Sybaritic Wanderings

A Christmas Martini

2011-12-12T13:42:00.001Z

I don't really like vodka Martinis, they just aren't right. Now that's off my chest let's look at the advantage of the vodka Martini. Its an easy base to work from and you can infuse vodka with all manner of tastes, including Mince pie. Yup mince pie.

Get some good mincemeat (like this) and put 4 good table spoons into a bottle of vodka, leave 48 hours and your vodka should turn a pale gold colour, strain out the fruit (you may need to filter spices & stuff too) and enjoy.

Or make a Christmas Martini
There were a couple of inspirations here, including a random conversation about bitters heavy drinks, you can make this without all the bitters, but they really help intensify the mince pie flavour.

2 dashes Angastoura Bitters
2 dashes Peychauds Bitters
2 dashes Orange Bitters
2 dashes Chocolate bitters
3 Parts mince pie Vodka
1 Part Noily Prat vermouth

Stir down over ice, strain & garnish with a cherry

Enjoy the extra winter cheer

Winter:- deep red fruit

2011-11-15T13:53:00.001Z

You probably know Crème de cassis from the Kir & Kir Royale. You might be a Poirot fan and have tried drinking it on its own (its an experience), but you can use it in many more drinks than that. It's a joyous ingredient mainly because of its colour, but also when diluted down from its intrinsic syrupiness the fruit taste shines through. Here are a couple of less well known Cassis drinks

The Mississippi mule

4pts Gin
1pt Lemon Juice
1pt crème de cassis

Shake with ice

It's smooth, the lemon cuts some of the sweetness & you end up with a strong dry fruity 30's style drink.

The Gotham

60ml Cognac
30ml Noilly Prat (feel free to substitute any French vermouth)
15 ml crème de cassis
2 dashes of lemon juice

Stir over ice

It'd been a long day & I ended up shaking rather than stirring, but given it wasn't the best of cognacs I doubt that mattered too much, its a great drink. I could probably spend a happy evening drinking these (I doubt the morning after would be fun but ...)

So if you have Cassis & are bored of Kirs try these curranty concoctions

The Last Rose of Summer

2011-11-07T12:44:00.000Z

So I might just be a hopeless romantic. Remember the Blue rose vodka ? Well I found a drink for it, taking inspiration from James Bond ...

""A dry martini," [Bond] said. "One. In a deep champagne goblet."
"Oui, monsieur."
"Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?"
"Certainly, monsieur." The barman seemed pleased with the idea."
Ian Fleming,Casino Royale

Now substitute Hendricks (which uses rose & cucumber in its botanicals) for the Gordon's and use the rose vodka for vodka and a rose petal as garnish (instead of the lemon peel) and you have the "Last rose of summer"

Enjoy

Mixmo LXII :- The Hard stare

2011-10-24T13:04:00.000+01:00

Well its another Mixology Monday and this time the theme of Morning drinks has been chosen by Kevin at the cocktail enthusiast.

I went with a breakfast drink rather than a pick me up/hair of the dog. Taking inspiration from Harry Craddock and a rather famous bear we get the Hard Stare.

1 Good large measure of dry gin
1 barspoon of marmalade
a large dash of orange bitters
Shake very hard over ice, single strain & serve

Normally I'd double strain a clear shaken drink, but with this you want the marmalade fragments in the glass as they provide a sparkle. As you can see from the photo I've used shredless marmalade, it makes a better looking drink. Also the orange bitters I use for this are quite odd, they are more of a bitter orange liqueur, that comes in at 20% abv, so I use almost a spoon full rather than the more traditional dash. They replace the lemon juice (which turns the drink cloudy) in Harry's original recipe.

As an aside I tried to order this drink for breakfast a couple of times in Las Vegas, unfortunately they don't seem to keep marmalade behind the bars out there, so I had to go with out.

Mincemeat

2011-10-19T16:15:00.001+01:00

Last time I made mince pies I vowed I was going to make my own mince meat & here it is (sort of)
I used Delia's recipe but I left out the almonds and used mixed fruits (a pre-mix of currants, sultanas & citrus peel) with some spare windfall apples from the orchard. I may also have used more booze than Delia does because I like my mince pies boozy.

There it all is in the bowl, absorbing the fluids, before it goes into the oven for the suet to melt.

Whilst making this batch I realised that the smoker runs at about the temperature required, so I whipped up another batch adjusting the mixed spice to be a bit more BBQish by adding a pinch of 5 spice & a tiny pinch of cayenne pepper. I swapped the brandy for Bourbon too and smoked it over maple for sweetness.

Right now both batches are in large jars in the cellar, in another couple of weeks I'll put them in smaller jars (with another splash of booze) and then give some as gifts & turn the rest into delicious mince pies. Watch this space

Lincolnshire sausages

2011-10-14T13:25:00.000+01:00

I've a superabundance of sage & a sausage stuffer.
So Lincolnshires (or as they are known in our house hippopotamus & duckweed). Its a simple recipe (though you need to tone down the pepper)

1kg pork shoulder
200g breadcrumbs
15g pepper
15g salt
50g fresh sage

That's a lot of fresh sage: look

the next 10 grammes, pretty much obscured the scales to the extent that it wasn't worth photographing them.

The sage, bread, salt & pepper went into the minichop & got blitzed up into a homogeneous mass of "filler". Meanwhile the pork gets chopped into rough cubes & gets fed through the mincer on a medium plate. Mix the whole lot together (get your hands in and get it evenly distributed). I then put the whole lot in the fridge for a couple of hours, even though this isn't an emulsified sausage it's probably a good idea to let the meat rest. Then its out with the stuffer. This time we tried the more orthodox stuff a large ring & then twist technique, which didn't really work out for us so we went back to stuff & twist.

Lincolnshire sausages aren't really a breakfast sausage, you want a banger or a pure pork sausage for that. The over pepperiness of these was a bit of a challenge, but using them in a nice warming sausage casserole seemed to find them a perfect home.

The Seelbach cocktail

2011-10-12T13:06:00.000+01:00

A good champagne cocktail is a thing of beauty.This is both good & not all that well known, which is a shame.
Its a slightly odd beast as it uses a lot of bitters, calling for anywhere between 7 dashes & a barspoon of both Angastoura & Peychaud's, which is responsible for the awesome colour.

Bourbon is used as a base rather than the more usual (in champagne circles) cognac. That & Cointreau provide sweetness, the Champagne brings dryness and the bitters depth & complexity. There are a couple of ways of making it, this is my preferred method.

25ml Bourbon
15ml Cointreau
7 dashes Angastoura bitters
7 dashes Peychaud's bitters

Stir down over ice & then strain into a champagne flute, top with good Champagne.

As you can see we tried a cherry garnish, which works well enough.

Filé gumbo

2011-10-07T11:44:00.000+01:00

Its more than the line from a song, its an actual thing, that you can eat. You need filé powder (which is ground sassafras leaves) and Andouille sausage and some other bits & pieces too. Most importantly the Holy trinity of Cajun/Creole cooking :- Green bell pepper, Onion & Celery. I'll come clean of the 3 I only really like Onions, fortunately the others dissolve if you cook them long enough and gumbo gets cooked for a Loooong time.

The base of gumbo is a roux. Every single recipe I found suggests you need to drink whilst making the roux, so here goes. Fry some chicken thighs, till brown and the sausage, pour the fat into a big old pan, add butter & melt it and then add flour, turn the heat low & stir and scrape and stir & scrape. Keep stirring & scraping till the roux is Milk chocolatey coloured (about 2 beers of time, or 45 minutes for the more scientifically minded).

DO NOT LET THE FLOUR BURN ! Because that wrecks everything & you have to start again. Whilst the roux is going on boil the chicken, which will make you a light chicken stock as well as cooking the chicken down for you.

Once you've a lovely roux, throw in the trinity veggies and any others you are using (I know Okra should go in at this point, but I'm not that keen, even if its where gumbo gets its name) and soften them. Add seasonings & spices. Then add your stock and your meat (Sausage & chicken) and let it bubble over a low heat for hours. I reduced my gumbo a little too much at the end, so it was thicker than most. Serve with white rice, a sprinkle of filé and some buttery bread.

Maybe not the most authentic gumbo as I amalgamated 3 recipes and information from an ex-NOLA resident, but it was damn tasty and next time there is cheap shellfish going I'll be making another.

The recipes are here

Chef rick duck & sausage

nolacuisine's filé gumbo

and the highly recommended baconconcentrate's gumbo-shops recipe

Andouille sausage

2011-10-05T11:10:00.000+01:00

This post suggested that Andouille (at least the cajun sort) was easy enough to make at home, the only slightly tricky ingredient was Prague powder. A hot smoked sausage, what's not to like there ?

First off you need some pork

and some spices (some of these are from the banger making)

The annoying part of making andouille is the chopping. The paupered chef recipe calls for half the pork to be chopped quite small & the rest to be minced. Grab your sharpest knife & cut the pork into chunks, put half of it into the mincer on a medium plate and then chop the rest of the chunks into tiny (about 1cm) cubes. Using cold hands mix the spices, the onion, the garlic, the cure & the meat (ground & chunked) into a large bowl and let it sit in the fridge for a while.

Break out the sausage stuffer and make the sausages. All the usual sausage stuffing things apply. One slight variation was I used pork casings instead of beef, it was just what my butcher had...

They then go rest in the fridge overnight prior to smoking. Since we had the smoker fired up for several little jobs & there was no pecan available we went with maple and let them smoke. Once done I quenched them as best I could and then sliced one open to see how it tasted.

It wasn't as spicy as I was expecting, but it was tasty, in fact it was rather moreish. If I hadn't promised some to a friend, and didn't have some cooking plans (hello gumbo) for it I think rather a lot would have been eaten there & then

In search of perfection:-Bangers

2011-09-13T14:10:00.000+01:00

Ahh Sausages. I like the good old banger, in fact I like it better than some pure meat sossies. Heston Blumenthal had a look at Bangers (& mash) in his perfection series, and the banger needs filler. These are pork, some spices a little rusk & toast water. Like all HB recipes there were lows & highs. Most of the issues with this one were due to having an ordinary kitchen, with a fullish fridge & freezer.

First off make toast, but make it in the oven, at gas mark 4 for 30 minutes or so. Whilst that's happening fire up the BBQ, you are about to char pork back fat over smoking woodchips. This was my first arghhh moment, my wood chips were a bit too wet and smothered the charcoal, still a blow torch rescued that.

Once the fat starts to go things get quite exciting in the BBQ. Gloves & eye protection are recommended as a lot of hot fat spits around. Once its all charred, blistered (and smelling awesome) take it off the heat & pop it in the fridge to cool. Also in there will be a large bowl of water & toast, oh and the pork mince. Cold is quite a vital part of banger making, the fat & meat (and spices & filler) need to emulsify, let it get too warm & it'll split. Blitz the charred fat and it looks pretty unpleasant.

Chill down the bowl & blade on your food processor & blitz the mince in batches, it needs to be smooth & not to rise above 10c. I have a tiny food processor, so this & the next stage were quite hard work and could be an area of improvement for my next batch. The meat and food processor bits go back in the freezer to get everything down to close to 0c, whilst you blend the spices, rusk, golden syrup and toast water

That gets to chill too. Then you blitz all the bits, fat, spicy toast water & meat again in small batches keeping a check that they never get above 10c, whilst that's going on let the sausage casings soak (put the now sausage meat back in the fridge to chill)

Then its time to stuff your sausages. If you can get help with this part do. 2 pairs of hands make it pretty easy. Having spent a few hours getting to this point, surrounded by lumps of fat, piles of meat & collections of spices I was pleasantly surprised to see sausages magically emerging from the combination, mincer, pasta maker sausage stuffer machine.

To enjoy them to the full Heston recommends poaching at 65c for 320 minutes & then frying, I couldn't wait I had to try the sausages.

Well worth it.

Yes its fiddly & a bit of a pain, no its probably not hugely economic to make small batches (we got about 15 bangers) but your own home made sausage is a pretty awesome thing. I've got casing left, so I might have a stab a Lincolnshire style next. Unless that is you know where I can get some hippopotamus.

(Blue) Rose Vodka

2011-09-05T15:11:00.002+01:00

I grow roses, I concentrate on "blue" ones due to limited space. Queen of the violets is an old double rose with a deep perfume & a good strong purplish colour, ideal for making scented/flavoured vodka.

The Vodka quickly leaches the colour from the rose, but it ends up a light golden/yellow colour rather than a stronger pink .

I just put a bloom or 2 in vodka, with out any sugar (though 25g/500ml is reckoned to be a good amount) and let it stand for a few days to let the flavour develop properly. Once that was done I strained & bottled.

But why stop with 1 single variety of rose vodka ? Twice in a blue moon seems to be having a late summer/early autumn flush and whilst being closer to a hybrid tea rose than the bourbon/old fashioned roses it still has a very strong perfume. So it was out with the secateurs and a few snips had a couple of those blooms in a bottle.

Tasting both is interesting, whilst they are both obviously rose flavoured they are quite different. The Queen of the violets vodka is heavy & very rosy. The Blue moon on the other hand is a bit more delicate and has definite vanilla notes. Now all I need to do is find a cocktail for it. It'll work in my Turkish delight drink, but there must be other uses though...

Macaroons V1.0

2011-04-15T11:53:00.000+01:00

In my world Macaroon means coconut, yes the French, almond kind are lovely, but really they need a better name. Oh yes they need rice paper too.

A coconut macaroon is a simple beast, where you mix egg white, sugar & dessicated (or flaked or shredded) coconut together & bake till golden. The end result should have a bit of bite surrounding some chewy moistness. There will probably be chocolate too, because well why wouldn't there be ?

This has an extra embellishment, lime.

So mulch together 100g of sugar, 2 egg whites, 160g of coconut the zest & juice of a lime. Once its all come together roll out bite sized balls. Line a baking tray with parchment (or greaseproof) and put rice paper on top of that (if you can't find plain get edible/funny money from your local sweetie shop). Put the coconut balls onto the rice paper allowing for spreading whilst they cook & slip the whole lot into an oven at gas 4 for 20 minutes or so (once they are golden brown they are done).

Whilst they cool melt some dark chocolate (about 25g will do) and drizzle it over the macaroons. Cut or tear them from the rice paper (and stuff yourself with the chocolate spattered trimmings). Enjoy (keep them in an airtight container, but honestly they won't last long .

Bourbon steak

2011-04-12T13:23:00.000+01:00

I saw a feature about The pyromaniac's cookbook and knew immediately I had to have it. It was one of those cookbooks that just needed to be on my shelf. Finding out it had a BBQ chapter alongside the Cocktails one was the icing on a fairly large tasty looking cake.

The unseasonably warm weekend signalled BBQ time, the quickest of flicks suggested Bourbon steak would be ideal.

Get yourself some nice steak, season it (the book suggests using smoked salt, if you have it then why not ?) and go get the charcoal going. Once the flames have died and the charcoal is kicking out fierce heat, stand your bourbon by the grill to warm. Then throw the steaks on. Cook them till they are slightly underdone to your taste and take them off the grill. Lift the grill out and put a heavy pan into the coals. Add a generous amount of butter, some chopped shallots and when its all melted & sizzling put the steaks in. Pour over a serious amount of bourbon and step back (you may need to light it with a spill or match).
Whizz the flaming pan & steaks to your guests & serve.

one day a year everybody is Irish

2011-03-24T12:15:00.000Z

Or so they say, Harry Craddock from the Savoy decided to add his take

1 Large Measure Irish whiskey(*)
1 tsp Green Chartreuse
1 tsp Green Creme de Menthe

Shake serve with a green olive.

(*)It needs to be irish, it just doesn't work otherwise

This is a surprising drink, in that it works at all, since the design on first glance seems to be use Irish ingredients & make it green. The olive is a bit unnecessary in my opinion, but then I'm not a big a fan of olives. Give it a try you might like it

The blackthorne

2011-03-18T13:43:00.000Z

St Patrick's day DISASTER there is no Jameson's in the house.

There is though some Middleton...
Middleton is a premium spirit, so I'm pretty loathe to go with plan A) which is "everyone's Irish" from the savoy book as the Chartreuse & Creme de Menthe are likely to kill the whiskey dead. The Blackthorne however is pretty much a Manhattan with the bonus of a dash of absinthe.

