October 2010 Archives

A few weeks ago, I was fishing for lobster in Pittenweem, Fife. While there were plenty of lobsters in those waters, I was alarmed to see that the white fish such as haddock, cod and whiting were not present; they had gone. But today, light the beacons, sound the trumpets and fire off a celebratory rocket or two. Just over two and a half years ago I met Mike Berthet of M & J Seafoods (http://www.mjseafood.com/), who was talking in Oxford about a fish supply scheme. I challenged him about whether it was really eco-friendly to use Scottish haddock. To my real surprise, Mike said there were plenty of those particular fish in the North Sea. Then to show how confident he was, he flew Gary Jones and me to Peterhead, where, on a perfectly ordinary morning, we counted 7,500 boxes of haddock for sale!  

Well that did indeed prove there was a lot of Scottish haddock around. The snag however, is that it did not prove was that this haddock was caught in a sustainable fashion.

But this morning, in what is really a fantastic event for the UK and for Scottish fisheries, Mike is bringing me the first landed Scottish Fisheries Sustainable Accredited haddock, and I will be cooking the first Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) Accredited haddock at Le Manoir for lunch.

They say good news comes in pairs. Well, the UK's GDP for the summer quarter was twice what was expected; and North Sea haddock is the first Scottish whitefish to be certified with the gold standard of sustainability. Last year the catch was 34.7 thousand tonnes and it was worth £34.2m to the Scottish economy. As Alex Salmond, the very appropriately named first minister of Scotland says, haddock is of huge economic importance to the entire UK, as it ranks fourth in volume and retail sale of in shot up year on year to 30th September by 5.4% in value and 17.7% in volume.
    
The hoops the Scottish fisheries have had to jump though to are truly formidable - these are serious, difficult to meet criteria - and the certification body is truly independent. So this is a huge victory for our food supply, for common sense, and for our purses and appetites. Haddock is, after all, one of our most delicious species, a complete joy to cook and a fish absolutely beloved by the British consumer. Before you hug your local chippy, just check that what he's frying tonight is MSC accredited North Sea Haddock. But this is a win-every-which-way situation - and heaven knows we need a few of those just now.

So MSC accredited haddock will be on both the Brasserie Blanc and Manoir menus soon.

Thanks Mike for this news.
 

Above, l-r Gary Jones, Alex Mackay, Raymond Blanc, Bruno Loubet

I remember being impressed by the talent of a 24-year-old French lad who was the 1985 Good Food Guide's "Young Chef of the Year" at a London restaurant called Gastronome One. He'd been head chef in the trendy King's Road restaurant, surprised everyone by chucking it in to join me as Head Chef at Le Manoir, and then became chef/manager at Le Petit Blanc in 1986. This showed just the right combination of pride, ambition and eagerness to learn, I thought, and marked out Bruno Loubet for stardom. Though he's from Bordeaux and I'm from the Jura, we're practically the same person - our cooking depends on the quality of the produce, simplicity, and tradition, but complete openness to modernity.

It's a funny story. We needed a modest sister restaurant, enough like Le Manoir that our longer-staying guests would be happy to have a meal or two there, but not so grand that it competed with Le Manoir on the same playing-field. Almost before we knew what had happened, Le Petit Blanc got a Michelin star in its first year. The irony wasn't lost on me - this would be the summit of most chefs' ambitions, but it wasn't right for me.

So the job Bruno had to do for me was the hardest imaginable. I needed him to get the standards at Le Petit Blanc up to what we now maintain at the Brasseries Blanc, while removing the "fine dining" label. You'd think it was mission impossible, but Bruno succeeded - he kept the Oxford restaurant popular with his special brand of robust, hearty, honest food, exactly as we do now at the Brasseries Blanc.

Since then he's had a tremendous career, winning his first Michelin star when he was at the Four Seasons on the Park, being chef at L'Odéon and some of the other iconic restaurants of the 90s and then moving triumphantly to Australia, where he stayed for eight years and acquired many additional skills.  Now he's back, and since February, he's been cooking at the Zetter.

Gary Jones and I joined him there a couple of Sundays ago. Bruno and we were paired to cook lunch. And what a lunch! The AmEx blurb says it's "a new landmark Festival event for 2010. London Restaurant Festival's American Express 10-10-10 event welcomes 20 of the UK's most celebrated chefs to cast aside their creative competitiveness and work side-by-side to create 10 unique collaborative menus". Among the guests were plenty of critics, including the best one of all, Fay Maschler.

