When you’re in a rush, it might feel like it takes forever to get a pan of water to boil.

But according to an Oxford University engineering professor, the key to speedy cooking is a bit of rocket science.

Dr Thomas Povey is an expert on jet and rocket engines, particularly the techniques used to manage and transfer engine heat in the most effective way. 

Now he has brought the benefits of his knowledge to the nation’s kitchens, dreaming up a new saucepan design which knocks a minute off a boiled egg’s cooking time.

From start to finish, it would normally take around six minutes to boil an egg – three minutes for the water to boil plus another three minutes of cooking time.

But Dr Povey’s patented new design could reduce this by roughly a minute, which might prove useful for people who need to cook a quick meal in the morning. Called the Flare, the saucepan works best with gas hobs. It has a series of fins which direct flames quickly and evenly up the side of the pan, holding the heat far more effectively than traditional versions.

The main body is aluminium but the handles are made of stainless steel, so will not reach the same searing temperatures as the base.

Flare pans, which can also be used with electric, ceramic and halogen hobs, reach the right cooking temperature around 34 per cent faster – and use 28 per cent less energy than conventional pans.

The Oxford Professor of Engineering has now formed a partnership with Lakeland homewares to turn his prototype into a finished product. The new range will be available in the UK exclusively through the firm’s stores and website.

But the cost of joining the kitchen space age comes with some pretty galactic prices – the designs range from £49.99 for a milk pan to £59.99 for a ten-inch frying pan, £64.99 for a saucepan and £84.99 for a top-of-the-range stockpot.

Dr Povey said: ‘A lot of tests have been done comparing Flare pans to conventional saucepans and they have proved to be at least 30 per cent faster in coming to the boil.’

The pans go on sale next month starting at £49.99.

Masterchef’s John Torode paid a surprise visit to a County Durham community centre where he managed to pick up a few culinary tips.

The celebrity chef called into the Come Eat Together Project in Stanley to see how elderly residents were coming together to enjoy good food and good company.

The aim of the scheme is to improve older people’s diets, prevent malnutrition and get them cooking with fresh, healthy ingredients.

The television chef was introduced to 76-year-old Enid Dent who was cooking up mince and dumplings ready to serve to the 18 members of the project.

Impressed by what he saw, John said: “This is fantastic, what these people are doing is coming together and enjoying healthy food.

“This is teaching older people to be self sufficient in an environment that shows being sociable goes hand in hand with good food.”

The scheme is run by Age UK County Durham and is appealing for votes in a bid to win £2,000 of Lottery funding.

John joined Enid in the kitchen before enjoying a hearty plate of mince and dumplings with other regulars from the group.

Enid, who chased John out of the kitchen before he “ruined her dumplings”, believes the scheme is vital in helping older residents from the Stanley community.

She said: “This brings people who are socially isolated out of their homes and introduces them to new friends.”

Enid, a widow, from Stanley, said cooking for the group had been a lifeline to her and given her a focus.

She added: “I’m not a professional cook and I live alone. Doing this gives me a real purpose.

“There are so many people whose families leave home and their husband or wife passes away, and suddenly they are all alone.

“Groups like this are so important for bringing people together.”

So what did Enid think of having an internationally renowned chef in her kitchen?“Well, that was the icing on the cake,” she said. “He said he couldn’t wait to taste my dumplings.”

Group member Margaret Stothard wasn’t so convinced by the celebrity visitor.

The 62-year-old, from Stanley has been a regular since the club started, said: “I knew his face but I couldn’t have told you his name.”

Harriet Gibbon, chief executive of Age UK County Durham, said the club was vital in bringing in older people who often find it hard to admit they are sometimes lonely.

She said: “Our lunch clubs and dining circles are tremendous social occasions and are an extremely important part of people’s lives. Many older people are lonely but they put on a brave face.”

Is Kate Middleton planning to sideline as a chef? Well – she has been rubbing shoulders with the professionals at her new cooking classes.

The Duchess has joined TV chef Rachel Khoo to take part in classes at the prestigious Leith’s cooking school in West London. Gizzi Erskine, Lorraine Pascale and Xanthe Clay, have also trained there, doncha know!

Khoo, who stars in BBC Two cookery show The Little Paris Kitchen, said of her new cooking buddy: “Kate was in my class. Kate was ill for a few days, so I took notes for her. She was a lovely person, but she kept herself to herself.”

