6 | Who's afraid of the deep-fat fryer
Sharp knives and hot oil
Thanks for reading On Hunger, my newsletter exploring food, creativity and desire. It goes out every other Wednesday, but sometimes other things just get in the way. I took some time off to line up more recipes and conversations with creative minds. If you like what you read, follow me on Instagram, or share this with a friend. I’ll be shaking things up a bit over the next few weeks, with shorter posts and more time out of my own kitchen. If you have any comments, I’d love to hear from you.
Dare I say it? For the last few weeks, I’ve felt a little… optimistic.
Carefully so, of course. If you know me in real life, you’ll know upbeat positivity isn’t exactly my personal brand. But something has lifted in my heart, after months heavy with sickness, isolation and financial worry. Something has shifted. It could be that I’m finally going back to work in two weeks, and giddy on the capitalist promise of a fat paycheck and a sense of purpose. Or is it the lido opening again? I’ve plunged my atrophied limbs in its cold water twice now, drunk on sunshine, rhythmic breathing and that buoyant feeling of weightlessness.
Or it could be the deep-fat fryer.
It’s a cheap, clunky thing. A metal base, a heating element, one rickety basket and a temperature dial. I purchased it on a whim just before the end of lockdown. I had vague, hungry thoughts about crispy noodles, triple-threat (tender, crispy, golden) fries, salty fritters too hot to handle. More importantly, I wanted to make the kitchen mine again: for months, my flatmate had worked from its dining table, and he had finally moved out.
We never had a fryer when I was growing up – just a wok teetering casually close to a naked flame, or thick pans full of glistening oil, swirling ever faster as the temperature rose. My mother thought nothing of these first-degree accidents waiting to happen. She’d make butterfly prawns when we had guests over, or lower spring rolls into the bubbling fat. My father would roll up his sleeves, showing off the marks where hot fat had seared into his arms. I’d stare at the strange flaccid skin, the way it wrinkled and sagged. Thankfully, he was never in the kitchen for very long.
It’s been years since I’ve fried anything – the curse of London’s tiny shared kitchens. But now! I throw open the door to the garden, lock the cat safely in the living room. I fry pakoras, fragrant with curry leaves and mustard seeds, plump gooseberry doughnuts happily bobbing in the pan, panko-crumbed avocados destined for tacos. I pick courgette flowers from the pots by my front door, stuff them with prawns, coat them in ice-cold batter. I burn my mouth out of pure greed. There’s joy to be found, always, in the simple things – crunchy, golden, tender morsels shared with friends and neighbours. There’s something to be said for good tools, too, how they make life just a little breezier. This week’s interviewee, Tom Saunders of Kitchen Provisions, has built a life and a business around this notion. Less fear, more fun. Something to keep us all going.
This week…
Read The future of food media is in your inbox
Learn The art of egg fried rice with Uncle Roger
Long For Mama Wang’s cooking
Courgette flower dumplings
Firstly, courgette flower fritters look like misshapen aliens and are impossible to photograph. Secondly, I first made these while intoxicated in the presence of good friends and chilled wine. I only scalded my lips, but please, do be careful when mixing hot oil and booze. I called these dumplings because the filling reminds me of har gow – Cantonese dumplings stuffed with prawn. For this batch, I experimented with frozen flowers, picked fastidiously from my two plants over the course of a couple of weeks. They were a bit too soggy to hold the filling well, so if you can, source fresh ones. My local Italian deli on West Green Road sells big packets of them in season, but you could also try your luck at greengrocers, farmers’ markets and Whole Foods, if you’re made of money. They should be seasoned generously and eaten straight from the fryer, with something sharp and fiery to dip them into.
10–12 courgette flowers
Vegetable or peanut oil for frying
For the filling:
275g of raw prawns, shelled and deveined
4 cloves of garlic, minced
20g of ginger, peeeled and minced
1 heaped tbsp of chopped chives
1 tbsp of light soy sauce
1 tbsp Shaoxing wine or sherry
Pepper to taste
For the batter:
2 egg whites
4 tbsp plain flour, plus extra flour to coat the courgette flowers
Juice of a lemon
A generous splash of ice-cold sparkling water
Ice cubes
Chop the prawns finely, or mix them in a food processor until you get a paste that’s still somewhat coarse, but holds together well. Fold in the remaining filling ingredients, then stuff the flowers with the mixture. Open them up gently, and be generous with the filling. Wrap the petals around it, twisting their tips at the top.
Heat your oil to 170C.
Whisk the egg whites until stiff, then lightly add in the flour, lemon juice and sparkling water. The batter doesn’t need to be smooth, but it does need to be cold: an ice cube or two added to the batter make for the crispiest fritters.
When you’re ready to fry, coat the “dumplings” lightly in flour, then dip them in the batter and lower them quickly into the hot oil. They’ll need two or three minutes before they’re fished out, drained on kitchen paper and devoured. Don’t burn your fingers.
