Archive
Salt Sugar Smoke: The Definitive Guide to Conserving, from Jams and Jellies to Smoking and Curing- Diana Henry
Diana Henry is, for my money, the best of our newspaper food writers. Her style is clean and simple, highly readable and to the point. Her book on leftovers Food From Plenty is one of the most stained in our house, indicating how often it gets used. This book again takes a fascinating subject and runs with it.
Preserving food is one of mankind’s oldest struggles. No matter how good the summer, how healthy the animals, winter was always a time when we lived on what we had stored. In our cupboards and around our muscles. This is why I don’t fear winter, I am well insulated. Back in the day we salted, we smoked, we made jams and we didn’t rely on the often fickle power of electricity. Freezer melt down anyone?
Preserving saves seasonal vegetables in glut to be enjoyed as themselves later, but it also magically transforms things into something else. Relishes, chutneys and mustards for example. And who doesn’t like a home pickled onion? The apple-crispness is a sensatiion shop bought ones never seem to have, perhaps because they use the shortcut of brine and not packed salt, as my father always used to insist on. Read more…
Woking it at School of Wok
The prep
‘It’s more of a gentle movement really,’ says Jeremy Pang moving swiftly out of range as I attempt to redecorate his class kitchen with the contents of my wok. ‘A gentle push forward and then a flick. Just relax’, he adds as I spatter some more onion about the place.
I’m actually cooling down the wok’s contents. You don’t adjust the flame under a wok if things get smoky, you just lift it off the hob for a moment and flick the contents over, it’s enough to dump the excess heat before the wok goes straight back on for more sizzling.
Many of us have a wok in our kitchen, for some it’s a white elephant, largely unused and taking up space. But even those of us who fancy ourselves as hard wokers, rarely get the all-important technique right. ‘People end up braising food in the, wok not frying it, because they don’t know how to keep things moving and keep the heat high,’ Le Cordon Bleu trained chef Jeremy explained earlier as he prepped the simple ingredients: sliced chicken thigh, red pepper, onions, cashews and spring onions with plenty of Szechuan peppers. The last would deliver a citric tang and a strange numbing sensation on the tongue but, despite their name, no heat at all. That was to come from a big bowl of sliced birds eye chillies. ‘You like chilli?’ enquired Jeremy as he sliced away, ‘that’s good!’.
The flip
The class kitchen at School of Wok is smart and shiny, at least when no one is scattering food about. Induction hobs in the main, perfectly ok for woks when fitted with a small stand, and a fabulous AEG induction wok hob, basically a large depression in the work surface, that I immediately want to have at home as it’s so sexy and perfect.
‘The order of preference for home wok cooking I’d say is gas first, then induction, then electric,’ says Jeremy, his large cleaver making short work of some spring onions. ‘I’ve carried out wok classes in peoples’ homes and really there is nothing that won’t work, although with electric a flattish-bottomed wok’s best, but not,’ he adds sternly waving the cleaver for emphasis, ‘one of those completely flat bottomed ones, you can’t move the food around properly in those.’
They carry out cookery courses non stop at School of Wok, including day long Chinese cooking lessons and Vietnamese evening lessons too, but I’m taking the one hour Quickfire Wok lesson designed to get some vital skills learnt in less than a lunch hour. ‘We prep, you cook,’ Jeremy told me as I strapped on my apron. ‘We want you to get properly hands on with the wok, so we prepare everything in advance, but I will show you how to marinade the chicken properly.’
The Grind
The thigh meat is his meat of choice, he laughs off my suggestion of breast. “In Chinese cooking we tend to use that more for stocks, it doesn’t have the flavour for main dishes we find. And thigh meat is cheaper, anyway.’ He adds Sesame oil, sugar, Chinese 5 spice, and light soy sauce to the meat and then some cornflour. ‘Just enough to make the marinade look creamy,’ he explains. ‘We don’t add the cornflour at the end of cooking as some people do, that makes the sauce thicken okay but it doesn’t make the chicken crispy which is what we want here.’
