Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

As if vinegars are not exciting enough on their own, they can be made even more exciting by adding other stuff. In these bottles I am making a garlic vinegar using white wine vinegar and a rosemary vinegar using a red wine vinegar.

You blanch the ingredients for one minute before refreshing them, then inserting them into a steralised bottle and filling the rest with the vinegar.

I cannot say whether it has been a success yet as you need to leave them for two months before use!

This is one of Michel Roux’s recipes. You heat half a litre of oil (I used sunflower) then dump some herbs into it. I used parsley and tarragon. Leave it to cool and infuse, then strain it and pour it into a steralised bottle.

Whether I can tell the difference between regular oil and herb oil remains to be seen.

I’ve seen a couple of restaurants offering a fruits der mer platter recently, so thought i would give it a crack myself. The name is French and translates to “fruits of the sea”. It typically consists of a mix of shellfish, served over ice.

Mine included a lobster, cut in half down the middle, a crab, crayfish, prawns in the shell, muscles and clams. All of it was bought live from the fish market. I am not normally a lobster fan, but serving it on ice worked really well.

The downside of serving it all on ice is that it created a very slippy base: when carrying the platter the whole array of food slid from side to side, and I even lost a prawn or two moving it to the table.

I served it with two mayonnaises. This was not the plan, but my first one turned out too thin, so I did a second one. I also did a gribiche sauce, which is the pale one in the bowl and a honey mustard sauce (bottom left).

I won’t be doing it again in a hurry: it was too much of a hassle.

We never buy pre-made pizzas in at the Worfolk household. However, I had begun to wonder whether we would actually get better results buying them frozen. My homemade ones were okay, but not the magic I was hoping for. For one, I could not get them crispy enough. I even tried pan frying them.

However, a few weeks ago everything finally came together. Reviewing what I did, I think it was a combination of all the different things I have been trying. So I have tried to codify them into one list.

Give the dough a good knead

I use my stand mixer to knead, so it is easy to leave it running for a while. So I did. I did not time it exactly but I think it was in there for over 10 minutes. I also gave it a longer rise: 2 hours compared to 90 minutes.

Get the oven really hot

Your oven wants to be as hot as possible. Mine, like many domestic ovens, only goes to 250 degrees, so I turn it up to that. I have a granite pizza stone and I have been gradually increasing the time I put it in the oven to heat up. Now I put it into heat up for at least an hour, maybe even longer. If the pizza does not sizzle when it goes on there, it is not hot enough.

Spin the dough

I have tried spinning the dough round in the air, but not with any real structure to it. Now I use a proper system. Roll it out, then spin it. Does this a little at a time and repeat the process over and over. Each spin moves the dough to the edge of the pizza, so you can then roll that out a bit more. This allowed me to get the dough thinner than I have previously.

Leave a gap

When dressing the pizza with the sauce, cheese and toppings, you want to leave a nice thick border around it. This allows the edges of the pizza to puff up and create a lovely light by crispy edge.

Use a wooden peel

I was using a metal peel (pizza paddle) because I was hoping the pizza would stick to it less. Actually, it turns out it sticks to it more. This meant I had to dust it with loads of flour, and so the base ended up tasting of flour if I was not careful. Using the wooden peel means I have to dust less, avoiding any flour left on the base.

In June we travelled to Iceland for our honeymoon, and were very impressed with a Reykjavik restaurant known as The Fish Market. So impressed in fact, that we shelled out for the cookbook while we were there.

The production values are high quality. Once you get past the menacing photo of head chef Hrefna Rósa Sætran wielding a knife on the cover, you find a hardback book, just under A4 size with a full colour photo of every dish. This is everything I want in a cookbook.

The recipes themselves are a bit more challenging however. I struggled to follow a lot of them. Perhaps they make more sense to a trained cook, but I could have done with many of the blanks filling in. The photography of the dishes is quite artistic and therefore, even though you have a photo, it is not always clear what you are aiming for.

