and throw up in a bucket out by the bins in a break in orders.

I know what you are thinking, oh my god, health and safety nightmare! These restaurants need to be closed down, they will kill us all. Wake up! It happens in every single restaurant without fail. If people really believed this was the case we would be looking at an epidemic not too dissimilar to world war Z! people crawling over each other to the toilet and vomiting into the gutter outside the restaurants, shitting themselves in taxis on the way home and turning green and smashing their lifeless heads into the plate of food on the table in front of them. I mean imagine if you have been looking forward to that top restaurant in your town for weeks, for your special occasion. You have been showing everyone the menu in advance, telling them how good it is, when you get there you already know what you are going to have because you have been reading the website daily for weeks, but you still plan to take the menu with excitement! You have bought a new top/shirt and finished work a bit early that day in anticipation for this special occasion. You spend an hour getting ready and arrive at the restaurant to find that the food hasn’t been up to your expectations tonight because one of the chefs or a waiter has called in sick and cover couldn’t be arranged, and the staff has struggled. It’s just not an acceptable excuse!

We as chefs are loyal dogs both to our work colleagues, the friends that we stand with day after day. Our industry and importantly to our customers. We don’t phone in sick; we go to work, battle through and get sick on our days off.

I don’t wear pants!

Those of you whom know me personally will know the title of this blog rings true. Yes I do not wear underwear of any description and it has been as long as I can remember, hang on that’s not entirely true, I haven’t worn underwear since I became a chef. That’s 14 years of genital freedom!

This is not uncommon for chefs and I can guarantee if you’re reading this as a chef and you are one of those people that don’t, then we are nodding heads in the understanding of each other, seeing the ways of kitchen comfort. Like two strangers in the same rare car acknowledging each other’s taste as they pass on the road. You my free hanging friend know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a personal thing for sure, and chefs that I work alongside tell me I’m a dirty bastard and so other such insults, but they just don’t understand or just haven’t given it a go.

The kitchen is quite obviously a hot environment and have you noticed that 95% of the heat producing equipment is at genital level! We are quite literally slow roasting those all-important reproductive organs, so who would be blamed for creating a small amount of air flow to reduce the temperature of my never region. those of you who do work in kitchens are probably screaming at the screen now; “What about chefs arse?” and if you don’t work in a kitchen you are probably now thinking what is this strange medical condition that seems to only affect our seemingly perfect chefs?

Chefs arse is a bitch, it’s the sore chaffing of the acute inner thigh and isn’t really your arse, however it takes chefs down on a daily basis but is not an excusable condition to grant you medical leave, even in extreme cases, it will make you limp and hobble around the kitchen, making every move a difficulty and the longer it goes on the more it hurts and can be treated and even prevented with a generous slathering of kitchen talc, aka. Corn flour! Not to be confused with strong bread flour as witnessed whilst at catering college, the poor un-expecting student managed to create a glue like paste of knob gnocchi, which i later learned had to be cut out by his mum! But no, not wearing underwear does not increase the risk of this excruciating discomfort. As chefs arse is simply the build-up of salt gathering from sweat in the groves (leaving that to your imagination) of your ugly parts, creating friction and yep you got it, a chaffing sore cheese grater effect with every movement.

So I don’t wear pants I don’t let a little pool of salty mess build up, I create air and movement down there, so now who’s the dirty bastard? Next time you see someone looking tired with burns on their hands and arms walking like they have a cucumber inserted sideways inside the rectum, you can now successfully diagnose a bad case of chef’s arse and recommend a good soaking in a hot bath as treatment!