And so to wok, using a ladle for everything is handy and saves on washing up. I get some oil, never sesame or olive oil; they have too low a smoke point and will burn long before they reach the high temperature required. Jeremy advises drizzling the oil down the sides of the wok in a circular motion and then watching for the smoke. As soon as it gets to that point, in goes the onion and red pepper. I stir the way Jeremy advises, pulling the veg from back to front using the ladle edge so that everything is evenly exposed to the heat. After a few minutes the veg are pushed to the back of the wok and more oil added before adding in the chicken garlic and peppercorns.
I bring the veg back on top of the chicken so they are protected from too much cooking and when signs of excess heat occur I do the ‘flip’, soon I’m getting quite good at it and feeling very professional and confident. Once the chicken is golden, in goes chilli paste, rice wine and soy sauce, the fresh chillies and cashew nuts. Job done.
The result
To go with it I make fried noodles after Jeremy explains to me how to deal with dried noodles, and that in itself is an eye opener. Adding Chinese greens and bean sprouts I cook them all fast and furiously, then add some dark soy sauce and serve the two dishes up. Although I say it myself, it’s delicious and photographer Al is impressed as he chases the cashews about with his chopsticks.
You can read books, you can watch TV shows but nothing beats hands on experience with an expert at your side every step of the way. Now I can do the flip and understand wok cooking on a visceral level, I’ll be getting the wok out more regularly in the week. Wok on!
schoolofwok.co.uk 61 Chandos Place, WC2N 4HG
We check out the Leisuregrow 100 BBQ. Dragon’s Den’s loss is our gain
The beast in the publicity shot
Like many a male I spent last weekend putting up a barbecue, driven to it by the rare sight of sun and a nagging family. Normally we just wheel out our trusty Weber charcoal BBQ but this this time we’d been persuaded to try a gas one supplied for testing – the Leisuregrow Grillstream 100 and just in time for National Barbecue Week too.
Now like most food fans I’ve always rather looked down my nose at gas BBQs. If you’re going to cook on gas, you might as well cook in the kitchen, has been my argument. A gas BBQ won’t give you that unique flavour, nor can you smoke so well inside it .Food that is, not you and 20 Marlboro.
On the other hand, there is the fact that a charcoal BBQ can be a right pain to light and in any case needs lighting a good 45 minutes before cooking can commence, something which makes it all too much of a fuss for weekday cooking.
Enter the dragon
This particular gas BBQ also had something special to recommend it; Grillstream technology.It was this clever idea that won approval in Dragon’s Den and went on to win a licence for factory fitting to Leisuregrow BBQs. To survive the den and emerge not fatally holed below the waterline is rare, to come out with a bright future even rarer. Read more…
Windsor Burger. Fit for a Queen?
Now I am no burger nutcase, I mean I like a burger now and then just like most people, but I don’t go all weak at the knees or gabble uncontrollably when I hear of another ‘restaurant’ that intends to serve up minced meat in a bun. Maybe it’s my age, when I was a young man burgers were still the food of people who had crude tastebuds and saw food merely as fuel. Americans we tended to call them.
Gourmet Burger Kitchen were not, I think, the first to try and raise up the burger’s image in order that middle-class parents could surrender to their kids peer-fuelled cravings without having the shame of being seen in Maccy D, but they were among the first. Clean wholesome places with no anti-drug lighting in the loos and quality meat on the griddles and sourced from good, traceable places.
Today GBK don’t really figure on the burger foodies’ radar; too chain, too unhip, but they carry on feeding normal people and doing it very well. Getting in the spirit of Jubilee. they’ve partnered up with the Royal Farms in Windsor to create a limited edition burger available for a restricted time only across all GBK restaurants from May 28th.
The Royal Farms in Windsor produce some of the finest beef in the UK and The Windsor is the only burger to be made from The Royal Farm’s world famous Sussex cattle reared in the grounds of Windsor Castle, with the meat then hung and aged to get extra flavour and tenderness.
Only the best grade cattle are selected and the meat is aged on the bone for the maximum allowable time. Each burger is fully traceable and made using a specific blend of chuck steak, short rib and brisket.
