Espresso: Why Creativity is All Around You - Calum Franklin

0:08how does the architecture like go in into your creative process like you seem to be pulled from different things yeah it's it's mad just so that came the steps behind the pie basically so that came about from um you hear a lot of chefs kind of talk about i mean tommy is probably a great example tommy banks right grew up in the countryside surrounded by farming i think his father is in farming right and i think so um and yeah they i mean they're a farmer yeah yeah and yeah you know tommy probably grew you know genuinely grew up pulling vegetables out the ground right and and surrounded by that sort of wonderful agriculture and and that's something for him that's uh a deep rooted connection in his food and you can see it when you're eating his restaurants is amazing I grew up in Southeast London right I mean when I was young we sort of I look forward to you know we've done all those happy meals and sort of going out and sort of being naughty on buses and stuff but being surrounded by that style of food wasn't there because that connection wasn't there so I when I hear about chefs talk about terroir and the connection to the land and stuff I'm like envious of that But I was like, how do I anchor my food where I live?

1:39And I do that through my other passion, which is architecture and design. So it was taking inspiration from the buildings around me, whether that would be, you know, the British Museum or, you know, whether it's, you know, the Freemasons Hall. And actually, you know, I worked on a really fun project a long time back where I got in contact with a guy who's a mudlarker. You know mudlarking? Amazing. Mudlarking is these people that go out at sort of low tide onto the banks of rivers, and they look for historical artifacts, right? And there's these like gangs of them that go out, especially on the Thames is pretty cool for it because they find all this incredible stuff from you know Victoria London and Roman times even um so this guy brought me a coin which was from the original Covent Garden when it was built and on the coin there was uh an unusual stamp through it and that stamp was the stamp of a Freemason now he was like look if you look at where you are and where covent garden is and where the freemasons hall is it's kind of like a triangle so i was like okay that's super cool let's do a pie where the design is based on this coin and we'll tell the story of that and how that came about um and yeah i don't know about stuff like that i just go nuts for all right about that's how we root stuff into things it's i love what I love about that is like being unapologetic unapologetically authentic do you know what I mean it's like you can't you're not saying you were pulling turnips out in you know the Yorkshire Dales it's it's being who you are and I think it's it's a it's a brave bold thing and it links back to what you said what we're talking about at the beginning it's like obviously now retrospectively it's easy but yeah obviously British pies the tourists coming in but back then it's it was a bold move to lean into your like completely authentic self is there an example um of like say we take a pie and we we we reverse engineer the creative process of like say say you're walking around london or paris and how that goes through what the ingredients were i'd love to just know that seems super interesting yeah i mean if say for example uh we think yeah i mean that would that would probably be one of the strongest examples of that that you know that single little coin garden out on the banks yeah but um how i work now i mean definitely we would start off with flavor profile right so that's the beginning of the process uh it's whether you know we're looking at okay if we're going to launch a pie in say end of the year potentially game season in the uk so that's a nice little starting point we can work from that And then from there, that's where I would open up to the team about design.

4:55Okay. So something that at the pyro, I try to encourage as much as possible is the creativity side of things. So as a chef, when I was young, that creative side was very much stifled. And it is quite often in the industry at the beginning. And I get it at the beginning. You need to learn how to cook, right? um but if it's stifled too much i think it can knock it out of you and i would still try to encourage the team a little bit so i'd say to them i wanted to go and do some drawings you know go find something that inspires you in the city go you know even if it's it could be music right it's something that's something you heard and it's say created an emotion in you i want you to come back and tell me about it and and to start bringing that into uh the pie room at the time and then from there that would be where the team would get together we'd start sketching together and then I would tend to sort of then push that up another level so I would find something whether it's in the design or in the pie making itself or in the cooking process which would challenge us right so it would it would take us out of our comfort zone um and generally the reaction to that always was from the whole team uh how how the hell are we going to do that and then we would find a way to do it and by doing that process every time we created new styles and new techniques within pie making itself um which we were happy always to share with the rest of the the sort of pie making community in the world um because that was that fed into another um ethos of us which was very strong which was uh sharing all knowledge and all technique with anybody who asked ever and and lots of people disagree with that what why why why did you why yeah because a lot of chefs want to keep it closed book like this is it's our ip essentially what why because um there's a very strong example of this and it's if you look at uh the explosion of sort of uh the nordic dining scene and then after that the rest of europe blowing up in terms of you know michelin-starred restaurants and skill and technique and it just exploding in europe and france falling behind right and the reason for that was there was a period of time where chefs were all across Europe doing collaboration dinners, sharing knowledge, inviting stagiais into their kitchen, being very open.