So the Blackthorne

60ml Irish Whiskey
30ml Sweet Vermouth
Dash Angastoura bitters
Dash Absinthe

garnish is a lemon twist (if you have one).
The absinthe pays for itself here, the anise taste is submerged in the drink, but the mouth feel gives a menthol coolness making the entire thing taste fantastically clean & strong.

Job for the weekend, try it with an inferior whiskey & see how the taste alters

Dessert, guess what it is jelly

2011-03-17T15:05:00.000Z

And what a jelly. It's poached peach & Chartreuse.

I took a couple of liberties, first off I made a gold leaf suspension top using a sparkling Chardonnay and I used a set of moulds giving me 5 jellies to serve.

The gold leaf suspension isn't difficult, but you have to have an eye on the cooling of your jelly, it has to be thick enough to support the gold leaf, but still pourable. The Chartreuse Jelly is very strongly flavoured (and quite alcoholic), its made with about 40% of the volume being Chartreuse, 10% being the peach syrup (we used tinned peaches, as my tame historian suggested they'd be most likely in Titanic's kitchens) and the remainder being water. Add an extra leaf of gelatine to the usual 5 leaves to 500ml ratio since there is a lot of alcohol around and you are good to go. Fill the mould 3/4-7/8 full & leave to set, once it's set enough to support the peaches add peach slices and the rest of the jelly. Set & serve (with cream or ice-cream, the jelly is a bit rich on its own)

Main course

2011-03-04T13:19:00.000Z

I wanted pastry on the menu and the various machinations of the menu meant it ended up here. The 3rd class menu has beefsteak & onion pie as a lunch. Not being totally hidebound I changed it to beefsteak & onion pudding. Since we were on an Edwardian theme I took the liberty of using oysters. Oysters back then were cheap, much cheaper than mushrooms, so were used to bulk out the gravy.This being a dinner party though I added mushrooms too for a super luxury pudding.

I cook the steak for an hour or so with herbs & onion plus some port to get it tender. Brown off the kidneys and add them to the steak mix. Chop the oysters & mushrooms, stir into the now steak & kidney mix. Ladle the lot into a nice suet pastry crust. Seal the lid on and then steam for an hour or two (about 90 mins is fine for a 750ml pudding). Because I couldn't find a large pudding bowl I made 3 small puddings (should have made 4, one for each funnel). Which turned out to be about right.
The oysters & the mushrooms dissolved into the gravy, giving a nice rich taste & texture, just the thing for a cold night.
I served them up with Mash & veg and it seemed about the right potion size for everyone (at least I didn't get any complaints, just 11 clean plates).
I think I'll be adding oysters again in future as they definitely bring a certain something to the dish.

Starting out

2011-03-03T13:59:00.000Z

First an apology, there are no photos sorry.

The Starter course caused me all kinds of hassle. Plan A was going to be Heston Blumenthal's individual scampi fry from his seafood feast. A shortage of scampi/langoustines/dublin bay prawns put paid to that. Never mind on to plan B, Scrambled Ostrich egg. A cold snap prevented the Ostriches from laying, so that was the end of that one. Time for plan C. After doing some digging I found eggs & ham on the 2nd class breakfast menu. I teamed it with fried potatoes, did my own honey glazed ham & went with Quails eggs. Originally I planned to fry the Quails eggs & serve 2 per person. However getting them out of the shells quickly & intact proved to be more of a challenge than I could manage, so I scrambled them.

There we go a starter of fried potato, honey glazed ham & scrambled quail's eggs. It was a small plate, I didn't want to over face the dinners after all

Sherry Punch

2011-02-28T16:39:00.000Z

The opening salvo in my Titanic dinner party.

I've steered clear of punch, since its often just mixed fruit juice with any old booze poured in. Or it requires LOTS of ingredients (my favourite starts with a gallon of GOOD champagne (their emphasis)). A bit of research suggests that a good punch requires "Oleo-sacchrum" or sweet oil.

This is made by muddling the zest of lemon with sugar.
The sugar pierces the zest releasing the oils, the sugar then acts to bring the oils out & a sweet oily syrup is created. The longer you can leave this the better.

Add boiling water and remove any pips, peel or other solids. I combined this step with tea making, so added a couple of teaspoons of good loose earl grey and let it stand with the boiling water for twenty minutes before straining.

Once it had cooled I added a few good measures of dark rum & Cognac. This formed the base of the punch (what some experts call "the Mixture") which stood for a good 24 hours.

In a mixing bowl the mixture went in with a bottle of amontillado sherry and a bottle of Chardonnay (originally it was going to be two, but the taste & quantity seemed right with just the one). A good quantity of ice was added, which thanks to a friend who has a similar sense of humour, was in the shape of Titanics & Icebergs.

Soda bread

2011-01-25T13:41:00.000Z

Oh I do like soda bread, occasionally I'll risk the treat of frying slices of it in butter, but it is best warm from the oven, so best get making it then.

The important parts of soda bread are baking soda & buttermilk. The acid in the butter milk reacts with the soda & makes the bread rise. By dough has some wholemeal in it (so its a wheaten really) and a couple of spoons of treacle.

You sift the flours, soda & salt into a large bowl, mix them and make a well. Pour melted butter, treacle & buttermilk into the well & bring together to make a dough. It doesn't need much work. Bring that to a ball & flatten it out then make a cross in the top. The handle of a spoon works well for this. Dust lightly with a bit more flour and then put into a hot oven.

You can tell its done when the dough visible in the cross is dry or when the loaf makes a hollow sound. Let it stand for about 5-10 minutes (this is necessary if you are using a knife, if you are just going to rip it open, then as soon as your fingers can handle it)

It doesn't really need anything more than butter, but it does have to be butter, margarine & spread just won't do. Eat and enjoy. Soda bread doesn't keep (apparently), but stopping eating it is more of a challenge than not. Should you have some a day or two old. Slice it, melt an unhealthy amount of butter in your frying pan & then toss the slices in till browned on each side. Deny all knowledge of this to any passing Dr or Nutritionist.

Pigeon

2011-01-24T13:59:00.000Z

The farmers market was on in town, and there were fresh pigeon breasts. I just couldn't resist.

Firstly they come from Wood pigeons and not the winged rats you find round the typical city centre. Hopefully that has cured you of any unpleasant associations between the meat & the scruffy oik birds eating greasy McD's leftovers.

So I had six breast fillets, what to do ?
First melt butter in a frying pan then add half a chopped onion & sweat it till transparent. Then add a couple of rashers worth of chopped bacon and a good twist of fresh black pepper. Let it all fry gently for a couple of minutes then turn up the heat & add the breasts. Pour over a good measure of brandy & flame (watching eyebrows, kitchen cupboards & so on) and cook the breasts for about 5 minutes, turning every minute or so. Then add a good 1/2 glass of port and simmer for another couple of minutes. Remove the breasts, add a splash more port & a handful of chopped mushrooms (go for something nutty like chesnut mushrooms) and reduce whilst you slice the breast. Put the sliced breast back in, stir round & serve on top of crushed potatoes & vegetables.

There you have it a tasty game supper for about 4-5 pounds a head (you can make it cheaper by bulking up the veggies & spuds)

Mulled cider

2010-12-25T14:06:00.000Z

Traditionally cider is mulled by plunging a redhot poker into the mug. So why not ? Well it turns out I don't have quite the right shape of poker, we can work round that though.

You'll need mulling spices:- Nutmeg,Ginger,Cloves,Cinnamon,Allspice & maybe a little Star Anise. Adjust them to your taste and put them in half a pint of good (hard) cider. A couple of spoonfuls of dark sugar, a measure of rum (or maybe brandy) and some citrus (hey it's Christmas so use some tangerine segments). Stir it well together and pour into a fireproof mug, then plunge in a redhot poker.
The cider will foam up, with a great hissing sound and the room should fill with the scent of christmasy loveliness.

If you aren't blessed with a real fire, then heat the mixture through gently on the stove till warm & then pour out.

Nog

2010-12-24T11:28:00.000Z

I'd been asked to make eggnog, well told to get making it really.

There are some truly frightening recipes out there (125ml of brandy +55ml dark rum for 1 person !), my favourite of those was this :-

General Harrisons Eggnog

1 egg
1 pt (hard) cider
1.5 teaspoons sugar
2-3 lumps cracked ice.

Given how dry our cider is I thought I'd skip that as it sounded like a recipe for curdled hell.

My Eggnog (for 3)

2 whole eggs
50ml spiced rum
60ml brandy
2 tsp icing sugar

Shake hard over ice till a uniform yellow colour
Add c150ml whole milk, strain into glasses
Top with nutmeg (fresh if possible)

Nollaig shona duit

Poached duck eggs

2010-12-20T13:05:00.000Z

I do like poached duck eggs, I finally got enough time together to have a stab at doing them sat bains style

First off I needed a water bath, this is my ersatz set up.

Thats a large pan of water, my meat thermometer and the smallest ring on my gas hob on it's lowest setting heating maybe a third of the pan's base. This kept everything at a fairly even 58-60c.

The eggs went in & I spent the next couple of hours stopping the water from heating too much or cooling down excessively. In between worrying about that I fretted about how I was going to get the eggs out of their shells (Yup you poach them in the shell, I assume it doesn't count as boiling, because you get nowhere near 100c). Turns out they come out of the shell quite easily if you can bring yourself to give the shell enough of a tap against the pan edge.

I served them on hot buttered toast, because it was a "quick" lunch rather than anything fancy & because I was all out of pata-negra ham.

Was it worth it ? I think so, with a proper water bath it's definitely worth while, the yolk ends up really rich. I think next time (and there will be a next time) I'll let them go for a bit longer and I'll keep the temperature more to the higher end.

Enjoy, I know I did.

Port wine #2

2010-12-14T13:31:00.000Z

This time of year cocktail thoughts turn to warming sweetish drinks, heavy on the brown flavours, with orange & spices. Losing the sharpness of fresh citrus fruit.

Looking through some lists found the Port wine #2.
This is definitely an old skool cocktail, being mostly port, here is the recipe (adapted slightly) from the Savoy Cocktail Book

Port Wine #2

large measure port
dash orange bitters
dash angastoura bitters
2 dashes triple sec

stir over ice, strain into a port glass garnish with an orange twist.

It is a sweet rich concoction with orange overtones and a spicy bitter finish. A surprisingly good drink for such a simple recipe. Getting the bitters together might be a bit of a job, but its a fine way to deal with the less than stellar port that turns up round this time of year.

Mince pies

2010-12-13T13:03:00.000Z

Ahh the humble¹ mince pie.

I feel sorry for all those cultures that don't get this Christmas delicacy.
First mincemeat, these days most shop bought mince meat contains no meat, even the suet (traditionally beef) is vegetarian, it is worth checking the jar though. I've not been organized enough to make my own, so I fell back on my gran's time honoured method. Buy some in a jar at the earliest opportunity, take out a spoonful (If there is just one jar I eat that spoonful) replace the missing mince meat with brandy, give the jar a good shake & stick it in the cupboard for at least a week, preferably longer.

I treated myself to a new bun tray, since the only one I had was more of a muffin tin & a bit too deep for mince pies. I splashed out on a seriously heavyweight one, which means individual Yorkshire puddings are going to appear in the near future.

Step one is make some pastry, I used my all purpose shortcrust (1 part butter, 1 part lard, 8 parts flour) and added some sugar to sweeten it (not necessary, but it can help). and put it in the fridge to chill. If you are making pastry, always chill it in the fridge before using it.

Then get rolling & cutting. Fill each pie case with a spoonful of mincemeat (Add a drop of brandy to each pie at this point if you like (I do)) put the lid on (or if you are feeling really fancy, cut out a Christmassy shape and put that on the mincemeat) and pop them into an oven. Most recipes say gas 6 /200c for 20 minutes, in my oven this was about 5 minutes too long, so keep an eye on them and when the pastry is golden take them out. Turn them out on to a rack or board & let them cool. Mincemeat like jam gets hot & sticky, a bad combination, so let that cool enough to be safe. Serve warm or cold, with cream, ice-cream or brandy butter (or a slice of strong cheese) and enjoy.

¹This is my little joke, mince pies where in times past known as humble or 'umble pies and used the humbles of an animal (usually deer) as the meat base (that's offal in modern terms).

Turkey

2010-12-03T15:45:00.000Z

What is Thanksgiving without turkey ? Apparently not thanksgiving, never mind nobody is really a fan of turkey.
To deal with this I bought a turkey crown (which was going to be a help with the oven size too)

I then had a look for some recipes. Citrus & sage butter sounded about right, so I grabbed more sage and got to work.

Shred the sage finely and zest a lemon, mix the lot up into some butter (about 100g was good for my amount of turkey) push the butter up under the skin & into the centre of the boned & rolled crown. Thickly slice the zested lemon & put it on the bottom of the roasting dish, stand the turkey on top. Stick the lot into a gas 6/200c oven.

I used my meat thermometer to find out when the centre had reached 70c (it ought to be safe from 66 up) . About half way through I covered the top with foil to prevent the skin burning.
Once its out let it rest (wrapped in foil) for 20-30 mins then slice & serve.

I was quite impressed, there was very little if any of the terrible dryness that can afflict turkey and the lemon & sage had perfumed the whole roast. Pretty worth while way to deal with the big bird.

Cider & Sage Jelly

2010-12-02T12:42:00.000Z

We've made some cider (hard cider for the US types) with our neighbours, using the apple from their allotment. At some point soon I'll do a huge post covering the cider making but for now here is a little teaser.

The ham needed something, after all the turkey had 2 kinds of stuffing & cranberry sauce, the ham was feeling left out so a cold savoury jelly seemed like a good plan. Alcohol retards the action of gelatine so a bit of thinking was required. I grabbed some sage from my garden and made up 250ml of sage/sugar solution. "50ml water 250g sugar put together in a pan over a gentle heat & stir, add a handful of sage leaves & carry on stirring to let the sugar dissolve. Leave to cool and once cool remove the sage leaves.

Next bloom the gelatine. I used a 50/50 mix of cider & sugar solution to do this, then top the pan upto about 200ml of sugar solution & cider heat gently and stir. Stir lots.
Once the gelatine is fully dissolved add the rest of the cider & the sugar/sage solution and stir quickly to incorporate. Then pour the whole lot through a fine sieve to catch any unpleasant solids that have been left behind.

I had intended to get a soft set, but we ended up with a pretty firm jelly, turn it out and mash it over with a fork to give handy sized chunks. Served with the ham it provided a great counter point to the sweetness and added a touch of needed bite to the plate

Ham in Coca-cola

2010-12-01T13:27:00.001Z

So we were having a thanksgiving party, what could be more American than ham in coke ?

Nigella Lawson has a few versions of this, so I went with it

I bought "green Gammon" from my butcher, its been slated but that's the full extent of the cure.

I always soak gammon joints, so it went in a big pan covered with cold water for a couple of hours, I changed the water hourly. Once you are done with that chop a large onion, put the Gammon skin side down in a the pan throw in the onion & add 2l of coke.

Bring it all to the boil & then let it simmer for about an hour per kilo and add on half an hour for good measure. At this point the meat is cooked & could easily be eaten. However its better if it gets glazed & has some time in the oven. In a fit of organization I did the boiling on the Friday and let my hame rest overnight.
Time to make the glaze

Take 2 tsp sugar
2 tsp treacle
2tsp mustard

Mix them together (do it in a bowl stood in warm water, it makes life a lot easier). Whilst that stands take the skin off the joint & cut the fat down to a "reasonable level". Score it (traditionalists use large diamond shaped scores) and then slather it with your glaze. Finally stud it with cloves at the intersection of each score.

Now it needs to go in the oven, since my ham was room temperature I used a slowish oven (gas 4/180) for 45 minutes, feel free to reach in & baste occasionally.

Let it rest and if you have fewer guests or a larger table than I had proudly carry it out & carve it in-situ. Or slice it in the kitchen & pile high on a plate.

Forgotten ?

