PERFECT PASTRY: Top tips with chef Calum Franklin
Pie aficionado Calum Franklin talks to KATIE WRIGHT about fundraising in lockdown and classic mistakes people make with pastry
YOU might think, given the long hours and frenetic pace of life in a high-end restaurant kitchen, that any pro chef would be delighted to take a breather for a while. Not Calum Franklin.
When the executive head chef at Holborn Dining Room was put on furlough for a week after his London brasserie temporarily shut up shop due to the pandemic, Calum didn’t sit back and relax – he teamed up with local foodie friends to fundraise for good causes.
“My wife works for the NHS so I think I had just a mixture of guilt and boredom after a week – I needed to do something,” Calum tells me on the phone, just days before he was due to reopen the highly acclaimed restaurant and The Pie Room – which sells pastry-based creations to-go – both located at the five-star Rosewood Hotel. That was before the new lockdown came into effect, of course.
“There’s a local butcher near me in Greenwich and nd I get on well with the owner – I went in with a plan. We organised a local business group in the Greenwich area,” he explains. “Whether it was a cheesemonger, a baker, a brewery, they all provided ingredients free of charge, then we made pies in the hotel and sold them at the butcher’s.
“And then all the money we raised over the lockdown period went towards building a garden for staff at Greenwich and Lewisham NHS hospitals, and we also raised money for a local hospice.”
As well as his philanthropic efforts, the 37-year-old has also been busy preparing for the launch of his debut cookbook, The Pie Room.
It features dishes that have appeared on the Holborn Dining Room menu alongside some new recipes, as well as guides on how to perfect classic pastr pastry types.
Calum hopes i it’ll help dispel f fears surrounding pastry-making. Why does he think people are often scared when it comes to pastry?
“One of the biggest issues people have, I think, is not controlling temperatures. It’s that thing of when you try to make a pie on a summer’s day and it’s super hot in the kitchen and the pastry’s melting, the butter’s splitting out of it, it’s hard to make it look pretty...
“That in itself is enough to put someone off doing pastry again, I think – that or getting a Wellington wrong and you’ve
got the whole family are around the table and you cut it and it doesn’t look nice, the beef’s overcooked... It’s a lot of work for it to go wrong.”
Naturally, the self-confessed ‘pastry deviant’ thinks homemade is best, but even he will bust out a packet of the shop-bought stuff on occasion.
“There’s no shame in it. I’ll use Jus-Rol at home if I’m in a rush to do something, I have that in the freezer,” he says, which is why recipes in the book include the option of readymade in the ingredients.
So what’s a good a recipe for a beginner to start with?
“The mac and cheese pie is a good one because the filling’s really quick and easy, and then you can apply some of the decoration techniques that are in the book,” Calum says. “And it’s SO tasty. It’s super naughty – I’ve never served that and it hasn’t made people smile.”
The Pie Room by Calum Franklin, photography by John Carey, is published by Bloomsbury Absolute, £26 (bloomsbury.com)