The Royal Farm’s beef is in finite supply, one doesn’t want all one’s cows going to the plebs obviously, and so The Windsor won’t be around forever unlike our dear dear Queen. It’s priced at £11.95 and available throughout the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics until they are all gone.
I tried a preview and it was certainly how I personally like a burger; not too rare in the centre, just blushing slightly, and with the outside pretty well sealed. The brioche bun was naked but for some mustard mayonnaise, and the lettuce and tomato were outside so you had the option of adding it or not. Personally I cannot stand burgers that have everything but the kitchen sink inside them, I want to taste the meat not a hodge podge of ingredients all mashing together in a gloopy mess that goes down my shirt sleeves. The Windsor is much more of a sandwich, simple and unadorned. Mind you I do like a gherkin.
GBK do a nice range of sauces/dips for your chips, although our skinny fries were so anorexic they hadn’t the strengh to survive dipping and we’d have been better off with the thicker options. GBK also serve Coke in original bottles, maybe it’s just me but I think Coke tastes better out of glass and the iconic bottle always makes me smile.
There are GBKs all over London, so if you’re in a royal mood tell the Queen to burger off in the nicest way.
www.gbk.co.uk
North African Cooking by Arto der Haroutunian
What I like about Arto der Haroutunian’s new book is not the fact that I can’t spell his name correctly without at least three attempts, nor that every recipe is mouth-wateringly good. What’s great is that there are no pictures.
Pictures of course bump up a book’s price, but for me the real sin is that they dumb down a cookbook. Pictures serve to lure in the casual cook, the bookshop browser, but they lie.
Sometimes they clearly feature ingredients not mentioned in the recipe, other times they show the dish in a state of art-directed beauty no one but the photographer and stylist can ever achieve. They are about as honest as advertising
A good cookbook lets the aspiring chef see the dish in the mind’s eye and of course in practical terms, you get more recipes in when the photos are left out.
Arto’s book is of course not in fact new, he died in 1987, and this book was first published in 1985 at a time when food in the UK wasn’t such a big deal. There were only 4 TV channels, one food programme and in general food remained a middle class pastime and restaurants rather posh.
Few cookbooks today would risk a long and thoughtful intro discussing North African history, culture, literature, art and food. Reading it is an education into food origins and how dishes evolve as people take them to new lands; whether as conquerors or as conquered. The Muslims in Andalucía for example.
So here we have a collection of dishes in twelve chapters and 300 dishes. From chorbat (soups) through salads, the ubiquitous grilled meats, couscous and tajines, everyday dishes, pickles, pastries and desserts. Dishes from what are today Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.
The ingredients are simple, short and generally easily obtainable, certainly more obtainable now in multicultural Britain than they would have been back in 1985. You can smell the spices coming off the page and revel in Arto’s descriptions of what you’re cooking and why.
Everything is a revelation and such a change from the ‘modern European’ style of cookbook which endlessly rehashes the same old things in the same old way. Outside of their homelands the majority of these dishes are barely known let alone served but are easily within the reach of the amateur cook.
It’s a generous book, like the people whose cooking it celebrates, it makes you long to take off for North Africa and revel in real food untainted by fashion or fad
{ISBN:190650234X}
Dubai Dining -old skool
What comes to mind when someone mentions Dubai? Ludicrously tall buildings, luxury leisure projects, endless sunshine and a desert held back only by the immense power of money? A place where low paid immigrants with confiscated passports do all the lifting of anything heavier than cash, while expat Brits eke away the time by spending tax-free income on parties, gadgets, cars and food?
This is all true and it’s also a place of hidden pressures, where Blackberries can’t log on to all Wi-Fi networks, because one of the ruling sheikhs has forbidden it. Some people suggest it’s because he owns a rival phone company, others that’s it’s because of the power of BBM. He saw how the oppressed people of another country used BBM to great effect to mobilise their forces and he didn’t like it. There’ll be no repeat of the UK riots on his watch.
You can eat every European menu in Dubai, often cooked by Michelin Star chefs in the restaurants that they’ve opened to siphon off all the money sloshing about. Pierre Gagnaire has one, so does Gordon Ramsay They are all fabulously expensive because ingredients have to come a long way to appear on their menus, and also because expensive means nothing to Dubai’s moneyed class.
