My year with Tom

The back story... 

When I received my copy as a Christmas 2020 gift, I quickly realised how far out of my culinary depth I was with this book.
Now, I thought I was a good cook, but this was more than a step up, this was way beyond the level of cooking I had expected! Time to up my game.

Due to the pandemic, and like many thousands of others who work in Hospitality, I had been made redundant from my position as a consultant for a revenue management technology company. I wanted to focus on finding a new job, but at a time when corporate hospitality jobs were unavailable, this book played a huge part in helping me to focus on being the best that you can every day, it really did help me.

I'm now back in a great full time role, working for a luxury hotel company based in the UK, and now get to hang out with my own Michelin Star chef team. Without the work I have put into understanding this book, I don't think I could have landed the job I now have, leading F&B related technology projects.

So, for those of you that don't know, the Hand and Flowers is a 2 Michelin Star pub, run by Tom Kerridge in the leafy town of Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Tom is a very, very good chef, and this book has changed the way I will look at fine dining and Michelin Star food forever. The work and the passion that goes into these dishes justifies the price that these restaurants can command. As a I said to a former housemate (who is also a Michelin starred chef himself), to achieve this level of perfection, every plate, every component, every service, every day, is a calling that few people can aspire to.

 

So - My goal was to complete every recipe in this book as faithfully as possible, before the end of 2021. It will be a miracle if I can make it happen as the dessert section terrifies me.  

On the plus side, I live in Belgium, where some of the more "unusual" ingredients, (such as a half pigs head, rabbits, venison, caul fat, pig trotters...) can be routinely found at local supermarkets, but this book has also made me a good friend of my butcher, the local fishmonger on market days, and knowing where to source produce from other local grocers, who have all got used to the sight of their favourite English customer asking for an increasingly obscure range of products, with a few lost in translation moments... As a result, there is now a video of me trying to prepare bone marrow canoes using my angle grinder as the butcher obviously hadn't had the chance to read Tom's book either. 

I am also blessed to be surrounded by some incredible local producers of pork, beef, organic veg and alike, so using these fantastic local ingredients and showcasing them using Tom's recipes has been a real pleasure. 

For some of the other more unusual ingredients, such as Trisol, Dextrose, dehydrated pork skin, transglutaminase (aka "meat glue"), i have sourced these from specialist distributors, or from general online grocery stores when I needed things like Marmite or Black Treacle. Brexit has made buying these products increasingly difficult, as for one item I ended up paying more in postage and taxes than I did for the product itself. Lessons learnt. 

To complete the recipes in this book, I have also invested in a few useful cooking implements and equipment, such as a sous vide immersion heater and vacuum sealer (don't bother trying anything in this book without one), a new deep fat fryer (my first attempt at triple cooked chips in the airfryer just made me sad), an ISI charger to make foam, lots and lots of muslin to strain sauces, and a few new nice presentation tools like an apple corer, fondant cutters. 

So, after my initial shock, I slowly started feeling my way through the book, figured out where my first line of attack would be, and by mid-February, I was ready to start on the Chateau Edwards version of "My Year with Tom".

Thanks to Tom, this book has made me a better cook.

I hope I get to eat in the Hand and Flowers one day, but for now, I have to go, there's a lot of food to prep.