them apples

The Cross Keys, Holbeck, Leeds

rich — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:04:57 +0000

It’s not often that I use twitter for something that’s actually useful, but I managed that small victory the other night when I booked a table at The Cross Keys in Leeds.

It was all done quickly and easily, and without any fuss at all – they sorted things out and tweeted me a confirmation. It’s only a small thing, but it really impressed me.

A good sign, I thought.

We went for a drink at another bar before arriving at The Cross Keys. It was a brilliant bar, absolutely superb, but the barman gave me the wrong volume of the wrong beer, which, being a fool, I paid for and drank. I got the distinct impression that he wasn’t really listening to me when I ordered, and the slight sneer I got at my temporary indecisiveness when confronted with a bar of a billion different beers didn’t really do much for my opinion of him in the first place, either.

The Cross Keys was completely different.

As soon as we entered through the small front door, a door that makes the place look like a cottage and makes you feel as if you’re barging into somebody’s front room, the barman, busy serving somebody else, said hello. We waited for a bit, while he finished serving, but a second staff member got there first and took us to a table. He took a drinks order, and took his time explaining exactly what they had on the bar. “Taste something, if you’re not sure”, he said.

No chance of the wrong beer there.

The Cross Keys’ menu is very decent pub food. You could call it ‘gastropub’ if you believed that awful word had any meaning at all…there are many pubs that serve terrible food, but why do the ones that do better have to have a separate category to themselves? Why can’t they just be places that serve good food alongside good beer?

Anyway, that aside, The Cross Keys’ menu is great. I had a starter of black pudding and a poached egg, with new potatoes, which was very good indeed, light and quite earthily brilliant, but not a patch on the huge venison pie I had next – great big chunks of Yorkshire venison, cooked to tenderness in a rich sauce and covered with puff pastry. It lacked a pair of Desperate Dan-style horns poking out of the pastry, but was otherwise…awesome.

The menu guides the befuddled towards a beer to match each dish, which is a great touch because the bar is well stocked and has lots of variety, which isn’t surprising when you take account of the fact that The Cross Keys is part of the same group as the sublime North Bar at the other end of town.

No sneery barmen here, either.

We sat under a big blackboard that showcased what I suspect is The Cross Keys’ trump card – Sunday lunch…big joints of beef, pork or lamb to serve eight to ten people for between £100 and £150. Sounds like a lot, but not for that many people, and the thought of a massive whole roast rib of beef served pink does sound quite tempting, and I’d bet that The Cross Keys’ kitchen could do it justice.

This is a great pub, a place that looks and feels like its been there forever, that feels rooted. It’s cosy and warm, welcoming and homely. It’s a proper bar that does proper beer with proper food.

It’s simple, really, but so difficult to get right, so it’s only right to treasure places that do.

And this place does.

www.the-crosskeys.com or on twitter at @crosskeysleeds

How to make croissants

rich — Sat, 05 May 2012 09:23:25 +0000

They look so complicated, with their elegant crescent shape and proudly airy layers of rich pastry, tightly curled up and falling over one another. Breaking one open sends a shower of buttery flakes everywhere and leaves your fingers satisfyingly greasy.

Surely, this type of baking is the preserve of the professional? Or the French?

But, no!

It is possible!

Croissants – good croissants – can be made at home, even by a Yorkshireman of limited continental patisserie related experience.

First of all, a warning.

Yes, it’s a bit of a faff. There’s a lot to do, and it pays to be precise and meticulous. Everything has to be nicely rolled out, squared up, evenly cut, rested, chilled… It takes some planning, and a lot of time, to say the least, but it’s worth it and it’s not particularly complicated once you get the hang of the processes.

So, what’s in a croissant?

Butter. Lots of butter. There’s dough as well, but it’s mainly butter. A shocking amount of butter, actually…all those who’ve harboured a faint hope that a croissant or two represented a healthy breakfast will discover soon that they were wrong.

All a croissant is is a type of laminated dough…butter is rolled out very thinly between sheets of dough, and folded and folded to multiply the layers to make each leaf ever thinner and lighter. The layers explode apart in the heat of the oven, the butter soaked into the dough. It’s wonderfully simple.

