I have been heartened to see more Scottish chefs putting themselves up for public scrutiny in the current series of MasterChef: The Professionals, and semi-finalist Ross Marshall of St Andrews so impress the judges – albeit shyly.
James Morton of the Great British Bake-Off also helped fly the flag.
But before we toast the final demise of the Scottish cringe and celebrate our new-found culinary confidence, a note of caution. Compared to their English, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts, Scots still dismally underperform when it comes to entering high-profile cooking competitions.
This matters because taking part provides a benchmark for chefs to compare how they're performing against their peers, helps them forge new professional relationships, and generally raises the bar in the standard of eating out for us all.
Scots still represent only the merest sprinkling of MasterChef contestants, and they don't even bother trying for the creme de la creme of them all, the Roux Scholarship.
Why should this be? I can vouch for some top-quality cooking in restaurants across Scotland – even if Glasgow remains a Michelin star desert – so I sincerely hope it's not some sort of knee-jerk aversion to aspiration that's stopping our talented young men and women from trying for a taste of glory.
Derek Johnstone, who once served fast food at Burger King in Paisley and is now head chef of Chez Roux at Greywalls Hotel in Gullane, believes it’s down to a combination of low confidence, poor training and zero support.
He won MasterChef in 2008 at the age of 25 but only entered after being encouraged to do so by his head chef Joe Queen when he worked at Crutherland House Hotel in East Kilbride. After winning, and a period at Michel Roux Jr’s Le Gavroche, he was given his own kitchen in 2010.
He says he knew he wanted to go far but didn’t know how to do it: “If it wasn’t for Joe’s support I wouldn’t have had the courage to enter MasterChef. It was an enormous personal and professional challenge but it completely changed my life.”
He doesn’t buy the argument that head chefs are reluctant to encourage their best staff to enter competitions because they don’t want to lose them: “If staff don’t feel they’re progressing, they will leave you anyway, but if you create winners the word spreads and other chefs will want to work for you.”
Perhaps there’s another reason. This series of MasterChef has exposed a fault in modern cooking: the jaw-dropping number of contestants who can’t perform basic skills such as properly cooking a fillet of salmon, making shortcrust pastry, butchering a lamb joint or preparing fresh squid. They might excel at fashionable foams and hot jellies, but ask them to demonstrate French classical training and they’re lost. Yet it’s clear this is what the judges are looking for.
I wonder if this is a reason Scotland has been the least represented part of the UK in the Roux Scholarship competition, in which modern interpretations of classical dishes are welcomed from chefs in all kinds of establishments, including gastropubs – as long as the basics are there.
Submissions for the 30th Roux Scholarship are now open, with a deadline of January 28, 2013, for a recipe that includes stone bass and whole fresh squid. It usually attracts about 70 entries each year (the male-to-female ratio is 9:1, but that’s another story).
Last year three chefs from Scotland applied but didn’t get past the first hurdle because their standards weren’t high enough. It’s a situation Andrew Fairlie, the first Roux scholar in 1984 and Scotland’s only chef with two Michelin stars, describes as shameful.
“To read through the 20 semi-finalists and see there’s nobody there from Scotland really is quite embarrassing,” he told me.
Fairlie, a Roux Scholarship judge, adds: “England, Wales and Northern Ireland are well represented, but Scotland is the weakest performer by far.
“Yet there are some great kitchens in Scotland now. You can’t tell me there aren’t lots of young sous chefs or chefs de partie who don’t want to try competitive cooking. But it is impossible to do it alone.
“It’s up to head chefs and patrons to pluck out one of their brigade and help them aim for a scholarship. They have to be prepared to invest a lot of time in that chef to let them practise and help with tasting.”
It does seem perverse that though we have one of the best natural larders in the world and boast some of the top restaurants in the UK, our indigenous talent remains in the closet.
Could it be that we simply don’t care enough?
Email: cate.devine@theherald.co.uk
Twitter: @CateDvineWriter
food cate devine
Why has Scotland got so few competitive chefs?
