Top Gear Pho
'God loves a trier', so they say in which case Jeremy Clarkson deserves top marks for having a go at making Pho, a tasty noodle broth and the national dish of Vietnam.
Quite why it turned out so badly is a mystery to me, but in my years of experience in the kitchen it is always advisable to get most of the cooking out of the way before popping any wine corks.
When a fat man gets suspended there’s only one thing to do – get cooking
By Jeremy Clarkson - The Sunday Times
We read often about active and busy people who die the day after they retire because they simply can’t cope with the concept of relaxation. So as I seem to have a bit of time on my hands at the moment, I thought it would be a good idea to take up some kind of hobby.
I began by watching daytime television, and soon I felt myself starting to slip away. So I turned over to the news and it was all about a not very interesting fat man who had been suspended from his not very important job. But watching the fat man made me hungry and that’s when the penny dropped: I’d take up cooking.
I’ve never really bothered with cooking in the past because it would have meant using a recipe book. And as a man I can’t do that, for the same reason I can’t use instruction manuals or listen when someone is giving me directions; because it means admitting that someone out there knows something I don’t.
And besides, recipe books are full of beautifully shot photographs showing you what your food should look like when it’s finished. No, it won’t, because you haven’t painted everything with varnish and employed a stylist to make sure the sultanas are all in the right place. Recipe books are just cruel.
There’s another problem as well. Anyone who can cook is able to control ingredients using their minds. This means it’s witchcraft. Don’t argue with this because it is. You put butter and flour into an oven and somehow it comes out after a while as a delicious fluffy cake. How? Why didn’t it come out as a yorkshire pudding? Or a profiterole?
And what is the origin of cooking? I think it’s almost certainly sinister because, let’s face it, nobody accidentally stumbled on the recipe for bread. You take the bullet-hard and completely tasteless seed from a sheaf of wheat and grind it into a powder. Right. I see. And how many other seeds did they try before they arrived at that? “Morning darling, I’m trying laburnum today and . . .”
But anyway, they ended up with a powder that is still tasteless and inedible but they kept right on going, adding water until they had a paste. Which is still a long way from yummy. Undaunted, however, our early-days Marco Pierre White then thought, “Hmm. I’m on to something here. I think if I just add the stuff that gathers in my navel if I haven’t washed for a while, this will be delicious.”
The whole idea is as preposterous as the idea when someone one day decided that tobacco wasn’t very suitable as a sandwich filler but that it was lovely when rolled up in a piece of paper and smoked.
Anyway, I decided not to cook bread. Oh no. I decided to get ambitious and cook the most delicious thing I’ve eaten in my whole life: a pho.
A pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup that contains about 128 different ingredients, and unlike bread or smoking, it’s very easy to see how it was invented. Someone who was very poor heated some water and thought, “I wonder if this would taste nicer if I put some weeds in it? And maybe a bit of that cow that has died.”
Today of course the weeds have pretty names such as star anise and coriander and cost more than cocaine. Mostly they are also harder to find than cocaine. But luckily I’m holed up in a part of London where you stand in line behind Alan Rickman, who’s buying half a pound of myrrh, and Jimmy Page, who wants a bag of lemon-infused pistachio nuts.
My greengrocer was full of Damon Albarn, who was buying all the things he needed for an exotic chicken korma, and naturally the place had everything I needed for my even more exotic pho. It was the same story at the butcher, which stocked beef knuckle and bone marrow. And so within minutes my son and I had all we needed to start my hobby.
Except a pan. I do of course have pans, all of which are easily big enough to handle some beans or a bit of Heinz tomato soup. But to make a pho you need a dustbin, really. We had to resort to a wastepaper basket.
We also didn’t have a rolling pin, which we needed, apparently, to “lightly bruise” the ginger. But I did have a hammer, so we used that instead. It didn’t go particularly well because ginger, it turns out, can’t really be bruised. You tap it and it just sits there undamaged. So you use a bit more force and it falls to pieces.
The instruction manual said that during the four-hour cooking process we should also spoon off the scum that formed as the broth boiled. But there wasn’t any that I could see. This might have been down to the fact that I couldn’t see much of anything at all, or talk properly.
The problem is, when you are cooking, you are near a fridge and fridges have wine in them. Well, mine does, because I haven’t been drinking much for the past few weeks. And with time to kill until the broth was ready, I came over a bit Keith Floydish.
This may explain why I didn’t roast the bone marrow or the knuckle before boiling them to bits and it certainly explains what happened later. I hadn’t really been listening properly when the man in the greengrocer asked what sort of chillies I’d like. And I must have selected some that sat on the Scoville scale just above lava.
I only used one or maybe two but it was enough to ruin four hours of work. The only good news was that my spoilt broth was already in the wastebin.
I went to bed that night hungry, drunk and with an ulcerated, gangrenous mouth from a tasting sip that I’d taken to make sure I hadn’t used too many chillies.