Far from competitive, it was like a conversation between us. In an advance interview Bruno had flattered me: "Raymond has always been an inspiration to me so I know how much my team will appreciate the experience. He is so passionate and energetic that it rubs off on everyone else. To have Raymond and his Le Manoir brigade here with us at Bistrot Bruno Loubet will be the highlight of the year for all of us, I am sure".

Here's how Bruno described the occasion in his own words: "As this meal is a special collaboration, the menu is a little more elaborate than you might usually expect from our modern bistrot but equally it is not a fine dining menu. We wanted to create a nostalgic menu, a tribute to the people and the ingredients that first inspired us so we have reinterpreted some of our favourite childhood dishes".

Earlier this week I took a trip to a farm in the Cotswolds, near Broadway, accompanied by my friends from the BBC. Every spring and summer our local landscape, from the Chilterns through to the Cotswolds, is punctuated by patches of vivid chrome yellow fields of rape. Some of you may worry about allergic reactions to rapeseed; however, rapeseed blossom is so nectar rich that an army of bees removes most of the pollen from the crop. (Indeed rapeseed honey is light and peppery, so strong that it is usually blended with other honey; but its abundance makes a problem for the beekeeper, as it needs to be extracted quickly to keep it from granulating in the comb.) Whether you love or hate the aesthetic effect, their product of these fields, rapeseed oil, is very interesting.

We were filming at East Lodge Farm, where two young brothers, Charlie and Lawrence Beldam, who have recently graduated from Cirencester Agricultural College, have started a micro-industry on their family farm, making and selling cold-pressed, extra virgin rapeseed oil. (We filmed them for our programme on raw vegetable foods, which will be part of the BBC2 Kitchen Secrets series, with the new book to be published in February by Bloomsbury.) They call their wonderful new product Cotswold Gold.

Of course we all love very expensive extra virgin olive oil (EVOO), but there are some dishes and some cooking processes for which it is not merely too expensive, but unsuitable, with EVOO beginning to degrade at 191˚C (and very high quality, low acidity EVOO at 207˚C). Try for yourself: taste your best olive oil after it has reached 191˚C: it is thin, acrid (and carcinogenic). That's why you should reserve your best EVOO for dressings and warm dishes.

For a long time now I've preferred rapeseed or safflower oil to EVOO because their smoke points are so much higher. (Refined safflower oil smokes at 266˚C.) Refined rapeseed smokes at 240˚C and untreated rapeseed oil at about the same, 242˚C.  The higher smoke point means that rapeseed oil doesn't denature physically or chemically, or in terms of taste when it cools to room temperature. As its cost is so much lower, it makes good sense to use it for all frying; and as it doesn't denature at frying temperatures, it can be used more than once.

We've been filming a new series of Kitchen Secrets for BBC2. Last week my fiancée, Natalia, a qualified doctor who has now added an MSc in Nutrition to her other achievements, appeared on camera with me. (If you don't know what she looks like, that is an additional reason to watch the series when it airs!)

But filming the series hasn't all been such smooth sailing. In fact, literally not. The very week I gave up my crutches, after six and a half months, we took a fishing trip to Scotland. The boat was not a smart yacht, but a creel lobster boat - about as luxurious as a no-frills airliner in a force-8 gale.



The skipper, Stuart, was a tough guy whose business means he spends his days bobbing about on the steel grey waves with white crests capturing those prehistoric creatures, lobsters and crabs.

With the telly crew aboard we left the scenic little Pittenweem Harbour and its calm waters. The voyage out started well enough: I had the only seat, close to the skipper. Fishing consisted of the two experienced fishermen shooting into the sea their line of 25 creels, each baited with mackerel.

The sea grew more and more agitated and dark, the swells grew bigger. I was sick. The cameraman was sick. Stuart, of course, did not get sick; he lit cigarette after cigarette, filling the tiny cabin with thick smoke.

Much as I love to cook lobsters, I now know I will never become a lobster fisherman. Cold as well as sick, my leg began to ache. I just wanted to go home; and after three hours, we did. But there were problems. The tide was so low that the boat was scraping the seabed.