How to spice up Christmas dinner: top chefs offer their tips
How to add a twist to the traditional festive spread
Christmas is no holiday for chefs. If they're not working in restaurant kitchens, they're probably cooking for friends and family at home.
But do they approach preparing Christmas fare differently from the rest of us? Do they apply a little extra creativity to the preparation of traditional dishes, to inject an element of surprise?
Well, for the most part, apparently not. Many of the chefs asked to contribute an idea politely declined on the grounds that they like to observe tradition at Christmas and stick to time-honoured recipes.
Mandarin Oriental executive chef Uwe Opocensky, who describes his cuisine as "progressive gastronomy", for example says Christmas is his favourite time of year and he likes to keep it on the traditional straight and narrow, both at home and in the Mandarin Oriental's restaurants. He worked under Ferran Adrià at El Bulli and you can always rely on him for a surprise, but that wasn't quite the kind I was expecting.
His counterpart at the Mandarin Oriental Landmark, Richard Ekkebus, is also a seasonal traditionalist, but acknowledges that some of the Christmas favourites can be bland and he is not averse to giving them a tweak. His take on bread sauce is a good example.
"Bread sauce is a very British sauce served over the festive season with poultry such as turkey. It's way better when you make it using sourdough bread, if possible a darker version like rye, that has been toasted very darkly," he says.
