Producer, musician and all-round underground rock type Steve Albini has started a food blog. It's called Mario Batali Voice, in honour of an impression of the US chef that the Shellac guitarist/singer does when presenting his food. But he's not the only music-type who dabbles in a spot of cookery: there seems to be a link between the stage and the kitchen, and it's not too hard to see why.
After all, cooking and music are both about creativity, timing, multitasking and showing off. If you have the sort of mindset that leads you to spend hours in your bedroom mastering the guitar, then you probably won't blanche at the prospect of taking a week or so to refine your hollandaise sauce. For some – in their cuisine as in their music – such discipline is not worth the effort. But there are surprises in store, as you'll see if you try one of these "rocking" recipes.
Steve Albini's bulgur peanut kimchi spring rolls
For someone well known as an advocate of back-to-basics and unadorned analogue recording, Albini doesn't half make some fussy food. He's forever making his own dolmades, marinating short-grained rice in V8 juice or hymning the virtues of his ceramic ginger grater. It's the above recipe that really captures the imagination however, not least because it includes the sentence, "it occurred to me that I could use peanut butter, which is fatty and has a protein mouth feel". For fans worried that this might signal the mellowing of music's last great iconoclast, don't worry. He gets positively furious when he can't work out a flavour profile that will suit delivery as a veloute-based sauce on trottoli pasta.
Billy Gibbons' renegade guacamole
Not content with being the guitarist in ZZ Top, Gibbons has his own line of Tex-Mex food. The Rev Willy's cooking speaks volumes about his background, as does his music. He's a Texan through and through so it's fiercely individual, there are a lot of references to Mexico and, as befits the composer of Backdoor Love Affair, it's gloriously unsophisticated. As this recipe shows, it also occasionally comes across as being a slightly incomprehensible in-joke. Still, you have to love a man who calls for "stealthy helpings of jalapenos". Now that's putting yourself into your food. Just as long as he's managing to keep his beard hairs out of it, you can't ask for fairer than that.
Kid Rock's Sprite-fried turkey
Rock has made a career out of bringing together disparate elements that should perhaps have remained, for the good of mankind, permanently disparate – his combination of MTV-friendly rap rock with Lynyrd Skynyrd-styled good old boyisms for example. Or his brave decision to intermingle pimp-chic fur coats with Appetite for Destruction-era Axl Rose hair and top the whole confection off with a Blues Brothers trilby. Evidently he carries this trait over into the kitchen, where you can regularly find him injecting a turkey with mixture of Sprite, salt and paprika before deep frying it. The turkey actually comes out of this encounter on top if you think about it. Granted it does have to suffer the indignity of being pumped full of fizzy pop by a man who looks like stoat dressed up as Flavor Flav, but it doesn't actually have to eat the resulting soft-drink infused culinary abortion.
Dave Grohl's pork tenderloins and mango salsa
The Nicest Man in Rock™ comes over positively brutal in this recipe, smothering the innocent pork with blackberry jam and mango. Much like the last Foo Fighters album, Wasting Light, it's pretty heavy stuff, reflecting his band's status as arena-rock mainstays and all-round rock animals. This is big choruses, big pyrotechnics and big lumps of mango all over your pork. Apparently. Your mileage may vary.
David Yow's bistecca alla fiorentina
For many Jesus Lizard fans, the band's defining moment came when their singer David Yow, as an accompaniment to their instrumental track Tight N Shiny, would ease an intimate part of his anatomy out of his flies and manipulate it until it became a visual tribute to the song's title. So it should come as no surprise to discover that he prefers to take his meat in a more natural manner than Grohl, advocating a simple rosemary and garlic rub followed by the briefest pass over a searing hot pan. Yow has serious cooking chops, having spent years working at restaurants in Texas and Chicago and once considered opening a "snobby little cafe" with his good chum, Steve Albini. The food would surely be impeccable, but it would definitely be worth your while checking that he'd washed his hands, thoroughly, before sitting down to eat.