Start with the detrempe, or dough. This is simply a case of forming a dough from a kilo of strong white bread flour, 10g of fast action yeast, 20g of salt, 140g caster sugar mixed with 330ml each of warm water and warm milk. This dough is very soft and sticky, so it’s best to use a mixer with a dough hook to knead it, for about ten minutes.

Rest the detrempe in the fridge overnight, covered with clingfilm. This long, cold rest allows the dough to ferment and develop. It’s where the flavour’s made.

In the morning, first thing, take 500g of butter out of the fridge to soften slightly. The butter needs to be cool, but workable.

Lay some clingfilm out on the worksurface, and place the butter right in the middle. Cover the butter with more clingfilm and use a rolling pin to bat and pat it into a square about a centimetre thick. Use a dough blade or a knife to get the edges nice and straight and the corners square.

OK, now for the dough. Roll it out into a rectangle just over twice the size of the rolled out butter, with an extra couple of centimetres around the edges. Carefully lay the butter on one side of the dough and peel away the clingilm.

Lift the other half of the dough over the butter and use a rolling pin to firmly seal the three open edges.

What you’ve got now is a block of butter encased in pastry.

Now for the hard part.

Turning this block of buttery pastry into a couple of dozen croissants takes a lot of rolling out and folding.

Roll the pastry out until it’s the same width but twice the length, then fold each end in by a sixth, then again by another sixth. The folds should meet in the middle.

Flip one side over on top of the other so that you’ve got a stack of eight folds. Use a rolling pin again to seal the edges and rest the dough, covered, in the fridge for an hour.

The next roll-out is the big one. The dimensions are MASSIVE, so clear a big space and flour it well. Aim for 140cm by 50cm, dusting underneath the dough regularly to help it along the way. Try to be gentle, and try not to let the butter burst through or tear the layers. If it’s too hard to roll out, leave it at room temperature for ten or fifteen minutes to warm up a little.

Keep the edges of the dough as straight as you can, then trim it to exactly 140cm by 50cm, then slice it lengthways in half lengthways into two 140 by 25cm strips.

Mark each strip at 20cm intervals on one edge then again at 20cm intervals on the other side, but this time indented by 10cm on the first cut. Use a pizza cutter to connect the marks so that you’re left with neat triangles that are all 20cm at the base. There’ll be about twenty-four of them.

Roll each one of the triangles up from the broad base towards the peak, so that the very tip is tucked underneath, as if the weight of the roll should keep it in place. Bend the ends of the roll inwards and, et voilà, a croissant.

Repeat this rolling up process with the rest of the triangles and let them rest for at least a couple of hours on baking trays, until they’re almost doubled in size. Don’t crowd the trays.

Brush with a glaze of beaten egg and bake for ten minutes at 200c before reducing the temperature to 170c and baking for another five to ten minutes. Keep an eye out for any signs of the croissants scorching or burning…they’re high in fat and do have a tendency to catch a little. Cover with some foil if things are heading this way.

It’s important to eat at least one croissant while it’s still warm, when it’s at its absolute best, so make sure you do. The rest can be reheated in a low oven when needed, or given a very short blast in the microwave.

This recipe is an amalgamation of methods from Bread: River Cottage Handbook No. 3 and Peter Reinhart’s excellent Artisan Breads Every Day.

Recipes from the Spanish Kitchen, Nicholas Butcher

rich — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:12:24 +0000

This book feels like a rediscovered treasure found once again at the back of a dark attic, loved but forgotten. Dusted down and spruced up, it suddenly fits again, makes sense again. You wonder why it was cast aside in the first place, wonder why people stopped loving it.

Recipes From the Spanish Kitchen was first published in 1990, and fell out of print many years ago.

This reprint feels current, it feels vital and alive, and it shows that Butcher’s book was ahead of its time all those years ago, with its focus on quality and regionalism, with heritage and tradition.

Butcher implies early on that defining Spain is a hard task because it’s a country of many variations. It may be easier to think of Spain, at least in culinary terms, as a loosely formed collective, with each region’s food only bearing a passing resemblance to that of its neighbour. Nonetheless, there are similarities, as Butcher argues, a deeper underlying thread running through the food of Spain that make it undeniably Spanish. ”Spain stamps its personality, and what a personality it is, ineradicably”.

