Michael Booth

Sea Urchin safari

For some years, Rene at Noma has been telling me about a mad Scotsman called Roderick Sloan who lives up in the Arctic Circle in northern Norway and supplies his restaurant with, among other things, the most amazing sea urchins.

Now, sea urchins happen to be my most favourite thing to eat in all the world, ahead even of flødebolle so, when I finally got to meet Roderick at the Mad Foodcamp Symposium back in the summer and he invited me up to Nordskott where he lives and fishes, I said yes in a heartbeat.

It was staggeringly beautiful, despite being -15.

Roderick had also invited a bunch of chefs, not just from Noma, but also from elsewhere in Norway as well as the much acclaimed Faviken in Sweden. Here he is, telling us where we are.

Cognitive scientists tell us that we more easily agree to do something arduous if it is going to happen far in the future. I don't really do boats. When Roderick invited me to the Arctic to go fishing in February, it was August. I said yes all too readily, then spent the next seven months wondering what on earth I had gotten myself into.

But here I am with my quarry after a not-too-bad-at-all trip on a trawler (admittedly drugged up to my eyeballs on sea sickness tablets).

But Roderick didn't just have a little fishing trip in mind. He wanted me - and in particular the chefs he supplies - to really understand exactly what was involved in the harvesting of the seafood they served in their restaurants. So, he gave us some dry suits (though no gloves or hats), a snorkel and sent us into the -2 Arctic waters to get a feel for ourselves.

The dry suits kept us reasonably warm (I was fully clothed beneath this, which explains the 'tubbiness'), but by the time we came out of the water it literally felt as if our hands were on fire, an incredible sensation - so cold, it was hot.

Roderick also dives for mahogany clams (left) and soft shell clams (right), or as the latter are apparently nicknamed in the Noma kitchen, 'dick clams'. Can't think why.

The dick clams, which we ate raw after peeling the, erm, protrusion of its elephantine skin, were the sweetest seafood I have ever eaten, with a wonderful texture. Fantastic.

The mahogany clams were also sensationally good, here being prepared by Jonny of Faviken, and served on flaxseed crackers. A stunning combination of earthy and iodine flavours. New Nordic surf 'n' turf.

The money shot:

Why the starfish? Well, as Roderick explained, every time a restaurant asks him to send a sample box he includes a couple of them. He knows they are eaten in Japan, and they are related to sea urchins, but can't figure out how to prepare them and he is hoping some inventive chef will come up with a use for them (I think in Japan they dry and grind them as a seasoning, though I am not sure).

Sea urchins have had a tough time of it these last years. Off the coast of California they were considered a pest as they were believed to eat the kelp which local companies used for beauty products, so they covered them with caustic soda. Then they realised they could eat them or sell them to the Japanese to eat, so they over fished them. The only really sustainable way to harvest them is how Roderick does it - leaving fields alone on a five year rotation so that depleted stocks have a chance to regroup - and picking them by hand.

It's hard work, and I watched Roderick dive for about an hour, as he lost all feeling in his lips, and his hands turned to blocks of ice during the process, but I am glad someone's doing it. And I am sure the guys at Noma are. Here is their 'sea shore' dish which features Roderick's sea urchins as a powder strewn like sand across the pebbles.

Avoiding any puns on the world 'cock'

My neighbour keeps chickens. She had a large male cockerell which went lame and had to be put down. She asked if I wanted to cook it (you have no idea how difficult it is to resist making a whole variety of very childish puns in this post). I said yes, but that I couldn't quite bring myself to put the bird out of its misery myself, having admired it for many months. It was a famously cantankerous bird, but still, very impressive looking and part of the scenery around here.

 

In the end the local gamekeeper's apprentice (which sounds like a title for a lost DH Lawrence novel, but isn't), did the dirty deed, catching the bird with a large, comical net from a Woody Allen film, while wielding a big stick. Once he had it in the net, the bird became strangely becalmed, as if resigned to its fate.

I stood slightly off stage at this point, metaphorically fluttering a handkerchief in front of my nose like a Merchant Ivory extra. He gave the cock two swift blows to the head (NO! Stop me), and it lay there twitching its legs for a few seconds, gave a big sigh, and shuffled off his chickeny mortal coil. The gamekeeper's apprenctice (or is it a Jilly Cooper...?) poked the bird in the eye, which he said was a good way of making sure it was dead. 'If it blinks, it's still alive,' he said. It didn't blink. Although it did keep kicking for a while, which was unnerving.