Two weeks worth of classes at the school will set you back a cool £1,600, for training from professional chefs, cookery writers and Masters of Wine, who, according to the school’s website, promise to: “impart enthusiasm for the food and wine trade and instil a lasting love of good food and wine”.

Kate and Prince William have just had a second kitchen installed at their Anmer Hall home, which will boast an eight-seater dining area, perfect for dinner parties. Looks like K-Mid is getting ready to serve up a storm.

We wonder who the first lucky guests will be!

The Prince of Wales heaped praise upon a celebrity Westcountry chef for his work in sustaining the public’s “connection with nature”.

Prince Charles described Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall as “an amazing beacon” on a visit to the chef’s headquarters at River Cottage near Axminster, Devon.

Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall looked round the River Cottage garden on the second day of their annual visit to Devon and Cornwall.

Speaking at the reception, Prince Charles told Fearnley-Whittingstall: “I have long admired all your remarkable efforts to remind people of the necessity of our connection with nature and the rediscovery of those artisan traditions, which this country threw away rather unnecessarily.

“I remember 20 years ago you could never find a really interesting cheese in this country except Cheddar but the extraordinary explosion of artisan-made cheeses has been one of the most remarkable things in this country.”

The Prince described Fearnley-Whittingstall’s work as “absolutely crucial in the reconnection, the re-understanding, the reawakening” of the public’s awareness of where food comes from.

He said: “I want to say that you are an amazing beacon, what you’ve done on the side of fishing and trying to reduce over-exploitation has been remarkable.

“I can only wish you every possible success in the future because I know you are training people here to become those in the future who really can carry on doing the vital work.”

Fearnley-Whittingstall said it had been an honour to welcome Charles and Camilla to River Cottage.

He told the Prince. “It was a few years ago that I had the privilege of a tour of your own wonderful vegetable garden at Highgrove and it’s been a great personal pleasure to be able to finally return the compliment.

“I recall that one of the things we talked about that day was the alarming power of industrial agriculture and food production and how it threatened the character and charm of our local artisan food culture.”

Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall said he heard Charles speak at a symposium on marine conservation, at the same time as the launch of the chef’s Fish Fight campaign.

“You said something that day which had really stayed with me,” he went on.

“Something optimistic. That the crisis of overproduction in our seas is essentially a solvable problem.

“And that with the right measures, and the right goals of sustainability in place, our seas would be not less productive than they are now but considerably more productive.”

Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall paid tribute to Charles’s “tireless example and leadership” that helped such issues have a “hearing at the highest level”.

The royal couple tasted a dessert of seaweed chocolate pudding and tried rose petal vodka on the visit.

The Pavilion restaurant is in London’s upmarket Kensington High Street and it involves a project worth £750,000.

The venture is part of the Pavilion (formerly Drylands) Business Members’ Club, with four floors of luxury serviced offices and working spaces and a 24/7 food and beverage offering.

The Pavilion restaurant needed a full refurbishment of the basement production kitchens to cater for the existing business while being extended to deliver the needs of the new ground floor restaurant serving an additional 60 covers.

Alan Dooley, general manager of the then Drylands contacted CHR to talk about the proposed new venture and the company worked alongside the internationally acclaimed interior design team Design LSM to realise the vision to make Pavilion, a star destination of the London dining scene in its own right.

CHR sales director Paul Neville said: “The hub of this operation is the newly designed basement kitchen, with the ground floor area expanded to incorporate the new restaurant.

“The basement is also a vital ingredient in the whole operation and logistics for the business.

“There is lots of induction, pressure cooking and high efficiency appliances which helps reduce the amount of ventilation required as well providing a more sustainable and energy efficient solution to the client.

“The design and build includes more than 80 per cent of British manufactured product and features our own Eco-Chef cooking block with energy monitoring fitted as standard.”

The restaurant also houses a deli counter which includes a fromagerie, patisserie, charcuterie and meat ageing fridges bespoke designed and using individually controlled zones for ageing and holding the impressive selection of meats on offer from both the deli and the restaurant itself.

You might not have a personal chef in your kitchen, inventing innovative recipes and techniques every night. But IBM may have the next best thing: An artificially intelligent kitchen helper called Chef Watson.

Chef Watson is based on the Jeopardy-winning computer that IBM showed off in 2011 and was programmed by Florian Pinel, a senior software engineer at IBM. It communicates with the app via the internet.

