What happens when you attempt to cook a dish from Michelin-starred chef Clare Smyth’s Oncore at home

What happens when you attempt to cook a dish from Michelin-starred chef Clare Smyth at home? Kitchen Confidential’s The Mouth finds out.

The Mouth’s attempt at a dish made famous by Clare Smyth. Picture: Supplied

Cooking out of a famous chef’s cookbook always feels a bit like singing karaoke: You’ve got the words and notes right in front of you but no matter how hard you try you’ll never be Glen Campbell singing “Galveston”.

Yet with so many Sydney folk apparently staying home of an evening to avoid Covid or La Nina or running into exes, this column imagines that an awful lot of readers are doing exactly that sort of culinary crooning and torturing their neighbours with smells rather than sounds.

So let’s take a week off the restaurant gig and talk about home cooking, celebrity chefs, and favourite dishes.

For anyone who really loves their food, this territory is more fraught than it seems at first glance.

Every home cook has their own algorithm for determining how much fuss is worth the end result, how much flavour is lost to Instagrammability (because pretty very often equals bland), and a million other considerations involving time and money and family screaming to get dinner on the table.

The Mouth’s attempt at a dish made famous by Clare Smyth. Picture: Supplied

We were thinking about this the other night when firing off – for perhaps the fifth time in a month – a plate of the famous Thai dish pad grapow out of John Chantarasak’s brilliant cookbook, Kin Thai.

Chantarasak plies his trade in London so it’s kind of hard to know if you’ve exactly nailed it.

But if you’ve lived in Thai-heavy Sydney for long enough, you’re sure to know what a good pad grapow – basically a spiced beef mince affair with rice and an egg deep friend in the wok – tastes like.

The Mouth attempts to cook a recipe from Michelin-starred British chef Clare Smyth’s cookbook.

Spicy and savoury and very addictive, it’s a dish that requires just a few ingredients, is basically what the kids are calling street food these days, and something that is worth the price of admission for the book alone (the duck curry is also very good).

But at the other end of the spectrum, where the pants get more fancy, things get more difficult.

Are expensive cookbooks worth it to make maybe one dish maybe once that requires who knows how much effort and time and technique one might not have?

This column’s shelves heave with such books and it was with some trepidation we pre-ordered Clare Smyth’s cookbook weeks before even her local restaurant Oncore opened at Barangaroo.

And to be honest most of the recipes sit at such a state of stratospheric complexity it’s hard to imagine trying any of them at home.

Yet for fun we tried recreating her signature “potato and roe” dish out of the book, and which we’d previously enjoyed at her restaurant, so we knew what it should taste like.

The famous potato dish at Oncore by Clare Smyth. Picture: Supplied

At its heart, the dish is a potato that has had a long bath in butter served with salmon roe and a buttery salty sauce based around Japanese sea weed.

And you know what? It came up more than all right.

Certainly not something that will be made as often as pad grapow, but 10/10 would make again.