It was dead though. He chucked it in the back of his pick-up and we headed over to where I had prepared a large pot of boiling water which we plopped the bird into. The gamekeeper proper had told me this would make plucking it easier. This has to be done instantly, apparently, otherwise rigor mortis makes it difficult to remove the feathers without tearing the skin. At this point, the gamekeeper himself turned up and pointed out that we were supposed to put the bird in cool water, then into the boiling water - which makes removing the feathers even easier - and that we should have chopped the bird's head off immediately to let its blood run out.

Who'd have imagined there was so much involved in preparing fowl? But this was just the start.

Left on my own now, I pulled the feathers off - which was surprisingly easy, much easier than my many frustrating hours plucking pheasants  - chopped off the feet and, wincing slightly, chopped the head off too. 

Then the really unpleasant bit: the innards. Starting at the neck, I cut around the base to open up the bit where the bird kept its food prior to being digested/ground up. Ugh. Masses of slightly digested grain and seeds, some greenery and a whole caterpillar tumbled out. Didn't smell great.

Then to the other end: guts, liver, heart, lungs  - all the gubbins had to be clawed out. And then one last surprise. As I pushed my hand in to scrape out the lungs, the carcass emitted a great, 'BUCKARK!' as if it were still alive.

It was one of the most disturbing and surreal moments of my life. In the spirit of experimentation, I pushed my hand in again, and again, the cock crowed. I began laughing, a little hysterically, like Mia Farrow in a horror film. And did it again. 'BUCKARK!' By now I realised that, by some weird confluence of air pressure, I was pushing on the late creature's voice box, summoning its once virile mating cry.

Tempted as I was to run to where my children were diligently doing their homework with my hand inside the bird like some gothic glove puppet, I managed to resist, so this extraordinary phenomenon, as yet unexplained by either Escoffier or Harold McGee, was witnessed only by me.

But here he is in all his glory, waiting to be turned into coq au vin, as per the excellent and only slightly flawed recipe to be found within the pages of Doing Without Delia.

MAD Foodcamp Symposium - How it went

Just spent a rather life-altering, world-changing three days with some of the world's greatest chefs and plant scientists in Copenhagen.

I was compering/hosting (not sure of the term, actually, I've never been to a symposium before), the MAD FoodCamp Symposium and introducing guests including Harold McGee, Adoni Aduriz, and Gaston Acurio on stage. Then there were the likes of Michel Bras, Magnus Nilsson of Faviken and David Chang and science authorities such as Stefano Mancuso (a 'neuro-biologist' who explained exactly how plants were sentient). Amazing.

Not sure where to start, so I'll begin with Friday where all the speakers and some of the Noma team were all taken by boat from our hotel, the Admiral on Copenhagen harbour, across the water to the festival and symposium site, where Noma's René Redzepi - whose idea the whole shebang was - showed us around (back of heads: Yoshihiro Narisawa and David Chang).

Mr McGee checked out the state-of-the-art induction wok in the circus tent where the symposium was to be held. He approved.

In the afternoon we gathered beneath blazing sunshine on the outskirts of Christiania to cook a meal. We were divided into groups, each one led by one of the star chefs.

René asked, 'Who wants to prepare vegetables with Michel Bras?' Bras is a legend, famed for his use and appreciation of vegetables - one of the great heroes of contemporary French cuisine, and with three Michelin stars.

'Me!' I said. 

He was a hard task master. Had me slicing fennel on a mandolin all afternoon, and told me off for chopping vegetables without enough care. Fair enough. Then Adoni Aduriz joined us, and took over - I looked up from my mangled veg to see five Michelin stars around me. A memorable moment. And it was especially worth it when, after about four hours of prep, he suddenly whipped all the various ingredients together into the most beautiful dishes (at the bottom, grilled baby leeks with pickled rose leafs and radish).

Needless to say, Chang was in charge of the pork.

 

Magnus Nilsson of Faviken grilled a couple of oysters with Alex Atala of Sao Paulo's restaurant DOM (he's widely considered the best chef in the whole of South America and forages in the Amazon).

And this was the gorgeous crayfish dish prepared by Tokyo terroir master, Yoshihiro Narisawa.

