Kissing in the Kitchen

Cooking. There was a time when it wasn’t so scary, so mysterious, so technical, so COMPLICATED. So I’ve got one tip for the less confident cooks out there. Keep It Simple Silly (KISS).

Molecular gastronomy, a new trend in haute cuisine introduced predominately by chefs such as Pierre Gagnaire, Ferran Adria from El Bulli and Heston Blumenthal from The Fat Duck, has sparked a trend that promotes the deconstruction of cookery methods to their minimal parts. Even to the point of having edible cutlery. This makes it hard for the common cooks’ spaghetti bolognaise to be as interesting as Heston’s snail porridge.

Playing with the chemistry and physics of food, molecular gastronomy has taken on a whole new level of food science in its promotion of reducing cooking and ingredients to particular functions and using them to transform what was once a beetroot into a beetroot foam.

As amazing as these discoveries are, food fads shouldn’t affect the genuine preparation of food for the everyday individual, who, let’s face it, doesn’t necessarily have a nitrogen gun tucked away in the pantry for an instant foam. I have high respect for the Hestons of the food industry, but their pursuits to be innovative have spread a complexity surrounding the idea of food preparation and cookery. Quite simply they have scared people off cooking simple, delicious recipes.

The confidence people have in the kitchen these days is as low as a fat kid’s in PE class, and I can say that because I was one. We are too scared to mess it up, burn it, over-cook it, over-season it, and what we end up with is cooking with cheat means such as sauce in a bottle, 2 Minute Noodles or just buying take away.

MasterChef has played a huge part in pushing the home cook movement, but it still endorses celebrity chefs to show us how it’s done. As a training chef myself, I’m constantly asked questions of how this or that should be prepared, but it shouldn’t be so scary. Why are we so afraid to make mistakes and just ‘give it a go’?

The kitchen, once the most central room of the home is now being excluded from newly renovated apartments. One could say that in the media’s pursuit to educate the masses on food they have in fact deterred them by promoting the idea that you should just let someone with the skills to do it. Or buy into the convenient and highly manufactured foodstuffs that promote so-called ‘no fuss’ cooking.

But you can be the master of your own kitchen, it just takes a little confidence and an understanding that there are no mistakes, only discoveries. What we need to do is go back to basics and understand that mistakes are where the magic of cooking happens. A few ingredients can be transformed into something delicious and unique to your individual cooking style. It just takes practice.

Remember, Keep it Simple Silly!

By Samantha Coutts

Photo;Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dumbledad/293003264/in/photostream/