2010-11-22T17:29:00.000Z

Forgotten cocktails, the latest Mixology Monday offering, set by rock & rye

I have apparently forgotten to include this in an earlier blog post which is a massive oversight on my part. The Claridge from the Savoy Cocktail book is practically the house cocktail. We found it after being presented with a bottle of apricot brandy. I've shown it to a couple of bartenders who haven't seen it before, so I think it counts as forgotten.

So what is it beside apricot brandy ?

2 pts Gin
2 pts Dry vermouth
1 pt Triple sec
1 pt Apricot brandy

Stir it down over ice & pour into a well chilled glass.

The apricot, orange & vermouth work really well together, the gin provides punch and the apricot lingers nicely. I don't normally garnish it, but a twist of orange or lemon won't hurt. Its pretty versatile, you can twiddle the proportions to make it drier or sweeter depending if you are serving before or after food.

Eau de Vie Sydney

2010-11-21T21:09:00.000Z

The recommendation for Eau de Vie came from the guys at 1806. It's not the easiest bar in the world to find being hidden at the back of the Kirketon, a boutique hotel in Darlinghurst.

Go in, cross the foyer ignoring the bar to your left, pass through the forbidding black doors with nothing on them, show no interest in the toilets and head through more anonymous doors to find a cosy low lit bar. Alternatively stroll up to the desk and ask for Eau de Vie, brooking no refusal.

The trouble is absolutely worth it. These guys know their stuff and have a very well stocked bar. We had a quick look at the menu & then callously discarded it, after all competent bar staff had recommended it. That and we were ordering classics, if they weren't good we would be leaving.

A gimlet, A Manhattan & A Gibson. The Manhattan was of course to the same exacting specifications as ever. The Gimlet provoked discussion, this one was made with Rose's cordial& lime juice and proportions were discussed. The Gibson was served on the side, some thing I wholly approve of, it keeps the gin cold but doesn't dilute it.

From there things got pretty technical, Old fashioneds were talked about & made, and we dived into the odder areas of some old books which led to me drinking a Hanky Panky. An all but forgotten variant on a perfect Martini that requires the addition of Fernet Branca. Its a damn fine drink and if you can get Fernet or have a friendly bar that has it give this a go (I'll be talking about another forgotten drink tomorrow).

What can I say, its a comfortable, well stocked bar staffed by people that know their drink. The prices are what you'd expect, some of the top shelf additions will push the cost over $50 (aus) per drink, but you don't have to go there. Oh the desk staff ? They are really friendly & told us where to get some great seafood.

1806 Melbourne

2010-11-05T13:42:00.001Z

Now with photo.

A quick trawl of the internet suggested that 1806 was the place for drinks in Melbourne. So we went along.
The main drinks list is here but you know how it goes with a decent bar, the menu is just a guideline in order to put them to the test I unleashed my secret weapon, a drink companion who is very particular about the way their Manhattan gets made. This got us a lot of bartender attention straight away. The house rye and the antica formula vermouth are both known to us but they swap orange bitters for a more usual bitters, they garnish with orange peel too. The verdict was a very nice drink but not what we were looking for in a Manhattan. The first round down we decided to ditch the menu entirely and have a go on our house cocktail "the Claridge" (which I need to post about soon as I can't believe I've missed it out) . This seemed to be a bit of a revelation to the bar staff, who were quite taken with it.

I bravely asked where to drink in Sydney (there is apparently a bit of rivalry between the 2 cities, but it seemed pretty insignificant compared to the Manchester/Liverpool one) and they recommended "Eau de vie" which gets a post of its own. Of course it would be rude not to make a return visit to tell them how we got on.

This time we went straight for the menu I had there back to back Martini which is really 2 drinks a vodka Martini & a gin one. They come ungarnished but with a tray of garnishes for you to add your own. I had to ask for onions though. Also they had the soup dumplings from their food menu, what can be better than a comfortable bar an ice cold Gibson & a plate of soup dumplings ?

Scoff a Cephalopod (*)

2010-11-04T10:46:00.000Z

Well I'm back from my journeying and its time to get things rolling again.

Recently I've been in Australia, mainly Victoria but a couple of side trips out of state. Part of the reason was to go & see the MotoGP at Phillip Island, and that unlikely place is where I'm going to start.

Anyone who has been to a major sporting event will know the disappointment of high price low quality food, and the guilty pleasure it can bring. Phillip Island turned that on its head, yes it was mainly fried and grilled stuff prepared in a van, but the prices weren't the expected gouge. Risking life & limb in the pursuit of taste I found a fish & chip van doing salt & pepper squid. I bravely plunged in. Salt & pepper squid is one of those things, if done right its truly delicious, if not pretty repellent. The first bite proved they knew what they were doing.The squid was al dente and the batter a lovely soft salt & pepper coating. I was pretty surprised, but very pleasantly so.

Later on in town I saw a sign to gladden the heart
"Grilled baby octopus on a stick". I had to have some (and who wouldn't ?). Unfortunately they'd sold out so instead I got a $6(aus) bag of fried octopus.

That's it just there. Quite a substantial portion, for what was meant to be a pre-lunch snack. In fact it tided us over till an earlyish tea. Once again the octopus was well cooked, the seasoned spicy batter adding its own crunch.

Two happy seafood experiences from places I'd not normally expect to be pulling off some of the trickier seafoods quite so well.

(*)Sorry about the title, what can I say, I had a misspent youth.

Duck egg

2010-09-23T13:54:00.000+01:00

When I started using the farm shop, I noticed a larger than usual range of eggs. I'd heard a lot about how great Duck eggs are for breakfast so bought some. After scrambling , frying & omeletting I tried poaching. That's now my favourite way to eat them. I absolutely had to try the ham, egg & peas at Sat Bains. Sat poaches his eggs in a water bath at around 60c for some hours, I'll be trying that on my next free weekend. Meanwhile I went for the traditional method (ish).

Here's how I normally poach a duck egg

Bring a pan of water to a rolling boil & add in a teaspoon of vinegar. Drop the egg (still in its shell) into the water for about 20 seconds. Fish it out with a slotted spoon and then crack it into the water. You should end up with a mostly egg shaped blob around the yolk & a bit of a tail/veil of white, with some breakaway bits floating about on the surface. I like my yolks soft so about 90s-2mins does the trick. Scoop out with the trusty slotted spoon, set on hot buttered toast and add maybe a twist of black pepper.

Bramble Gin Fizz

2010-09-22T13:20:00.000+01:00

My little foraging adventure gathered more blackberries & some elderberries, so what better way to enjoy them than in a drink ?

First up make bramble cordial. Put blackberries & elderberries in a bowl and add a reasonable amount of sugar, then either microwave or heat over a simmering pan. Either way you should end up with a thick sweet deep purple cordial. You can use this in either alcoholic concoctions or temperance ones.

Bramble Gin Fizz

10ml of bramble cordial
30ml of gin
5ml of St Germain or elderflower liqueur

stir down, add a couple of ice cubes and stir again.

Top up with soda water.

A nice long drink for the few warm evenings left.

Lamb lid pie

2010-09-21T13:57:00.000+01:00

I am against "liddy pie" this is the thing usually served as a pie. A Lid or top normally made of puff pastry is floated on top of pie filling in and individual bowl. The one allowable savoury exception in my book is a hot pot pie. So I made one, having combined it with an idea I had whilst writing another post...

I mentioned lighter ales & lamb when I was talking about steak & ale pie and got to thinking about fruit beers. Being on a touch of an economy drive after Sat Bains I spotted lamb neck at the butchers & decided I'd give the idea a go. I added Liefman's Kriek to my basket.

First I melted & seasoned a bit of butter in my pan, tossed in garden herbs (mainly rosemary & bay) and half an onion and let it all sweat on a gentle heat.
I took most of the meat off the neck chops, cubed it & reserved one bone portion. The meat got dredged in flour and then tossed into the pan to brown. That job done in went the beer and the bone, the whole lot was brought up to the boil. This is great fun as suddenly everything smells of cherries and your stew gains an excitable pink frothy head. Crank the heat back to a simmer, pop on the lid & go and enjoy yourself. Stews & pies are one of the best things about Autumn & Winter, they fill the house with a comforting cooking smell, the promise of filling food and allow you to loaf about reading whilst they simmer & burble away.

After an hour or two everything should be reduced down and cooked to tender. About 3/4 of the way through Chuck in a handful of chopped potato, you can do this at the start, but you need serious chunks unless you want the potato to just thicken the stew & not be a separate presence on the fork.
Turn the oven on to preheat, about gas 4 and break out the pastry. Roll it out to about 10-20mm larger than the top of your pot. Unfortunately the rim on my otherwise marvellous Le Creuset pan is to thin to support the pastry so I had to transplant everything into a pyrex dish. Put the pastry over the stew and crimp to the rim of your dish, make a couple of knife slashes in the top to let the steam out and pop in the oven for 30 minutes or so.

I have to apologise for a couple of the recent photographs, they've been taken under less than ideal conditions, usually snatched with a phone cam in low light. Still they should give a reasonable idea of what I'm wittering about.

Mixmo Lime

2010-09-20T13:10:00.000+01:00

It's MixMo time again, and Limes have been chosen.

I find Lime to be quite a tricky ingredient, it's acidity can be too overpowering at times, so I keep lime drinks for before dinner.

I think this is an underrated lime cocktail :- The Stiletto

Ingredients

1 part fresh lime juice
1 part ameretto
4 parts Bourbon.

Juice the lime, I tend to use this as my base measurement, in general unless the lime is elderly it'll yield enough juice for two drinks.

Pour it into an iced bar glass, add in your ameretto and your bourbon. Shake, strain & pour.

This is one of those magic cocktails where all the parts harmonize with each other & you don't get too much of any one flavour. I'm always surprised that when DiSaronno are advertising this drink never comes up as it shows off very well indeed. I guess if you aren't a marzipan/almond flavour fan then this will look like a nightmare, however whilst the almond note is still present, it is fairly subdued. Give it a go, if you don't like it then don't order another. Maybe though you'll be pleasantly surprised.

The Stiletto

Restaurant Sat Bains

2010-09-19T19:15:00.000+01:00

Nottingham's only Michelin starred restaurant, Sat is also a molecular chef, so some comparisons with the Fat Duck are inevitable, so I'll deal with the 2 biggies straight off. Sat's menu is a lot more local & seasonal, he also is a bit less multi-sensory/theatrical than Heston. We'd got a package offer, so a

room, champagne on arrival and the 7 course tasting menu. The wine list is huge and roams from pretty reasonable (25-30) to stratospheric. Having had the paired wines at the Fat Duck we did the same here. First up was an amuse bouche from the kitchen of an oyster foam with a pigs head croquette and a smoked haddock one, both were really good. Next was Sat's signature dish of ham, egg & peas. If you don't know this is the only dish that scored a perfect 30 in the great British menu and consists of a slow poached duck egg, peas, pea & mint sorbet and pata negra ham. I've eaten a fair few poached duck eggs, this was glorious. The sorbet tastes incredibly fresh & green and provides a great contrast to the warm duck egg.

Then it was onto the menu proper and an Alsatian white that we ended up killing, that was for the starters and went incredibly with the first, Pork, pears, chicory & monkfish which came with a liquorice sauce. The pork was superbly cooked and the pears which ranged from raw to a pear gel really went with it, the monkfish & liquorice were good together, but might not have needed to be on the same plate as the pork. Next up was Organic salmon with coriander.This was a cube of raw salmon, incredible pickled vegetables where placed on top and covered in an oyster & coriander emulsion. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

Next came NG7 2AS, an enigmatically named dish, that turns out to be foraged from with in a mile of the kitchen. If you get to eat it, it probably won't be the same as this. A salad of mainly sorrels with pickled elderberries, textures of crab apple, hazelnuts and a hazelnut sand. With a glorious horseradish croquette.

For me this was the stand out dish, and it took a while to eat as everything needed to eaten on its own and then in combination.

The "main course" turned up, Yorkshire grouse with blackberries and a home made faggot, paired with a premier cru Burgundy. If the dish was any bigger then it would have been instant gout. Lovely meaty flavours from the (very) rare grouse breast and the beef faggot, complemented incredibly by the deep blackberry sauce and matched to the kind of wine that makes you understand where Jilly Goulden & co are coming from.

Then came "Crossover" a bridge between the main course & dessert. Its a mix of ham, pineapple, maple syrup and Parmesan cheese. Sounds odd but really works.

The first of the desserts was simply titled "Chocolate" and was a rich chocolate mousse with a thyme & salt caramel and a buttermilk ice cream paired with an Australian muscadet, another standout bit of wine matching. Again well chosen complementary flavours the acidity of the buttermilk cutting through the rich sweetness on the plate, the addition of thyme to caramel provided a pleasant je ne sais quois and is something I think I might give a bit of a try in future.

The final menu course was "Raspberry" which consisted of a dish containing various raspberry things (a granita, a gel, whole berries) dotted with hazelnut meringues, both hard and soft and a lolly of freeze dried raspberries a white chocolate shell and a beetroot ice cream.

Beetroot is much loved by the modern/molecular chef as it has a very interesting trick, where its flavour can be flipped between sweet & savoury depending on what it's served with(*). If you know that you can play with it in this dessert. This was teamed with a Sauternes which was probably the most disappointing wine of the night, in so much as it was merely very good, compared with the excellents of the other wines. Finally the richest chocolate brownie I've ever eaten arrived on a small square slate. I managed half of it.

So go, it's highly recommended, staying over in one of the fairly luxurious rooms takes a bit of a sting out of the bill, but you are paying toward the top end of 1 star prices. That said I don't think it can be too long before a second star arrives. The dishes are innovative and very well made, the wines well chosen and the service spot on. There is a 12.5% service charge on the food bill, which is reasonable at this level.

(*) A high degree of acidity flips the beetroot from beetrooty to blackcurranty. Eating the raspberry chocolate shell to expose the ice cream with in (as shown in the photo) allows you to taste the beetroot ice cream in its vegetable guise. Dipping it into the granita turns it fruity again.

Steak & Ale plate pie

2010-09-16T11:41:00.000+01:00

Ahh autumn, I know Keats was fond of you, I am too, for different reasons though. Autumn means that the oven can be used with impunity & that stews are back on the menu, Steak & ale pie means both.

You'll need some shortcrust pastry, which you can make or buy. Steak (one of the cheaper cuts, its is about to be cooked for several hours) onions, mushrooms and Beer. Beer is an important ingredient in this dish, in fact it's almost all the stock/gravy so choose well. Ideally it'll be a fairly dark strong beer to go with the deep flavour of the beef (you could use lamb and a lighter ale if you like). I went with Theakstons "Old Peculiar" which I've always been fond of. So get you best stewing/casseroling pan out and melt some butter, season it as you like. Chop some onion and sweat it in the butter. Add a mushroom or 3 (these will probably melt into the stock, they are there to add body). Toss your steak in flour and brown it in the oniony shroom butter. Pour in the beer (500ml/pint) add some herbs and simmer. You have an hour or 3 to amuse yourself, stop simmering when the stock, gravy is just a touch less thick than you'd like.

Line a greased pie plate with pastry, and slice a couple more mushrooms. Stir the mushrooms into the steak stew & then ladle the lot into the pastry lined plate. Make a pastry lid, attach it & brush with milk. Into the oven on gas 4 for 30-40 mins. Enjoy.

If you can't eat the pie in one sitting, you can either eat it cold later or like the one above put it in a low oven to heat through whilst you cook some spuds & some veg.

Make this, if nothing else it'll make your kitchen smell awesome. Cheat & buy the pastry. Cheat more and use an ovenproof pan & just lay the pastry over the top of it. Just make the pie, its the thing now the nights are drawing in.

Blackberry Jelly

2010-09-14T13:24:00.000+01:00

The blackberry glut is almost worked out, fortunately another glut is hard on its heels. Anyway blackberry jelly

On the left are macerating blackberries, plucked from various sources around work & home. On the right is a bunny jelly mould, something a number of commentators have told me I have to have to make "proper" jelly. I figured blackberry would be quite easy, since blackberries & raspberries are essentially the same. Set the blackberries & some sugar in a heat proof bowl over simmering water. After 45mins or so, you'll be left with a lot of juice and some shrivelled berries. Pour the juice through a sieve and make up to 500ml with water/sugar syrup (You'll have to do this bit by taste as there are way too many variables).