And a jolly good time was had by all, I think.

So, then came the weekend during which time I was too preoccupied jumping up and down to the stage introducing folk to take many pictures.

I took this one just before the audience arrived, as a distraction technique from my butterfly-infested stomach. Note the complete and utter absence of any major corporate sponsorship - intentional.

And this one of the produce Monsieur Bras used in his demo:

And this was taken by my more quick witted wife of all the speakers at the end of the weekend:

I'll try and recap some of the highlights of the talks - and there were so very many - soon.

 

Muji Macarons

Firstly, a quick thanks to everyone who turned up at Asia House in London to hear me witter on about Japanese food last Tuesday. The event was a sell out, which was a massive and lovely surprise. So thanks again, especially to all those who asked really interesting questions, and stayed on afterwards to chat.

Now, as a kind of addendum to my thing in the Guardian today on how some foods just don't travel, how about this: a kit for a classic French patisserie, bought in Japan, and tested out at home this weekend?

I found it in the flagship store of Muji, in Yurakucho. It's part of a new range of products they are making to try and get families to spend quality time together. So, rather than buy a pack of ready made macarons, they thought it'd be nice to get parents and children to make them together (they also have a self-build cardboard chair).

I bought them because I was deeply sceptical that you could make macarons - the most notoriously temperamental of baked goods - from a kit.

The kit included two measured sachets of icing sugar, two of almond flour, one sachet of cocoa powder (to flavour the chocolate macarons) and one of caramel powder (to flavour the caramel macarons). There were also some chocolate buttons to make the ganache filling.

You have to provide the egg whites, whipped to soft peaks, plus a little milk or cream for the ganache.

A Japanese friend kindly translated the instructions for me, and I set to work. This is the result:

 A little flat, perhaps (I must have over mixed the whites, cocoa powder, sugar and almond flour just a tad - told you they were temperamental), but otherwise I reckon it's pretty much the Platonic ideal of a chocolate macaron. Which, sadly, was not something you might say about the caramel ones.

Look, they weren't cooking fast enough, so I did what any other man would do and, instead of waiting a few minutes more, I turned the oven up, ok? They tasted fine enough.

Will macaron kits catch on? I could imagine so, being this easy, but I doubt Pierre Hermé is quaking in his boots just yet.

 

Asia House Festival of Literature

Hello to anyone dropping in by way of the second piece on my and my family's recent Indian odyssey in the travel section of the Sunday Times.

 

Thought I'd use this opportunity to shamelessly plug my forthcoming appearance at the Asia House Literary Festival next month.

 

Fresh from my even more forthcoming trip to Tokyo (next week - woo-hoo!) I’m going to be divulging some of the great secrets of Japanese cuisine, talking about the current trends there, and looking at the weird and wonderful techniques and ingredients.

 

Here’s the blurb:

 

http://www.asiahouse.org/net/Events.aspx

 

Michael Booth - Sushi & Beyond
What the Japanese Know About Cooking
with Erica Wagner of The Times

 

Tuesday 18 May, 2010 6:45 PM - 7:45 PM
Location: Asia House, 63 New Cavendish St, London W1G 7LP,

 
Asia House Festival of Asian Literature

Doors 6.15pm

The Japanese go to surprising lengths and expense to eat the finest, most delectable, and downright freakiest food imaginable. Their creativity and ingenuity, not to mention courage in the face of dishes such as cod sperm, whale penis and octopus ice cream, is only now beginning to be fully appreciated in the sushi-saturated West. In Sushi & Beyond, travel and food writer Michael Booth takes a fascinating and funny journey through this extraordinary, food obsessed country.


Tickets £10, Concessions £6
Asia House Friends £5

For booking please call 020 7307 5454 

Online booking closes 24hrs before all events.
Bookings are neither refundable nor transferable.

 

The truth about wasabi

I’ve always been fascinated by wasabi which, up until I started travelling to Japan, meant the sweet, fiery green paste served in a pea-sized blob with sushi. 

(Or, less conventionally, with ice cream and melon, but I'll come to that)

What on earth was it? Where did it come from? Why did it make my nose burn like Vicks Vaporub?

I’d heard all sorts of explanations, ranging from that it was a kind of horseradish, to that it was made from mustard powder or, as I tried to convince my children, from Kermit’s dandruff, but it wasn’t until I visited Japan for the first time about ten years ago that I had the earth shattering experience of trying real, fresh wasabi.

