I live in a loft apartment in a converted matchstick warehouse in Bow, east London. The kitchen is tiny, so I’ve a limited amount of stuff in there, which spills out into wardrobes dotted around the rest of the flat. Since I rarely cook for more people than myself, it’s ample. It’s open plan, to the extent that if I cook anything like a steak, the fire alarm goes off. It looks very neat here, but usually there are about 1,000 condiments behind me.
I recommend a cast iron griddle pan for cooking meat, you get a really nice char – this is a Le Creuset one that my mum bought for me years ago. We use Thermopens at work, and I have this one at home. I think it’s one of the most essential tools when cooking meat. I don’t like the idea of serving red raw chicken. Conversely I grew up with my mom always overcooking stuff just to make sure it was done, so I think using one of these is a good idea, as a safety precaution. You can take things a bit easier, because you have more of an idea of what’s going on.
When you’re measuring herbs and spices for recipe development, it’s almost impossible to work without a precision scale – I do a lot of my restaurant recipe development at home, so this is one of the most used items in my kitchen. Normal electronic scales just don’t cut the mustard.
I have about 30-40 Japanese knives – it’s a little bit of an obsession. It’s important to cut things correctly, to have the right knife for each job, and to keep them sharp. The biggest issue I have when I go to other people’s houses is blunt knives – it takes ages to chop onions and slice roasts! This one was a birthday present from my girlfriend – it’s beautiful. For me, a good knife needs a carbon steel blade.
My staple condiments include lots of Japanese sauces, fish sauce, soy sauce, XO sauce, and lots of fermented chilli sauces: I basically raid east Asian supermarkets for everything I can find. The white packet is MSG – I add it to quite a lot of things I cook at home. It makes things delicious. I usually cook very simple rice and veg dishes, and like to pack in as much flavour as I can. I often make curries with whatever I have lying around, so I have lots of whole spices that I grind down too – hence the pestle and mortar, which is in use almost every day. As does the microplane, for zesting ginger, making garlic paste … without that my life would be a lot harder.
A child did this drawing of the Temper kitchen in Soho one night. He was sitting with his family at the bar one evening, during the month we opened. They had a really good time, and he gave this to me at the end of the meal. It just says: “I love tacos.” I had it framed; it was a really nice thing to do. He was five, but I never found out his name.
I have about 100 cookbooks; this is just a revolving small sample related to whatever I’m cooking at the time. I read cookbooks almost every day, for glimmers of ideas to start me off, but I think home cooking is about having fun with ingredients you like, and whatever else you have lying around. I don’t think you should hunt down every single ingredient in a recipe; they’re more for inspiration.
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Neil Rankin is the head chef at Temper restaurants in London and the author of Low and Slow: How to Cook Meat (Ebury)
