Don’t know about you, but I’ve long been the antichrist to the godlike creationary chefs with their squeezie bottles, foam accelerators and aerosol cans – hey if I wanted foam with my meal I’d have ordered a cappuccino and life is way too short for peach dust and apple caviar. In any case I’ve always thought of myself as a tasty chef rather than a drizzly one. So this whole current trend to ‘deconstruct’ everything drives me mad.
Take the old black forest gateaux for example. It was a dark sumptuous sponge laced with kirsch marinated cherries, thick fresh cream and real chocolate until Sarah Lee got hold of it and turned it into the plastic frozen glace fake chocolate face flannel that we all know and hate. But wait… that was before the deconstructed version… Now, should you take your sanity into your own hands and dare to order there’s every likelihood you’ll end up with a pool of deconstructed chocolate (eg melted) with a deconstructed marinated cherry (eg a fresh one and an unopened bottle of kirsch – useful should you be short at home), a pile of flour, cocoa powder and a quails egg (cooked of course– we don’t want you suing for salmonella or something nasty again now do we?).
For Christ sake it’s a cake – the clue is in the title Black Forest Gateaux – honest look it up , it means CAKE! And that’s another thing – some of them have even deconstructed the name to BFG. Sorry, but in my household that stands for Big Friendly Giant which when teamed with Black Forest Gateaux gives me nightmares similar to that of my first hearing of Peter and the Wolf.
Ok, so many of you out there will say I’m just jealous being a small unknown little pub restaurant chef with only a few gongs to my name, oh and a girl to boot (Once the face of one of our customers fell when after several meals she finally met me – Oh, I thought you were a proper man chef!), but I’m going to stick by my pans on this one. There’s nothing wrong with extreme experimental cooking; of course you’re never going to eat it everyday and it’s great for special occasions, but why does it have to be a deconstruction? Why not just take the responsibly for creating a new dish, admittedly based on flavour combinations that are well proven, rather than trying to say it’s something you clearly don’t want it to be recognised as being anyway? Is it that as customers we are so out of our depth that if we don’t see some scrap of wording we recognise we just won’t try it. Sort of a sneaky way of getting us to try out a dish and so educate our taste buds to new unexplored flavours… er sorry no, these are old tried and tasted flavour combinations…. So in fact a sneaky way of getting us to try eating new presentations and revelling in the artistry. Not unlike munching on a prawn cocktail deconstructed into a sandwich whilst reading Elle Decoration….