It seems improper not to talk of the recipes. They’re all here, in their earthy Spanish homeliness…the paella, the tapas, the crema Catalana, the tortillas…but the food isn’t the only reason this book is so enticing. Food is one thing, but great writing is another entirely, and Butcher can certainly write, his flowing prose betraying an excitement and affection for his subject. Here is a writer who knows his subject and wants to tell his readers about it in the best way he knows how.

It’s a joy to read – insightful, expert, affectionate.

On the civilised Spanish tradition of taking time over lunch:

Lunch is simple called ‘the meal’, la comida, and is the highlight of the day. It is the time for conversation and tapas, that untranslatable word which means a little plate of something, hardly more than a mouthful, to eat with ice-cold lager, sherry or wine. … Often they will talk about food too, not with pretension but as naturally as we talk about the weather.

“As naturally as we talk about the weather”…a parallel that brings with it instant understanding. We talked at work today about the mundane and formulaic conversations we have with people who visit our office as we walk to the meeting room…traffic, weather, holidays…I guess the Spanish do the same, they just talk about jamon.

Much more interesting.

Recipes From the Spanish Kitchen is a great read. It’s absorbing and interesting, with first-class recipes.

There may not be a better introduction to the food of Spain than this.

How to make parathas

rich — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 16:46:15 +0000

A while ago, I spent some time in India, travelling around Rajasthan and the north of the country. We ended up in the town of Jaiselmer, deep in the Rajasthani scrublands, a place that feels like the very edge of the world.

The big tourist thing to do in Jaiselmer is to hire a guide and trek out on camelback into the Thar desert, spending a night camped out under the stars. At dinner time, our guide squatted down in front of a fire and made chapatis, turning small balls of dough in his fingers until they became flat disks, widening quickly. He slapped each chapati on a flat stone sat in the edge of the fire, the embers glowing, heating the rock through. The chapatis blistered and burned, scorched and hissed on the rock, blackening and cooking.

They were rough, coarse, uneven breads, served with a simple curry of chickpeas, carrots and tomatoes. They could well have been the best chapatis I’ve ever had.

These types of unleavened breads are easy to make, once you’ve got the knack. It’s about technique and routine. That Indian guide had it in the desert, each chapati the same as the last.

The humble chapati is only one of many different Asian breads, but it’s the basis for most, the first in line. One up from the chapati is the paratha, essentially a chapati enriched with oil. The technique involved, folding the oil into the dough, gives the bread a laminated feel, and helps to keep the bread moist.

Parathas, like chapatis and other types of roti are best made with chapati flour, but a 50/50 mix of wholewheat and plain flour will do perfectly well – you need 225g of whatever flour you’re using, with half a teaspoon of salt added. Sprinkle over two tablespoons of vegetable oil and form a dough by adding 175ml of warm water.

Knead for ten minutes, cover and leave it in the fridge for half an hour to rest.

When the dough is rested, divide it into six pieces and roll each one out into a 15cm wide disk. Spread a teaspoon and a half of vegetable oil evenly over the rolled out dough, then gather the edges together to form a ball-like pleated pouch, twisting the open end slight to seal it. Turn the pleated pouch over and roll it out again to the same size as before.

Cook the paratha on a hot frying pan, brushing the pan with more oil. Whilst one side is cooking, brush the other with oil, then turn the paratha over to finish cooking, two or three minutes on each side, or long enough for the dough to cook through and start to scorch.

It’s best to do one paratha at a time, getting it in the pan before rolling out the next one while it’s cooking.

Serve with just about any Indian or Pakistani meal.

This method is as old as India herself, but comes from The Essential Madhur Jaffrey.

Indian tomato mutton curry

rich — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 18:37:36 +0000

Our eldest son, is starting to enjoy spicy food.

He now demolishes platefuls of tandoori chicken wings, the spicy kind from the Asian supermarket, and has developed a remarkable tolerance for extra-hot peri-peri sauce.

This is all good, and to be expected from a young Bradfordian. We know a thing or two about spicy food, you see.

The other one, the little one, is showing no such enthusiasm. Yesterday, she decided that she could no longer tolerate ham. On pushing, she did concede to liking ham when it was hot, but not cold. I mean, seriously, what on earth?