In fact it does mean something: the more it costs, the more they like it. It’s status, like the supercars that line the streets but have nowhere to go except to the desert, where they test their top speeds in the middle of nothing, or roll down boulevards in town lurching heavily over speed bumps their exhausts growling grumpily in protest. At least the drivers are all sober though; alcohol is only available in a few places and locals are rather surreally obliged to wear Western clothes while consuming it.
There is another Dubai however, where buildings are less than three storeys high and don’t have Tom Cruise crawling down them. Where the street still meander and disappear into blind alleys, where westerners are notable by their virtual absence, where the smell of souk and spices, not Dior, hangs on the air and the food is fabulous.
Local blogger Arva, better known to her many fans as www.iliveinafryingpan.com, has lived in America but came back to Dubai because she loves it and she loves the food. Kindly putting off business meetings she agreed to whistle stop me, unfresh off the plane, around some of her favourite places in town, ones where the food is what locals want to eat every day.
First stop was Sadaf a Persian (Iranian) restaurant on Maktoum Street. Housed in the base of a grey block of a building on a road that was one of the first paved streets in Dubai, it had the look and indeed the smell, of its 33 years of history. Inside men in thawbs ate with wives completely concealed by burkas, lifting their veils only enough to post their food in underneath.
Borani Esfanaj, strained yogurt with spinach and garlic and puddled with olive oil and scooped up with singed flat bread was delicious, but the real deal in Persian restaurants is the kebab. Minced meat on a skewer, not an elephant’s leg sliced, this was powerfully flavoursome lamb laced with sumac on super long grain rice studded with berberries. Amusingly the restaurant adds a hotel portion of butter to optionally stir in, as people like to do that here. Very good but no time to linger, on to the next
At Breakfast to Breakfast, Al Rigga Road, part of a chain and rather grim looking, the lunch rush had been and gone but they fired up the ‘pizza’ oven to make us manakeesh bi zaatar, a classic breakfast/lunch dish. The flatbread dough is shaped thinly to order and flavoured with sumac and the za’atar herb. Sharp and salty akkawi cheese is spread on top before the whole lot is shot into the oven. A breakfast of champions even for me, now feeling the effects of an overnight flight and being seven hours ahead of myself.
And so we rolled on to Al Tawasol, near the clocktower roundabout. Seriously Yemeni it has a large eating area at front where diners eat on the floor. Those diners are exclusively male; women and mixed groups must go to the back parts where majils ‘tents’ have been created. We kicked off our shoes and crawled inside to lounge back against cushions, or attempt to sit cross-legged. A buzzer summoned a waiter who soon came back with a plastic sheet to protect his carpet/table and a selection of dishes selected by Arva soon followed.
Lentil soup was spicy and smooth but the speciality here is the Yemeni national dish of Mandi chicken or lamb cooked in a Yemen tandoor, (a taboon) that is basically a hole in the ground lined with clay and fired by charcoal. The result is a meltingly tender piece of meat flavoured by both the spices and the smoke and made even better by dripping a harissa style hot sauce on top. We sucked on bones and drank lots of water.
Two final stops. First the Sultan Dubai Al Falafel Restaurant, Muraggabat Road where we ate the best falafels I’ve ever eaten (and I’ve been to a few music festivals). These were Falafel mahshi (fava bean falafel stuffed with a tomato mixture and topped with white sesame seeds). Crunchily fabulous on the outside, melting inside and who doesn’t love the taste of sesame?
It ended of course with Lebanese mint tea at Al Safadi Restaurant, Al Rigga Road, My eyelids were drooping from all the food and missed sleep and I was told I’d merely scraped the top of what was really on offer food wise in Dubai.
Few people go to holiday in Dubai, most are on business trips. However you go, it’s far better to avoid eating at the overpriced posh places or in the burger/pizza joints that are in the tourist areas. Strike out into old Dubai and meet ordinary locals and try the variety of food on offer, the prices are right and the people are friendly and the sun, of course, always shines.
