If you ever worry what the people closest to you really think about you, I recommend telling them you plan to cook with a blowtorch next weekend. One friend went very silent before telling me: “You know, we’re all very fond of you.” Another frowned and asked: “Is that wise?”
So unnerved was I by all this that I took the time to take out a life insurance policy and write a will. This is ridiculous, of course, because if you live in a tower block you can be set ablaze at any given time by the carelessness of someone three floors down, but there is something particularly nerve-wracking about the word “blowtorch”.
Your blowtorch will also face two great tests. The first is resisting the small voice in the back of your head that wants to use it to melt small household objects. The second is caramelising sugar. As Delia explains, the rise of the chef’s blowtorch has been a giant leap forward for anyone wanting to achieve “that thin, glass-like coating of caramel”. Early models were too weak to be effective, but at the time of writing, Delia was hesitant to recommend one from a DIY shop, “envisaging hundreds of firefighters up and down the country taking me to task for recommending their use”. Also, you can’t sell recipe books to people if they burn their homes down. Nowadays, however, self-igniting chefs blowtorches are available for 20 quid at all good kitchen stores.
This is great news for budding chefs, but when you’re writing about cooking, your incentives are odder. Obviously, I didn’t want to set the flat on fire, but the thought did occur that losing an eyebrow would give me something good to write about.
So I was a little bit disappointed when I arrived to collect my blowtorch from the store and discovered that my weapon of mass destruction was scarcely bigger than a marker pen. I would have to work very hard to burn an eyebrow off.
Blowtorches have a variety of functions in the kitchen – they can unmould a jelly, skin a tomato and are a great substitute when embarking on any recipe that unhelpfully assumes everyone has a gas hob. But the creme de la creme, ahem, of blowtorch jobs is Delia’s passion fruit creme brulee.
Creme brulee is a pudding in two acts. Act one is the custard, which is fairly easy provided you have a well-organised worktop. I found the addition of passion fruit too sweet the first time around, and preferred to use just 100g of sugar rather than the 150g Delia’s recipe specified, but your mileage may vary.
I recommend taste-testing that first, though, as it is when you caramelise the sugar on top that the wheels can really fall off. Despite testing out my blowtorch on thin air, I am still taken aback at how much of the flame reached the sugar the first time around. The aim is to gently lick the sugar with the tip of the flame until it is golden brown. There are two ways to achieve this. The first is to have better hand-eye coordination than I do. This is not particularly difficult, as everyone I ever did PE with could attest to. But the more transferable approach is to make slightly more than you need while you are learning. And happily, all my eyebrows are still intact.
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Stephen Bush is cooking his way through Delia’s Complete How To Cook (BBC Books, £40) in a year. You can watch Delia Smith’s free Online Cookery School videos at deliaonline.com; @deliaonline