Use your 500ml to make up a jelly in the usual way (50ml of liquid is used to soften 5 leaves of gelatine, then melt the gelatine over a double boiler, add the remaining liquid, stir strain etc) and pass it through a fine sieve into your mould. Put it in the fridge for a few hours (overnight is best, it removes the temptation to poke about & see if everything is ready) and once set turn out.

Serve, ice-cream & small children are entirely optional.

Lavender Old Fashioned

2010-09-13T13:05:00.000+01:00

This came up in MixMO as an entry from Backyard Bartender which intrigued me, especially as I still have lavender flowers.

I had a read of the recipe & thought since I'd give it a go. Then I had a read of The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks and decided to stick to a more standard old-fashioned. I'd used up all my Gomme making Jellies so I had to do it the hard way

First put 1//2 a barspoon of sugar in the bottom of your glass add 2 dashes of bitters an Ice cube & a lavender flower head. Stir gently to start dissolving the sugar. After a couple of minutes add 5ml of St Germain (Elderflower liqueur). Keep stirring gently, you want to dissolve the sugar but not break up the lavender. Add 10ml of bourbon and keep stirring. Once all the sugar has dissolved (5-10 minutes) add 35ml of bourbon and a second ice cube, stir for another 10-15 seconds and then enjoy.

You should end up with a very well balanced drink in which the lavender & elderflower florals combine and act quite nicely with the bourbon, giving a smooth drink with a bright aftertaste. It is always a bit of hassle to make an old fashioned from scratch, but this one is worth a go.

Blackberry Flip

2010-09-08T13:44:00.000+01:00

This is a straight forward variation on Jamie Boudreau's Raspberry flip

Blackberry flip

6 blackberries
1 egg
3 parts Bourbon
1 part creme de murre
dash bitters

I've always been told when using egg or egg parts to put them in the mixing glass & give it a quick whisk with the bar spoon. So crack an egg into there and beat it to break up the yolk & roughly mix it into the white. Drop in the blackberries (whole) and the ice. Add bourbon & creme de murre. The original calls for peach bitters, I didn't have them so opted to leave the bitters out this time.

Shake HARD strain & serve

You end up with basically a blackberry smoothie, quite dangerously the alcohol bite is hidden away.

Don't be afraid of whole egg, most UK eggs are salmonella free (at least the lion mark ones are). The resulting drink is really worth it. Drink it now before Michelmas when Satan ruins all your blackberries

Tarte Tatin

2010-09-07T13:31:00.000+01:00

Windfall apples, what to do ? A quick glimpse at Family Food suggested Tarte tatin, after all what could be nicer than a caramel apple pie ?

For some reason I'd never realized that tarte tatin is cooked upside down, the recipe also called for frozen puff pastry. I skipped that as I was making my own shortcrust for some other bits.

First off came lining the bottom of the dish with 100gr of butter. Then I sprinkled 80gr of sugar over that (Depends a bit on how sweet the apples are). Then I cut some wedges from my apples. This is great for windfalls as you can chuck the less good bits of the apple.

Once it's all set up put it on the hob at a medium heat & watch the butter melt & the sugar begin to caramelize. At this point the recipe suggested putting a plat over the apples to make sure they got nicely covered.

I looked at several pictures on the web and the apples are really deeply caramelized, to a very dark brown. I didn't go that far, taking it off the hob when everything was golden. Now came the tricky sounding part. Next time I make this (and its not going to be too long before I do) I'll roll the pastry & measure it first, it can rest at the right size.

I dropped it over the apples & tucked it in as best I could. You can see bits of buttery caramel escaping up the sides. So it wasn't going to be the worlds best looking tarte tatin (I think that goes to those with the regular spiral of thin apple slices), but hopefully it was going to taste OK. With that it went into the oven on Gas mark 4 for 30-40mins (depends on the oven, whether you've pre-heated it and all those other factors).

Then comes the nailbiting section, turning it out. Place a plate over your flan dish & quickly invert, perform what ever voodoo you regard as acceptable & tap the flan dish, if everything is going you way you'll hear a flopping sound & then the big reveal.

Eat with cream, or ice cream (I like ice cream when the tart is warm & cream when its cold). The next day I was idly poking around the internet and several websites suggested that Tatin was a difficult thing and reading some of the recipes I'm not surprised. This was pretty straight forward, and if you aren't good at pastry, Jus-roll and similar work fine. If you've an abundance of apples this is worth a go, and the anxiety of turning out hot caramel is always a spice to an afternoon in the Kitchen.

Blackberry "Bellini"

2010-09-06T13:52:00.000+01:00

The Bellini is a simple concoction of Prosecco and white peach. It does lend itself to variations & riffs. I had a bottle of Prosecco and having finished my run in the woods access to a whole bunch of blackberries.

I was feeling a bit lazy so I macerated the blackberries with the microwave. This is dead simple, put sugar on blackberries (slightly more than you think you need) and heat indirectly. The juice flows out and forms a strong syrup. (takes about 5 mins in the microwave 1min full power, 2 mins stand 1 min full power). For what I wanted a little too strong, so I diluted it with grappa (about 2 syrup to 1 grappa) and shared it between flutes. Top off with prosecco, garnish with a small berry and enjoy the autumn.

Pizza with little people

2010-08-31T14:36:00.000+01:00

I found myself babysitting, so I thought we could make pizza. After all it's a pretty simple dough (Flour water yeast) and if I cut up the toppings & manned the oven a five yr-old could do most of the work right ?

Mostly.
I got Them to test the water for the yeast (like Goldilocks, not too hot, not too cold) and to mix up the dough.

The stickiness of this step was not entirely welcome, but making a well in the flour & then pouring water into it seemed to be about the best fun you could have. That said we ended up with a ball of dough that wasn't too bad after 5-10 minutes and some deft avuncular handy work.

We took a break at this point, the recipe I'm using for the dough doesn't need to rest, but the little fingers appreciated it. I shooed them out of the kitchen, cranked the oven up & chopped a few toppings.

The salami is really for my benefit, and I know pineapple on pizza isn't great, but I didn't want to make food that was too new/unusual/weird.
Anyway everyone love smooshing out dough into a rough pizza shape. Everyone except my nephew every time it got thin enough he'd roll it back up & start again.

We eventually got a pizza shape everybody was happy with, I assisted in covering them with sauce and then it was time to make some Pizza. Somebody was insistent that theirs was a face, somebody else was more interested in how much stuff would fit on the base.

Not bad though, minimal interference from me (though I admit to not braving making tomato sauce with them & using a jar of pasta sauce instead). Popping them in the oven wasn't greeted with enthusiasm, in fact there were a couple of howls of dismay. Until we realized that they could be seen through the door.

10 minutes later and :-

Hmm maybe I let him pile a little too much ham on there. I've not got any eating photos as we were a bit on the busy side at that point. We managed to join the clean plate club too. First outing cooking with the tinnies was definitely a success. What to do next time ?

Mixmo:- Brown,Bitter and stirred

2010-08-30T23:13:00.000+01:00

Mixmo, Manhattans, Interesting.

A number of writers place the Manhattan up with the Martini, a couple even give it the crown as the king of cocktails. In short it has a reputation, one which for once is richly deserved. Every now & then a bit of a tinker with it is in order, what makes the Manhattan's magic ? For one drinker I know its all about the cherry. With that in mind, I went all out for the Cerise Manhattan.

Simply I swapped cherry brandy in for the vermouth and Kirsch in for the bitters so

45 ml Bourbon (drinkers choice)
15 ml Cherry Brandy
2 dashes of Kirsch

Stir over ice, strain.
Lift a maraschino cherry with your barspoon & drop it (with attendant syrup) through the drink.

This was a massive DRY cherry hit. I was using home made cherry brandy, so that wasn't as sweet as the commercial stuff (I'm stingy with sugar) which might have made some of the difference. However I think that cutting the cherry brandy with half red vermouth might well produce a more balanced drink.

I guess I'm just going to have to keep experimenting till I find an acceptable cherry Manhattan, could take me a while, but I'll sacrifice myself like that since it's unlikely that I'll mix up anything utterly unpalatable.

The hound of the Baskerville's remix

2010-08-21T17:34:00.000+01:00

Last Blackberry season I made this we settled on calling it "the hound of the Baskerville's". Leaving work recently I've noticed a lot of blackberries, so I went to pick some. Unfortunately some were out of my reach, so I didn't grab that many.

Having arrived at the bar I decided I'd introduce the guys to this one.

Hound of the Baskerville's

1pt creme de murre
1pt sweet vermouth
2pts dry vermouth
6pts dry gin
handful of blackberries

Muddle the blackberries down, add a large handful of ice and the rest of the ingredients, stir hard till very cold, strain & serve. The Borage flower on the top is a nice touch, I'd normally serve with a small reserved berry.

As you can see it is a variation on the "Bloodhound" and a bit more refined than my original attempts. It was pretty well received. So if you are keen on classic type cocktails and a fan of seasonal fruits take the time over the next couple of weeks to grab a handful of nice blackberries from an overlooked briar patch and mix up a couple of these.

Watermelon Jelly

2010-08-18T13:04:00.001+01:00

I had a plan for going off recipe with jelly, then a free watermelon arrived & the plan changed, more about the original plan later.

Seriously though how hard can it be ?
Step 1 check your fruit doesn't have any dodgy enzymes which interfere with Gelatine. (That's kiwi,pineapple,papaya, and figs as far as I know).
Step 2 Juice your fruit
Step 3 Make the juice upto 500ml. This is where you adjust the sweetness add booze and otherwise adulterate the juice to provide a better jelly.
Step 4 Make a Gelatine solution
Step 5 Set
Step 6 EAT

Nobody seemed to think watermelon and gelatine presented any problems, so it was juicing time, slice the melon up (catching any juice from this stage) and pulp in a blender, pass through a sieve and away you go.
Step 3 had me worried, melon is a delicate flavour and I didn't want to wreck it, so I added a dash of white rum, a spoonful of sugar and made it up with water. At this point I remembered something from the Fat Duck Cookbook about adding malic acid, so I added 1/2 a teaspoon.

Hours later and the jellies smelt fantastic, time to unmould & taste.

Fortunately they tasted as good as they smelt. I'll be adding watermelon to my list

TMS

2010-08-11T13:05:00.000+01:00

A simple BBQ plum dessert

First off mix up a honey simple syrup, and infuse lavender & rosemary into it (Couple of teaspoons of honey, double the amount of water, a sprig of rosemary & a fresh lavender flower head). While that is heating (you don't want it to boil) halve & stone plums. Lay them in a fireproof bowl & pour over your syrup.

When all the meat has been consumed from the BBQ , but it's still fairly hot cover the dish with foil & put it on the grill, after about 10-15mins it should be bubbling away. Lift it off, carefully peel back the foil and serve spoonfuls of hot plum with a good vanilla ice-cream.

Double Plum Jelly

2010-08-10T13:02:00.000+01:00

There are going to be quite a few plum posts, as I seem to have gained an embarrassing excess.

This is a simple "technique" jelly, in which sliced plums are held in a plum jelly. The recipe calls for the plums to be simmered in Riesling, but I switched it to half water half wine, mainly because that was the amount of wine that was spare. Halve & stone you plums, add sugar to taste cover with wine/water and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Push the mixture through a fine sieve into a jar & make up to 500ml with water. Do the usual jelly routine of softening & melting the gelatine. Line your mould with halved plums and then pour in enough jelly mixture to just cover them. Fresh fruit floats in jelly, so if you want it at the top of your decanted jelly you have to let the first pour thicken. If you stand you mould(s) in a bowl of ice water the process goes that bit quicker.
After an hour or so the plum layer should be gelled enough to add the rest. Due to the slightly magical nature of gelatine, the top should set faster then you'd expect. Chill for a couple of hours & then serve. I didn't unmould this one, serving it instead in glasses, but it looked good & tasted great (quite a grownup taste due to the sourness that comes with plums)

Burgers

2010-08-09T13:09:00.000+01:00

Since my first run of "Perfection burgers" I've been wanting to try a good restaurant burger to compare these too.

So you can imagine my excitement when I found that GBK was coming to town. At last something to measure my burger against, after all Gourmet is in their name. They claim a 100% aberdeen angus beef in the burgers, so it had to be worth a go. Unfortunately whilst the burgers are fine, they aren't great. I was asked how I'd like my burger so said (almost by reflex) "Rare please". Apparently that's not possible, would medium rare do. When the burger came, it was more medium than medium rare. In a nutshell that's what I found wrong with GBK. They go further than most burger providers but they don't go far enough to justify their pricing. The bun comes stacked with stuff, but its mostly salad giving the illusion of height, not a thick burger. Sorry GBK.

To cheer myself up I took a batch of "perfection burgers" along to our neighbour's allotment BBQ. Since they'd just started to harvest the onions it seemed rude not to turn one of them into a good onion relish , pile it on the Burger and enjoy it in the setting sun.

Gimlet

2010-08-05T21:39:00.000+01:00

The Gimlet

a really old fashioned cocktail, great for warm summer nights.
It is just gin & Rose's Lime juice. Some people say 50-50, others (myself included disagree).

1 Part Rose's Lime Juice(*)
4 Parts good dry gin

stir over ice till brutally cold, serve.

There is a theory (quite a romantic one, which I like) that the drink is named after a royal navy surgeon, one Surgeon General Sir Thomas D. Gimlette, KCB who introduced the drink to the officers mess as a way of making the scurvy preventing lime ration palatable. The ratings of course took theirs with rum, making grog. Alternatively it is named after the tool, due to the penetrating nature of the drink on the imbibers sobriety. Like I said I'm going with sir Thomas, because a drink this good has to be good for you.

(*)Rose's Lime juice is a cordial (also with a fine naval history) most authorities agree that it is required in a proper gimlet. Ersatz versions can be made with lime juice & gomme or other lime syrups and for those desperate to ruin a fine drink vodka can of course be substituted for gin, but why would you want to do that ?

Irish Calzone

2010-08-04T12:45:00.000+01:00

In the pizza experiments, using the BBQ kept turning up as an idea. It is quite a reasonable one too, as the barbie gets a lot hotter than my oven. So I used the dough recipe to make some thin crusts and gave it a go. The main problem is wrestling the floppy topping charged dough on & off the hot grill. I simple answer is to fold your pizza in half. Ok its not a true calzone, but its close enough.

The Prosciutto & potato pizza made a big impression, an excess of potato (yeah its the cheaper ingredient) & dough led to experimentation, I mean Ham & Bacon are basically the same right ? Getting to the bottom of the sauce led me to adding onions . Voilà the Irish calzone. Bacon,potato,onion and cheese, grilled quickly over a high heat for a minute or 2 each side. The photo above doesn't do it real justice, but next time you are making pizzas give this one a go.

Lavender Lamb

2010-08-02T13:14:00.000+01:00

I have a pretty small garden, with not even enough room for the number of roses I'd like to grow, so I appreciate multi-purpose plants, lavender fits this quite nicely. It can be used for more than toiletries though.

First get a leg (or part leg) of lamb, size depends on the number of people you want to feed (800g will feed 3 adults), then get it butterflied. You can do that yourself if you have the knives & the skill, but a decent butcher will do for you as part of buying the meat.

Next you'll need some lavender, you just want the flowers and since they are currently in bloom use fresh ones, you need a handful (if you have to use dried, they are more intense, so halve the amount), a couple of sprigs of rosemary and 4-5 garlic gloves. Grind it together with some pepper & salt and then add a dash of olive oil to bind it. Coat the lamb & leave it for a couple of hours.

You'll want a fairly hot BBQ/Grill. The lamb wants 10-15 minutes a side, I'm using a meat thermometer & its set at 65c which is the bottom end of well done. Normally I'd have lamb rarer than that, but I was cooking for a couple of other people that wanted/needed it well done. Once you time has elapsed or your chosen internal temperature is reached then take the lamb off & let it rest. It will produce a reasonable amount of juices, which can be used for sauce/stock/gravy. Most of the herb crust will have charred, so you can scrape that off, it's job is done now. Slice and serve

The lavender is quite a delicate flavour, which comes as a bit of a shock after the grinding (which can make your kitchen smell like a natural trust gift shop) and really complements the lamb well.

