The Mechanics of Oil is a professional guide to understanding how fats behave in real kitchens. Written for chefs, it explains structure, stability, heat, and failure through cause and effect, not rules. This is not a buying guide or nutrition manual, but a book about judgement under pressure.
Oil is everywhere in professional kitchens, yet rarely examined until something goes wrong.
The Mechanics of Oil is not a cookbook, a nutrition manual, or a list of recommendations. It is a practical guide to understanding how culinary oils and fats actually behave under real kitchen conditions, where heat is repeated, time is limited, and decisions are made under pressure.
Written for chefs and serious cooks, the book explains oil through structure, stability, and consequence. It moves from what cooks observe, thickening, smoking, foaming, flavour loss, to the underlying mechanisms that cause those changes. Scientific language is used only where it clarifies behaviour already familiar in practice.
Rather than promoting “good” or “bad” oils, the book focuses on limits, trade-offs, and context. It examines heat beyond smoke point, cumulative degradation, extraction and refinement, emulsions, frying fatigue, flavour transfer, health narratives, and sustainability, always through cause and effect rather than ideology.
Each chapter is designed to sharpen judgement, not dictate technique. The aim is to help chefs recognise problems earlier, make better decisions sooner, and avoid correcting issues that were inevitable once limits were exceeded.
Supported by clear appendices and diagnostic tables, The Mechanics of Oil functions as both a reference and a professional thinking tool.
This is a book for cooks who already know what they are doing and want to understand why it works when it does and why it fails when it doesn’t.
The Salt Spectrum is a professional guide to understanding salt as a tool of control rather than taste. Written for chefs and serious cooks, it examines how salt affects flavour, structure, and safety, replacing folklore with clear frameworks for judgement, restraint, and deliberate decision-making in real kitchens.
Ian McAndrew’s memoir, Just Call Me Chef, traces over five decades in professional kitchens, from a working class childhood in County Durham to Michelin starred success in London. With wit and honesty, he reveals the pressure, sacrifice and joy behind a life spent cooking at the very top.
A straightforward, practical 60-minute audit for real UK kitchens. This digital guide walks you through stock, purchasing, menus, labour, energy, and waste to reveal where cash is leaking and how to plug the gaps quickly. No jargon, no gimmicks, just a simple routine you can repeat weekly to protect your margins and keep service afloat.