the times | Thursday July 30 2020 1GT 7
the table
unnecessary bits of kit. That’s not
true in my case. My pastime is a
simple one: just me and the grill
and a box of matches.
Although of course I did need to
order two jumbo-sized bags of oak
and hickory lump charcoal and
several boxes of natural fire starters.
And as well as the cast-iron grill,
I have a stainless steel one that
can be used with or without the
diffuser plate, which enables
indirect cooking.
The pizza stone has been much
in use, but I have yet to deploy the
vertical roaster that you can stick up
a chicken’s backside to cook it. All
these are merely the key essentials,along with my burger flippers,
skewers, alder boards (for grilling
salmon), thermometer, extra-long
tongs with a magnetic clasp and
cleaning brushes. They are stored
in a modest 6ft chest behind the
garden shed.
A cynic might point out that I
could grill burgers in the kitchen and
it would take a few minutes. “If you
want to burn food, why don’t you just
do it in the oven?” my 14-year-old
daughter asked the other day.
I need to spend the rest of the
summer educating her. It’s all about
the superior taste of flame-grilled
food, and suggestions that I am
pig-headedly committed to an
absurdly unsustainable and polluting
method of cooking because I am
motivated by strange atavistic desires
are inaccurate and unkind.F
or some men the past
few months have
been transformative.
They have fulfilled
long-term fantasies
to write novels or learn
Swahili, or turned the
spare bedroom into
a gym and emerged with
the biceps of a prisoner
serving a life sentence
(I’m using the word
“transformative” loosely
here).
Other men — overfed,
underexercised and
on the sofa — have gone
backwards. I have regressed
about 10,000 years. I have
become a caveman: fire and
flesh are the only things
that matter now.
Last year my in-laws gave
us a Big Green Egg. This is
a large ceramic barbecue
that can be used for
grilling, baking, smoking
and launching low-orbit satellites.
During the sunny spring
I dedicated myself to getting to grips
with this temperamental beast.
Perhaps it was a mistake to
begin on Easter Sunday, a beautiful
early-lockdown day when people
were quietly enjoying their gardens.
Within minutes of ignition our
neighbourhood resembled the
scene of a Battle of Waterloo
re-enactment when the new guy
on the special effects team has lost
control of the smoke machine.
As the wind changed suddenly and
I was left temporarily blinded and
coughing from the smoke, my wife
sneakily whipped the rib of beef off
the Egg and stuck it in the kitchen
oven. I shut down the Egg, slunk
back inside and let the neighbours
venture out again.
Controlling the temperature of
the Egg relies on careful adjustment
of the vents and the chimney draft.
It is easy to find that the temperature
has suddenly dropped — or has
soared upwards and off the top
of the scale on the thermometer.
Then it is like trying to cook on
Vesuvius circa AD79. The steaks
are blackened as soon as they touch
the grill.
Over months, with a lot of practice,
I managed to provide my guests
with edible burgers and sausages
that were mostly recognisable
as sausages. We’ve eaten good fish
and pizza.
I now aspire to be able to
successfully time the cooking so
that the food from the grill is ready
within the same hour as other
dishes being prepared conventionally
inside the house. This is something
that I believe master Egg-heads can
achieve. I’ve been watching a lot of
them on YouTube. They talk about
cuts of meat in frankly lascivious
terms: “Phwoarr! This beauty is
lookin’ good.”
Some men with new hobbies
become unhealthily obsessed with
buying new, expensive, often totallybe the judge?’ Then he stuck his finger
in it, tasted it and told me not to make
such a fuss.”
In another episode Tzortzoglou
was asked to cook for the explorer
Ranulph Fiennes in a segment filmed
at the august Royal Society in London.
She was overawed. She felt her pastry
was inadequate for the first man to
cross Antarctica on foot.
“Sir Ranulph is an incredible icon
and so I was concerned about my
kataifi pastry in which I intended to
wrap him some prawns. It must be
fresh, but mine had been frozen and
was very brittle to handle.” I point out
that Fiennes sawed off the
fingers on his left hand with
a hacksaw after suffering
frostbite on a North Pole
expedition in 2000. Would
he really notice? “Well,
that is not the question.