I haven’t written about much from the book, but here is the breaded pork tenderloin I made.

The language can also be a bit confusing. It is written in American English, rather than proper English. I was struggling to find shrimp chips, until I realised they were prawn crackers. A few times I wondered whether the translation had become a bit muddled. Some of it appears to be in need of a proofread too. The hot chocolate cake recipe for example: it says “melt the chocolate and water in a double boiler.” There is no water in the recipe, but there is some butter that is never mentioned. The word was almost certainly supposed to be butter.

This resulted in a lot of the recipes being duds for me. I simply couldn’t re-create them, and even when I could, they did not even resemble the picture most of the time.

Then there was the search for ingredients. Leeds has twice the population of Iceland, and four times the population of Reykjavik. Why can’t I find these ingredients? We did venture in to the Thai supermarket and international supermarket, with some success, but there is still much on my list that I have not been able to locate. Not that that is the book’s fault of course.

When the recipes did work though, they were delicious. The pomelo and papaya salad with sweet cashews have quickly become a go-to salad for parties, and the white chocolate cheesecake is so easy and so delicious that we have had a continually rolling batch of them on the go for about a month now.

It might not be the most practical cookbook ever. However, it has produced a few tasty recipes and is a lovely way to remember our trip.

We don’t often repeat recipes in the Worfolk household. There are so many amazing cuisines, cookbooks and ideas out there that we try something new almost every night. However, there are some recipes that are tasty enough, quick enough or reliable enough that they are reused on a semi-regular basis.

As you might imagine from knowing me, I keep them on a spreadsheet. I thought it would be interesting to analysis how many recipes from each cookbook made it onto the spreadsheet and therefore which cookbooks have stood the test of time.

I have linked through to the review, where one exists.

* indicates I am still working my way through this book.

This isn’t an exact science. I re-use some recipes more than others. If anything, Veg Every Day deserves to be higher because I use that a lot, whereas although I have marked Easy One Pot as having a recipe I would re-use, I certainly don’t go for it anywhere near as much.

It is also unfair on some of the books. A lot of the baking books for example are full of amazing recipes that I have yet to try, but one might day and find they are definitely keepers.

Based on these figures, it seems sensible for me to recommend River Cottage and Mary Berry cookbooks. River Cottage consistently does well. The original River Cottage Cookbook isn’t really a cookbook, it’s more of a book about self-sufficiency, so it is not surprisingly it did not do well. The River Cottage Fish Book did not score so well either, but it was fun read. At the other end of the table, both of my favourite River Cottage cookbooks are storming ahead.

Mary Berry is also on the recommendation list because I am working through my second cookbook of hers at the moment and that is also going to score well. Plus they’e excellent for easy meals and dinner parties as they almost always contain instructions for making in advance.

UPDATE: Since writing this, I have finished working my way through Mary Berry Cooks that added 8 new recipes onto my spreadsheet. That puts it in third place behind the two River Cottage books.

As my quest to make a better pizza continues, it occurred to me that when I cook flatbreads I fry them in a dry frying pan, so maybe I could apply the same idea to my pizza.

It turns out that I am not the only person to have had such a crazy idea. A recipe from Pizza Pilgrims details how to do it. I didn’t actually read their instructions, but immediately took heart that it could be done and set about trying it for myself.

I heated my sauté pan on the hob, put the pizza base in, dressed it as it was cooking, and then put the sauté pan under the grill to cook the top.

Results were mixed. I did get a crispier base, but not as crispy as I wanted it. Maybe the pizza itself was too thick: it is difficult to get it fully cooked all the way through. Also, I only have an electric grill, which is a rubbish kind of grill. I am an adult: give me some flames!

My next plan is to build a clay oven on the balcony.

I ordered some exotic meat from Kezie Foods. They offer a great range of non-mainstream options including horse, kangaroo, camel, crocodile and edible insects.