Warning! Food ponce alert! (As if everything else on this blog hasn’t been enough of a warning). I realise how precious this sounds, but having now tried real wasabi a few times, I realise how rubbish the stuff we get in the West is. It is like comparing fake aerosol snow with the real stuff.

The stuff we get in the West, in sushi restaurants and in tubes/powdered form in the supermarkets is usually made from coloured mustard powder and perhaps some dried horseradish.

The real stuff comes from one of these: it’s the root of the wasabi japonica plant, a rhizome in the family with horseradish. It doesn’t burn your sinuses and tastes mild, sweet and beautifully fragrant. 

Sorry, that's not a real one. This is:

While researching ‘Sushi and Beyond’ I was lucky enough to travel to Ugashima, a forested peninsula south of Mount Fuji, where the very best wasabi is grown. I visited Yoshio Ando, an award winning wasabi farmer and, with a little gentle pleading, he agreed to take me high up into the hills to see where it was grown.

There, as we looked out over what looked like a rice paddy valley filled with rhubarb, Yoshio explained that wasabi is one of the most temperamental crops in the world to grow, requiring strict temperature limits (never colder than ten degrees, never warmer than 16) and constant, fresh, clean, cold flowing water. They have apparently been cultivating it in Japan since 1744, when they discovered its antibacterial properties (which is how it came to associated with raw fish).

They have also managed to cultivate it in California and China, he explained, but only using lots of chemicals and without the flowing water.

Later that day I enjoyed an entire wasabi themed meal at Shirakabeso, the White Wall Inn, an amazing spa nearby. Ten or so courses, all including wasabi, might sound rather overwhelming, but fresh wasabi is not nearly as fiery as artificial wasabi, and worked really well as an accompaniment to everything from wild boar, to live abalone, to ice cream and pickled rhododendron leaves. 

The owner, Ikuko Uda, is a world expert on wasabi, having spent years studying the plant at Shikawa University, and she explained its anti-carcinogenic properties, how to grate it in a circular motion on a sharkskin grater, and lots of other fascinating wasabi facts.

As well as various minerals and vitamins, wasabi contains around twenty different types of isothiocynates (a compound it shares with mustard and broccoli) which have anti-inflammatory properties. This makes wasabi a useful treatment for allergies and eczema. It’s anti-microbial qualities also mean it works against tooth decay and apparently it can even calm diarrhoea. Most interesting of all, the isothiocynates are thought to stop the spread of cancers at the metastasis stage. Wasabi is, then, a bona fide superfood - you can even eat the leaves. They taste a little like very peppery rocket. The Japanese also pickle the stems in sake lees, the left overs from making sake. Very good they were too.

(That's wasabi bread!)

So, I can’t urge you enough to try and get hold of some real wasabi by any means you can. 

THE CAMPAIGN FOR REAL WASABI STARTS HERE! 

(Incidentally, proper sushi chefs get very annoyed if you ask for extra sushi and mix it in with your dipping sauce/soy. They very carefully add a blob to their nigiri or maki and, rightly, believe that too much numbs the palate. Doesn’t stop me, though, I have to admit.)

Obligatory asparagus food blog post

Spotted these little beauties in my favourite Paris market the other day. They are wild asparagus. No, I've never seen them before either but I fried them in butter and served them as a bed for some fresh scallops with a zingy dressing and they were transcendent - fresh, grassy, crisp and sweet.

(And note the fresh morel mushrooms next door. Sadly, I don't have a name which ends in '...ockerfeller' so I couldn't quite stretch to them).

While I am at it, more Paris food market porn comin' at ya:

Sweet Potato Ice Cream

When we were in Okinawa researching just what it was they ate that helped them all live to be 100, we discovered the delicately floral-flavoured Okinawan sweet potato ice cream, famous throughout Japan. It is made from the equally celebrated Okinawan sweet potato, a deep purple-coloured tuber believed to have miraculous nourishment properties. Even though I am not a big fan of strictly following recipes, when the Times in the UK asked me to come up with a top ten list of some of my favourite Japanese recipes , I knew the sweet potato ice cream had to be on it, so I set to work to figure it out. I think this is pretty much an exact match for the light, non-eggy way the Okinawans like to eat their ice cream. Ordinary sweet potatoes work almost as well, although you won’t get quite the same pale lavender colour.