Jelly vs Jelly

2010-08-01T17:40:00.000+01:00

In the yellow corner we have

Hartley's lemon flavour jelly.
40p a packet at Sainsbury's

In the other yellow corner we have home made lemon jelly

Needs a few more ingredients than the Hartley's and a bit more equipment, oh it costs more too, about £1:60 for the amount of ingredients used.

The packet jelly goes in the jug with 100ml of water and into the microwave for a minute, the water & molten jelly don't really mix, so when you make it upto 500ml (or a UK pint) you have to stir it a fair bit to get an even mixture. Then you pour it into your moulds and put it in the fridge, total time ?About 4 minutes. Over in the real jelly corner the first job is a simple sugar syrup. 125ml of boiling water gets 125g of sugar dumped in and stirred till its all dissolved. Actually I let it stand and stirred in between my juicings. The sharp eyed amongst you will have spotted an orange, this has 2 uses. 1 it dilutes the citric acid from the lemons.

Second it improves the colour, giving you a strong yellow, rather than a vaguely murky translucence. That's the jelly liquid on the left ready for actual jelling. First of cut up 5 leaves of good gelatin and then just cover them with your jelly liquid. They are going to sit there softening for about 10mins. Whilst that's happening bring a pan of water upto simmer. The bowl with the softened gelatine is going to sit on that till all the jelly dissolves (another 10 mins) once that is done stir in the rest of the liquid. Pour through a sieve and or a strainer into your moulds and put it into the fridge. All the hard work is now done, spend the next few hours doing other things and not frequently going in the fridge to see how your Jellies are doing.

At this point I think its worth pointing out that the Hartley's jelly uses no artificial flavourings or colourings. Look at the packet closely and you'll see its lemon flavoured jelly. It doesn't use any lemons either. The citric acid might come from them I guess and the coyly named "natural flavourings" may use lemon oils, but the colour comes from beta-carotene and curcumin, thats carrots & tumeric to us. Here are the end results.

That's Hartley's on the left, and mine on the right. They are obviously quite different looking, fortunately a brave volunteer offered to do a blind tasting.

It probably comes as no surprise that the packet jelly didn't fare to well, at first it appeared to have a more subtle flavour than the home made jelly. On a second tasting this was declared to be a lack of flavour. The home made jelly packs a hefty citrus punch and has a much longer finish (and greater depth). Pretty much all my taste testers preferred the home made one. I'm not bothered by the fact its 4x dearer or that it takes about 10x as long to make, it is a glorious lemony summer dessert.

Mai Tai

2010-07-29T13:33:00.000+01:00

I'm not normally a fan of Tiki style cocktails, since they are usually rum(s) disguised by fruit juice(s). The Mai Tai has a bit of a storied & complex history, the one above is Mr Boston's version of Trader Vic's. Minus golden rum as I didn't have any. The mix of lime,cointreau & orgeat gives quite a good base to the rum, the dark rum float gives it a bit of a hit. Not my normal fare, since I tend to like bitingly dry drinks, but not a bad summer sup.

Pizza !

2010-07-28T10:51:00.000+01:00

Over at lifehacker they're pretty serious about pizza. Pizza is pretty nice, I can get one delivered with little more effort than opening a new tab on my browser, so what's the fuss about ?

Homemade pizzas

Turns out pizza is one of those things worth the hassle. Heston Blumenthal goes into his usual depth when he makes pizza in "Perfection" Kilos of tomatoes get used, dough is prefermented and so on. The main thing he talks about though is the temperature at which the pizza gets cooked. Wood fired pizza ovens are really hot, hotter than you can get out of a domestic oven. Fortunately there are some simple solutions to get you started.

First, dough. My pizzas were made with a simple flour,water,yeast and salt dough. It takes about 10 minutes & doesn't need to prove though letting it rest always helps. Toppings, cheese & tomato are glutamate rich, so a well made pizza should have a strong umami flavour. To get my tomato sauce I butchered a ketchup recipe leaving out the sugar & the final reduction and fiddling with the seasoning (Basically I left out the spices & added more herbs). Takes about an hour, though most of that is the sauce bubbling away on its own. The 2 pizza halves up top are potato & prosciutto (top) and Salami & mushroom (bottom). To cook them I used the skillet method, heat a cast iron pan on full heat for about 20 minutes, meanwhile get the grill going at full heat.

Slip the prepared pizza onto the bottom of the skillet(*) and whiz everything under the grill, 2 minutes later you have pizza. Really good pizza, OK it takes more than opening a tab on your browser (I had to do that to get the dough recipe) but the taste is worth it.

(*) Sounds simple, it's not. You are going to be wrestling with a floppy circle of dough, loaded with sauce,cheese & toppings and a ferociously hot pan. Get help, make sure you've got tools and take care.

Dirty Dirty Martini

2010-07-16T15:57:00.000+01:00

Funny how summer leads to ice cold refreshing cocktails.

This combines my love of Gin with my love of BBQ.
You will need, GOOD olives, a hot BBQ and a skewer or two.
This takes a bit of timing, but make up a very very cold version of your favourite martini.
Thread your required number of olives onto a skewer & BBQ. First they'll sweat, then they'll begin to char at this point take them off the heat. Drop the hot Olives into the cold martini they should split, dirtying up your martini nicely.

There you go one dirty martini.

(I mean it about good olives, thats why I'm using Kalamatas)

Cucumber martini

2010-07-13T12:42:00.000+01:00

This dangerous concoction is courtesy of Larousse. They make it with vodka, but as you know, I'm a gin martini person.

Peel & roughly chop half a cucumber, you are going to muddle this with some sugar in the bottom of your mixing glass to get as much liquid out of the cucumber as possible. Having successfully muddled add a dash of dry vermouth (to counter the sugar), a very generous handful of ice and as much gin as you need(*) stir down for a good 30-40 seconds then double strain to serve.
Drink, very very carefully. On a hot day the refreshing nature of ice-cold cucumber will dominate pretty much everything, don't be fooled, there is a good dose of hard liquor in there which ever way you choose to make this one.

(*) Taking into account the number of them you are making (half a cucumber will do upto 4) and how strong/dry you want the final drinks to be.

Orange Jelly

2010-07-09T14:05:00.001+01:00

I was given a copy of the jelly book(*) so I got down to one of the simpler recipes.

Orange jelly, I wanted to have a go at strawberry, but getting the juice out of the strawberries is a bit of a palaver, oranges just go on the juicer. The recipe is pretty simple requiring orange juice, lemon juice, sugar syrup & gelatine. I'm afraid all the recipes include gelatine, the reasons are given in a chapter about gelling agents as is a conversion to agar-agar for those who aren't able to use gelatine. I also just grabbed my cocktailing gomme of the shelf rather than make up a new batch of sugar syrup. The technique is fairly easy and the difference in work over say a packet jelly is not huge (something that can't be said about the wilder technique jellies that'll be making an appearance later). The taste however is way better, the authors say making your own jelly is a revelation and they are right, I recommend it to everyone. Oh yes unmoulding is very tense, but the results speak for themselves, treat yourself (oh and buy or make some good ice-cream to go with it).

(*)Jello in American

Ain't nothin' but a hound dog

2010-07-08T13:29:00.000+01:00

My neighbours have a glut of raspberries from their allotment, so it was time to turn them into a drink.

A simple variation on the bloodhound seemed to fit the bill

I just swapped the strawberries for raspberries, I used a few more raspberries as they pulp down a lot more than strawbs do.

1 Large handful of raspberries
1 pt sweet vermouth
1 pt dry vermouth
4 pts Gin

Muddle down the raspberries, add the vermouths & gin, shake hard over ice, double strain. (This is the hard/irritating part as the pips & pulp clog the strainer quite quickly).

That's the resulting drink on the left, and that surprisingly is its natural, unenhanced colour. If you like raspberries and have enjoyed the other bloodhound variations, this should help perk up your summer drinking

Gooseberry Fool

2010-07-07T09:47:00.000+01:00

Back in may I made fool, mentioning the superior nature of gooseberry over most other fools.

Somebody somewhere heard me & sent a punnet of organic gooseberries in the fruit & veg box. Gooseberries are often seen as time consuming to work with, but with a good sieve & a food processor you can skip all the topping & tailing. Simply wash them and then drop into a pan with either a splash of water & a spoonful of sugar or if you are feeling a bit more adventurous use either elderflower cordial or elderflower liqueur. After 20-25, it should all have gone a bit mushy. Pour that into your food processor & give it a whiz or three, then pour the resulting purée through a sieve, this will take out the seeds & the tops & tails of the berries leaving you with a bowl of smooth green loveliness. Unless you've got very sweet (red/pink usually) gooseberries, you are going to have to add some sugar. Now is the ideal time whilst the purée is warm. Just remember that the cream will add some sweetness, so add perhaps half a spoonful less than you think you'll need. Stir so all the sugar is dissolved & blended and then put it into the fridge to cool.

Once the gooseberry mixture has cooled whip up some cream (about 1/2 a pint /300ml will do) to the soft peak stage. Then fold in the purée in stages. I like to leave the last lot roughly swirled, so you get ribbons of gooseberry through the fool. Then dish up into glasses/bowls/ramekins remembering that its quite a rich dish and pop them back into the fridge to chill before serving.

Death in the Afternoon

2010-07-05T13:01:00.000+01:00

Well that was a longer pause than I meant, but let us get on with the booze.

Death in the afternoon is possibly the best known absinthe cocktail, it's credited to Ernest Hemingway, and this is how he tells you to make it :-

"pour 1 jigger of absinthe into a Champagne flute, top with Champagne until the correct opacity is reached."

I've found that this tends to make a bit of a something & nothing drink, where the anise just dominates all the other flavours. There is a second method though. Soak a sugar cube in absinthe, place in the bottom of a Champagne flute & fill with champagne as normal.
This tends to clean the Champagne flavour profile and although the anise flavour is there its doesn't dominate.

The picture to the right is using Dom Perignon 2000 as the Champagne & la fee Parisian as the absinthe. Its a combination I quite like as it deals with the odd sweetness I find in Moet et Chandon's house style. There isn't really any need to go to these lengths, and I did make this because I could. Any dry champagne will work, and Prosecco can be used as a reasonable substitute (I find that Cava is far too sweet).

So next time you have a hot thirsty afternoon and some absinthe & Champagne indulge in one of these, or maybe 2 but take care, the mixture of the green fairy & bubbles is a heady one, and your evening might end up finishing earlier than you'd planned .

Newspaper trout

2010-06-07T11:23:00.000+01:00

This isn't so much a recipe, more of a method for cooking trout. I was told about it by a fellow fishing from a bridge over the river Slaney. The fact he was fishing from the bridge & a story he told me about phoning fish(*) lead me to believe he was actually a poacher. Mind you since he had a bag of fresh river trout and this is a simple goto method for cooking trout, I'm happy to over look it.

You'll need some trout, 1 medium trout per person is the right amount in my kitchen, you might like to go for a larger trout & share between 2. Several sheets of newspaper, 1 sheet of broadsheet or 2 of tabloid is about right per fish. Seasonings e.g. salt,pepper, parsley or other fresh herbs. Gut (or get the fishmonger to) the trout and wash out the cavity, then stuff it with what ever you fancy (I'm using a little butter & a couple of lemon wedges).

Wrap the trout to make a nice parcel and then soak it through. Do this after wrapping the trout, doing it before will just leave you in a mess of papier mâché.

Then it goes under the grill, onto the BBQ or into a hot oven (gas 6 or equivalent). If you aren't using the oven you'll need to flip the parcels half way through the cooking (so after 5-8 mins). Once the paper is dry (and beginning to singe) the fish is cooked. This is where this method scores highly, as you unwrap, you'll find the skin sticks to the paper. The flesh should just come away from the bones, with a bit of patience/practice you can remove the fillets intact, usually at this point I'm too eager to get eating. That's all there is too it, perfectly cooked trout time & time again.

The Salad leaves on the right are the first produce from my micro salad garden (which unfortunately got devastated by the rain that started hammering down about an hour after I'd finished eating). Give this method for cooking trout a go, its easy & the results are very tasty.

(*) The fact he was fishing from the bridge, gives a clue that he wasn't entirely on the level, due to the very weird laws we have in England & Ireland about river ownership. By fishing from the bridge he wasn't trespassing, though he probably had no right to the fish. Phoning fish is definitely dodgy, but this act was carried out by a "friend" of his. An army surplus field telephone, a boat & a net are required. You drop the wire from the phone into the water over the side of your boat and crank like mad. The resulting current stuns the surrounding fish and you scoop them out with your net.

Peanut butter squares

2010-06-06T17:17:00.000+01:00

It's not all cocktails and rich food over here at sybaritic towers, I do exercise, sometimes in extreme ways. Yesterday was the Wincle trout run, a 9km fell race so some kind of post race recovery fuel was needed.

Nigella has a recipe for peanut butter squares in "how to be a domestic goddess" which she describes as being "very rich" those of you who have experience of her recipes will know that this is a scary thought.

Anyway its a simple enough recipe, sugar and peanut butter are stirred together to form the base. If you are not using a machine this step is reasonably hard work and might just burn off enough calories for a finished square or may be two. This is then pressed into a baking tray. A mixture of plain & milk chocolate is melted with some butter and then poured over the base, the whole lot goes into the fridge to set. Cut it into small squares (it is very very rich, I don't think anybody made a 3rd square even post race) and enjoy.

Millionaire's shortbread part II

2010-06-02T15:28:00.000+01:00

The first attempt went quite well but I wasn't entirely happy with the biscuit. Whilst the olive oil biscuit base might work very well in the context of one of Heston's menus it's not quite right for just scoffing. The quick shortbread I used for the Public sector version didn't really cut it either.

I found another HB recipe, that the Times published (which I found by a bunch of people complaining that the Dulce de leche step took 3 hours) for a simplified version. I used the short bread from that which worked out quite well (that's it to the left) and had much more of the texture that I associate with Millionaire's shortbread/caramel squares.

The salted butter caramel from the FatDuck cookbook was really good, I'd had a couple of issues with it, that I was hoping to resolve with the purchase of a sugar thermometer and an untextured pan. Whilst it worked better than before (and seems to have created a very rich sticky caramel) I still had issues with it sticking & singeing.
Once again rolling it out & cutting to size was very tricky, hopefully The big fat undertaking will be making the full recipe before too long (though I think the chocolate wine may require a centrifuge) and I'll have another source of reference. The tempered chocolate though is definitely a step not to miss out, there are several easy ways to do this at home, that don't involve water baths or marble slabs and the end product is glossy chocolate with a real snap.

Assembling the squares isn't to bad. This time round I'd decided to make one giant piece & then cut it to size, which makes working with the sticky slab of caramel easier, but means you have to have a bowl of hot water handy to slice the chocolate layer.

I've tasted the trimmings and its pretty much close to my ideal of Millionaire's shortbread, a crumbly base, sticky caramel and an intense chocolate hit. Given the richness of the caramel (it uses both butter & double cream) you have to be a bit careful with the base (I crossed off one recipe that used 500g of butter) and its best to use a high cocoa dark chocolate for the top (otherwise I think it could get too cloying).

I might have a go at the Dulce version in the future, but to be honest I'm quite happy to go to the trouble of making the caramel & tempering the chocolate.

Strawberry shortcake

2010-06-01T17:13:00.000+01:00

I'm afraid strawberries are going to crop up quite often in the next few weeks, they are a personal favourite, and hard to beat in combination with fresh cream. I fancied a bit of a change so looked up strawberry shortbread.
I found this recipe from the BBC's ready steady cook. The shortbread looked quick and not too rich, and the ingredients looked like they fit into my minichop. The dry ones & the butter did, just. However I got a great sandy crumb texture, so did the egg yolk bit by hand.

Then its just a case of whipping the cream, folding in the fruit & a splash of bramble liquer. Build it on the plate/ dish and slap a whole strawberry on top. Another tasty strawberry dessert.

BBQ Dinner

2010-05-31T16:22:00.001+01:00

I don't believe the BBQ is for burning burgers on bank holiday Mondays. There is much more to it than that, so I decided I attempt a full dinner from the grill.