The problem is that they are delivered via a standard courier. You might wonder how they keep them frozen in transit. The answer seems to be that they do not. They put the products in a polystyrene case that they pack with dry ice. This is supposed to keep everything frozen for 48 hours.

However, when I received their delivery, everything had defrosted. I spoke to their customer services and they were very nice about it, arranging another delivery. The problem is, the exact same thing happened the next time.

Maybe I have somehow misunderstood the definition of frozen. But it feeling exactly like defrosted meat does not seem correct.

So I am giving up. I cooked what I could from the latest batch and will leave it there. At least until I can progress my backup plan of starting an ostrich farm. The products themselves seem good quality: the meat I did manage to eat very good.

The last time I tried to make brioche, it was a total disaster. The recipe book made it out to be this terribly complicated process. The River Cottage bread Handbook dismisses this as nonsense however. Following the much easier to understand instructions, I managed to successfully produce two lovely looking loaves.

You probably know how to cook a meal for a group of people. You do not need the many gems of wisdom on offer from Pippa Middleton. Nevertheless, I have a clear and well-defined process for how I prepare for a dinner party, and I thought it might be useful to share that so that we can compare notes.

Decide what to cook well in advance

I do my grocery shop weekly and I don’t really want to have to spend any other time shopping. Therefore, ideally I want to know what I am going to take a week in advance of the event so that I can get it included in that. If I need something fresh I might go out a day or two before to get it, but I want all of the dry and store cupboard ingredients to already be there.

At the planning stage, I make sure everything will work together. Like most people, I have just one oven and four hobs. Therefore everything has to fit on them at one time. This is a limit that is easily reached if you have your starter and your main overlapping.

Draw up a plan

I get pretty detailed with my plan. I tak an A4 sheet and divide it into 5-minute segments. In each of these I can list actions like “turn potato on” and “remove chicken from oven”. If required, I can put multiple columns into the sheet to deal with each part of the meal. This means I don’t have to worry about what I am supposed to be doing while in the heat of battle because I just need to check what is on the plan.

This normally includes two sections before the clock starts rolling: morning prep and evening prep, both discussed below.

The other thing you need is a clock. This is a strange thing to have these days. Many people have replaced their clocks and watches with using their phone to tell the time. However, if you don’t want to be constantly checking your phone every few minutes, you will want a nice big visible clock so you know when each 5-minute segment is up. The solution: more technology. I have an alarm clock on my iPad that I put in a prominent position in the kitchen.

Morning prep

The first stage of prep I do for the party. This is anything that can be done on the morning, or even the day before. This could include baking bread, making a marinade, preparing batter mix for Yorkshires or baking and chilling a dessert.

Evening prep

Second round of prep. This is stuff that I want to do as late as possible, while still doing before my guests arrive. Things like chopping vegetables and pealing potatoes for example. I want to do these as late as possible to keep everything fresh. However, it’s not as important as talking to my guests, so it is stuff I want to get out of the way ideally just before they walk in the door.

This section should include as much stuff as possible, such as:

• Laying the table
• Lighting candles
• Putting some plates in the plate warmer
• Getting all the utensils and making trays out
• Cleaning the kitchen
• Preparing a pan full of potatoes so I can literally just turn the pan on
• Slicing bread

Cleaning

Nobody has a kitchen as big as they would like, so I find it important to keep it as clean and tidy as possible. That means ensuring it is clean and tidy before I start. I make sure that the dishwasher is empty and after it runs its last cycle in the afternoon I tend to wash everything by hand to ensure I have everything I want to hand: the only things that go in there are things I know I definitely will not need.

Then I clean as I go. If I find myself with a spare minute as I bring a pan to boil I will wash something up. Or, when I clear the table I will load it straight into the dishwasher, rather than dumping it on the side for later. This does take a bit of time away from my guests, but also makes for a far less depressing end to the evening when I am left with a far smaller pile of clearing up to do.