Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

The Curry Bible is a cookbook on curry and curry-related food, surprisingly. That seems like a clumsy way to subscribe it but I am not sure what the best way is. It is not just Indian as it covers curries from other cultures as well, and goes beyond curries with a selection of other good, kebab for example. I can’t say Far East though, because that might suggest things like sushi or Chinese. Anyway…

It’s pretty good. Ironically, I found the curry recipes the least helpful. They are difficult to get right. It often tells you to reduce them, and sometimes gives a time, say an hour. In my experience this does not work though: you still come out with a very runny curry. The most success we have had with them is doing them in the slow cooker all day.

The non-curry recipes have been more successful though. The Vietnamese pork has found itself onto regular rotation in our kitchen, and a few other dishes repeatedly pop up too.

The section on sauces is also very useful. If you want to make a Thai red curry sauce rather than using a jar for example, the book will gives you instructions on how to do it.

Following on from my previous post looking at statistics we can pull out from the Leeds Restaurant Guide dataset, I wanted to look at how the restaurant scene has changed since we first published the guide.

Here it is:

In this graph, I have plotted each cuisine type against the number of restaurants. This is shown for the 1st edition (2013), 3rd edition (2014) and 5th edition (2015). As we learned in the last post, the number of restaurants has risen, so in general, we would expect most categories to have grown between each addition. I have not included pub grub as the size of it makes the rest of the data difficult to see.

For the most part, this holds true. Some cuisines have grown faster than others though. We have seen a rise in restaurants serving American, British, International (those that serve food from all over the world with no real speciality) and steak.

In other areas we have seen a decline though. Buffet, French, Indian and seafood have all seen a decline. Persian has too, but this was always a small market. The biggest change is possibly Chinese restaurants. In the first edition we had seven Chinese restaurants, now we have only four.

In terms of the most popular cuisines, Italian remains king. When we first wrote the guide we even considered splitting Italian into two categories, one for general Italian and one for restaurants that specifically did pizza. Latin is also very popular thanks to the growth of tapas bars. It used to be equally as popular as Indian, but Indian has since fallen away.

We can draw the most popular cuisines in a table. I have omitted hotels and casinos, and international because these do not really tell us anything about people’s tastes.

It is a pretty consistent story. The only change is that Indian has dropped off from a joint-second spot in 2013 to now being 5th, behind British and American. Much of the growth in these categories is down to meat places such as burgers and BBQ so it could be people are looking towards more meat-heavily dishes in recent years. Or it could also just be random chance. The sample size is not that big after all.

Earlier this month I launched the 5th edition of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. Now, with five editions behind us and several years of data, I decided it would be interesting to see what we could mine from that information.

Number of restaurants

You might expect the number of restaurants in Leeds to be going up. It is, but only slightly.

This graph shows the total number of restaurants. Over the past two and a half years the number of restaurants has increased 10%. These are not the same restaurants though. It is a case of them opening faster than they are closing.

This graph shows the number of new restaurants opening and old restaurants closing between each edition. Restaurants have consistently opened while closures have been more sporadic. It is worth noting though that the release of each edition of the guide has not been equally spaced, even though it is shown this way on the graph, so that distorts the picture somewhat.

How we rate

Most restaurants are likely to be middle-of-the-road, with some not so good restaurants, some very good restaurants, and a few poor and excellent restaurants at either ends. So what happens when you plot frequency against rating?

Ah, just what we wanted: a beautiful bell curve! Two is a little low for a perfect curve, but normal distributions are often imperfect in the real world. This suggests to me that our ratings are consistent with what you would expect from restaurants running in the free market.

That only shows data from restaurants that are still open. What about restaurants that have closed?

What we would expect to see here is a little less clear. Perhaps that 1-rating is the highest as poor restaurants should close the most. But given there are some many 3-rating restaurants, this might not be the case, and you may have to adjust it for frequency to see such a result. As it is we have another bell curve.

There is a clear asymmetry in the graph though. Far more 1-rating restaurants close than 5-rating restaurants, and far more 2-rating restaurants close than 4-rating restaurants, indicating that our ratings are broadly consistent with where the market chooses to spend, or not spend, it’s money.

What type of food is the best?

What cuisine produces the highest standards? Can you provide any correlation between the type of food and how good a restaurant is?

This graph shows each cuisine type and the average rating it receives. No category can maintain an average rating lower than 2 or higher than 4 because no range of restaurants can be that consistent.