That's a beercan chicken (aka beer butt chicken, chicken on the throne, etc.). For those of you who know your British beer that is a Carling black label can, it doesn't contain Carling though. I subscribe to the school of thought which holds "If you wouldn't drink it don't cook with it" as a truism. Inside the can is a nice local summer ale and some of my fresh garden herbs (sage, a little rosemary & a couple of bay leaves) and a pinch of salt and pepper.

Those of you who have never beer canned a chicken before will want to read this bit as its the how to. Get a can of beer, if you can find one you are happy to drink, rather than one you'll swill back because its there so much the better. You need the can 2/3rds full of your chosen beer, so you can drink of the top 1/3rd or dispose of it some other way. Then remove the top of the can with a can opener. Add in any extra flavourings (I must do this with a wheat beer & lemon at some point). The eye watering bit comes now, insert the can into the chicken, your aim is a stable chicken, so push the can in until the bird's legs form a tripod with the can. The cooking takes about 2 hours, so make sure your BBQ will be at a good cooking temperature for that long. You can lift the whole lot out, but its a real hassle. (I had to do this as I forgot to put some foil under the bird to prevent fat flare ups). In the back I've got 3 good sized potatoes, rubbed with oil & then wrapped in foil, after 2 hours they should be baked to perfection.
If you have a meat thermometer, the chicken wants to be at 70° C. If not the juices need to be running clear. Once that is the case the chicken is done.

Whilst the chicken is resting do the veggies. It's the English asparagus season at the moment and grilling it over hot charcoal for a couple of minutes is a great way to cook it. The leeks were done on a sheet of foil with a nob of butter for about 10 minutes. Time to serve. Wrap each foiled potato in a tea towel and give it a smart sharp karate chop (seriously, this allows most of the steam to escape in an instant fluffing up the flesh) turn onto the plate with a generous nob of butter, add the veg and some of the nicely sliced chicken (and as the chef pick the "oysters" I'll leave it to your conscience who's plate they land on (if any)) and serve. One whole chicken dinner done entirely on the BBQ. Beer can chicken isn't a mere affectation, the beer imparts flavour to the chicken (this is why lighter ales are best, but some birds can stand Guinness) and keeps it incredibly moist. Try it, you've very little to lose.

BBQ overload

2010-05-28T11:16:00.000+01:00

Apologies, real life got in the way a bit this week.

It's very rare I cook up a "traditional" barbie any more, having discovered the amount of fun you can have with fish,smoking & inserting beer into chickens. However having the perfection burgers too hand I figured they needed a good go on the grill to see what they were like. Also one of the issues I've had cooking them in the kitchen is getting the skillet hot enough.

Having decided to do burgers I thought I'd go the whole hog, I triple cooked some chips, and made up a bit of BBQ rub in order to have some wings as a side dish. The difference between this & a super market BBQ pack is massive. I'd not do this every Saturday evening as it does require more planning than chips & a burger would suggest, but its a Damn fine version and every now & then well worth having a go at.

Strawberry daiquiri syllabub

2010-05-19T13:00:00.000+01:00

There were too many strawberries to make hounds of various kinds, plus there was an invite to dinner, so a dessert seemed the thing to do. Strawberries always suggest cream, these were a little elderly to have au naturel so a bit of thinking went on (only a very little bit). A fool was out Strawberries just cant cut it (raspberries on the other hand). Then a moment of inspiration.

Syllabub

This is another of those flexible recipes.
First off get your strawberries, enough for 4 (its going to be rich so about 300g ) and reserve 4 good whole berries for decoration. Quarter the rest slicing off any over ripe bits and put them in a blender along with enough sugar to taste (in my case this is about a teaspoon full) and then blitz. Once they are down to a compote kind of texture add a shot or two of good white rum (again to taste) and give another couple of seconds. Pour the whole lot into a sieve stood over a jug (it's going to take a while).

Whip 500ml of double cream with about 80g of sugar, some more rum and the juice that has come through the strainer(*) to soft peaks. Pour strawberry compote into a serving glass, pile the syllabub on top and decorate with a reserved strawberry.

You can adjust the amount of rum you use to make it all a bit more teatotaller friendly (but then its not so much of a daiquiri) and fiddle with the ratios of the ingredients to get it to a taste you are happy with.

(*) You should end up with 3 distinct parts from the straining, pure juice which will come through first, smooth purée which comes through next and a dense compote which remains behind, all 3 bits can be used, but the compote can be a bit heavy on the seeds.

Cocktailing for beginners Pt 9 :- Daiquiri

2010-05-18T20:57:00.000+01:00

The daiquiri, favoured drink of Hemmingway and 80's favourite.

This is basically a rum sour, and as such you can use Embury's all purpose sour recipe for it. You can also jazz it up in a number of different ways.

We'll start with the basic.
4 parts white rum (bacardi is traditional)
2 parts lime juice
1 part gomme

shake hard over ice.
if you blend it with ice you get a frozen daiquiri. Some people switch the gomme for powdered sugar. Hemmingway apparently favoured the "papa doble" which uses the juice of 2 limes, half a grapefruit & a good dash of maraschino, sparing the sugar (perhaps as a nod to his diabetes). Which ever way you have a look at it there is a lot more to the daiquiri than the slush puppy alcohol light versions that popped up all through the '80s. Give this one a go, use fresh fruit & good white rum, perfect for the summer evenings that are beginning to creep up on us.

Vicious Hound

2010-05-17T13:08:00.000+01:00

Whilst doing a spot of shopping I noticed some cut price strawberries, a quick check showed they weren't the horrible ElSanta(*) I bought them, despite them being Spanish & too early. I had a couple of things in mind, this new variation on a bloodhound cocktail being the main one.

When I'd been playing with the Sakitin from vinegar-cocktails, I was thinking about strawberries & balsamic vinegar. I quickly topped the the strawberries, quartered them & put them in some balsamic for 24 hours or so. I lifted them out of the vinegar with a slotted spoon, I wasn't too fussed about getting some vinegar into the mixing glass. I muddled them down, adding a little sweet vermouth to loosen it up.

This is where I really departed from the standard bloodhound, as I left out the dry vermouth entirely, thinking that the strawberry & balsamic would provide the requisite dryness. Top up the mixing glass with ice, more sweet vermouth & gin, then shake hard. You'll need to double strain it, or you'll end up with a glass full of pips.

Despite the name, its actually a smoother drink than the bloodhound, it all balances quite nicely. Its definitely one for summer evenings as its very refreshing and you get strawberry balsamic as a left over & that has to be a good ingredient for a summer salad vinaigrette.

(*) El Santa is the supermarket favourite strawberry, if you grow it carefully in your garden you can get a good well tasting crop. If though its grown in an intensive agri-business way it ends up as a very good looking, but tasteless strawberry. A couple of supermarkets have recognized this and are selling different varieties, personally though I'm looking forward to the fresh English strawberries.

Turkish Delight

2010-05-13T15:58:00.000+01:00

I've mentioned I like floral flavours a couple of time. Turkish delight usually supplies a good rose hit, hwo difficult could it be to make ?

I'm still not sure

There are two families of recipe, gelatine or non-gelatine. I went with non-gelatine. The theory is simple mix a sugar syrup with a cornflour emulsion and boil for a while, colour, flavour & allow to set. Only it didn't work like that for me. Adding the sugar to the cornflour immediately formed a thick paste, so I divided it into 2. I added about 3cl of creme de menthe to 1 batch, to give a green minty delight and a mix of rosewater & grenadine to the other to get the traditional rose. Stirring it together was fiendishly hard, but I turned it out & left it in the fridge for a couple of hours to set. The result was definitely turkish delight, but it wasn't quite right.

My mistake had been to let the cornflour emulsion cool, it needs to be just thickening and coming to the boil when the sugar is added, at that point you should get the heavy syrup that I was looking for. I have since found a recipe that calls for the technique I inadvertently used, but I think the taste would be improved by the second boiling. I'm going to have to order up a sugar thermometer and try again.

Hot wings

2010-05-12T14:13:00.000+01:00

Let's face it, most meat eaters like hot wings/buffalo wings. They aren't a healthy food stuff, they are dirty,naughty & delicious. Unfortunately to get some here in the UK you usually have to go somewhere to eat out and then the menu is going to be fried & greasy or just nasty.

Fortunately Asbestos fingers know a thing or two about hot wings. I'd been helping them find Franks© hot sauce when I came across it at the farm shop. I bought a bottle on the grounds I could use it even if Asbestos fingers had found their own supply. Discussion quickly turned to hot wings (a big favourite round here) and how to make them. It turns out to be as simple as it is delicious. First wings. I asked the farm shop butcher, unfortunately BBQ season has kicked off so they'd all been marinated & packed. There is a prize winning butcher just down the road from my house,he had lots of wings, about 1/2 a kilo seemed right for 2 of us.

Next job separate the flat of the wing from the drummer. I've not got round to owning a cleaver yet so I steeled my largest knife & fell too. I apparently don't NEED a cleaver, but it would have been oh so much more satisfying (even if it wouldn't have been much quicker). Heat oil to 190c and fry the wings for 10 minutes, whilst that's going on make the sauce. 2 parts Franks to 1 part melted butter was recommended to me (I know, but I said they were dirty didn't I ?). It makes a smooth glossy looking sauce. Once the wings are done toss them in the sauce & enjoy

I think this will be an occasional home treat, but it is definitely a treat.

Fool

2010-05-06T15:46:00.000+01:00

There are 3 traditional English cream desserts, trifle,fool & syllabub. Syllabub is sweetened cream whipped with fruit juice, zest & alcohol. Fool is unsweetened cream combined with fruit compote. Of the two I have a ridiculous attachment to fool, preferably rhubarb or gooseberry. It's a bit early yet for gooseberries so ...

Rhubarb Fool

If you can get forced rhubarb (that's the pink/red stuff) then do, its sweeter and it makes your finished fool look a bit better. The first step its to cut the rhubarb down to 3cm chunks & put it in a corrosion proof pan, then add a small amount of water (a couple of tablespoons will do) and double the amount of sugar. Heat gently & watch the culinary magic happen.
What you do now depends on a couple of things, if you have nice pink chunks of rhubarb, whip a few out to decorate your finished dish with. If its older green rhubarb cook it down to a compote. The pink stuff you can simmer till soft. Put the whole lot through a sieve to get some pinkish rhubarb juice/syrup, reserve that & then sweeten the rhubarb to taste (probably 50-100g of sugar). Let everything cool. If you like you can sneak some of the syrup away for cocktail making (more on this in a later post). Whilst all that is going on its time to whip 500ml of cream, use the good stuff and whip it to soft peaks.
Fold your syrup into the cream, if it won't all go give the cream an extra bit of whipping & carry on till its all in.

Then start to fold in your Rhubarb chunks/compote. Taste regularly and once its to taste stop adding to it. The texture is difficult to describe, its sort of lumpy but not quite, similar to a thick clotted cream but with an acid bite. If you look carefully at the photograph you can see strands of fruit in the fool, and that is what you want. Dish it out into ramekins (it's quite a rich dessert, though I've never been in the position of having too much fool) and decorate. I've used a spoonful of compote & a slice of ginger, which goes very well with rhubarb. Chill till about 5-10 mins before you are ready to serve and you are good to go.

Its well worth making both a fool & a syllabub to compare the tastes & textures. It'll take a lot to convince me that the fool isn't superior though.

Triple cooked chips

2010-05-05T13:06:00.000+01:00

(note for Americans, I'm talking about what y'all call fries)

That man (HB) has made a quiet, but extensive contribution to British food with the triple cooked chip. Hardly anyone who knows their way around a kitchen uses any other method, even if they don't go to the extremes of dry matter ratios & refrigeration some recipes call for.

One of the earliest recipes I've seen is "chips cooked in hay" which has the added bonus of injecting the finished chips with ketchup.

The first step is to wash the loose starch away from the cut chips, rather than run water wastefully I soaked & dumped a couple of time, then bring it all up to the boil & cook the chips. They want to be on the very verge of coming apart. This is where the magic happens, we are attempting to create small fissures in the surface of the chip which will enable us to form a starch glass in the frying stages. That ought to mean we end up with a good crunch & a soft fluffy interior.

Getting the chips out of the boiling water is the hard part. They are on the edge of falling apart, the chips are going into the fridge, for at least an hour, which has 2 main effects. 1) it helps dehydrate the chip, which we need when they are about to go in the oil (hot oil + water == very bad). 2) It firms them up, making it easier to handle with out them falling apart all over the show.

Next up hot oil, it wants to be 130-40°C for the first fry, this mainly to bring the chips back up to a cooking temperature, so they stay in until a crust has formed, it takes about 8 minutes don't let the chips colour that's for the next stage. Crank the heat under the oil up & get it to a much more serious 190°C and cook till golden.
Drain and dry the oil off, now for the fun.

Getting hold of syringes is pretty easy, but nobody wanted to sell me hypodermic needles. I'm not sure if the sale is controlled or if most pharmacies just don't carry them. Fortunately I know people in the medical profession who seemed unfazed by my tales of injecting chips with ketchup & trying to get marinade under the skin of pork. I'll recommend sucking the ketchup up before fitting the needle, it seemed a lot easier that way.

One question that seemed to crop up without answer everytime this recipe was mentioned is "How much ketchup do you inject ?". Answers seemed to be lacking, which is because when you start injecting, you can feel the amount of ketchup going in, at a guess though I'd say a decent sized chip takes about a 1/3-1/2 a millilitre of ketchup since I was filling my 5ml syringe every 10-15 chips. Eat them whilst hot, really, they are excellent.

Oh yeah there is actually a reason to inject the ketchup, its to stop that lovely starch glass outer from going soggy & ruining the crunch you've been doing your best to create. Also try to have enough syringes for everyone to have a go (Well grown ups at any rate) it'll add a certain level of amusement to the proceedings.
(Oh yes I skipped the hay step mainly because I'm not convinced the hay I had was safe to eat, but once the spring lambs start to be more available I may do lamb baked in hay with hay cooked chips as a Sunday dinner.)

Opium Nottingham

2010-05-04T12:51:00.000+01:00

Relax it's a Chinese restaurant.
And a rather a good one too. It used to be quite a high end place, then it vanished and now its been re-incarnated, but the downstairs has been turned into a bar.

We went with the set meal, which started out with a dim-sum sampler. Whilst all three offerings were steamed, they were very good. Since we'd come from a cocktail bar we went with tea, and unusually there are several choices, so I went with the "Superb Pur-eh". I like Pur-eh in general for its earthy taste, it seemed darker in colour than usual, and was perhaps brewed a little strong. When the dim-sum wreckage was cleared away, the waitress noticed the colour & said "Your tea is a little too strong, should I replace it ?" I said yes, and she did. The original was a little strong, but not enough for me to feel like complaining about, so good service there. Good service was the hall mark of our visit, and I'd recommend them on that alone.

The main courses were all generic/Cantonese (which is pretty much par for the course outside of London) but very well done, the lemon chicken well fried & without the cloying taste that comes from cheap sauces. The Prawns were cooked just right having a good bite to them. The fillet steak was lovely, however it is the source of my nitpick. I think a rib-eye or sirlion would have stood up better with the sauce and provided more of a background flavour. That said I can see why they use fillet, so a very minor niggle.

The Dessert menu had some nice options including my favourite Dan tat. Unfortunately I've been really spoilt by some cracking Dan tat in my time, and whilst this was good, it could have been better, still though I think that says more about me & my love of egg tart than the standard of the kitchen.

All in all about 20 pounds a head (you could easily spend more) including tea & dessert. Good service & a nice clean airy dinning room makes it a worthwhile place to visit, I might try & have the pre-theatre menu next time, which looks like it makes an early evening eat out to be well worth while, especially when only Chinese food will do.

Fabulous feasts

2010-04-28T13:48:00.000+01:00

I think its fairly obvious I'm a fan of Heston Blumenthal, so I'm an avid watcher of his TV shows. Here in the UK Channel 4 are well into the second season of fantastic feasts. The first series was responsible for my wallet damaging trip to Bray, to experience the Fat Duck for myself (nutshell, its worth it). This time round I've noticed more about how he reuses and revisits ideas & techniques.

