Day 3: Real hens don't eat quiche

An order of work is an apparently essential weapon in any chef’s armoury. It details what you are going to do and when. You start with the moment you serve your food and work backwards. You will generally be making at least two or three different dishes so you need to interweave their components. Some things should be left very late, others should be done first. How hard can it be?

Well, it isn’t actually that hard. But it took me a lot longer than I thought it would - 6 sheets of A4 before I really nailed it. My dishes today were Quiche Lorraine and a Red and Yellow Tomato Salad with Basil. As you will quickly learn, I don’t really like eggs. So I don’t eat quiche, let alone make it. In fact I loathe it, not least because it seems to me that pouring a load of eggs over some bin-fodder that you have prised off the bottom of the fridge is no way to carry on a gastronomic tradition. However, even I would be pushed to make a quiche sans oeuf.

We are broken down into four kitchens and in each kitchen you work as pairs either side of a hob, with another pair facing you across the worktop. There is plenty of camaraderie and lots of support and sharing of ingredients and advice. And there is so much space to work - it is a completely different experience to anything I have encountered before.

I kick off by making pastry, which I haven’t done for years. I think we did it in Home Economics at High School too but we were too busy frying kippers trying to stink the first floor out to notice. So, pastry in the fridge and it’s time to break some eggs. No drama here, I can handle the handling. In a little while I face a dilemma though - with all the ingredients in the mix I need to taste for seasoning. I can do this raw, or get out a frying pan and drop teaspoonfuls in there to taste when cooked. I can’t be arsed to do that and I’ve never been one to waste a pan so I go raw. And it tastes fine. Actually it tastes better than fine. It tastes good.

It tasting good can be attributed to two things - the fact that I am a culinary maestro who instinctively seasons everything perfectly (or just got lucky), and the fact that the recipe contains rather a lot of cream. Cream that three hours early was sloshing around the inside of a cow’s sagging udder. Also, the bacon was excellent and I blanched it very quickly before frying it taking a slight edge off its saltiness. I never do that at home.

It gets a bit tight towards the end of the cooking time, mainly because I omitted a cooling stage from my order of work. The pastry holds up okay though and the quiche has a lovely browning colour on top. It lacks a little firmness but makes up for it in taste. It gets a slow nod of approval from my taster as I stand and watch like some headlight blinded Masterchef contestant and I have nailed my first quiche. I even tuck in myself.

Now, everyone in the world bangs on about ingredients. Everyone. You can’t polish a turd, they say. Well, you can actually, but it is still a turd. The tomatoes in my Red and Yellow Tomato Salad do not need polishing. They are the sweetest, juiciest, tastiest tomatoes I have ever encountered (we have the hens to thank for that). I under season them as a result, and tear my basil leaves too early so they blacken. The whole thing still tastes great, no thanks to me.

By lunch I have just about had enough of quiche, so I take on some soup, a little mushroom tart, salad and coffee. I have to skip out early as I am on hen feeding duty today. Basically, everything compostable and organic gets thrown in buckets in each kitchen, which then get emptied into an old skip. The hens feed on this (99% of it probably just goes straight in your bin at home) then shit it out and it gets used to fertilise the whole farm. There are, quite literally, hundreds of the little fuckers.

It’s a cliché of course but the whole circle of life thing is very much at work here. It is easy to achieve in this environment - once the effort of setting everything up subsides it is actually far more convenient to recycle and re-use than to waste. Translating that to a city or a busy house gets a lot harder. Unless you have a couple of chickens pecking around your living room of course.

After lunch a cheese importer rolled a 40kg Parmigianino Reggiano wheel into the room and talked us through its origins. From a producer called La Villa in an exclusively organic valley outside Parma. Each one is made from 160 gallons of milk, with the cream and ricotta removed before it is packed in the moulds. It sits a while then spends 14 days in a salt solution before being transferred to racks where it remains for two and a half years at 16ºC and is cleaned every week. Needless to say it tasted incredible, less salty than you would expect, but creamy and lingering and worthy of being sprinkled over something special or gorged on its own.

The highlight of the rest of the afternoon was our instructor’s dry wit and wonderful turn of phrase. Sadly it was not enough to light up the shadow cast by what seems to me an abusive use of cream and chorizo in a pasta sauce that I have to make tomorrow.

As I sat there watching this unfold in the mirror my mind began to wander. I thought of the bacon I used this morning, and how much finer it would be to take some of the crushed chillies that were inveigling their way into a pasta of zucchini, French beans and peas, mix them with some lardons of that bacon in a pan with some onions and those tomatoes and rustle up my Monday night favourite Bucatini all’Amatriciana.

I came here to learn how to cook, and that is what I am being taught - the techniques of cooking. I didn’t expect to fall in love with every recipe I have to make, and I am not the only one questioning the cream, butter and salt approach. But if I sharpen the tools then I can cut my own way later on. There are a lot of hungry hens round here that need feeding and a few shredded recipes won’t harm them in the least.