I was not surprised to see Thai so high up. Steakhouses are also typically on the higher price range, so score well (though we do factor in price to an extent when awarding ratings). Chinese scoring to high is mostly a result of the less nice Chinese restaurants closing down.

The number in brackets after each cuisine indicates the number of restaurants in that category. So the ratings for Persian, German and seafood are pretty meaningless because it is based on a single restaurant.

What useful information we can draw from this is less clear. Just because the average restaurant scores well or poorly does not mean that all restaurants will. There are bad Thai restaurants for example (actually, there aren’t, but there used to be one) and good Indians (lots of them!). However, if you were to avoid eating at new hotels, casinos, fast food and pubs based on it being unlikely to be a good meal, few people would fault you for that.

A few weeks ago Elina was ill, so to make her feel better I made her a mixed grill. It turned out very well, but it was the bill that surprised me. I spent £20 at Tesco getting everything for it. There were a few other small items, but most of it was grill money. That works out at nearly £10 each.

It has given me a renewed appreciation. How the hell do Wetherspoon’s do it for £7 each, including a drink?

Having eaten most of the mango chutney I made a few months ago, I have tired of mango and moved on. The tomato chutney turned out quite well, but my own-recipe apple and blackberry chutney is the real winter, especially with the holidays approaching.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the secret to a really good chutney, is onion. Lots and lots of onion. My next project will be to find a way to replace the onion so that Elina can have some too.

I have been working my way through Paul Hollywood’s book Pies & Puds. Having done most of the pies, I moved on to part two: puds. Thus invading what has traditionally been Elina’s territory in the kitchen. She can probably keep it to be honest. Desserts are hard work. You have to be exact and everything sticks to everything else, until you want to stick, then it just falls off.

Many restaurants fail to make a good peppercorn sauce. You are served a watery gravy that looks like it might have been near a peppercorn once, perhaps long ago. I did not have a particularly good recipe myself though so I set out on a quest to come up with a better one.

Looking back now, I realise how dull my life really is. It comes with a good sauce though.

The photo shows a few of the iterations. The one on the right is the final champion.

At Elina’s request, and because it sounded like a fun challenge, I have recently turned my hand to pie baking. It is an interesting journey, though they take a long time to make. If I have stuff to do after work, they don’t always go in the oven until 10pm! They do provide plenty of food though.

I am not a fan of shortcrust. Too crumbly. Good to sweet pies, but I think I am going to stay away for savories. I have fallen in love with ruff puff. In a very many, working-class way of course. Hot water crust is nice to work with, and produces a good result if you do not want flaking.

Neatness is something I definitely need to work on. They usually look like the recipe, if the pie in the recipe had been beaten up. Which is not really a problem as it is recognisable and tasty, but won’t be winning me any prizes on Bake Off.

Corned beef pie with a shortcrust pastry.

Pork, apple and cider pie, might have been ruff puff.

Sausage plait. It was supposed to be made with full puff. However, when I came to make it, the first step was make the puff pastry and chill for 7 hours. So I did ruff puff instead.

Raised game pie with a hot water crust pastry.

Thug Kitchen is a cookbook with the subtitle “eat like you give a fuck”. It is also an organisation of the same name and comes with a quote from Jamie Oliver on the back. It is full of vegetarian recipes.

It is a pretty good cookbook. The recipes can be a bit long winded, but not to the extent of River Cottage, and the results are usually pretty good. Around half of them have pictures.

I found quite a lot of the recipes of limited use though. I’m somewhat reluctant to make recipes without photos as seeing the end result provides an object and motivation, so that comes out a lot of them. Then other sections. Other recipes are breakfast,s ideas or other small dishes that do not fit into my schedule.

The swearing is rather over the top too. I’m always having to “chop that mother fucker.” Why? I have no problem with swearing, but I do find it silly when someone tries to make non-magic mushrooms part of gang culture. They mock out the word “fuck” on the cover. If you are going to spend your whole book swearing, at least have the balls to write fuck in full on the front.

My biggest issue with the book it is that it very American though. I can manage cups, because those translate into litres quite well. However, the use of imperial measurements, particularly temperatures, means I regularly have to google what it is in modern measurements. No alternatives are provided.

Overall, it has some nice recipes in, but not ones I would use regularly.

Cookbooks often come with chapters on breakfasts, desserts and sides. I usually ignore them. Not on purpose, but I usually work through the recipes for dinners, so they just do not get scheduled. For lunch, I’m normally eating whatever I cooked last night.

To correct this, I’m making an effort to try a few other recipes. Such as this raspberry trifle.

They may not look quite the same as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s, but they did taste good.