Food and cooking articles and information:

KITCHEN NIGHTMARES

The kitchen can some times be a dark place! Inanimate objects can come alive and unimaginable things can go wrong. Disaster can strike at any time making any chef or enthusiastic cook go weak at the knees . . . enough to make a strong man use the F word or need a stiff drink to steady the nerves.

Below are stories of some of those kitchen nightmares! Many thanks to all who have contributed.

Kitchen Nightmares of Gemma Driver:

Tip - don't cut corners when preparing snails. Thinking that most of the procedures I had read seemed overcomplicated (purging, starving, initial boiling, gutting, salt and vinegaring, boiling in stock for hours), I followed a recipe that cut out several stages of the snail preparation process. The resulting gristle-in-copious-slime effect was inedible. I still tried to eat it of course, (unsuccessfully) but the experience put me off snails for a few months!

Gemma Driver ~ Food Writer
www.gastropod.co.uk
www.frenchentree.com/france-food-cuisine

Kitchen Nightmares of Alan Spedding:

I took part in a prime time television cookery show. Part of the fly on the wall documentary involved me spending the day training at one of the countries top restaurant kitchens, shadowing the head chef and second chef around all day.

To cut a long story short, during dinner service, my job was to help plate up the starters of Tuna Tartare surrounded by a ring of lambs lettuce petals. Anyway, I was only managing to plate up one portion as opposed to the second chef's three portions. My lambs lettuce just wouldn't lay flat on the plate. They kept curling up and looking untidy. Only when I was about to give up did I notice the chef's special technique for getting them to lie flat on the plate . . . a little spread of saliva on each one! Just like licking a stamp! I watched, mouth open, speechless and amazed . . . and it worked too! It was horrific and needless to say I didn't add this to my list of kitchen techniques.

The next day I shadowed the head chef (name withheld to protect my life). It was canapé time and crab samosas were the highlight of the menu. The tip must have been catching on! If you have ever seen anyone rolling their own cigarettes and licking the paper - top tip of the day this - that's how the head chef got the crab samosas to seal well . . . a quick lick of the tongue . . . I never returned for a meal!

Alan Spedding

Kitchen Nightmares of Alan Coxon:

As the head chef responsible for one of the largest four star hotels in Europe, looking after 1,098 rooms and around 3,000 guests on full occupancy, not forgetting the non residential guests that increased figures to around 4,000 customers per day, I was constantly faced with challenges.

The main reason for these challenges was the fact that there were only 480 seats available in the main dinning room, all the food was cooked fresh on the a la carte menu, and needless to say everyone preferred to dine around 7:30pm to 8:00pm for dinner.

The shortage of seating led to hundreds of people queuing for hours!

If this was not bad enough I was permanently operating twelve chefs short of my full compliment due to challenges within the personnel dept and their recruitment processes. As the restaurant was bursting and the queue backing up as far as the eye could see, most frustrated guests would opt to return to their rooms and order room service.

Logical to many people but unfortunately the kitchen that looked after the main dining room also looked after room service as well. If this was not bad enough, room service was equally short staffed having only three waiters to look after the 1,098 rooms. The hotel was so big that once a waiter was dispatched with the food it would take them 15 minutes to reach the average room followed by a 15 min return journey with no satellite kitchen en-route. Needless to say room service needed to be booked days in advance for any hope of obtaining any service whatsoever!

If this was not bad enough the new high-tech kitchen had the latest safety sensors, ensuring that a complete gas cut off switch was triggered at the slightest draft! When the gas cut off it naturally needed a specialist to reconnect the system and to return the kitchen back to full scale action. The whole process taking around thirty minutes.

A one off gas outage could be understandable but this sensitive pipe would leave us stranded three to four times an evening, causing all the imaginable upsets in the process. With 4,000 customers begging to be served, no staff and then no gas, life could not get any worse.

With food orders pumping out of the points of sale system, rolling out like toilet roll, I as management had added responsibilities such as being a member of the first response team, who in case of emergency was called out to investigate with immediate action any potential fire risk.