“We started about two and a half years ago,” Pinel said. “Watson had just won on Jeopardy … and we wanted to see if we could push the boundaries of cognitive computing even further to help humans be more creative.”

Watson has already been put to work at IBM events, in cafeterias and the company’s food truck. The idea is pretty straightforward, when given a handful of ingredients, Watson is able to create new, original recipes. In other words, Watson acts like a chef who might be looking in your fridge or shopping at the farmers’ market.

Earlier this year, at the SXSW Festival in Texas, Chef Watson helped the IBM food truck churn out Vietnamese apple kebabs, Belgian bacon pudding, Austrian chocolate burritos and Peruvian potato poutine.

“What makes it [Chef Watson] completely different from other cooking apps … is that here we create new recipes that have never been seen before,” Pinel said.

“This is not about search, this is about helping people be more creative and create recipes that are tailored to their dietary needs and preferences.”

In order to be able to generate brand new recipes, Chef Watson was trained using 35,000 existing recipes. From those, it learned about different cuisines, what ingredients typically go together, and what it takes to make certain types of dishes, like soups or burritos.

Computer-assisted cooking since 1969

Cooking apps, or computers in kitchens, are nothing new. In fact, the very first home computer was meant for the kitchen. The Honeywell Kitchen Computer was released in 1969.

But it didn’t take off. It weighed 45 kilograms, cost $10,000 and required the user to learn binary code to use it. To search forbroccoli recipes, the user had to enter the code forbroccoli: 001101000.

As things became more user-friendly over the decades, the computer in the kitchen acted as a sort of virtual database, a giant binder full of existing recipes.

Chef Watson may be a step up from that old virtual database, but is he better than a real deal chef, with years of experience in the kitchen?

“It’s better at considering all the possibilities without bias,” Pinel explained. “I think you know that the way chefs work is that they have ingredients they like, the dishes they like, they have a certain style. Chef Watson doesn’t have the bias, so it’s going to help you diversify the dishes you create.”

But bias can be a handy thing in the kitchen, and that’s where Chef Watson might fall flat. A chef’s bias might be based on previous experience, and a bias against combining certain ingredients might come from earlier disastrous results.

Chef Watson doesn’t have years of experience, and so he might be able to produce some unexpected and unusual hits — and maybe the odd miss as well.

A CHEF who has cooked for rock stars and royalty served up a treat for students at the opening of a school dining hall.

Michel Roux-trained chef Jo Stoddart invited pupils and guests at Longfield Academy, in Darlington, to take part in a fun tongue twisting flavour challenge using jelly to help celebrate the unveiling of the school’s first ever dedicated dining facility.

She worked for Michel Roux at his restaurant Le Gavroche in London for six years and is now in charge of catering at the award-winning Middleton Hall Retirement Village, near Darlington.

She said: “It is an absolute honour to be invited along to be a part of the opening celebrations for Longfield’s new dining hall,” said Jo.

“I think it is a fantastic area, very colourful and vibrant and a place students will really enjoy coming to eat their lunch.

The new dining area is part of a multi-million pound re-development of Longfield Academy, which has seen the infrastructure of the school significantly improved both internally and externally.

Deputy headteacher Beverley Clifton was nominated to cut the ribbon for the dining hall after teaching food technology at the school for more than 33 years.

She said: “This is the first time there has been a dedicated dining facility at Longfield in the school’s 46-year history.

“We never had the space or resources before to provide a separate dining room and had to use the main hall where PE classes and exams are held.

“It means a lot to the school to have this new space. We’ve always provided good quality nutritious food and now we have a good quality environment to eat it in.”

Millions watched David Kelman as he battled his way into the final of BBC’s popular Great British Menu but the proud Welshman insists he not a celebrity chef.

For him life revolves around producing quality dishes from the freshest possible ingredients for the Ellenborough Park Hotel’s Beaufort Dining Room.

The father-of-two has been the executive head chef at the hotel on the outskirts of Cheltenham since 2010 and it’s clearly a role that he relishes.

But that’s not to say that he doesn’t enjoy the buzz that comes from pitting his skills against the cream of the cooking world, having represented his native country in a variety of events both nationally and internationally.

These include the World Culinary Olympics in Germany, during which David was the team captain of five chefs who had to prepare three courses from scratch in six hours for no fewer than 110 people.

