Celebrity Interview - Stefan Gates
Food fun, fads and fibs
Stefan Gates Food fun, fads and fibs
FROM HARDCORE FEASTING TO COOKING IN THE DANGER ZONE... KELLI BRETT GOES ONE ON ONE WITH THE GASTRONAUT.
I think it would be fair to say that Stefan Gates is a man who likes to play with his food. A TV chef, comedy producer, director and script writer, his hysterical book Gastronaut has now earned him another title for his ever-growing CV: "Epicurean Desperado".
You won't find many cookbooks that will make the transition from stoveside to bedside as easily as these adventures in food for the romantic, the foolhardy and the brave. Stefan views food as a way into areas of our lives that we would perhaps not normally go. To become a "Gastronaut" you must be willing to experiment with your food and look at food as an adventure with a whole set of new possibilities yet to be explored (all from the comfort of your own kitchen of course).
He says, open that door and you will begin to transform food from fuel into love, power, sex, shock, drama, history, poetry and all sorts of emotions, even morals! Now for those of you thinking gleefully back to those scenes from the movie 91/2 Weeks with Mickey Rourke and Kim Bassinger experimenting in front of the fridge, yes - now you're in the zone, although he's quick to point out that if you're searching for an aphrodisiac you're out of luck. After years of exhaustive research he's still amazed at the number of things people claim (usually in desperation) to be foods that stimulate their sex drive. "I think if anyone actually finds an aphrodisiac they will quickly control the world. Potatoes, almonds, cabbage, prawns, cloves, figs, basically all fibs. Oysters, yes they've got a lot of zinc in them so they can be good for you, but frankly there is absolutely nothing on the planet that will make somebody want to have sex with you when it's not entirely deserved, not even chocolate!" (I do recall that scientists did discover at one stage that eating chocolate can produce the same effects as marijuana, but they can't remember why.)
Instead Stefan decided that creating the right atmosphere for romance seemed to be the smarter way to go and he conducted a survey to find out what meals regularly come before sex. Apparently the strangest things cropped up, and they were nothing to do with the actual cuisine. A take-away meal, a quick meal, and one that seemed to be a constant winner for the ladies, an expensive meal.
Yes, there are recipes in the Gastronaut that are morally dubious, not to mention those designed to bring out your "inner cannibal", but there are also recipes that are delicious and wonderful. Admittedly not food for your average Tuesday night when you want to get home from work and slip something under the grill, but every single recipe is a journey, perhaps a book for when you have a little time on your hands or for a group of friends with whom you would like to share an irreverent journey through the culinary world of the exotic, the bizarre and the truly extraordinary.
Stefan's "Bum Sandwich" (a little twist on the normal way of looking at a sandwich) caught my eye very early on during my own gastronautical journey. Basically a sandwich with all of the ingredients of pesto, plus a little salad and some grated cheese, and perhaps some ham if you fancy it. So where does the "bum" come into, it you ask? "Ahh well," says Stefan, "you wrap it in cling film and put it into a bag and then you sit on it for an hour. Great for kids 'cause it's a great way of getting them to sit still. You basically compress it and use your body as a very gentle oven. It warms up your sandwich and flattens it like a pancake. A bit like when you took your sandwiches to school and sat on your bag."
What's worrying me is how he actually dreams up these concepts? "Well, TV chef Fanny Cradock used to go to her Women's Institute meetings, hand out currant buns wrapped in cling film and then instruct the ladies to sit on them. Now Fanny was a strong-willed woman so no one dared mess with her, and at the end of her jam making speech she'd say, 'Right! Buns out ladies', and they'd all pull out their nicely warmed flattened buns; the currants would be all soft and gooey and she swore they tasted better that way. I'm just taking it one step further."
Along the way Gastronaut answers some tasty little questions for us:
What foods make us flatulent?
How do you make your own moonshine?
How to re-create the Last Supper?
Is it possible to teach grandmas to suck eggs?
And even... How would you stage a bacchanalian orgy in the comfort of your own home? (Incidentally, after an impressive experiment involving 20 grandmothers and an intricate egg-sucking technique, Stefan did finally discover a grandmother who can't suck an egg.)
Now Gastronaut he may be, but Stefan is best known as a TV chef. You may have seen him on one or another of a multitude of food networks. He has over 120 episodes of Food Uncut for UK Food under his belt and has also presented Full on Food for BBC2. However, his latest project for the BBC is his most daring yet, and that's saying a lot for a man who has appeared naked on the cover of a Led Zeppelin album (admittedly he was only a nipper at the time).
"Cooking Show: A television program that presents the preparation of food in a kitchen on the studio set. The host of the show, usually a celebrity chef, prepares one or more dishes over the course of the show, taking the viewing audience through the food's preparation and showing all intermediate stages of cooking."
That´s the Wikipedia definition of "cooking show", but recently Stefan has taken the world of the cooking show to a completely different level. When I first heard of his TV series Cooking in the Danger Zone I imagined a cross between No Reservations presented by America's gastronomical Indiana Jones, Anthony Bourdain, and The F Word presented, of course, by the hot-headed His Gordoness himself.
However, that's definitely not what you get when you tune into Stefan's latest show. What you do get is a journey that will put you through the whole gamut of emotions, from laughing out loud, to really feeling rather ill, to guilt as you watch people with so very little that are willing to give so very much. Each week on Cooking in the Danger Zone Stefan Gates travels to the world's hotspots to tell a story through food that defines people's lives, showing us their poverty, misery, happiness and so many other things in between.
So far we've seen Stefan take to the Arctic and South Korea to tackle the topic of "Taboo Foods". The Inuit eat seal, walrus and raw whale, while the Koreans munch their way through two to three million dogs per year (an episode that had animal rights activists up in arms and earned him a bonafide death threat). Then it was on to Chernobyl & Fiji/Tonga to investigate "Foods that Kill". In Chernobyl food and land are highly radioactive, yet people still farm there. Tongans are the fattest people on the planet, and their diet is killing them.
Afghanistan and Uganda followed with a chilling look at "Food and War" within the chaos of the refugee camps and the fighting troops. China and India were stomach-turners with India's rat-eating Untouchables being systematically kept hungry by the wealthy, and China's rapid growth causing a vast wealth and huge hunger gap (not to mention the Yak penis-eating party members). In Burma and Venezuela Stefan found food to be more of a weapon, with the ruthless Burmese regime trying to starve the Karen people out, and the Venezuelans having their own food and land used against them as political weapons. With the third series of Cooking in the Danger Zone already underway it's hard to imagine where Gates will go next to satisfy his obsession with extraordinary food and the emotional, moral and mortal significance of what the world eats.
Stefan says the title of the show is misleading and makes it sound like a grotesque reality show, but the real idea is to try to understand the "biggies": refugees, climate change, global warming and people living in extreme poverty. To try to understand aspects of their lives that touch ours
"Food is the basic building block of life and if you understand how people eat you'll begin to get a sense of how they live. I'm not claiming to be making this program to change the world, but if it enlightens people and helps them to understand what's going on a little better... it can't be a bad thing." Not just your average north London cook, huh?