Meet… Tom Saunders, Kitchen Provisions
Tom looks a bit coy in this photo, but he’s a larger-than-life character, usually found behind a pile of wet stones in his Stoke Newington shop. I’d brought in my knife to be sharpened, and we got chatting about Japan, my mother’s ancient carbon steel knives, and the artful jumble of graters, boards, vintage pressure cookers and other mysterious accessories stocked by Kitchen Provisions. It’s obvious much of the shop’s appeal comes from Tom’s colourful personality and passion, so it’s a shame I had to cut his tales for length. Here are the highlights.
You’ve got a nice booming voice, so my voice memo app should work perfectly fine.[Laughs]
So we’re standing in your shop on Church Street. How long have you been here?Coming up three years now. I’ve had Kitchen provisions for six years. Me and my other half Helen set it up six years ago, just importing a few things. I actually tried to work out last night when I quit my job. And I couldn't remember.
That’s a good sign.
Yeah! I quit my job, and the next weekend I had my first market stall down. Three years ago, we got our first bricks and mortar shop – I mean it was a glorified shed in Netil Market. And then, in the second year we opened this shop. It snowballed from there, and just over a year ago we opened in Coal Drops Yard with Jake, who part-owns that shop.
A classic sort of Hackney story.
Yeah yeah yeah! I hated my old job as an estate agent, loved this, thought “let’s have a go”. I had cheffed, then left cheffing because I wasn’t earning enough. When all my mates moved down to London earning decent money, I was doing the whole 90 hours a week on 20 grand a year thing. You have to devote your life to it and it wasn’t for me at the time. So I looked for something that was paying me the most money humanly possible, for doing the least amount of work. Being an estate agent 100% ticks that box. But I loved this world and just felt that it wasn’t done very well in London.
What was your vision for the shop?
For it to look as much like our house as humanly possible [laughs]. To only sell stuff that I would have at home. I go shopping for me. I think that’s what this is. Everything I have on the wall, every knife here I'd take home. I'd say 90% of the vintage stuff in here is handpicked by me. We go out to Japan and source it. And it’s fun. A lot of the ethos of this company is slightly tongue-in-cheek, like proper professional advice, but in a take-the-piss manner. Like the absolute opposite to my experience in Japan. And I love it out there, I obviously love the product. But it is so serious. No dicking around. I think that’s one of the reasons we get taken out there. They just look at us and think: does this exist?
In Japanese culture, if you buy a high-end knife and you’re an end user, that’s a bit offensive. If you go and blow £1000 on a chef’s knife, that’s a bit nuts. Here, we don’t have that. Appreciation is everything.
Is there something about fetishising cooking in our culture?
Yeah. And that’s my biggest enemy. It’s cool, isn’t it. It’s cool to cook. Japanese shit’s cool. Whether it’s these knives, or wabi-sabi, or… what was that Danish one last year?
Hygge?
We’re very much in that now, aren’t we? Simplify your life, slow down, buy once… But, we just care about what we care about. I have to lean over every so often and say, “Do I have to tell you, when you buy a pair of moccasins, that you don’t climb a mountain in them?” And they’re like, “Well no, that’s stupid.” Yet you know what a bread knife is, but you just don’t care, do you. You don’t care that there might be some rules to this world.
What happens to the bread knives?
So they’ll just take this knife [picks up expensive Japanese knife] and use it on hard sourdough bread to cut it, and it destroys them. And they wonder why like, “Well, it's a high end knife it should be able to do that”. And then the funny part is they’re like “I think this knife is faulty?” I think the Westerner attached to the end of it might be the problem in this equation. So it's funny.
Am I wrong in thinking this is quite a male world?
On the outskirts… Japan is the most misogynistic country I've ever been to in my life. Me and my other half will be sitting there. She speaks Japanese. She wears the trousers. And yet still, they're like, “Thomas-san, you need more housewife knives” and you're like, “Holy shit”. But that’s Japan. Over here, we call it mansplaining. Men don’t understand. There's something very primitive where they're like, “Well of course I understand how to sharpen a knife, I mean fucking hell I light a fire every night by hand. Like every day I'm wrestling a bear and…" Helen gets it worse. She'll be sitting where I am and guys are just explaining this world to her.
How did you learn to sharpen knives?
Repetition. Master Youtuberoo. I probably do 14 hours a day. People think it's some mystical, black-magic art form. It’s grinding metal off a knife and forming a triangle. People can sharpen scissors and, mate, it's two of these [gestures at knives]. Does it have a big shiny bit on it? You stick that against a stone, rub it back and forth.
Do you think we've lost a bit of that magic of learning from someone else?
Yes… I think there’s worse things though, much worse things. I think being taught is brilliant. People just can’t think anymore. Not mechanically, not technically. There’s one variable: your angle. If you’re not doing it right… You don’t need to come in and ask me that. You’ve got to practice.
