Meet Lee Murdoch, Exec Chef of The Coal Shed

How a simple tomato soup recipe turned a teenage school-dropout into a master of fire cooking. We sat down with Lee Murdoch, Executive Chef of The Coal Shed Brighton, to get the full story.

Q: What food can people expect from the new Coal Shed?

Lee: When The Coal Shed started 13 years ago, cooking over coals on a Josper oven was new, but everyone is doing that now. We want to take it to the next level and set the next trend. We want to showcase the best products we can work with.

You need to understand where your product comes from, and I’m talking to our suppliers, farmers and fisheries every day. They send me pictures on WhatsApp of produce they’ve just farmed. These guys that we work with, they’ve been farmers for their whole lives; their grandfather, their mother – we can learn so much from these people. They know these products better than anyone. How to cook it, what to pair it with. How the position in the field, or the amount of sunlight has produced a different flavour. For a lot of restaurants, farm to table moves in one direction. I’m about going back down the line and talking to these producers to learn from them.

So, they could send me a picture of some fresh radicchio or buttermilk lettuce from that morning and we can say “yeah bring that in, we’ll make something with that tonight”. We want to have that flexibility of being able to work with the best produce of that day. We don’t want to confine ourselves to what we’ve put in a menu description. And if we’re changing the leaves in the salad, we can think “maybe a lemon is too sharp with this leaf, let’s use something softer like a desert lime or a smoked virgin olive oil tonight”.

We’ve also got the Salt Chamber here, it’s our own dry ageing room. We’re gonna be doing the butchering ourselves. We’ll get prime ribs on the bone which we can age with pink salt using its own tallow to change the dynamics of the beef. Just using different techniques to bring out the best of that product.

Q: When did you first get into cooking?

Lee: My brother was a chef; he went to culinary school. He was like, you know, the straight one. I hated school, hated teachers, had no interest in it, and I never knew at that age I was dyslexic, but I just couldn’t focus. I had never been interested in food, never at a young age. I’d make fun of him basically.

One day he goes, “Come on, let me show you something.” He took me upstairs and he says, “I’m gonna make tomato soup”. And I swear, mate, hand on heart, I thought tomato soup came out of a tin. Like in the way a plant grows in the wild. I knew nothing about food. I hated cheese, I hated mushrooms. I was so fussy.

My mum used to work sh*tloads, right. Growing up, we’d open the tomato soup, put it in the microwave and that was it. So, my brother showed me how to make it. It was like watching somebody invent the wheel. I was f*cking blown away. I thought, yeah, cooking, that was it for me.

My brother was working in the Turnberry Hotel which was near where we grew up, and he got me a job there cleaning when I was 14 or 15. I’d try to get morning shifts and then I’d go in early so I could get my work out of the way and spend time in the kitchen helping out. It was chaos, like the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. We were serving 700 covers a day. But you’re all in it together, you’re a team working towards one goal. It was like a brotherhood.

They asked me to do an apprenticeship. I got my chef whites, I bought a knife, and I thought, yeah, this is it. But I just always have to be better than everyone else, I think it goes back to when I was a kid on the streets. So, if I saw a chef who was better at fine dicing onions than me, I’d line up 20 and try and do it faster. I’d practice with my eyes closed. I was a 17-year-old boy in there with 30–40-year-old chefs from all over the world, trying to better them.

Q: What kind of food were you serving?

Lee: It was like classical French cooking. We had a saucier station, poisson, pastry.

Q: How would you describe your cooking style now?

Lee: I still love the French style, making great sauces, stocks. Making flavours which are really bold in depth. I spent time in Germany in a 1-Michelin star restaurant for about a year. I learnt a lot – we had this crab dish with roasted papaya, and we were cutting these diamonds of papaya, and they had to be so equal. Everything was like that. But there was flavour behind it. That’s when I realised you can have a bit of fun with flavours. Like breaking out of the rules of classic French cooking. But I wasn’t falling in love with Michelin cooking as I did when I was a kid.

Then I started to get interested in how our ancestors used to cook. I decided to travel the world and see how different cultures cooked; I spent time in Southeast Asia, Japan, Europe. I went to the Middle East and got my first head chef job; I worked with a guy called Jason who was the sous chef for Thomas Keller at the French Laundry, and he really taught me about depth of flavour. We used to braise a short rib, marinate it for 18 hours in red wine and mirepoix, and then we’d cook it at 72 degrees for three days. Then, we take the sauce, remove the rib, press it and reduce the sauce. We’d add beetroot and you’d eat it and go “f*ck me”.

We used to cook a lot of things Sous Vide in Turnberry, but this all comes from ancient methods of cooking you know. We’ve put things in pig stomachs, cooked over ash, dug holes in the ground for earth cooking in the Middle East, Africa, cooking with hot stones in Europe; all these techniques we’re starting to use now are ancient. So that’s the style I go for now, it’s not just about putting a piece of meat over a flame, which is delicious, but let’s get a clay pot and steam it first with different herbs, different wines. It’s almost spiritual, because you’re using a raw earth product, rather than just turning on some gas and cracking on.

Q: Will the menu be similar to the previous Coal Shed?

Lee: Yes and no. At the heart of it, we’re still working with the best beef we can find, the best seafood. But we’re introducing these techniques of cooking; clay pots, the copper kettle oven, and it’s going to take all that produce to another level.

It’s a bigger menu, and we wanted to have something for everyone. The DNA is still the same, we’re still serving the best steak and beef you can get. But we’re in a seaside town so we’re cooking the best fish and seafood too. We’ve got great veggie and vegan food, cooked over coals, cooked in the ash, steamed in clay pots. There are bar snacks for if you’re coming in for a drink, and then on the other end of the scale there’s that real special occasion type of food.

I’m bringing together everything I’ve learned, from the French classical cooking at the Turnberry, Michelin cooking in Germany, wood-fired cooking in the Middle East, the precision of Japanese kitchens, and I’m putting it into this menu. If people think they know The Coal Shed already, this is gonna blow their minds.

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Meet Lee Murdoch, Exec Chef of The Coal Shed