The nomadic chef on black garlic, beautiful chef’s knives handmade in West Cork and a book of very simple Japanese home cooking
INGREDIENTS
Black garlic
“Put a head of garlic in a rice cooker for two weeks on the ‘Keep Warm’ setting and it becomes black garlic. It doesn’t look like much but mix it with vinegar and you get this totally umami taste. I first tried it at Bar Tartine in San Francisco: their smoked potatoes with mushroom and black garlic vinaigrette totally stopped me in my tracks. I like the idea of using humble ingredients to create something really unusual.”
Sayuri sake
“I don’t know much about sake but I saw the chef from Forest Avenue in the Asia Market and he bought six bottles of this, so I was figured it must be good.”
Toons Bridge buffalo mozzarella »
“Toons Bridge is the first buffalo farm in Ireland. They do really great buffalo mozzarella and halloumi and ricotta.”
Apple vinegar
“Apple vinegar is one of the oldest medicines in the world. It’s good if you have an acidic stomach and it works for a lot of other things too. A woman from West Cork came up and showed us how to make it – the water you use is very important.”
OBJECTS
Fingal Ferguson knives »
“I got my knives [pictured above] made by one of the guys who runs Gubbeen cheese, who is also a knife-maker. He’s designing the table knives for the Fumbally Stables at the moment.”
Vitamix blender »
“There are some Thermomixes in the Fumbally but I really think my little Vitamix is a lot better. It doesn’t do heat like they do but the blade is so much stronger.”
Pointed spatula »
“I use my Vitamix all the time, so a pointed spatula is my best friend.”
Tribest Sedona dehydrator »
“I use a dehydrator consistently – for seaweed, for mushrooms. It’s a great way of preserving food.”
BOOKS
Washoku Cooking, Elizabeth Andoh »
“The people at Bar Tartine recommended Elizabeth Andoh’s cookbooks to me. She’s an American woman whose books focus on very simple Japanese home cooking. I’ve only cooked one thing out of this so far, the rice balls with nori, but I must have made them at least 10 times in the last two weeks.”
Bar Tartine: Techniques and Recipes, Cortney Burns and Nick Balla »
Cookbook from the San Francisco restaurant where Katie recently did a stage. “What’s cool is that the book is split in two: the second part is recipes – there’s a kale dish that’s incredible – and the first part is how to expand your larder with oils, fats and dehydrated spices and so on. It’s really good.”
Wild Fermentation, Sandor Katz »
Katz is one of the most influential writers on fermentation. “His Art of Fermentation book is bigger with lots of great info but I really like this book because it’s more accessible. It’s a good starting point if you’re interested in fermentation.”
Relae: A Book of Ideas, Christian Puglisi »
Puglisi, the chef-owner of Relae and Baest in Copenhagen, used to be the sous chef at Noma. “This book is really good. One of the essays is about water – if you make a chicken stock with tap water, then with filtered water, you get a totally different stock. It’s funny, because we source all these really careful ingredients but 60% of cooking is water and we don’t really think about that bit.”
Never Trust A Skinny Italian Chef, Massimo Bottura »
Bottura is the mischievous chef who runs the acclaimed Osteria Francescana in Modena. “I’ve been to the restaurant, it’s really good, and the book is too.”