“For me it’s about trying to better myself as a chef,” explains David.

“I believe I learn from doing competitions, not just from what I do but from what other people are doing.

“On programmes such as The Great British Menu it’s all about thinking outside the box.

“I think some people have come to the restaurant as a result of my television appearances but at the end of the day I am still a chef; not a celebrity chef like you see on TV.”

All modesty aside, however, David is now one of the most recognisable chefs in Gloucestershire as a result of The Great British Menu, his appearances in food festival demonstration kitchens and his charity work.

He’s also been asked to cook at several prestigious events: the Welsh Assembly drafted him in to cook for the Queen, in 2007 and 2011, and for Prime Minister David Cameron when he attended St David’s Day celebrations.

“When cooking for the Queen, she is not going to judge the food and so it is more relaxed in that sense, but it is pressure as the food must be of an excellent standard,” he says.

“My style of cooking is to work with the ingredients and let them speak for themselves.”

Another prestigious accolade came last year when David was named the Best Chef at the 2013 Taste of Gloucestershire Food and Farming Awards.

In fact, last year’s event proved to be a double whammy for the Ellenborough Park Hotel, which also received the best restaurant award for its Beaufort Dining Room.

“I had entered the Taste of Gloucestershire Awards before but this was the first time I had won it,” says David. “To get two awards was amazing.

“In whatever I do I try to promote the best of Gloucestershire, to put Gloucestershire food into a good light.

“Even though I’m Welsh I want to showcase what’s best around here.”

Right now, strawberries feature highly in David’s weekly routine, whether he is making pressed strawberry terrine to serve for dessert or potting up lashings of strawberry jam ready for the hotel’s popular afternoon teas.

“I have a local farmer, Alan Cox from Stow-on-the-Wold, who brings me as many strawberries has he can,” says David.

“He’ll give me a ring and let me know what’s good. He lives near me and drops off produce on my doorstep for me to bring in.

“The pressed strawberry terrine is very popular: I soak the strawberries in Grenadine and then slowly cook them with jamming sugar, for the pectin, for half an hour until they’re soft.

“I drain off the liquid and use agar agar, made from seaweed, to make a jelly to pour over the strawberries. It makes a lovely terrine.”

Other ingredients used in David’s kitchen are supplied by Creed Foodservice and its fresh and speciality food section Mise en Place, both of which source a lot of their produce locally; New Wave Seafood of Fairford and Evesham Microcress.

At the same time guests at Ellenborough Park often see David and his chefs out in the hotel’s kitchen garden snipping fresh herbs and harvesting various vegetables.

David has been working in kitchens since the tender age of 13, beginning as a pot boy at a local hotel in Llandudno.

“The chef used to get me doing fruit salads and things like that and I got the bug from there,” he laughs.

“I’ve always loved working with my hands; I always loved arts, crafts and design and was never really into English and maths, although I loved history.”

Catering college beckoned after David left school, during which he went to the prestigious Bodysgallen Hall Hotel to do some work experience.

“At the time it was probably the best hotel in Wales and they offered me a job there,” he says.

“I worked my way up to senior sous chef and really enjoyed it.”

David moved to Gloucestershire in 2005 after getting a job at Lower Slaughter Manor, which went on to achieve three rosette status while he was there, before getting the job of executive head chef at Ellenborough Park in 2010.

“I do enjoy it here, it’s a lovely place to live,” says the 39-year-old, whose home is in Upper Rissington.

“I have always liked to live in the countryside; I wouldn’t like to live in the city.”

David is married to Sophie, a languages teacher at the Cotswold School, and the couple have two children; son Iwan, 14, and six-year-old Cerys.

“Iwan has not shown any interest in following me into the kitchen; he loves computers,” laughs David.

“Cerys likes to help me in the kitchen though.”

As for the future, David says he would jump at the chance to return to The Great British Menu, in which his dishes were rated consistently highly.

“I would love to do it again,” he says. “Everybody said I came across well on TV, even though the stress levels are massive when the TV cameras are around.”

He’ll also be entering The Taste of Gloucestershire Awards again this year.

“It was a great night last year and I’m looking forward to this year’s event,” he says.

Do you think you could be crowned Gloucestershire’s Chef of the Year? Apply online at http://www.digital-thisis.co.uk/gloucestershire/taste