What’s the summer like? FUC-KING-BRU-TAL! I hereby declare wet T-shirt season officially open. And no, this is not about the sexist sniggering of blokes with advanced dickie-do syndrome.
And here’s one of the life-saving tricks for the kitchen in summer
Cold soup for a heatwave — ingredients and method
INGREDIENTS:
- 400 g soy yoghurt
- 150 g cucumber
- 20 g mustard
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1–2 tsp sugar or other sweetener
- 1–2 tbsp lime or lemon juice
- 50 g tofu
- 30 g oil
METHOD:
Blend the yoghurt, cucumber, mustard, salt, sugar, tofu and juice together.
While blending, slowly pour in the oil
NOTES:
Oil obviously doesn’t mix with yoghurt, which is mostly water.
But both soy and mustard contain lecithin, an emulsifier, which is why blending lets you mix the oil thoroughly into the water. Exactly the same mechanism is used for making mayonnaise from soy milk
SERVING:
Best straight from the fridge. If it’s really hot, you can serve it with ice cubes
How hot does a kitchen actually get in summer?
In summer I look at the weather forecast with more dread than at a child-support summons.
The kitchen is always at least a few, usually ten degrees hotter than outside. Lucky me that during the last heatwave, when it hit 38°, we had no guests. And for the next event the forecast says a fairly moderate twenty-something degrees.
On top of the heat in the kitchen there’s high humidity. For ****’s sake, no need to fly to exotic countries, you’ve got the tropics right there at work.
And of course kitchens have extractor hoods over the stove, but when it’s hot outside, they mainly pull out the water and oil vapour from above the pots, and the particles rising from them while you cook — the temperature barely drops.
How do you cool down in a hot kitchen?
If you can’t cool the room, you can cool yourself. A water spray bottle, say, or soaking your cap. But the king of these methods is the wet T-shirt.
The best way to cool down in a hot kitchen is a wet T-shirt, soaked in cool water.
What counts as real work?
That’s the kitchen. Hard, tough, chop or die… That’s proper work, not ******* about with nonsense.
This is what I’d do, I’m no techno-utopian, but I believe in what technology can do and it could already be done:
First, an hour of hard work, not necessarily in a kitchen. A tram driver doesn’t have it easy either, or a Lidl checkout girl (even now they no longer have to wear nappies to work). And only then an hour of ******* about with nonsense.
Most of the intelligentsia and LinkedIn experts, if they swung a shovel for a few hours, wouldn’t have the strength left for ******* about with nonsense online. The strength would be with working people, the grafters, for whom 8 hours of ******* graft is the norm.
By the way, I’ve got a second point for the definition of what real work is.
Reminder of the first: real work is work your smartwatch registers as a workout
The second: work during which you’ve no time for ******* about with nonsense online.
So is your job real work, or at best a bullshit job?
Or, the horror, are you a LinkedIn expert?
Questions you’d ask anyway
What thickens a cold soup without cream?
Nothing. Tofu and soy yoghurt bring the body themselves, and the oil driven in by the blender turns it into an emulsion. You control the thickness with the tofu — more tofu, thicker soup.
Why doesn’t the oil separate from the yoghurt?
Because soy and mustard contain lecithin. That’s an emulsifier — it holds fat and water together, exactly like in mayonnaise. Pour the oil in slowly with the blender running.
How do you cool down in a kitchen that hits 38°C?
A wet T-shirt soaked in cool water. A spray bottle and a soaked cap work too, just not as long. The extractor hood pulls out vapour, not temperature.
What is a bullshit job?
David Graeber’s term — a job the person doing it considers pointless. My two tests: real work is work your smartwatch registers as a workout, and work that leaves you no time for the internet.
Read next:
- How to Avoid Food Poisoning in Summer — heat isn’t only about discomfort
- Five Dark Sides of Working in a Kitchen — the long version of “chop or die”
- Plant-Based Yolk Sauce — same mustard emulsion, different job
- More soups
The kitchen is my space for lifestyle medicine.
I'm not a dietitian or a doctor – I'm a chef, and a member of the Polish Society of Lifestyle Medicine. Nutrition is essential to a modern kitchen, and that's nothing new: working from Hippocratic dietetic principles was part of a cook's craft centuries ago. At Rude Kitchen I tie that tradition to modern science — and to lifestyle. Read more about how I bring cooking and lifestyle medicine together on the About page.