7:59And in France at the time, they were still very, no, this is our recipes, this is our knowledge, this is a secret. And what happened was Europe moved very quickly ahead. The rest of Europe, sorry, moved very quickly ahead. And things have changed now. France definitely caught up. yeah but I saw that happening and I knew there was something to that but also I the way I explained it to the team was look tell me what what's the worst that can happen if I invite a chef in here and say okay in the next three days I'm going to show you every single technique and skill and bit of knowledge that I have on this specific you know cooking style what is the worst thing that can happen and they'd always say well he'll go away and he'll do it better than you and I was like yeah but that's not a bad thing well it's not a bad thing because it means that I constantly have to evolve and push myself and do better and always strive to be on top Otherwise, we just sit at this level.

9:14It's very comfortable, you know, and potentially the others just rise up above you anyway. So it's about creating competition and making sure that there's always this drive to be better, to learn and to create new things. And it makes people come and say, I want to learn, I want to learn, I want to learn. So, yeah, it was this ethos that we put in and it worked really well for us. quick one guys Espressos have got a brand new sponsor Unleashed Unleashed is inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software we use Unleashed daily at Ireland I bloody love it we've got our admin time in half saving approximately 30k a year why use it save money save headaches save stress get granular clarity on your margins know where your stock is don't miss availability look your favourite brands literally use Unleashed as their backbone candy kids tiny rebel trip always religiously look there's a link in the show notes please feel free to book a call with josh and his wonderful sales team at unleashed they're amazing even nothing comes of it and even better news you'll get your first month free if you reference hungry thank you yeah so i love doing these conversations you learn so much that you don't expect to learn but like yeah almost creating your own competition to to keep pushing you pushing you up is mad is there example of that where you someone came in and then they did their own pie and then that that forced you to push harder yeah i mean definitely i mean you know we we would invite so we started doing a an old school french style of pie called patin crits right which is uh it's really interesting sort of the rectangular cold pie um which has a jelly in it and traditionally uh you know a peasant dish it was made of pork foie gras that doesn't sound like peasant but it was back in the day uh and like the trimmings of pork and foie gras and then wrapped in pastry and a pork jelly and over the years become extremely elaborate and extravagant and beautiful and detailed in terms of making it and there's a world championship and yeah we would um there was weird little world when we started doing it of a small handful of chefs around the globe who were all trying to learn this technique because in France they were very closed off about the technique it was very secretive so we were sort of learning from each other and and I think um in the pyram because we were making it every day at the pyram um we got quite far ahead and and that was when chefs would come and we would share that knowledge with them and it would be you know kind of unusual things I learned sometimes I would feel like okay everyone's caught up with us what can I do to push things forward again right to not to show everyone but just to like me put myself mentally in a place where I'm I'm sort of like no we're okay we're sort of we're cracking on so I did a dinner with Tom Kerridge and Tom said to me look it's gonna be 12 guests it's very sort of small private dinner is there any chance you could do something kind of fun for the evening something a bit unusual so I went away I said yeah leave it with me I'm gonna do something I had seen this technique done maybe in the 70s where that style of rectangular pie, they would slice it.

12:55And I'll show you, I'll let draw this because it makes more sense to draw it. In the center of the pie, if you had a slice, would be a sausage, right? So it'd be a slice of sausage there. And literally there would be a clock face on it, right? which they were like wait by you know this amazing sausage making technique and i was like well i'm gonna do that but this is a big but the when i've seen it done what the chefs used to do was after they slice it they used to with a little paintbrush with some squid ink they used to draw the hands of the clock on right and i was like that's cheating so what i want to have is the the hands of the clock are on there and as you slice the pie the time changes right so it's mental i spent i genuinely spent a month working it out and i think i didn't sleep properly for a month because i was trying to sort of work out how i would do it with this sausage making technique my wife thought we were in financial trouble or something because I wasn't, I was just waking up looking like a haggard.

14:09And I was trying to, I didn't want to explain to her. It's because I'm trying to work out how to put a clock into a pie. Into sausage. Yeah. That's jokes. But on the evening we had, you know, I sort of presented this on croute. And on the side of it, it had written in black pastry, you know, the watch company, Patek Philippe. So I put Pate Philippe down the side and I said to the guests, look, This is a working clock made of pie, right? And I'm going to slice it and it's going to show you what the time is in the room tonight. And I sliced it knowing that it was the wrong time, right? And I kind of turned it around and showed it to everyone.

14:56And all the guests were like, didn't work. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. Sometimes with these things, you know, they need a bit of a shake. So I shook it and I sliced it and it was the right time that was in the room. And it kind of just like blew my mind. But learning that technique, I felt kind of pushed me a little bit further forward. And then again, you know, since then, I've probably explained that technique in detail to chefs countless times so they can do it. And I'm not going to fall back on it. That's something that I've done and now I have to learn other things. So, yeah. yeah it's what i'm getting from you may is this almost this this and i i kind of i kind of relate to you in this kind of upset anxious obsession with learning i i just channel it into a podcast i love speaking to people but you can apply it to anything um and it's like once you learn something it's the next thing i've got this kind of constant what's the next fucking thing i've got to learn thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day let's be having you if you want the full episode it will be in the show notes a link will be in the show notes the full episode thank you so much please stay friends as well means the world to me