'I'm quite bossy," says Amy Willcock.
"Agas are designed to cook in, not on. The rule is
to cook 80 per cent of your food inside and 20 per cent
on top. Once you know that, you know everything."
The Aga guru has a day to teach me, a vestal Aga virgin,
how to cook. Willcock had watched the first of my Tamasin's
Weekends series where I confessed to never having cooked
on my new Aga until the cameras rolled. Horrified, she
offered to demystify me.
Why do people love Agas more than their children, husbands
and dogs when they can't even control the cooking temperature?
Do Aga owners secretly rise at dawn to put in their Sunday
roast, offering up prayers to the gods of fire and the
hearth?
Amy has a full fry in the roasting oven before I can
even ask, and is whisking batter for Yorkshire pudding.
She is intent on proving that it can be made in advance.
"Cook it completely because of the heat loss and
lack of space later," she says. "Melt the dripping
on the floor of the roasting oven - the hottest place
- then cook it on No 4. The next hottest is No 1, at the
top, for grilling.
"I didn't know this great cast iron beast of burden
could grill. But it can. The full fry, which has been
merrily grilling for 15 minutes (as well as locking in
moisture, Agas lock the food in tighter than Wormwood
Scrubs so you can't smell anything cooking), is set down
on the worktop. Amy extolls the virtues of the sheet of
Bake-O-Glide that has been laid on the bottom of the roasting
tin (no need to decrust), with a rack above it from which
the sausage and bacon fat can dribble into the juicy depths
of the tomatoes and mushrooms.
A full fry with no greasy worktops, no hissing cook,
no spitting fat, no malodorous smells and the kitchen
still a smokeless zone? Heaven or what? But what about
the eggs? A circle of the greased sheet is laid on the
hotplate. Amy cracks an egg on to it and it fries in seconds.
"If you want it easy over, just put the lid down
when you cook it," she says. "You can toast
sandwiches like this too."
In an instant she has unwrapped the loaf she gets sliced
lengthwise ("the slices fit perfectly into the tennis
racket toaster"), filled it with Cheddar and plonked
it on the Bake-O-Glide. The hotplate lid is down and in
seconds she's made a perfectly crisped and oozing toasted
sandwich. But is she really going to reheat a Yorkshire
pudding? Not only is Amy Willcock going to perform this
unlikely trick, she is about to show me that the potatoes
she part-roasted the evening before are as delicious crisped
up and finished today as those made on the day. She is
clearly certifiable.
"Always under-time things with an Aga and move things
around," she says. "Agas create intuitive cooks
because you get to poke and prod with your fingers and
listen to your food." Amy illustrates this point
later with her cider vinegar cake, removing it from the
oven so that we can hear the moisture crackling, which
means it is not quite ready.
I learn that pastry doesn't have to be baked blind, but
can be put directly on to the roasting oven floor - even
from frozen - and that if it browns too quickly it can
be covered with the "cold plain shelf." I risked
it for Woman's Hour recently and it worked. You can bring
chicken stock to the boil, put it in the simmer oven and
abandon it for hours.
The ovens are self-ventilated so that they don't steam,
and you don't need to clean them. I learn about hot spots,
the best places for baking, bringing root veg to the boil
then cooking them, drained, in the simmer oven. Risotto
- and I say this as a stir-the-stuff risotto snob - can
also be cooked behind closed doors. My son, Harry, and
I ate Amy's risotto heated through two days later and
he pronounced it the best he'd eaten in ages.'
No one buys an Aga to cook on. It's an emotional buy
that transports you back to that time and that place where
your mother cooked the roast," says Amy. And the
Yorkshire? Still risen and perfectly cooked. The potatoes?
Good, but with my six-oven Aga I'll make them on the day.
I suggest Aga updates its image and gives copies of Amy's
books to all new Aga drivers. We're paying a lot to buy
into the dream and we could do with her thoroughly modern
handholding.
- 'Amy Willcock's Aga Know-How' (£5.99), 'Aga
Cooking' (£19.99) and 'Amy
Willcock's Aga Baking' (£18) are published
by Ebury Press and can be ordered (plus £2.25
p & p) from Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222.
- Her 'Rangeware' for Agas can be bought from Mermaid
(0121 554 2001).
- For Bake-O-Glide stockists, call 01706 224790.
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