I would notice.”
Tzortzoglou is a force of
nature. Again, meraki is the
difference between good
and great. Fiennes
gratefully ate her prawn
starter and afterwards
asked her to sign his menu.
After she reached the
all-female final, the show’s
producers asked the
remaining contestants to
film an at-home family
segment to be shown in
the event of victory.
However, there is a three-
month gap between
filming and transmission
of the MasterChef final,
so Tzortzoglou told her
family that she had, in
fact, lost.
“I had to keep making
excuses for going back
down to London when
my part in the show was
supposedly over,” she says. “It was very
tough. When they finally broadcast
the final I think there was quite a lot
of genuine surprise.”
Her stepson Gavin had taken part in
filming the family segment. He works
with the British rock band Mumford &
Sons and saw the result while they
were on tour in America. “His initial
reaction was a text that said, ‘F***
you,’ because I’d lied to him, but I did
eventually get a lovely photo of him
and the whole band jumping to
celebrate on stage.”
Tzortzoglou includes in Under the
Olive Tree stories that recall a lost
world. Before she moved to Athens
from Crete aged eight, she had never
seen her parents buy vegetables.
Everything — from asparagus and
beans in March to artichokes, onions
and courgettes in April and apricots,
melons and cherries in May — grew
around them. Reading the book, you
sense her mother’s influence
throughout.
“My father died aged 48, so my
mother gave us everything,”
Tzortzoglou says. “My cooking
reflects that. I’m as happy with a
beautiful simple salad as one of the
fancier dishes, like a celebratory loin
of venison with chestnuts with
celeriac puree.”
However, telling Tzortzoglou that
her book is fascinating is not enough.
“Tell me, what have you cooked from
it? Does the book actually work?” she
asks brusquely. “There is nothing
worse than good-looking cookbooks
which, when you actually try and
make the stuff, it doesn’t deliver.”
I promise her that I will make
something from it and report back.
“Good. I never had children and I feel
it’s important to create a legacy. This is
not an ego trip for me. I’m 62. What
am I going to do with celebrity? Four
months ago I thought I was dying. I
want to make the most of my second
chance to share with people the
wonders of the land I came from.”Help! I’m totally obsessed
with my Big Green Egg
By Damian Whitworth
As my
symptoms
developed,
I couldn’t
even stand
in the
shower
Damian Whitworth at home
with his new pride and joyin Greek cuisine
Serves 4 as a light lunch, with
a few green leaves
Ingredients
18 peeled and cleaned raw
king prawns
50ml extra virgin olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
3 spring onions, chopped
2 peppers (1 red, 1 green),
de-seeded and chopped into
small dice
1 red chilli, de-seeded and
finely chopped
5 medium tomatoes (I prefer
to buy them on the vine),
skinned, de-seeded and
chopped
1 tsp caster sugar
Pinch of dried oregano
50ml ouzo
250g feta cheese, crumbled
2 tbsp chopped fresh parsleyMethod
1 Season the prawns with salt
and pepper, and put to one
side. Heat a couple of
tablespoons of oil in a sauté
pan, then add the onion andcook for a minute or two over
a medium heat.
2 Add the garlic, spring
onions, peppers and as much
chilli as you wish, and cook for
a couple of minutes more. Add
the tomatoes, season, and add
the sugar and dried oregano.
Cover the pan and cook for 10
to 15 min.
3 Heat another couple of
tablespoons of oil in a separate
frying pan and cook the
prawns for a minute on each
side. Pour over the ouzo and
continue cooking for a minute
or so to evaporate the alcohol.
4 Transfer the prawns to the
sauté pan, sprinkle over the
feta, then cover the pan and
continue cooking for another
5 min. Don’t overcook the
prawns or they will toughen.
Sprinkle with the remaining
tablespoon of oil and the
chopped parsley, and serve.
Under the Olive Tree: Recipes
From My Greek Kitchen by
Irini Tzortzoglou (£25,
Headline) is out nowBoozy king prawns
t f a f e h t I n d a g s a a p r f s t H m f o s f f e d m
B ki
I have become a
caveman: flesh
and fire are all
that matters now