Cooking for Insta

Muchos cooking happening on social media. From Atherton to Aikens, through Kitchin and Tanaka it seems every well-known behemoth of the industry I’ve chosen to follow has taken to the titchy-tiny-small screen to share their versions of home cooking and to give us a glimpse into their private life and kitchen. Having never watched much IGTV before I find myself glued to my phone, impatient to see how Jason’s Ibiza night turns out, or how Aiken’s slow cooked lamb shoulder will pull after 7 hours in the oven. It’s a simplified and oddly fascinating point of difference form normal food telly which I find harder and harder to watch as it gently melds into one median.

But as I watch Tanaka talk through bowls of pre prepped vegetables, perfectly sliced and shaped, and read through Aiken’s prep list of lentils boiled with thyme, bay and tomato I can’t help think that these chefs don’t quite understand home cooking for mortals. What they do in their professional lives is extraordinary - absolutely amazing and worthy of respect and reward, but it doesn’t translate well into home kitchens. Whilst it takes huge amounts of self-discipline, knowledge and perfectly honed recipes to run a top-level restaurant it takes totally different set of skills to run a domestic kitchen. The issue is that these chefs are unable to loosen their toques enough to let their standards slip and adapt to be relevant to the resources and mindset of the masses. As I watched Atherton fry Iberico pork steaks on his plancha set to break neck heat, my mind wandered from his method of cooking to his method of extraction; the man must have a small turbo fan installed above his hob to cope with the plumes of smoke bellowing from the delicious looking steaks that I was no longer bothered about. If I cooked like that in my kitchen it would set the fire alarm off, which would make the dog bark which would make the toddler cry which would make my wife shout – a chain of events I prefer to avoid more than I prefer to eat perfectly browned meat.

It is not only in the cooking method that these masters of cookery lose us. It’s in their recipes and inability to break free of their self-imposed standards. To be fair, Atherton makes some very simple and tasty looking fare, even if it does require the jet engine of a Mig-29 to be retrofitted into the extractor hood, but Aikens’ recipes are a perfect example of the difference between chefs and cooks. Put simply, the food Aikens produces is food porn. Not the over used term chucked around to describe pretty looking food on the telly, but real food porn – a fantastically over engineered version of what we do at home that we will never be able to recreate, because we lack the thrust and wherewithal of the professional. As he made his version of hummus, using cooked lentils and sweet potato, dictating an exact 12 turns of the pepper mill I couldn’t help but wonder who the hell was going to reproduce his dish. Most people can’t even muster the energy to crack open a can of chickpeas at home let alone execute a recipe with a volume of ingredients accompanied by an essay of instructions. I watched another one of his videos, entitled, Light lunch salad”. There was nothing simple about it, requiring blanched tender stem broccoli, cooked quinoa and two-tone tomatoes. The simple truth is that Aikens and his peers are too good for the majority of home cooks, so good as to teeter on the verge of irrelevance.

The videos have made me reflect on a realisation I had a few years ago when I was working with Bill Granger. Bill, if you don’t know is a blonde headed Antipodean with no formal training but a huge amount of zest de vivre. He has perfect teeth, a great big smile and a wonderful way with bold flavours, not dissimilar to our own, Prince Jamie. I was lucky enough to work with him on a series, and to observe his philosophy and methodology of cooking first-hand. Having come straight off the back of a television program that showcased the finest work of Michlein chefs I felt it was a step down in skills to be working with a person who had shot to fame because he knew how to make a decent breakfast out of avocados, eggs, coriander and a bit of lime. Having spent a long period of time prior, prepping up high quality dishes for the likes of Kerridge, Caines, Randall, Roux Jr. and the aforementioned new stars of IGTV I knew I had the skills to breeze any challenge Bill could pass my way. But as we ventured further into the series and deeper into his repertoire, I realised much of what I prepped for him was being quietly re-prepped by Bill before we turned over to film. Things didn’t improve and soon he was insisting that the dish he made would be the one we took pretty shots of. Normally that is my job, or at least the job of my department. I felt I was failing and so talked to Bill about what I could do to improve my work. He told me the exact opposite of almost everything I had learned and held dear to that point; he told me to be rougher, less exact, more liberal, more off the cuff. It was a bit of a shock, but being the consummate professional, I heeded his words and payed more notice to how he was prepping and cooking. I became fascinated by the way he worked; he paid no attention to age old techniques, he cut roughly, he tossed ingredients into pans way before or after they should have been going in. He ripped with his hands, he cut with his scissors, he was a totally mesmerising kitchen cavalier. As time passed, we fell into a groove and I became more like Bill, I worked hard to emulate his relaxed way of cooking and slowly I could feel the scrunched up, neurotic double helix of my cooking DNA slacken and relax. Bill taught me so much about cooking in those two weeks in Notting Hill.