(0 out of 10 for presentation, perhaps, but it tastes fantastic).

Recipe

150-200g baked, blended and sieved sweet potato flesh

50g sugar

500ml whole milk

2 tablespoons cornstarch

30g mild honey

Seeds of half a vanilla pod

Essentially, all you are doing is replacing the fruit puree element of your favourite fruit flavoured ice cream recipe with cooked - baking best cuts down their water content and intensifies flavour - blended sweet potato that has been pushed through a drum sieve. In this case I use a basic gelato recipe because I find egg-based ice creams can taste, well, eggy. Mix a little of the milk with the cornstarch to make a slurry. Heat the rest of the milk along with the sugar, vanilla seeds and sweet potato pulp until they almost boil, mixing well. Reduce the heat and add the cornstarch slurry, stirring constantly for a couple of minutes until the it all thickens nicely enough to coat the back of your spoon, like grandma used to show you when making custard. Off the heat, add the honey and stir. Cool thoroughly, and then pour it into your ice cream maker as per usual. I have made this ice cream without the sugar and vanilla in the past and it was still good, just make sure you use a light, mild flavoured honey. A little lime zest also works well to cut through the chestnutty sweetness.

Think it's time I got a new ice cream machine, don't you?

Paris chocolate tour part II

Next stop, in my crazy, sugar-fuelled, chocolate zig-zag across town was Jean-Paul Hévin at 231 rue St Honoré in the 1st. 

I first encountered the inspired work of Hevin a few years ago when I was doing a chocolate course at the Hotel Ritz’s sumptuous cooking school around the corner, and was pleased to bump into the man himself, once again, when I visited his shop this time.

Along with a dazzling array of cakes and flavoured ganaches, the highlight here for me is Hevin’s cheese ganaches made with goat cheese, Epoisses, Roquefort and stinky old Pont l’évêque. Yes, that’s what I thought when I first heard about them, from my chocolate guru Christian Forais (although I didn’t pull quite such a face), but trust me, these so-called aperitif chocolates are extraordinarily good. Not sure how he makes them, but I guess he melts the cream with cheese instead of chocolate (the filling is creamy coloured) and some sugar, along with an additional flavour - cumin with the Epoisses, thyme with the Pont l’évêque, hazlenut with the goat cheese and walnut with the Roquefort. Incidentally, they were originally made to mark the new millennium; so much more appropriate than a great big tent, don’t you think?

Really, truly, honestly, they are staggeringly moreish, not at all cheesy, but unlike any other chocolate you will ever taste. In a good way. Actually, I once heard - or perhaps made up and have come to believe it as true - that the molecular structure of blue cheese, in particular, is an almost perfect match for dark chocolate, so perhaps this isn’t as batty-bonkers as it initially sounds, and, certainly, we all know that saltiness goes very well with all chocolates so why not salty cheese?

All I know is that for the price of a CD (or whatever format the youth of today use to listen to their popular beat combos), you get one of the world’s great, original chocolate experiences.

And Hévin is a very nice man (not sure about the sweaty weirdo next to him though).

I asked him about the secret of his cheese ganaches but he refused, ever so politely, to divulge it and, when I pushed him further, simply called the police and had me forcibly ejected, crying, from the shop.

But not before I had bagged me a box of cheese chocs, of course, which I ate en route to the latest chocolatier to open in Paris, Jacques Genin, whose deeply glamourous chocolatier-cafe-atelier is right at the top of rue de Turenne in the Marais. Definitely the most chic chocolatier in the city, with extremely elegant, thin ganaches covered in the most perfectly tempered couverture I have ever seen - super glossy and crisp, with some inventive flavours like sichuan pepper.

There is is! Quick, someone catch him and get him to make us some more!

Aren't they gorgeous? As Coleridge (or was it Keats?) said, 'A thing of beauty, is a joy forever. Now pass me the After Eights'. 

Finally, because according to a recent EU directive all food bloggers at one time or another are compelled to do something on Parisian macarons, I popped by Pierre Hermé’s new store on the rue Cambon and had a liche and rose flavoured Ispahan sorbet sandwich. 

