‘Cooking is a life skill that really does mean life’

Scotland’s national chef Gary Maclean on how his new cookbook can improve readers’ diet and wallet

IT’S difficult to discern the line between Gary Maclean’s recently acquired twin identities as TV’s MasterChef: The Professionals 2016 winner and as Scotland’s first national chef. Both roles have propelled him into near-celebrity status, with the attendant ever-filling appointments diary.

He says his life has changed dramatically since taking on both, yet the baseline under it all is his lifelong vocation as a food educator: the father-of-five has been a senior lecturer at City of Glasgow College for decades, even during his career as a restaurant chef.

Distilling all that into one cookbook must have been a quite a challenge, then.

“It took me a year and it was really hard,” he admits brightly when we meet in the teaching kitchen at the college, where he’s preparing a £125-a-head dinner with fellow contestants on his MasterChef team while helping students follow the guest chefs’ recipes. “I knew from the get-go how difficult it could be. I naively thought I had a book already there because I had lots of recipes written down. I assumed it would be a case of picking 150 and that would be it, job done.

“But then we realised that the vast majority of them were for pastry [sweet dishes]. Chefs don’t write down savoury recipes because all the technique, understanding, method is all in your head. I didn’t have any savoury recipes, save for risotto or what I’d written for magazines.

“So I had to dump all 150, plus five days’ worth of photography of dishes I’d spent days and days writing and preparing, and start again.”

His second pitch to the publisher – whom he knew as a contributor, while head chef at Yes in Glasgow, to its chefs’ recipe book, Glasgow on a Plate, edited by Ferrier Richardson – was somewhat more refined.

“I started from the ingredients. When it comes to cooking, everybody seems to be on autopilot, buying and cooking the same things week in, week out, and even parking in the same spot at the supermarket. From my experience of teaching and demonstrating, these are intelligent people – heart surgeons, F1 engineers – who for one reason or another just can’t cook and have got into the trap of reproducing the same half-dozen or so meals on rotation.

“I want people to get off autopilot, start using their brains and think about what they are going to cook and eat. I reckon the skills I can pass on to achieve that are based on me being a dad, a teacher and a chef.”

He describes his book as being “for grown-ups for whom cooking is a complete mystery” – the modern generations who have grown up on ready meals, out-of-home eating and working mothers, who lack the knowledge about cooking from scratch

once handed down from their mothers and grandmothers. “It’s like teaching a commonsense cookery course. There’s nothing gimmicky,” he says.

All the same, it does look pretty sophisticated. The artful photography is achingly aspirational and there are recipes for such delights as salt pickled beetroot, duck leg confit, lemon sole tempura. There are plenty of Asian and Moroccan-inspired dishes too. And pakora. And there’s a foreword by Marcus Wareing, chef-patron of the Michelin-starred Marcus in London’s Knightsbridge, who as a judge on MasterChef: The Professionals described Maclean’s cooking as having “nailed the flag of Scotland to the mast of the MasterChef UK kitchen”. Which could, I suggest, be quite daunting for the nervous home cook.

“They’re not difficult at all, they’re all easy,” he responds when I challenge the simplicity of, say, rustling up a lamb tagine or potato and Parmesan gnocchi. “It’s all about planning ahead and spending a bit of time.” In other words, prioritising food as an essential – and enjoyable – part of our lives.

To be fair, alongside these are the solid foundation dishes such as pea and ham soup, whole roast chicken, braised beef and chips. He also gives an extremely useful step-by-step instruction on how to chop an onion, joint a chicken, brown meat properly on a high heat to intensify the flavour (most of us tend to be fearful of this and timidly put it on too low a heat), using leftovers, using a slow cooker and baking blind. There is millennial material aplenty: ramen, chicken katsu curry, mac’n’cheese, braised pigs’ cheek, all highly suitable for round-thetable with friends.

He devotes an entire section to explaining the benefits of planning. “Cooking is a serious business,” he writes. “I can think of nothing that will improve your diet and wallet more than planning. Food is expensive, but if you spend a little time each week planning what you are going to buy you will save a fortune, you’ll learn new cookery skills – and it can be the start of a much more varied diet.”

Batch cooking is one of his favourite things to do at home: he devotes a day to it once a week and cooks to music. This can save time in the kitchen during the week and he gives vital advice on how to store food safely.

He wrote his book on the table in his open-plan living-dining room at home, wearing earphones to block out the television and using a highlighter pen to mark off each item on his notebook as he worked through his list.

Surrounded by family, colleagues and students for most of his life, he describes the writing process as “a very lonely, solitary job”. Yet throughout there is a running commentary from Maclean the teacher on each page, his voice guiding us through the minutiae of getting to grips with the cooking-from-scratch habit.

Although he mentions Scotland rarely, if at all, it’s possible to discern his Glaswegian accent in the little expressions he uses – “Tuesday tea”, a “wee bit” and “I like to get that out the way” – which I find both charming and reassuring. The photography was done