I think, therefore, some people are not born to be cooks. They lack the special powers needed to influence the outcome of what is basically sorcery.
So my new hobby is called “going out to restaurants and letting people who know what they’re doing cook my food”.
We read often about active and busy people who die the day after they retire because they simply can’t cope with the concept of relaxation. So as I seem to have a bit of time on my hands at the moment, I thought it would be a good idea to take up some kind of hobby.
I began by watching daytime television, and soon I felt myself starting to slip away. So I turned over to the news and it was all about a not very interesting fat man who had been suspended from his not very important job. But watching the fat man made me hungry and that’s when the penny dropped: I’d take up cooking.
I’ve never really bothered with cooking in the past because it would have meant using a recipe book. And as a man I can’t do that, for the same reason I can’t use instruction manuals or listen when someone is giving me directions; because it means admitting that someone out there knows something I don’t.
And besides, recipe books are full of beautifully shot photographs showing you what your food should look like when it’s finished. No, it won’t, because you haven’t painted everything with varnish and employed a stylist to make sure the sultanas are all in the right place. Recipe books are just cruel.
There’s another problem as well. Anyone who can cook is able to control ingredients using their minds. This means it’s witchcraft. Don’t argue with this because it is. You put butter and flour into an oven and somehow it comes out after a while as a delicious fluffy cake. How? Why didn’t it come out as a yorkshire pudding? Or a profiterole?
And what is the origin of cooking? I think it’s almost certainly sinister because, let’s face it, nobody accidentally stumbled on the recipe for bread. You take the bullet-hard and completely tasteless seed from a sheaf of wheat and grind it into a powder. Right. I see. And how many other seeds did they try before they arrived at that? “Morning darling, I’m trying laburnum today and . . .”
But anyway, they ended up with a powder that is still tasteless and inedible but they kept right on going, adding water until they had a paste. Which is still a long way from yummy. Undaunted, however, our early-days Marco Pierre White then thought, “Hmm. I’m on to something here. I think if I just add the stuff that gathers in my navel if I haven’t washed for a while, this will be delicious.”
The whole idea is as preposterous as the idea when someone one day decided that tobacco wasn’t very suitable as a sandwich filler but that it was lovely when rolled up in a piece of paper and smoked.
Anyway, I decided not to cook bread. Oh no. I decided to get ambitious and cook the most delicious thing I’ve eaten in my whole life: a pho.
A pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup that contains about 128 different ingredients, and unlike bread or smoking, it’s very easy to see how it was invented. Someone who was very poor heated some water and thought, “I wonder if this would taste nicer if I put some weeds in it? And maybe a bit of that cow that has died.”
Today of course the weeds have pretty names such as star anise and coriander and cost more than cocaine. Mostly they are also harder to find than cocaine. But luckily I’m holed up in a part of London where you stand in line behind Alan Rickman, who’s buying half a pound of myrrh, and Jimmy Page, who wants a bag of lemon-infused pistachio nuts.
My greengrocer was full of Damon Albarn, who was buying all the things he needed for an exotic chicken korma, and naturally the place had everything I needed for my even more exotic pho. It was the same story at the butcher, which stocked beef knuckle and bone marrow. And so within minutes my son and I had all we needed to start my hobby.
Except a pan. I do of course have pans, all of which are easily big enough to handle some beans or a bit of Heinz tomato soup. But to make a pho you need a dustbin, really. We had to resort to a wastepaper basket.
We also didn’t have a rolling pin, which we needed, apparently, to “lightly bruise” the ginger. But I did have a hammer, so we used that instead. It didn’t go particularly well because ginger, it turns out, can’t really be bruised. You tap it and it just sits there undamaged. So you use a bit more force and it falls to pieces.
The instruction manual said that during the four-hour cooking process we should also spoon off the scum that formed as the broth boiled. But there wasn’t any that I could see. This might have been down to the fact that I couldn’t see much of anything at all, or talk properly.
The problem is, when you are cooking, you are near a fridge and fridges have wine in them. Well, mine does, because I haven’t been drinking much for the past few weeks. And with time to kill until the broth was ready, I came over a bit Keith Floydish.
This may explain why I didn’t roast the bone marrow or the knuckle before boiling them to bits and it certainly explains what happened later. I hadn’t really been listening properly when the man in the greengrocer asked what sort of chillies I’d like. And I must have selected some that sat on the Scoville scale just above lava.
I only used one or maybe two but it was enough to ruin four hours of work. The only good news was that my spoilt broth was already in the wastebin.
I went to bed that night hungry, drunk and with an ulcerated, gangrenous mouth from a tasting sip that I’d taken to make sure I hadn’t used too many chillies.
I think, therefore, some people are not born to be cooks. They lack the special powers needed to influence the outcome of what is basically sorcery.
So my new hobby is called “going out to restaurants and letting people who know what they’re doing cook my food”.