By the time I was working with Bill, I had been fortunate enough to work with other stars of food television who would gladly and proudly label themselves, cooks, and fight any notion of themselves being chefs. I’d made programs and series with the Hairy Bikers, Nigella and Diana Henry, and if I’m totally honest I hadn’t paid them the same respect as I’d been paying my Michelin heroes. However, it began to dawn on me that these cooks had a lot to offer, perhaps even more than the cheffy chefs.

When a chef learns to cook, they learn technique, much of which hasn’t changed since Careme and Escoffier ran the pass. It’s a proud and vital education necessary to work in a quality kitchen; size and shape of vegetable prep is standardized and christened with French names. Preparation of meat, portioning of carcasses, trimming and tying are repeated until the actions engrain themselves deep in the muscle memory. Cooking processes: saute, simmer, roast and grill are applied in a standardized way, each title referring to an exact process which must not be deviated from. It is a proud tradition and the proper way to become a chef, and more practically it’s a code that ensures communication can be delivered quickly and exactly from head chef all the way down to commis. It has worked for over a century and it will work for a century more. However, where there is consistency and formalization there is often conservatism and limitation. And often the better the chef, the deeper into their mindset the training permeates until it becomes unshakeable dogma.

The cooks of the world don’t suffer the same mindset, they operate free from the shackles of formal training. It allows them a huge scope within which they can function and create. This was essentially what I learned from, Bill a sort of renegade disregard for the prescriptive methods of formal cooking. And as I looked at the cooking of Nigella, Diana Henry and the Bikers I realised they were very much the same. They had no code to follow, no culinary diktat to suffer. I began paying way more attention to their methods and their recipes and I soon realised I was working amongst a different type of food brilliance; those who’s ultimate goal was flavourful, and easily accomplished food for the family table. The shortcuts and the hacks that came naturally to these chefs so often contravened tradition and jarred with my conventional mindset, but from my new perspective I realised that they were clever, often ingenious and made the dishes accessible to the average punter.

Whilst the very best chefs work tirelessly to gain small percentiles of flavour to push their food to ever higher standards, the best cooks try to make big, leaping gains with only regular amounts of effort and regularly available ingredients. That is why Jamie Oliver is so successful and so brilliant; he manages to straddle the gap between the professional and domestic kitchens. He took his chef knowledge and transplanted it on to everyday food. Suddenly, by following Jamie’s recipes people were creating food that packed huge amounts of flavour by simply adding a well advised, glug of olive oil, fistful of ripped basil or snowstorm of parmesan – he was a welcome revelation. His energy and delivery convinced people to take a punt and his recipes delivered on his earnestness. Rick Stein is another who has managed the divide between the two worlds perfectly; and more than educated riffs on recipes, what I admire most about Stein is his humility. To be a leading chef demands a certain level of ego, a self-belief and determination which, at times can slosh and spill over into arrogance. Stein has none of that, he listens, and he learns, and he communicates his discoveries honestly and believably through his presentation and his recipes. It is no surprise that these two characters of the industry have managed long and successful careers - they both possess rare brilliance.

So, as I watch Aikens and Atherton rapidly adding to their social media, I can’t help but think it quite aptly reflects their personalities and their cooking styles; the videos aren’t really for you and me, they are for them, and any enjoyment you or I garner is a mere biproduct. The same can be observed with most geniuses of a creative art, part of their brilliance is shuttering out the world and focusing on their own obsessions and goals. It is only by doing this that you can be truly original. And it is also for their egos. I know this, because it is why I post recipes online. Cooking isn’t really the altruistic pursuit many believe it to be; when I cook it is partly because I enjoy the process but mostly because I know those, I’m feeding will like me just a little more. I’m used to having my ego massaged at work as do the chefs of the world, but now whilst we are furloughed, and the restaurants have been shut the plaudits and praise have all but dried up. So that’s why we head to social media, to hook a little of the virtual good stuff to make our egos glow again.

So next time you’re flicking through Instagram and you come across a totally impenetrable recipe presented by a leading light of the cooking world, don’t bother trying to duplicate their dishes, instead enjoy it like you enjoy any other fantasy television - with a beer and a bag of popcorn.