As I left my gasless kitchen and screaming guests I would race fanatically towards the room to assess the situation, all of these I am pleased to say turned out to be false alarms, sadly the battles encountered within my own domain were real and can only be described as none other than real Kitchen Nightmares!

Alan Coxon ~ food archaeologist and celebrity chef
www.alancoxon.com

Kitchen Nightmares of Gayle Hartley:

I love baked potatoes, especially cooked on the fire until the skin is crispy and the insides are perfectly squashy. Combined with butter and cheese it is heaven for me.

Not long ago we were barbecuing and I was sick of boiled potatoes or potato salad so I thought I'd do baked potatoes. The coals were too hot to cook them from scratch so I started them off in the oven to be finished off in the hot BBQ coals.

When the potatoes were almost done, I wrapped them in foil and put them under the BBQ grill to crisp off while we were cooking the meat. The meat took slightly longer than expected but it didn't matter as I like my potato skins crispy. After about half an hour of cooking we served up the meat and I got out the potatoes, took them into the kitchen and unwrapped them . . . there in front of me were six little black tennis balls! The potatoes had shrunk a little and burnt but I thought I could just scrape off the black bits! I wish! When I tried to cut one in half the whole thing just disintegrated in my hands. They were all the same so we had tomatoes instead!

Traditional Spanish paella - no problem! Humble baked potato . . .

Gayle Hartley
www.orceserranohams.com
www.livinginacave.com

Kitchen Nightmares of Jonathan Arthur:

At the age of eleven, that's many years ago, I was enrolled in Callington Grammar school, in darkest Cornwall. I have to say it was a perfectly fine school with dedicated if somewhat eccentric teachers and a generally enlightened outlook.

It did however stick to many of the traditions of the day. Sports and metal work teachers tended to have a military background and short manly nicknames that they fondly thought the pupils wished to call them . . . Skip, Gunner and Pip are three that come to mind. They also included in their lessons a ritual humiliation and jovial sadism that was no doubt was supposed to be good for our character but was something I could never see much fun in. The result was that I, which was a first for a male student, opted to take lessons in domestic science rather than metalwork or woodwork.

Domestic science had nothing scientific about it but the class was all girls, apart from my friend Cobb and I, which was just fine by me.

Our first lesson was hardly challenging. The menu was beans on toast and cocoa. Each pair of aspirant cooks had a work surface, sink and gas stove. After successfully getting the beans out of the can and into a pan, the milk into another pan and the already sliced bread under the grill I couldn't help thinking this was all just too easy, and in the same way that the first officer on the Titanic might have nonchalantly called for some ice, I asked Cobb to look for some plates for our meal.

As he crouched down to look in the cupboards next to the stove a number of things started to happen in quick succession. First, realising that the beans were, to put it mildly, over cooked, I tried to scrape them off the bottom of the pan, not noticing that the milk was on the point of boiling over and that the already smoking toast had burst into flames.

Luckily, or perhaps not, our teacher had spotted the situation and strode purposely over to take control of the situation. What she could not have realised was that one of us (we both later blamed the other) had managed to switch on the gas oven without lighting it. The pressure of the gas slightly pushing open the oven door.

It might have been the lit rings on the top or a piece of falling, incandescent toast but the oven chose that moment to explode setting light to Miss Pendragon's light blue and white check house coat, which went up in a sheet of flame leaving molten plastic stuck to her clothes, arms and nyloned legs. The force of the blast also knocked the cupboard off hitting Cobb's head momentarily stunning him so he was in no condition to avoid the boiling milk that now jumped off the stove . . . it did spring him back into consciousness quite quickly though!

With what I still believe to be great presence of mind I doused both thoroughly with a bucket of water that had previously been used for cleaning the floor but I am saddened to say was never thanked by either of them.

Jonathan Arthur ~ chef and cooking vacation organiser
www.italywithrelish.it

. . . there are more to come!

If you have a kitchen nightmare to contribute then email info@hub-uk.com

Published 19 July 2007