While travelling in Southeast Asia, I was in awe of the open-air kitchens of street restaurants. Just by wheeling out a few carefully stocked trolleys and some prepared ingredients, one person was able to run a bustling street-side restaurant serving a score of customers delicious, fresh-cooked food each night. It's a remarkable feat of ingenuity and efficiency.

Some of the attributes I noticed about the best ones:

Menus with prices visible from a distance

We made some of the decision about whether a place looked good as we approached a stand. A clear menu with large prices you can see as you walk up is a simple way to slow down the right customers before they've walked past.

Seeing the fresh ingredients at the front of the stall builds trust in what you're about to eat and whets the appetite.

Pre-chopped ingredients and giant rice cooker

Having boxes of pre-chopped ingredients to throw in makes cooking super speedy, and as so many dishes were served with rice, a single giant rice cooker enabled preparing meals in moments.

Trolleys on wheels and everything within reach

Having everything on wheels allows quick and easy deployment and packing up, and a chef can adjust each unit to have everything in easy reach.

A single high-powered gas stove with a large wok cooks nearly all the dishes

Trolleys stacked with plates, bowls, cups and utensils

A waste bin handles scraps and excess liquids

A multi-use towel wipes surfaces and hands

We had a delicious meal from an old lady in Vietnam who'd just carried her entire restaurant on a bamboo pole over her shoulder, with two large baskets at either end. The pole held everything necessary to cook, including several small stools to sit and eat on.

It helps to have the right kind of weather. A warm and generally dry climate means you don't need to rent indoor space, heat it or cover it. This enables so much creativity with food, reducing prices and barriers to entry and increasing selection. Alas, I'm in the UK for this one.

It also suits food that is quick and simple to cook, often using pre-prepared, flavourful sauces and fresh ingredients that cook quickly, as opposed to dishes that require long preparation, ovens, or simmering times. Thai and Vietnamese food, in general, lend themselves well to this.

It's remarkable how these simple yet effective setups can spin up a restaurant at the side of the street, turning a few trolleys, some carefully chosen gear and a talented chef into a culinary treat.

Arrange kitchen storage to minimise excess travel

And all sorts of other food and drink sketches

The open-air kitchen

The tomato test, or tomato slicing test, is a handy way to see if your knives could do with sharpening. The idea is that a properly sharpened blade should slice through the taut skin of a tomato with minimal pressure.

Somewhat counterintuitively, most cooks seem to agree that sharp knives reduce the risk of accidents as you don't have to push down as hard as with blunt knives.

To do the tomato slicing test: Place a tomato on a board and gently run the knife over the top surface. A sharp blade will glide through the tomato skin, cutting it precisely all the way down. You shouldn't need to apply any pressure if the knife has weight. If you need to push down to pierce the skin, it could be time to sharpen.

Cutting the top off the tomato first allows it to sit stably on its end, so you don't have to hold it.

Alternatively, you could use a serrated knife which is handy for foods with a hard outside and a soft inside.

The sharper the knife, the less mess you'll make and the easier you can ghost cook.

The tomato test

The law of diminishing returns: at some point, doing more of the same stops paying off like it used to.

You might think that adding more of a good thing would make things better. And, yes, that’s often true, up to a point. However, the law of diminishing returns suggests that as you add more of a single factor, you are likely to yield progressively lower benefits.

It’s like the old adage, “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” Another cook or two might help, but beyond that, they’ll probably start getting in each other’s way. Aside from cooking broth, you might see the law play out in spending on advertisements, quality improvements in production or your wealth.

And we should also never forget that “more is different”.

The sketchplanation is an homage to perhaps my favourite comedy sketch with an early-career Simon Pegg in the series Big Train: The Cake Factory (video). Well worth two and a half minutes.

Also see: the law of diminishing brownies

I updated this sketch for the release of Big Ideas Little Pictures. Here's the original

Law of diminishing returns

Traditionally, stocks have the flavour and gelatinous collagen-y thickness that comes from cooking bones. Broth was cooked not with bones but with the meat itself. While a jus is a sauce made from the pan drippings, usually from a roast. This simple distinction I learned from Thomas Keller.

Now, you can also have vegetable stock, so some other useful distinctions between stock and broth include that, generally, stock is intended to be used in the preparation of another dish rather than eaten directly like broth. As such, you would more likely use whole vegetables in stock to impart the flavour, but still scoop them out afterwards, while a broth would have cut vegetables ready to eat in the broth itself.

Stock, Broth, Jus

If you like pomegranate but are put off by the prospect of the effort of pulling out each individual seed and spraying pomegranate juice across the kitchen, then this is a fun and handy tip.

a bowl of water helps stop spraying when pulling them apart and naturally separates the light fluffy pith from the seeds, and 

whacking them on the back with a spoon is a surprisingly effective and fun way of making the seeds shoot out.

Deseed a pomegranate

Before getting started in your kitchen both Thomas Keller and Gordon Ramsay picked out this safety tip to stop your chopping board slipping while cutting. Just lightly wet a piece of kitchen towel or a tea towel and lay it flat between the surface and your chopping board. Hey presto! No slipping while cutting so all your fingers stay intact even with those tricky butternut squash.

Stop chopping board slip

I’d never really thought this through before, but just a tiny lip makes a massive difference. Should be a standard feature on pretty much every saucepan.

How a lip stops drips.

The classic “use cutlery from the outside-in” still holds, but I realised there’s a little more to it than that. And I learned what a charger is.

Amalgamation of tips from the cookbook I use most, the Joy of Cooking.

Set your table in time-honoured positions.

Boiling point of water vs altitude in ft.

Cooking at altitude

Roll limes before squeezing and you’ll get more juice

The art of cooking leaving a sparkling, untouched, kitchen.

Ghost cooking

Gelato, sorbet and ice-cream

Vinaigrette, rehydration mixture and Pimms.

Useful mixtures and their proportions

And save a little more time for life. We switched 8 years or so ago and haven’t looked back.

Use crushed garlic and ginger in most of your cooking

Rules of thumb for cooking steak

Never rush an onion (from Gordon Ramsay), avoid moving chicken if you can, and don’t stir fry too much - best keep stir fries to 1-2 person portions max.

3 Miscellaneous cooking tips

Every time I stop and think about a microwave I am reminded of Arthur C Clarke’s 3rd law of prediction:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Right up there with wifi and MRI. All just magic.

Also, I think you can use microwaves that little bit better when you understand what’s really going on.

On microwaves

Or, buy a rice cooker. You won’t regret it. But still no peeking.

Cook rice like a pro

Turn carrots while cutting

Your handy reference for how to poach an egg in the microwave. In just a minute with a mug, a microwave, and a little water, a perfectly serviceable poached egg can be yours.

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Category: cooking