All hail the microwave!

Marco Pierre White may have earned a reputation as the tousle-haired kitchen bad boy who once made Gordon Ramsay cry, but these days he spends his mornings rather more quietly, enjoying his kippers. Yet in his retirement, he can still cause controversy. He recently told a podcast how he cooks his kippers. ‘On a plate, paint it with butter, wrap in cling film, in the microwave, two to two and a half minutes.’ A microwave? Really, Marco?!

Yes. As far as kippers go, his reasoning is spot on. ‘Most people put them under the grill, which intensifies the salt’. Meanwhile, boiling them – jugged kippers – washes away the flavour. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with a microwave. As Marco put it, the haters need to ‘take off the blinkers’. The truth is, for some things, they just work. ‘When we used to cook veal kidney in the fat, we’d start them in the microwave because they’d cook from the inside out,’ Marco said.