At the coal face
London’s latest ingredient is smoking hot. Victoria Stewart chows down on charcoal
A CURIOUS colour change has taken place in London’s kitchens. Once brightly coloured fruit juices have begun to look bruised. Cocktails are oddly murky. And now the classic brioche bun — with its shiny lid and rich golden hue — has turned black.
The culprit is charcoal, which is now being added to mixing bowls in kitchens across London, having stormed through parts of Asia. Last year Burger King Japan launched a black burger with charcoal cheese and squid ink sauce, while on Instagram there are more than 2,600 posts including #charcoalbun or #charcoalburger, mostly from Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Australia.
In London, juice businesses including The Botanic Lab, Raw Press and The Juice Well have charcoal-infused drinks on their menus, and Michelinstarred chefs Tom Sellers and Simon Rogan of the restaurants Story and Fera at Claridge’s incorporate coal oil on theirs. Bull in a China Shop (BIACS), a new Chinese rotisserie chicken restaurant opening on April 13 in Shoreditch, is to offer a chicken charcoal burger in a black brioche bun.
Some, including Simon Chan, chef and co-owner of BIACS, believe charcoal is a health supplement, although at this stage there is little evidence to back up its long list of apparent benefits, which include lowering cholesterol and reducing flatulence. Having never heard of it being used before as something to eat or drink, Chan began researching and found that bamboo or coconut activated charcoal had been used as a healing aid for stomach pain in ancient Chinese, Ayurvedic and Western medicine. Chan has since commissioned the Dusty Knuckle bakery in Dalston to supply him with black buns, and asked his barman to make a black version of an Old Fashioned cocktail.
“The guys got the bun just right. The charcoal doesn’t affect the flavour… but if you try hard you’ll notice a slight graininess at the end.”
For Rogan, who currently serves grilled leeks in coal oil at Fera, discovering it was a happy accident that took place at his Cumbrian restaurant, L’Enclume: “One of the chefs accidentally chucked hot coals into a vat of oil from a frier. It caught fire and caused a huge amount of smoke. We put a damp cloth over it and left it to cool. Later we realised that it had developed an amazing aroma and an incredibly smoky taste.
Like Sellers, Rogan makes his own coal oil, because it “adds a lovely clean barbecue accent to any dish. We constantly get asked how it’s made. People assume that it’s a complicated process but really it’s just an offshoot of the day’s leftover grilling coals.”
So the secret’s out. Are you ready for the black stuff ?
‘It adds a lovely clean barbecue accent to any dish. We constantly get asked how it’s made’