Last weeks camel burgers are a straight remake of the perfection burger with camel instead of beef, served with the famous triple cooked chips (which once I get a digital sugar thermometer I'll be making). Last night he used the blood/black pudding recipe from "Balotine of Anjou Pigeon" in several places.The butter salted caramel from millionaires shortbread, also saw some use (in the fabulous graveyard dessert). I'd decided that I was going to use that if/when I next needed a caramel myself (of course I'll need the thermometer).

Anyway having made another batch of the burgers (the farm shop had some beef on offer & it seemed to make sense) ready for the BBQ I'm unlikely to use a different burger recipe as the results are so good, just goes to show how what initially seemed to be cutting edge & outre techniques are a lot more reusable than they first appear.

Leftovers

2010-04-26T16:06:00.000+01:00

I'm not keen on waste (who is, its expensive and annoying) so when I found I had 3 large egg-whites left over I thought hmmm what to do with them ?

Meringues was the answer I came up with. Due to my ISP not playing I had to hit the books. Harold McGee knows about egg foams so that's where I went first, I couldn't find the cream of tartar but I did have malic acid to hand. The slightly annoying thing about my whisk is that when you turn it on, it jumps to medium rather than slow. That aside after 5 minutes I had some fluffy meringue, 10 mins after that I'd made a sheet full of passable shapes.

As you can see my oven did it's usual trick of being hotter than expected and singed them slightly. (actually it ruined the other sheet, but that meant I had test pieces for what came next).

When I was younger, the cake shops used to sell 2 large meringue shells glued together with whipped cream and decorate with a glacé cherry and perhaps some angelica.

I thought it was time to give that a bit of a home grown twist. I found some spiced orange chocolate, which I thought would make a good coating and then thought about the centres. Whipped cream lead quite naturally to syllabub. A quick look through various books furnished me with a basic recipe (1 tsp alcohol, juice of 1 citrus fruit 2 Tbsp sugar 250ml cream). I had spare oranges and I thought the carry through from the chocolate would be quite nice. So I whipped up a quick orange syllabub, and added the orange zest as well as the juice.

For an operation in using up leftovers it turned out really well, even after what was quite a filling meal they only lasted moments.

I am worried though that I may have started off on a quest for the perfect meringue, before you know it I'll be buying a copper bowl and a more specialist oven so they turn out perfectly white.

Vodka

2010-04-23T14:05:00.000+01:00

I have to admit I don't really get vodka. I have some good potato vodka in my drink cabinet, you can tell it apart from grain vodka by mouthfeel but generally I go for a low end triple or more filtered brand. It doesn't see a lot of cocktail action, getting used when fresh grapefruit is available in the salty dog. In high summer in cucumber Martinis or in Vespers.

One thing that vodka is good for though is creating cordials or liqueurs.
Do yourself a favour though & use reasonable ingredients.

1st Vanilla vodka.
1 Bottle of Smirnoff red or similar quality vodka
1 Vanilla pod.

Drop the pod in the bottle, let it sit for a couple of days and remove the pod. Don't leave it to long or the flavour will become bitter.

2 Generic fruit vodka

The trick with fruit vodka is balancing the sweetness, most soft fruits are quite acid and the result of just fruit is sometimes to dry to drink, so add a little sugar, if it's still too dry add a little more.

I'm currently trying a ginger vodka to replace Jamaica Ginger, I'll let you know how it goes and what drinks it ends up in.

Gin,Elderflower & dreams of summer

2010-04-20T14:11:00.000+01:00

Gin & elderflower go well together, you can go the whole hog & get gin with elderflower in the botanical mix . You can make G&T with elderflower cordial (or ditch the tonic & go with elderflower pressé). There is St Germain which you can switch for the vermouth in a Martini or you can make some grown up "Jello shots".

Gin & Elderflower Jelly
Following last weeks experiments with tea jelly, I wanted something similar with a delicate taste to follow on from the Salmon. I did some reading about Gelatin & gelling to find out what the malic acid was for (it's a flavour enhancer) in the fact duck recipe and then I tweaked it to my own ends. First off I dropped the unrefined sugar as I wanted a clear end product. Then I made up a Gin & St Germain mixture & replaced the Lemon juice with that, adding an extra 5ml or so to account for an alcohol loss whilst the jelly was hot. More importantly I left myself more time. I think I can now conclusively say that I'm using water with too little calcium & I'll have to go hunting for something nearer the 200mg/L concentration.

I ended up with quite a loose set, but a good clarity & a very good taste. Hopefully with just a little more refinement this will become a great summer BBQ dessert.

Meanwhile that Martini in full

8pts Gin (drier the better)
1pt St Geramian
1pt Noilly Prat

Stir over ice, make sure its very very cold & serve.

(I'd recommend making the Martini with some "spare" and using that to make the jelly)

Bradan Orach

2010-04-19T13:57:00.000+01:00

Bradan Orach is a smoke roast salmon.

Whilst tidying the cellar I found some peat chips (probably knocked of some of these, and yes I know). I thought hey these would make some good smoke.

So hot smoked salmon, seemed to be the best way to go. That,s the salmon over there, with delicious peat smoke curling all round it.

Now I'm going to fess up, I bought good quality salmon, because I figured I could always eat it raw in sashimi/sushi fashion. I was worried about over cooking so I don't think I got enough heat in the system before starting up the smoke.

After about 30 minutes the salmon looked pretty good & my temperature probe was giving me a safe reading, unfortunately some dust had got blown around through the vents

It looks worse than it is due to the camera flash. the very top of the salmon is pretty much raw, but smoked, the bottom is reasonably well done (If you've had one-side cooked salmon you'll know it quite well). It tasted pretty good with a lingering peat smoke, but it would have been better if I'd either generated more smoke at a higher temperature or if I'd left it for another hour or so.

I'm going to keep playing with smoking over the summer (I've just gained quite a lot of birch chips) and this is bound to make a re-appearance. Hopefully I'll be able to set up some cold smoking too.

Paradise

2010-04-15T22:04:00.000+01:00

This is a classic prohibition cocktail of gin, fruit juice and modifier. Designed with knocking the rough edges off bathtub gin in mind it still stands up now good gin is available.

4 pts Gin
2 pts Orange juice
1 pt apricot brandy

Today this stands or falls on the orange juice as it would be horribley easy to make it over sweet.

-- Post From My iPhone

Michelin star recipe == Michelin star food ?

2010-04-13T13:51:00.000+01:00

Of course not, that ought to be self-evident, but why not ?

I think there are 3 reasons

Ethos
Training
Equipment

Equipment is the easiest to tackle, I'm not talking about the kind of molecular gastronomy stuff like thermo-blends & sous-vide units. Most of us home cooks have to put up with ovens that are temperamental or have odd hot/cold spots, our fridges & freezers have to keep the food we need on a day to day basis. Its no wonder when we put them to the precise requirements of haute cuisine they are found wanting. Unless you plan to be a chef or have mild OCD then your knives & pans are probably not quite up to it either.

Training, I can make a fine pastry. To make the kind of pastry that haute cuisine requires with equal amounts of fat & flour takes me hours. Rolling & wrapping meat/fish/veggies into clingfilm logs goes wrong more often than it goes right and well its going to be quite some time before I get the hang of quenelles. I've got a job and a social life that isn't all cooking & cocktails, so I don't have the time to practice, which brings me to ethos.

Ethos. I'm a cook, I want most of my food out on the plate & eaten. I'm not always prepared to cut & chuck good food in order to make a better looking dish. I'm cooking for 2-6 people not a full service 2-3 times a day. I'm cooking for fun (or hunger) not for a living. I'm coming from a completely different place, a different starting point & pretty much ending in a different place.

Ethos is the big difference, I can't really make the investment required to turn out one plate of star grade food. I don't have the time to practice that one dish over & over till it's perfect. And frankly I'm not great at cleaning ovens, fridges & so on, sure its all hygienic but its not enough to coax the constant & consistent performance from my kit.

One day I might by luck & skill combined turn out that plate, but I'm not counting on it. It's not going to stop me buying serious cookery books & attempting the recipes though. I'll just try to be a little less harsh on myself when it doesn't come out exactly as it might at a restaurant.

Tea Jelly

2010-04-12T15:32:00.000+01:00

Another mention of that restaurant.

A couple of things left me with very strong taste memories, the first was the Douglas fir sherbet. I was out mountain biking a couple of months after eating at the fat duck & passed through a Douglas fir stand, instant hunger.

The second was tea jelly, I was reminded of it whilst doing research for the shortbread, since the chocolate wine was a definite no-go maybe the tea jelly would be good ? I wasn't holding out much hope due to the presence of exotic gelling agents in HB's cookery. Fortunately this used good old Gelatin. Malic acid was the weird ingredient, but its easy to get at homebrew shops.

The book is very precise about the water used, it needs to have a calcium level of 100-400ppm. I had a slight factor of 10 issue when converting to milligrams so ended up with a water having 36ppm of calcium (this may be important later).

It also needs 3 different types of tea, calling for earl grey, Darjeeling & green. I've got a fairly good idea about tea, so I used my favourite smoked earl grey and swapped the Darjeeling for a maloom and used a gunpowder green for the green tea .
Anyway you make a syrup of 2 kinds of sugar & then cool it to 4c. Then the lemon juice, malic acid and teas go in to infuse for a couple of hours, which you then strain to clear (I used 2 strainers, you can use a muslin if you want it really clear). Add the leaf gelatine to the mixture and heat gently till it's dissolved and refrigerate till it sets.

I'd not left myself a lot of time, and it didn't seem to be setting, so I panicked and put it in the freezer, all the while trying to work out if I had got my factors of 10 confused. I served it (more than a little dispiritedly) as a failed tea ice. The taste was pretty much spot on (I'm ridiculously happy about this as its a taste I really enjoyed and I can make it whenever I want) and it had started to gel so maybe my failure was time based ?
I've found a water with the correct calcium ratio, so I'll be having another attempt and I'll leave myself some more time.

Note for Americans, jelly in this case is similar to jello, not a preserve for spreading on bread.

Millionaires shortbread

2010-04-12T14:47:00.000+01:00

Or as its sometimes known caramel shortbread squares.

Last year I ate at the fat duck in Bray, I got to eat many wonderful things and was given a copy of the big fat duck cookbook, the original giant 5.6Kg format. Now its a very very nice book, but it is full of recipes and they demand to be used. The shortbread (and accompanying chocolate wine) wasn't on the menu when I was there but I really wanted to taste it.

Some of the recipes in here are scary, the chocolate wine being a case in point, a centrifuge ? whey powder ? Gellan ? I know why these ingredients & techniques are used, but it can''t really happen in my kitchen. The millionaires shortbread didn't seem too scary. I couldn't get T45 flour, but knowing its a plain fine white flour allowed me to substitute.

Those are the ingredients for the shortbread. The method and measures are precise (this is a feature of Heston Blumenthal (HB) recipes). I needed 45g of egg yolk (turns out that is almost 2 co-op large eggs) and actual vanilla seeds, also required was olive oil, which came as a bit of a shock since I'm used to butter being the only fat in short bread. Due to a cockup with the amount of olive oil I had in I had to add a little mandrine olive oil. The dough comes together remarkably well but feels a bit sticky. It goes in the fridge to rest for 24hrs (look at the treacle tart recipe for HB's take on pastry resting) When it comes out you've got a rich firm dough, which you roll out very thin & return to the fridge to rest for a couple more hours.

Whilst that's happening let's make a start on the caramel. The glucose is easy to get hold of, just go to your local pharmacy and they have it. You are going to end up with a pretty rich caramel. I had a little issue in that my thermometer only goes up to 130c & I needed a temperature of 147c so a bit of science got involved. unsurprisingly once the caramel is done (and stirring in the cream to the hot sugar mixture is one of those scary cookery procedures) that needs to go into the fridge too, this time its going to set.
That leaves the chocolate top. The recipe calls for 24hrs of sous-vide but a bit of reading suggested that this was to temper the chocolate, a bit of reading suggested some work with a digital thermometer would allow me to temper the chocolate reasonably well, so I got that all set up & ready.

The shortbread goes into a slow oven (gas 2) for 15 minutes, you've rolled it out pretty thin, so it doesn't take long. At this point I realized I had a lot more caramel & chocolate than shortbread, but never mind I had a plan.

The book calls for 1cm x 4cm slices, which I felt were a little small so we went with 4cm squares instead. The caramel is a bit of a bugger to work with, that could quite easily be me not getting it to the correct temperature or just my lack of skill with caramel.

That's the final assembled product. I had gold leaf, not powder so I scribbled gold onto the chocolate rather than gold coating the salt crystals. Once again hard work with a worthwhile outcome.

The left over caramel got used with a more ordinary millionaires shortbread that we christened "public sector shortbread". I used a straight flour & butter shortbread & just spread the top with melted chocolate, which gives a very different mouth feel from the sharp snap of the tempered chocolate. We gave it a light gold scribble because as we all know the public sector isn't that rich

All jolly tasty and I''ll definitely give it another go when I've got a better thermometer and a smooth sided & bottomed pan for the caramel.

Pastrami

2010-04-12T13:02:00.000+01:00

A pastrami sandwich is a good thing, I think most meat eaters will agree. How about home made pastrami ? It turns out you can, you just need brisket, spices, salt and smoke. Oh and time.

First step is to get a nice bit of brisket, ask the butcher nicely and tell them what its for. I had a nice slab just over a kilo in weight and it cost me £7:00. This needs to be brined to make a salt cured beef. Put the brisket in a pan and cover with water, then take the brisket out and pour salt into the water still it stops dissolving, add herbs & spices and heat gently and add a bit more salt. Let it cool and use it to cover the brisket, then put it somewhere cool and dark (like the veg drawer in your fridge). The internet has all kinds of time-scales for the brining part, 3 weeks cropped up a lot and fitted in quite well with my schedule, so that's what I went for.

If you are brining for that long its a good idea to soak it over night in clean fresh water to reduce the saltiness.

Then its time for the exciting stuff, making rub. There are all kinds of rub recipes on the internet, so I read a bunch of them to get a feel for ingredients & quantities and then made my own.
Garlic,Peppercorns,Mustard seeds and Juniper berries seem to be common ingredients I added a couple of cloves some brown sugar, a bit of fenugreek a splash of hot sauce, a splash of Jack Daniels and some smoked paprika. All the dry spice went into the pestle & mortar whilst the garlic cloves & wet stuff went into mini-chop. Once the dry stuff was nicely crushed that went into mini-chop for a quick blast too et viola rub.

Pastrami needs smoking and again opinion was divided over hot or cold. I went with hot, because I was going to have to fettle up a smoker.

If you are used to indirect grilling with your BBQ kit this is a fairly easy job. Rub the beef with your rub, and let it sit in the fridge (in a sealed container, unless you want everything to be pastrami flavour) whilst you go sort out smoking.
I had a bit of luck my neighbours have just taken charge of an allotment, there was a lot of applewood available, so that was smoking wood sorted. Pile all your fuel (Charcoal in this case) on one side of the grill. Then make a divider out of foil. Light the charcoal & let it get to temperature, then put your wood (dampen it with water to get a better smoke) on the other side of the divider. The meat is going to want to sit directly over the wood, so it gets cooked by the hot wood smoke & not directly from the charcoal.

Smoking takes a couple of hours or so, I aimed for an internal temperature of 50c in the thickest parts of the meat. If you can't get it even don't worry you can finish the meat off in a slow oven. Slice & serve. It's great hot, but even better cold on sandwiches, your bread, your trimmings.

I've got a few more photos here.
Price wise I think I'm saving 50% on supermarket pastrami and getting the bonus of being able to make it as spicy as I like.

Brownies

2010-04-12T11:32:00.000+01:00

More chocolate.

I like Chocolate brownies (like most people) and they shouldn't be too hard to make at home right ?

First I tried Nigella and much as I like her & her recipes she does like to add chopped nuts to her brownies, not what I wanted at all. Many of the other recipes I found were also unsatisfactory, a large number choosing to involve nuts/dates raisins & so on and a smaller but equally significant number being light on the chocolate.

Then I found cooking for engineer's recipe Dark chocolate & no nuts.

Its a nice simple recipe, most of the work being done in a double boiler (or in my case a pyrex bowl balanced over a pan of boiling water). Not just diving into a bowl of glossy chocolate & butter before adding the rest of the ingredients is a bit hard to resist because it looks so very good.

