Fancy Cooking Gadgets Won't Make You a Better Chef

At 22 years old in 2002, Aiden Byrne became the youngest chef to pick up a Michelin star for his work at The Commons restaurant in Dublin. He is currently executive chef at Manchester House as well as owning several establishments in the North West. The restaurant's £2.5 million development and recent opening was the subject of 2014 BBC documentary, Restaurant Wars: The Battle for Manchester.

Cooking is a fairly simple art—or at least it should be—but there seems to be a strange and unrelenting obsession with technology in kitchens, restaurants, and people's homes. Food is so fashionable at the moment that it's making chefs and the general public fall for buying stuff that they really don't need and waste a load of cash in the process.

The coming and going of cooking sous-vide is a classic example. It's a total wind up.

I recently went to a restaurant and had a piece of chicken that was cooked sous-vide. It was like eating chicken paste out of a fucking squeezy metal tube, like that horrible synthetic cheese stuff you used to eat at college. It'd probably been cooked for about 700 hours in a water bath so it had absolutely no texture. It was about £30 for the main course.

It's a trend, and we as chefs can be like sheep on that front. As soon as we see someone at the top of the food chain—like Thomas Keller at The French Laundry or Ferran Adria at elBulli—do something, our first reaction is, "Ooh, I want one of those."

If you're a high-end restaurant and you can afford to buy it, that's fine. Sort of. But then demand goes up, the products get mass-produced, and the boys at the bottom of the chain—no disrespect intended—are over the moon because they can get all that kit for much cheaper. They get themselves a water bath and then start cooking absolutely everything in it.

The problem is that the quality differs massively. If there are two versions of the same thing and one costs thousands whereas the other costs hundreds, you're never going to get the same results. Not in a professional kitchen.

A water bath can cost anything from £300 to £1000 depending on power and quality, so it's a big layout. But when they first came out, they were two or three grand and people were just buying them because the top boys had them. I worked in one place where we had seven water baths. A year later, we had one in the kitchen and six in the garage gathering dust.

Then you get phone calls from all the suppliers saying, Well, he's got one down the road, and I've just sold one to XYZ. Part of you thinks, Shit, I'd better get one. Peer pressure.

Lots of lower-end restaurants are being sold the dream, investing in a water baths and then being told that they have to invest in a vacuum machine and loads of other stuff. Before you know where you are, you've spent seven or eight grand. But if I'm being honest, the most annoying part of it is that average punter probably won't know the difference.

The latest one is centrifuge machines. They emulsify and clarify sauces by whizzing them round really, really fast. But if you don't use it in the right way, you can strip all the flavour and substance out. If you don't actually know what you're doing, you'll do more damage than good.

It's all "boys' toys," and loads of us fall for it. It's tech for tech's sake. At Manchester House, we only use kit if it's absolutely necessary, not for the hell of it. That being said, I can't live without my Thermomix blender. I've got two of them. They cost me £1000 each and they do everything. All the soups, sauces, and purees; they all go through the blender, so they're on the go constantly. They work harder than some chefs I know, so you can have that one.

I had some bloke sat at my chef's table in Manchester House the other day proudly telling me he had a vacuum pack machine. At home. You fucking what?

I just had to smile and say, Oh, that's nice. It's restaurant kit, for crying out loud. What on earth is he doing with one of those in his house? It'll be sitting in the fucking garage with his Xbox in a year. If he's got enough money to buy something he can show off to his mates when they come around twice a year, fair enough. But I had to wonder.

So here's the thing: you probably don't need half the kit in your kitchen. You need a pan, a stove, and an oven. That's the same if you've got a restaurant or if you're just a home cook.

Learn to cook. That's the best tip. Because if you can't, there's no amount of kit in the world that'll make an ounce of difference.

As told to Simon Binns