Thanks to Arva www.iliveinafryingpan.com and Samantha at www.foodiva.net for all their help. Before you go to Dubai, look these ladies’sites up. We flew British Airways and stayed sumptuously at the Sofitel Jumeirah Beach
Cinnamon Soho is coming.
Vindaloo pork pie anyone? That’s a big fat yes from me, especially when it’s been cooked by Vivek Singh. He’s been West at Cinnamon Club and he’s been East with Cinnamon Kitchen, now he’s going central with Cinnamon Soho. I visited the building site to meet Executive Chef Vivek and find out more.
Green day
Just back from a pop up in New York, he’s looking bright eyed and is characteristically full of cheerful enthusiasm as he answers questions and tries to ignore our circling photographer
Have you wanted to be in Soho for some time?
Soho has been our list for a while yes, but you never seem to get the right place and to be honest despite all the doom and gloom people talk about there wasn’t much going, Soho properties still get snapped up fast. Luckily for Cinnamon Soho we were offered this old Red Bar before it went onto the market.
Behind youuuu!
So what’s going to be the difference at Cinnamon Soho?
Well the idea if you like is to be more Cinnamon Kitchen than Cinnamon Kitchen! The City has its own style and that affects what a restaurant feels like. Cinnamon Kitchen is more suit and tie than perhaps we imagined it would turn out, Cinnamon Soho will be what we originally intended Cinamon Kitchen to be. Read more…
Ken Hom -100 Easy Chinese Suppers
Happy with in his wok
Ken Hom looks much the same today as he did the day he brought Chinese cooking into our lives back in 1982, except he has a few more lines on his face. His first cookbook, Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery was a mega-seller at the time and it’s still in print today,
He lives now mostly in his adopted Thailand, but he is in fact American by birth, along with stints at his home in France. Despite being semi-retired and recovering from cancer treatment, he popped up on Saturday Kitchen recently. It confirmed him as one of the nicest chefs around and still one of the most skilled. Read more…
Taste the real difference – the best of Scottish produce on a plate
Don't be shellfish
The salmon hooked me, a reversal of the way things usually go. The great sides of Summer Isles smoked fish were sliced thickly on the spot and anointed with the barest drop of lemon, no brown bread and butter thank you, and tasted delicious. The merest hint of smoke coming through from the rich, buttery, flesh as well as hint of sweetness from their special brine. You couldn’t compare it with supermarket smoked salmon; it was a different kettle of fish entirely.
Summer Isles were just one of around ten Scottish producers who had lugged their lovely grub from the Highlands all the way down to the lowlands of the RAC Club in Pall Mall. The intention was to show first hand what we miss out on when we fix our foodie gaze on Ludlow or the continent. The Scottish Highlands are a land rich in fine produce, none of which need to consume air miles to get to our plates.
Achiltbuie kipper pate with seaweed relish on oaties and cones of native lobster were passed around and gobbled up. Venison carpaccio wrapped around Highland Blue cheese was burst in the mouth flavour. The RAC Executive Chef Philip Corrick had cooked all the small plates and if you wanted any reason at all to join then to be able to eat his food every day would be a compelling one. Read more…
Toast!
Breville, now there’s a name you don’t really hear much of anymore. It’s not like Ronco, gone to the great brand graveyard, and yet there was a time when it strode the world like a colossus whilst now it merely wanders about like a lost kid in a mall.
They were famous for their sandwich toaster; it may even have been the product that made the company’s name and fortune. My family had one, every family had one, and after initial manic use they either ended up under the sink along with the Ronco button master and with their plugs removed by a dad too indolent to go to Woolworths, or they were solemnly bequeathed to a child about to go to University.
That’s how I got mine, my mother feeling that I would otherwise starve. In fact I had already mastered the art of making spaghetti Bolognese as well as curry/stew (one contained curry powder, one didn’t) so I was quite safe. All I recall about using the Breville at university are clouds of acrid cheesy smoke on the staircase by my rooms and the college porter giving me a lecture on fire drill. Read more…
Nick Harman 