I have been heartened to see more Scottish chefs putting themselves up for public scrutiny in the current series of MasterChef: The Professionals, and semi-finalist Ross Marshall of St Andrews so impress the judges – albeit shyly. James Morton of the Great British Bake-Off also helped fly the flag.
But before we toast the final demise of the Scottish cringe and celebrate our new-found culinary confidence, a note of caution. Compared to their English, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts, Scots still dismally underperform when it comes to entering high-profile cooking competitions.
This matters because taking part provides a benchmark for chefs to compare how they’re performing against their peers, helps them forge new professional relationships, and generally raises the bar in the standard of eating out for us all.
Scots still represent only the merest sprinkling of MasterChef contestants, and they don’t even bother trying for the creme de la creme of them all, the Roux Scholarship.
Why should this be? I can vouch for some top-quality cooking in restaurants across Scotland – even if Glasgow remains a Michelin star desert – so I sincerely hope it’s not some sort of knee-jerk aversion to aspiration that’s stopping our talented young men and women from trying for a taste of glory.
Derek Johnstone, who once served fast food at Burger King in Paisley and is now head chef of Chez Roux at Greywalls Hotel in Gullane, believes it’s down to a combination of low confidence, poor training and zero support.
He won MasterChef in 2008 at the age of 25 but only entered after being encouraged to do so by his head chef Joe Queen when he worked at Crutherland House Hotel in East Kilbride. After winning, and a period at Michel Roux Jr’s Le Gavroche, he was given his own kitchen in 2010.
He says he knew he wanted to go far but didn’t know how to do it: “If it wasn’t for Joe’s support I wouldn’t have had the courage to enter MasterChef. It was an enormous personal and professional challenge but it completely changed my life.”
He doesn’t buy the argument that head chefs are reluctant to encourage their best staff to enter competitions because they don’t want to lose them: “If staff don’t feel they’re progressing, they will leave you anyway, but if you create winners the word spreads and other chefs will want to work for you.”
Perhaps there’s another reason. This series of MasterChef has exposed a fault in modern cooking: the jaw-dropping number of contestants who can’t perform basic skills such as properly cooking a fillet of salmon, making shortcrust pastry, butchering a lamb joint or preparing fresh squid. They might excel at fashionable foams and hot jellies, but ask them to demonstrate French classical training and they’re lost. Yet it’s clear this is what the judges are looking for.
I wonder if this is a reason Scotland has been the least represented part of the UK in the Roux Scholarship competition, in which modern interpretations of classical dishes are welcomed from chefs in all kinds of establishments, including gastropubs – as long as the basics are there.
Submissions for the 30th Roux Scholarship are now open, with a deadline of January 28, 2013, for a recipe that includes stone bass and whole fresh squid. It usually attracts about 70 entries each year (the male-to-female ratio is 9:1, but that’s another story).
Last year three chefs from Scotland applied but didn’t get past the first hurdle because their standards weren’t high enough. It’s a situation Andrew Fairlie, the first Roux scholar in 1984 and Scotland’s only chef with two Michelin stars, describes as shameful.
“To read through the 20 semi-finalists and see there’s nobody there from Scotland really is quite embarrassing,” he told me.
Fairlie, a Roux Scholarship judge, adds: “England, Wales and Northern Ireland are well represented, but Scotland is the weakest performer by far.
“Yet there are some great kitchens in Scotland now. You can’t tell me there aren’t lots of young sous chefs or chefs de partie who don’t want to try competitive cooking. But it is impossible to do it alone.
“It’s up to head chefs and patrons to pluck out one of their brigade and help them aim for a scholarship. They have to be prepared to invest a lot of time in that chef to let them practise and help with tasting.”
It does seem perverse that though we have one of the best natural larders in the world and boast some of the top restaurants in the UK, our indigenous talent remains in the closet.
Could it be that we simply don’t care enough?
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