I’ve tried his ice creams before and, as usual, this was sickly sweet and wincingly perfumed (and his wasabi and grapefruit macaron had zero wasabi flavour, grumble, moan, complain...), but as with the films of the Cohen brothers (Oh Brother Where Art Thou?: That's an hour and a half of my life I won't see again), I never seem to learn where Hermé is concerned.

That said, his crimes pale in comparison to those of Godiva, who judging by the display in their store window around the corner, persist in perpetrating the dangerous delusion that chocolate and strawberries go together (apparently Godiva is owned by a Turkish confectionary giant).

Sorry about the bad picture, but I was trembling with indignation. Chocolate and strawberries? Don’t get me started on that particular culinary heresy. Ooh, why I oughta...!

Phew! Had a brief black out there. Not sure what happened. Anyhoo, I'm off on an assignment for a magazine to Norway tomorrow. Not renowned for its food, Norway, but I am prepared to have my preconceptions overturned and will report back.

The chocolatiers of Paris

Sometimes, occasionally - okay, only really as I write this and reflect on a day spent almost entirely in the pursuit of chocolate perfection - I do ask myself, is it entirely healthy for a grown man in his late 20s (cue awkward coughs and sideways glances) to be so fixated on what is, essentially, candy?

To which the self evident answer is, well, what else is there to do with a free day in Paris? An almost perfect ignorance of art and architecture liberates me from the crushing tedium of galleries and museums. My wife’s necessarily iron grip on the household finances, and the Wiemar Republic-style devaluation of the pound means there isn’t much mileage in shopping in Euros. And, besides, I’m not in my late 20s anyway.

So let’s get on with the business at hand. Who is the greatest chocolatier (someone who makes chocolates, rather than someone who makes chocolate) in Paris today.

The usual answer to that is, whichever one I happen to be standing in, but this time I thought I’d try and be a little more rigorous in my evaluation, which is just another way of saying, I wondered just how many I could visit and sample in one day.

First up was an old classic, and a favourite of mine since I first started coming to Paris about, ahem, that can’t be right... but it seems, well, that was 17 years ago (how can I have reached a stage in my life when I can recall doing anything 17 years ago with any clarity?).

As well as fashioning quite staggering statues, figures and, erm, sausages out of chocolate - not sure why, really, as the guilt you’d feel at dismantling them would surely undermine the pleasure of their consumption (if only for a brief moment, at any rate) - Michel Chaudun also makes the definitive, bare naked ganache truffles.

Ganache - essentially a crystalised blend of chocolate and cream, usually with a little butter and trimoline/sucré inverté (inverted, or syrup sugar - you can use honey) - is usually coated with tempered couverture and often infused with citrues fruits, herbs, teas, spices, alcohol or, these days, any other theoretically edible compound that exists within the universe. But some of Paris’ chocolatiers also sell them in teeny tiny cubes lightly dusted with bitter cocoa powder. I am not sure, but I think Chaudun was the first to do this, and his are still the best: light, smooth and silky with no hint of graininess, and, somehow, delightfully springy. This box of six worked out at over 50 cents a piece, which probably makes them about as costly as mammoth ivory, but they are an unsurpassed sensual pleasure and an essential rite of passage in any chocolate lover’s life.

(His shop is on the corner of the same 7th arrondissement street - rue Malar - as two great value restaurants, Stephane Jego's Basque restaurant L’Ami Jean, and L’Affriolé, by the way).

To counteract the calorific burden of my Chaudun purchase (and as I knew I would pass a couple of really fine patisseries on the way) I actually walked across a good chunk of the Left Bank to the next stop on my chocolate itinerary, the little shoe box shop of John-Charles Rochoux (whose chocolate crocodile featured in my last post) at 16, rue d’Assas in the 6th. I’d read about it on David Lebovitz’s wonderful blog, and thought I’d check it out.

As well as the croc, there were more wacky/troubling, gothic choc-tures (could you eat a baby? A whole one?).

The cheery M Rochoux himself was manning the till and directed me to his basil and tobacco ganaches the flavours of which were punchily vivid. The tobacco flavour had an amazing length - if you can forgive me the choc-poncery - but the basil - which seemed to have candied basil stalk mixed in - was especially, and unexpectedly fab. Definitely up there with the best I have ever tasted, and nice and chunky too.

This is the tobacco ganache. Very nice too it was.

Part II of my chocolate odyssey after the break. No flicking!