GIZZI ERSKINE
Chef and food writer Gizzi Erskine invites us into her home kitchen this summer…
What is your home kitchen like?
At the moment, I live in a two-floor warehouse conversion in Dalston, Hackney, and the whole of my ground floor is basically open plan, with a living room, dining room and big kitchen. It’s a really cool space, and it’s pretty diverse in that we can move it around depending on what we’re doing.
In terms of the kitchen, I spent a very long time designing an industrial space that I would be able to work from if I had outside events to cater for or recipes to develop. So for me, first and foremost, it always had to be practical.
It’s a beast of a kitchen. It’s solid, it’s practical and it’s got so much storage space. Each cupboard’s been completely planned out for each utensil and each bit of kitchen equipment.
There’s a lot more space than your average kitchen and I’ve also got big appliances – I’ve got an industrial fridge set back into the wall, a custom Falcon range that we designed together, and a sous-vide steam oven that’s actually set in a butcher’s block.
On the surfaces, I’ve got a proper industrial deep-fat fryer, a Thermomix, and then I’ve also got an air fryer which is quite unlike me, but I don’t think you can escape them anymore. And then, because I am a coffee fiend, I’ve also got a really good coffee machine.
Are you an organised chef or a bit chaotic in the kitchen?
What’s really interesting is I’m incredibly chaotic as a person – I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD for 17 years now and my chaos is part of who I am. But the kitchen is the one place where I can see what I need to do and I'm able to really focus. I think there's something very ritualistic about cooking and doing something step-by-step definitely keeps you on a beat.
When I first got diagnosed, I became really interested in the frequency side of ADHD because I know a lot of chefs have it and it seems to allow us to hyperfocus in these situations. There's actually some really cool research which shows that we all get in sync in the kitchen and that's why it becomes like a poetic little dance.
What dishes do you like to cook in the warmer months?
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a classic alfresco dish. I think sometimes we all try too hard to be modernist and actually it’s good to go back to basics. Over the weekend, I made a chicken pollo diablo and