Once you've got the batter together (the only tricky bit being incorporating the eggs) pour it into a tray and slide it into the oven. Of course with all the best things that go in the oven opening the door is a no no, even if your kitchen is smelling wonderful.

Once its out of the oven let it cool for a while and then slice it into squares and as the cook exercise your privilege and eat all the offcuts/ edge bits and then pile the good looking ones onto a plate & watch them disappear.

The well tempered gourmand

2010-04-11T21:19:00.000+01:00

Oh dear a punning title and warning of a glut of edits.

Anyway this is about chocolate. Hard as it maybe to believe chocolate is pretty complicated stuff, it exists in 6 different crystal forms. The one we really want is the β crystal and to get that we have to temper the chocolate.
Normally chocolate already comes in this form, by melting it we mess that up, this is where tempering comes in. The old fashioned method involves heating the chocolate till its fully melted and up around a temperature of 41c. Then removing 3/4 and working that on a cool marble slab down to 28c then adding that to the remaining 1/4 and bringing it to a temperature of 31c.
However we can take advantage of a bit of science and do this in a slightly easier way, using seed crystals. Since our chocolate is already tempered,we can reserve a bit and use its crystals to get the melted chocolate to behave. A bit of reading suggests about 10% is enough. So put the remaining 90% in your double boiler and melt it, stirring to bring the whole lot to a uniform temperature of 41c. Take it off the heat, and drop in the reserved chocolate, stir till the whole lot is at 32c, the chocolate ought to be tempered. Its then time to use the chocolate, of course if it goes above 32c you'll have to temper again.

You should end up with a glossy chocolate that snaps very definitely. It is a bit of fuss, but it does provide a much better chocolate for some applications.

Violet cream showdown

2010-04-08T20:51:00.000+01:00

On the left (in the case) is the Fortnum & Mason Violet cream on the right Hotel chocolat's offering.

Hotel Chocolat

This is a thin square of violet cream, liberally coated in 72% cocoa solid dark chocolate. The chocolate here is the main event, the violet cream being unfortunately overshadowed by it (the rose creams slightly less so). The fondant has a fairly stiff texture and is pretty much as the box says "scented" with violets. On the whole whilst I happy to eat these I'd rather have something with a bit more punch in the violet.

Fortnum & Mason

This is a more traditional type of cream a good solid block of cream enrobed in dark chocolate (60% cocoa solid this time). For me the balance is better, the chocolate provides the right amount of bitterness to foil the violet cream, which this time has a strong floral flavour. Its more harmonious than the hotel chocolat square with a long tail of rich chocolate and violet after.

Out of these two its the Fortnum & Mason for me, but I'm going to have to try it against the Charbonnel et Walker violet creams, which hold first place in my memory.

Breakfast of champions

2010-04-03T13:13:00.000+01:00

Yes along with Kurt Vonnegut I think the Martini is an under rated breakfast. This is the king of breakfast Martinis, the marmalade.

Marmalade or Breakfast Martini

This is my recipe

1 barspoon of good maramalade

1 dash orange bitters

1 good measure gin.

Harry Craddock goes with

1 barspoon maramalade

1 good measure gin

1/2 a small measure lemon juice

Normally I don't drink for breakfast, but there is a bit of a good reason today. Whilst in Vegas we took the adage "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" to heart and attempted to order this cocktail at several hotel bars. Most barstaff looked at us as if we'd grown horns or something. One however said "what goes in that then", I explained that we were after a very dry Martini with a spoon full of marmalade "you mean like orange jelly ?" (actually no, I mean marmalade, which is a jam & a particular one at that) "yes, the stuff you put on toast"

"in a drink ?"

"yes, its very good"

"jelly ! in a drink ! If I had any I'd make you some "

I should have dashed over to the breakfast bar and liberated a couple of those plastic boxes of marmalade, but it didn't occur to me.

So there you go a breakfast cocktail, its really worth drinking if you get the chance.

Cocktailing for beginners Pt 8:- Putting it together

2010-03-30T16:00:00.000+01:00

If you've been buying along you should now have a pretty good drinks cabinet.
Let's look at some things we can make.
Gin & both types of vermouth is the basis for a number of great drinks, here's one that uses pretty much everything at once

The journalist

6 pts gin
1 pt sweet vermouth
1 pt dry vermouth
1 dash bitter
1 dash lemon juice
1 dash triple sec.

Shake hard over ice.

or for a real classic

The Bronx

3 pts gin
1 pt dry vermouth
1 pt sweet vermouth
1 pt orange juice

finishing up with gin if you switch it in for the brandy in a side car you get

The white lady

2 pts gin
1 pt lemon
1 pt Cointreau or if you prefer you can use Embury's formula for a sour type drink of 8 base spirit (gin in this case) 2 sour (lemon juice) 1 sweet (Cointreau)

Brandy
you can swap brandy for bourbon in both the old fashioned & the Manhattan for a deeper taste or try one of these

The gazette

5 pts brandy
4 pts sweet vermouth
2 dashes lemon juice
a pinch of sugar if wanted & stir with ice

The Charles

1 pt brandy
1 pt sweet vermouth
1 dash bitters stir with ice

and finally our last base spirit

Bourbon

The admiral

6 pts bourbon
3 pts lemon juice
2 pts dry vermouth shake over ice & serve

The westminster

4 pts Bourbon
3 pts dry vermouth
3 parts sweet vermouth stir with ice

Of the above the journalist & the white lady are the ones I've drunk most, but my taste tends to run to dry citric gin cocktails. The admiral makes a good aperitif and I make it now & then. Brandy is tricky as its a very aromatic base so it tends to steer clear of vermouths and run with Brandy liqueurs, such as apricot & cherry.

Next time we'll look at another base spirit and another real classic cocktail

Jack Cain & white cargo

2010-03-28T19:49:00.000+01:00

Jack Cain's is a premium small batch gin from Northumberland. They use hedgerow botanicals, and on first sip you can tell, the gin has a wonderful elderflower note. I'm guessing its not the easiest gin in the world to get hold of (my bottle is #16 from batch 90) but here is the website. A gin this tasty needs careful handling, of course it makes a great dry Martini, but sweet or perfect might ruin it unless you are very careful with the vermouth.

The white cargo

1pt gin
1pt vanilla ice cream

Shake hard, serve.

How easy is that ?

Of course you need excellent ingredients and luckily we have a local ice-cream maker and I'm using the clotted cream vanilla. That said I'm very tempted to give the elderflower a shot, but then that might well be over egging the pudding.

Vinegar cocktails ?

2010-03-25T13:07:00.000Z

This post from "the paupered chef" caught my eye. It looks counter intuitive, but then I am a fan of the gibson and pickle vinegar from the onions must sneak in somehow. So I thought I'd take a taste test. I started out with the idea of a Martini, because its familiar ground and I know the gibson works. Looking through the cupboards I spotted some Sushi vinegar. This is basically rice wine vinegar to which some sugar has been added. That suggested a sake-tini or similar.

So here we go
1 barspoon sushi vinegar
1 pt Sake
5 pts Gin

Stir or shake depending on your preference.

The sake, is sweeter than vermouth, so you may have to play with the proportions to get a drink that you like. The vinegar definitely adds a certain something, but you'll probably be quite hard pressed to say exactly what. In fact my test audience were shocked to find out that the drinks contained vinegar.

I've got a couple of other ideas lined up for this as well as something more along the lines of the cocktail in the article.

Cocktailing for beginners Pt 7 :- Gomme & Grenadine

2010-03-23T21:47:00.000Z

Two ingredients this week, both from, the what the hell is that end of the scale. Well they are both syrups, that's right reader dear non-alcoholic ingredients(*). Grenadine is pomegranate syrup, used to colour & flavour drinks. Your best bet is to buy it, Monin is easily available (though they say their syrup has little pomegranate, being red berry & vanilla). Gomme, gum or simple syrup is just that a mixture of sugar and water, this you can make at home. The standard recipe is 2 volumes of sugar dissolved in 1 volume of boiling water and then allowed to cool. Some recipes call for 3 sugar to 1 water, I tend to split the difference and go with 2.5 :)

So onto the drink. This is another classic, the old fashioned. Making a traditional old fashioned is quite a job, and tends to take about 20 minutes, it is worth the work, however with a bottle of gomme to hand we can make a good old fashioned. This is something the Fontana bar at the Bellagio (Las Vegas) would do well to learn as they served me a mess of an old fashioned gritty with undissolved sugar.

The Old Fashioned

In a tumbler/rocks glass put 1 or 2 teaspoons of simple syrup, add a couple of dashes of bitters (angostura is usual) stir to combine. (If you are making an traditional old fashioned, you would be working on dissolving sugar into the bitters with a meagre drop of water, this takes time). Add in a good measure of Bourbon, I'm not giving exact amounts because it depends on taste & glass size, but a standard single measure (25ml) is where you want to aim. Stir some more, again you are after a homogeneous mix of whiskey,bitters and sugar syrup.
Add a couple of lumps of cracked ice and top up with more Bourbon. This brings us to the tricky question of garnish. My old fashioned (on the left) has a Maraschino cherry, as I added a drop of Maraschino liqueur. Normally a strip of peel, either orange or lemon is best. Some people would have orange slices, lemon wheels, cherries, and other assorted fruits. At this point it is worth remembering the words of "hot-lips"Houlihan. "Bring me a scotch old fashioned & remember hold the fruit"

(*) Ok sometimes a little alcohol is added to stabilize them.

The Gilded Truffle

2010-03-22T15:25:00.000Z

A bit of a tale here, Mum brought over some of her home grown blueberries and I didn't have time to get them into a recipe, so I chucked them in a kilner jar with some vodka. After sometime I'd got a nice blueberry vodka, it makes a great vesper, lightening the Lillet slightly. I also had a few vodka soaked blueberries, they might make a nice truffle I thought. What I really wanted was something similar to the Dutch Slagroom truffle (the best I've had are from michel in haarlem) which is pure whipped cream in a thing bitter chocolate shell. I was unable to find a recipe, so made do with a white chocolate ganache, using a 2:1 chocolate: cream ratio (hotel chocolat make a nice organic white).

The ganache came together with no trouble at all, unfortunately though it set far too solid to be workable, so I gave it 10s in the microwave, that turned out to be 5s too long and I now had a bowl that was far too liquid. I let it reset and then scooped out the truffle and melted it in my hands (hey cocoa butter is good for the skin right ?) until I could roll the blueberries in it. As you can see I wasn't completely successful,but I did have some mostly spherical, mostly covered blueberry balls, ready for coating.

I'd been given some very strong dark Ecuadorian chocolate, that looked just the job. I shaved some off and melted it. Realizing the ganache was quite temprature sensitive I stuck my thermometer in to the molten chocolate and let it cool down to 28c. Hoping that would be liquid enough to work with, but cool enough not to instantly melt the truffles.

As you can see it appeared to be working quite well, though sometimes we didn't have the best hold on the cocktail sticks, so some of the shapes we ended up with weren't going to win any beauty contests.

I had some pure gold leaf left over from a DIY project (involving neither food nor drink !) so I thought I'd put a dab on each truffle. If you are going to do this the truffles need to be set first, other wise you just end up with chocolate smeared gold leaf.

They taste really nice, the shell is rich & bitter, then the truffle is creamy with a fair hit of vanilla and then the tartness of the blueberry, with a solid hit of vodka.

So if you have a recipe for Dutch whipped cream truffles, let me know, otherwise I'll be using this one again once soft fruit season is upon us

Not green beer

2010-03-20T09:36:00.000Z

Yes that is a Guinness cocktail. It's a Fejoia/Guinness sour. Some how the flavours work really well together, the lime cutting through the sweetness of the Guinness. The mint garnish providing a note of interest on the top. Another grand drink from my favourite cocktail bar.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Cocktailing for beginners pt 6 :- Brandy

2010-03-16T21:30:00.000Z

I could wax lyrical for hours about brandy as its one of my favourite spirits, but I'll spare you all that and suggest that for making cocktails you want a reasonable brandy, and unless the recipe calls for brandy from a particular region I'd stick with cognac. In fact I'll go further and say you want a V.S.O.P. Cognac. You can probably get away with a V.S. from one of the better houses if needs be. Don't forget if you wouldn't drink it neat why inflict it on a cocktail ?

I Mentioned in the Triple Sec Edition that it played it's part in several classics, today we'll look at the Sidecar, a gorgeous brandy cocktail.

Embury (one of the great cocktail writers) claims to have been involved in the origins of the sidecar and that it has several ingredients before being streamlined to its present form. He also adds that the standard American recipe of equal measures wrecks the drink entirely. The more perspicacious of you will have noted 2 similar but distinct drinks to the left. The furthest left is Harry Cradock's Sidecar
1 pt Lemon juice
1 pt Cointreau
2 pts Brandy

Shaken over ice & served.

The one on the right (in the glass with the wobbly stem) is Embury's all purpose sour-type recipe

1 pt Cointreau (or sweet in the general form)
2 pts Lemon juice (or sour in the general)
8 pts Brandy (or base spirit)

Shake over ice & serve.
The Embury recipe isn't that much stronger (in alcohol terms) than the Craddock recipe, differing by no more than 5% abv. In taste terms however its leagues apart, it's much drier and the Cognac comes through, just being smoothed by the other ingredients, if you are going the Embury route, you really need the good stuff. The Craddock sidecar is a more easy going drink, if you aren't upto very dry aperitif cocktails make that over Embury's.

If you want to try the standard which Embury rails against, its 1 pt lemon, 1pt Cointreau, 1pt brandy, but that is probably too sweet to be properly enjoyable.

Chocktail

2010-03-15T13:49:00.000Z

Hotel Chocolat make some unusual cocktail chocolates, in their seasonal range (which the website doesn't show) they are currently doing an "Alcohol-led" White lady truffle.

That's the truffle on the right, next to it is a freshly shaken White lady, let us see how they stack up.

The savoy book gives the recipe as 2 Gin, 1 Triple-sec, 1 Lemon juice, which seems to be quite standard. If you know your cocktails, you might notice that that is very similar to a sidecar, indeed you may find the White lady listed under Chelsea sidecar.
This gave me a bit of a start as Embury has a very different ratio for this family of drinks, which generally results in a cleaner, sharper taste. Since I don't know the relative proportions inside the chocolate shell I decided to forego Embury this time and go with the more widespread result.

Inside the chocolate shell is a creamy white ganache flavoured with well a white lady cocktail, the lemon & Cointreau notes are right up in front, the gin however is very faint and more of a back note. The cocktail however pushes the gin forward and gives a more citrus finish, now whether this is indicative of a different ratio in the chocolate or just an artefact of the manufacturing process its difficult to tell (had I gone with Embury's recipe the gin is very much the base ingredient).

It's a fun little thing to do, and if more of the cocktail truffles come out I'm probably going to try the experiment over, this time with a little more strictness in the procedure. For now though if you like either the chocolate or the cocktail, its pretty likely that you'll enjoy both.

Roast Beef

2010-03-14T18:30:00.000Z

Another Sunday, another roast. I've been eyeing up the côte be bouef at the butchers for a while, and this seemed an ideal opportunity.

That's a kilo & a half, with a bit of marrow bone the butcher provided to give the meat a glaze. Opinion seemed to be dived over using the hot oven and then turn down or the skillet & slow oven method. I went with the skillet, coloured the sides and then put it into a slow oven (gas 3) with the meat thermometer set to go off when the central temp reached 57c (about medium rare).

One mistake I made was not to leave the joint in the kitchen for a hour or two before cooking. Still it wasn't a disaster, I think it would have just improved the timing.

Don't forget to let it rest, whilst it was doing that I turned the oven up high & chucked the potatoes in the pan juices (supplemented with a dash of olive oil) to roast. I got a good yield of meat, with some on the rare side and other bits heading towards medium, keeping everyone round the table happy.

I'd been given orders to reprise the treacle sponge (Mothers day meal, so I do what I'm told). Which coming after this was a calorie festival of epic & somewhat delicious proportion. I'll be buying this joint again, maybe in a half Kg so I can do it as a rich steak rather than a roasting joint.