Maddening and just mad.

When I was young I did not like liver, it was a hard grey unpalatable meat that was served in school dinner and something that my father ate. Evan cooked for a really long time on a low heat it was just something I did not like.  Then I had one of those moment that just changed the way you look at things .

I was just a young lad of about 16 or 17 year old and the souse chef asked me if I would like to have some of the calf’s liver to see what it was like. I of course said no I did not like liver, I had had liver but it was not the sort of thing that I liked to eat. So he cooked me just a little to see if I could change my mind, and what he cooked died change my mind. It was cooked in a second or so in a pan and served nice and pink; it was the best liver that I had ever tasted. It was that lesson that taught me that you should never discount anything just because you had it once and did not like it.

So it was with a heavy hart that I read on the Big hospitalityweb site that Brassiere Blanc has been banned form serving pink lambs liver. The whole thing is just maddening and so prescriptive . It is suggested that to cook liver safely you should cook it at 70c for at least 2 minutes. Utter rubbish you need to cook it for no longer than you need to. That is to say if you have a thick piece of liver then it will need to be cooked longer than a thin piece. Just to put an arbitrary time on the cooking of the liver is like saying to cook a steak you have to cook it for 25 minutes until it is ready or 10 minutes to boil an egg. It takes as long as it takes and then it is cooked. If you do not like liver cooked pink ask for it well done, same as for your egg and steak.

The fact that they served some 26000 liver over a year and had no problem, the fact that no bad or dangerous bacteria were found by the EHO or an independent body.   Controls have to be in place, and two cases from the same place would look like a problem but a blanket ban is not the way forward I would say. I hope that this is not something that will start to get out of control.

So depressed by this I was surprised, well perhaps not surprised when you realise who is involved but it did make me raise my eye brows and read more.  In The Guardian it is reported that Heston Blumenthal, who else, was experimenting with a tampon as a palate cleanser. They say you live long enough you will see everything but reading more you probably will not be seeing this .

I am myself parochial to a little sorbet in-between course, or just a glass of water, but a tampon and dipped in yoghurt . He is quoted in the article as saying .

"If you drain the moisture in your mouth you experience richness, creaminess and sweetness more intensely ... and there is really nothing much more absorbent than a tampon."

But as you read on you realise that he is not, at least at the moment  but you never know, putting it on his menu . In fact he say that he got the idea from a Don Prince an oral physiologist from the Food research centre in Wageningen, in the Netherlands.  Those crazy Dutch guy.

I know that there are a lot of thing we do know and a lot we do not know, but I do not think this will catch on. Interesting in the laboratory, but this time let’s hope what happens in the lab says in the lab.