I just watched you give a customer a lesson, and at the end you said “Go away, give it a try. See what happens.”
Yeah. It’s not really hard. You just have to want to do it. I've really changed how I teach now, it’s not me telling you how to do it. If you understand what we're trying to do, then you can go and solve the problem. I'm not some sharpening god, it’s not do as I do. I don't care what you do. I care about the results of what you do. Is the knife sharp? Are you maintaining the geometry? Are you thinking about it? I get asked a lot, “How did you learn to repair chips?” Because you idiots chip your knives. I don’t chip my knives.
I’ve chipped my knives.
Yeah! I learned because I care about this world. I feel privileged to be able to sell what I sell. It annoys me – don’t get me wrong – it really pisses me off when they get broken. But it’s my right, I think – and that’s one of the big differences – it’s my right to fix them properly. It’s my right to put them back as they should be. People want quick, cheap fixes. No, can’t do it. You bought something special; let's look after it. Of course accidents happen, but let's get away from this quick-fix mentality. Let's do things how they're meant to be done.
What’s your top knife?
I think one of these is going to be mine. Cow sword, Japanese answer to a Western chef’s knife. The one most people will have seen, bar the santoku. It just looks like a normal knife. It’s not like the other stuff in here. It's not got a pretentious handle on it, or made out of, like, unicorn horn.
What’s special about it?
The people in the know – people who own knife shops and have a vast knife collection, geeks on YouTube, people who have way way way more money than I do – they say it’s the best user knife ever made. Not the best knife, but the best if you just want to put it on a board and you want to use a knife how it should be. They reckon that this is the pinnacle. And they just don't really make any of them. I've never tried to order one. There's no point. And yet two of them are in this cabinet.
They just materialised magically one day?
[Laughs] A guy contacted me. So the more I do this, the more I go to Japan, the more people contact me. I used to go out literally door-knocking trying to get this stuff. When I say wholesaler it sounds unromantic. Like we're talking one dude who speaks Japanese and handles knives, who happens to sell on behalf of these people. So I got a late-night email, like, “Do you want this"?” [Tom pulls out something that looks like a sabre, in a case lined with red velvet] As you can imagine, I’d had a few drinks, I was like… the fuck is that? I quickly looked on the internet, there's none available in the world. Yeah of course I want one of those!
What is it?
Sakimaru. It’s the most stupid thing in the world. It’s an enormous slicing knife. It’s not the sort of stuff I normally sell. It’s more of a “I can do this, check me out.” You could imagine a beef wellington, at a hugely expensive dinner, with the chef in front of you… I wouldn't be surprised if that was bought by a private chef and put through the owner on a boat or something like that. So it gets used once a year just to look cool. To go back to what you were talking about: a man will buy this.
Yes. I mean, there’s something a bit phallic about it.
[Laughs]. Absolutely.
But you took it!
It all went downhill after that, like deeply downhill. And then several grand later… [Tom pulls out more knives]
Oooooh.
That’s honyaki, so a true-fired blade, with Mount Fuji on there [He points out the silhouette of Mount Fuji etched on the blade]. So that’s rare. That line is called a hamon. Without going too far down this rabbit hole, it’s a differential hardening line. It shows that the steel above that line is softer, the steel below it is hard. They do it with a weird clay mixture on the back of it. Let's leave it at that, because otherwise I will literally talk about that for hours.
You must have missed your trips to Japan, these last few months.
Yeah, I love it there. Just being in the middle of nowhere, and well out of your comfort zone. It’s fun. Where you have to – there’s no other option – you have to drink two high-strength beers at about 6 or 7 o’clock to get the courage to go out. I live for that. It’s so funny. If you can laugh at yourself, Japan is hilarious. Like when you walk in and everyone… everything stops. But are they not the most welcoming people in the entire world? And then the language barrier breaks down, you’re buying everyone shots, all the drinks are coming to you and you’re not asking for them, and the weird dishes…
Well, passion is a communal language. Which brings us to a question I’m starting to ask all my interviewees, which is: what are you hungry for?
Knowledge sharing I suppose? People being able to appreciate what I appreciate, and that doesn’t have to be… Look. Hungry, it could be different things. Right now, let’s earn lots of money and get this business off. I've run it for six years off passion, I wouldn't mind lining my pockets. Let’s go with the dirty answer. But what would make my life easier? People realising how amazing what they’re getting is. This was made a by a dude who’s done it 30,000 times. It’s nuts.
It’s a bloody hard question that. Make loads of money… that’s unromantic. But do it in a romantic way.
Kitchen Provisions offers while-you-wait knife sharpening sessions and lessons in its Stoke Newington shop. Book online. The Coal Drops Yard shop is equally delightful, particularly if you’re in the market for handsome ceramics, vintage serving platters or a large plastic pigeon. I bought my bread knife there. No more chips for me.
That’s it for today. Coming up soon: PR, growing pains and sausages.