This curry was an attempt to cover all bases. It tastes Indian, it looks Indian, but its spicing comes from places other than the chilli plant. What we’ve got here is a fragrant lamb and tomato stew, with distinctly Asian overtones, something that’s mild, accommodating, but still packed with flavour and body.

I love my chilli, but I also enjoyed this.

The key deviation I made from the recipe in the frankly awesome (much overused work, but used correctly here) Tasting India by Christine Manfield was to use mutton shoulder, on the bone. Those bones make a hell of a difference, boosting the flavour and giving the dish real soul. Mutton shoulder is a good, economical cut, too, and Asian food like this is very suited to it…long, slow braising help the tough meat to soften into tenderness and give the subtle spices time to work their way into the meat.

The tomato part of the dish is nothing more than 500g of ripe tomatoes, quartered and left to simmer gently for half an hour. To give this its twist, throw four cloves and a green cardamom pod into some hot oil, heated through in a large pan – the spices need to sizzle and spit - before adding the tomatoes.

When the tomatoes have cooked to a soft pulp, push them through a sieve to remove the seeds and the skin, leaving a smooth sauce behind.

For the base of the curry, heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil in a large pan, and add two bay leaves, four cloves and four green cardamom pods, followed closely behind by 500g of thinly sliced red onions. Stir for a minute, then add eight cloves of minced garlic and two teaspoons of minced ginger. Lower the heat, cover the pan and cook for ten minutes until the onions start to turn pink and translucent.

Add 500g of diced mutton, stir and cover. Cook for another ten minutes then add the tomato gravy and two teaspoons of salt. Cover the pan yet again and bubble away on a low heat for at least an hour, maybe longer, until the mutton is soft.

To finish, stir through a handful of chopped fresh coriander and serve with parathas or chapatis.

On simplicity, or maple syrup & citrus marinated pork chops

rich — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 18:55:18 +0000

I’ve been on my own this week. When that happens, I don’t cook a great deal, mainly because the routine disappears.

When the routine goes, so does my will to cook anything much at all. I get too easily distracted by Other Projects that eat up the evenings, other things that need doing. Time slips away until all I can be bothered cooking is an omelette or heating up something that’s been sat in the fridge for a day or two.

Most of the time, I quite enjoy that because it’s easy. It’s simple.

Cooking gets out of control very easily. Heston Blumenthal’s monumental Fat Duck Cookbook sits on my shelves…it’s a fascinating book, beautifully presented and packed with wit and knowledge. It has passion and enthusiasm, verve and excitement.

But do I cook from it?

No. Never.

Too complicated. I can do without thrice cooking chips using a grand’s worth of sous vide machine. That type of cooking has never appealed to me, with its crazy playfulness and over-worked procedures. The problem is the complicatedness of it all, the fiddliness, the self-conscious artifice.

The key to this recipe is a good pork chop. Find one with a nice, thick layer of fat, and cut into the rind and fat every centimetre or so to stop the chop curling up in the pan.
These cuts also let the marinade get to more surface area, which makes for better tasting fat.
You do eat the fat, right? It’s the best part…

I prefer simplicity in food. I prefer recipes that are stripped down, lean, where everything counts, where everything has a purpose and a reason.

What does a very good piece of steak need with it? Some mustard, salad? Some chips? Is that plate of food more satisfying, more rustically enjoyable than the same steak faffed around with and dressed up in a reduction of something or other with a vast array of complicated sides? It depends on the circumstances, and if there are any Michelin starred chefs out there who want to go to the trouble of rustling up something over-complicated for me, be my guest, but at home, in my kitchen, I’m going to go for the simplicity of a nearly naked steak every time.

Simplicity is under-rated.

There isn’t enough of it.

Edward de Bono suggests that because simplicity appears easy, we believe that it’s easy to do, and become disheartened when we fail, so we stop trying.

Simplicity is hard.

Simplification is complicated and difficult, but the end results are better, leaner, more rational. That may sound paradoxical, but the journey to simplicity is the real test, the real challenge.

The chop needs to be marinated overnight. It’s a simple process…just mix together three tablespoons of dark soy sauce, four tablespoons of grain mustard, the zest and juice of both a lemon and an orange, half a teaspoon of dried thyme, a couple of cloves of crushed garlic and 100ml of maple syrup. Season with salt and pepper and pour over four pork chops, turning and basting so that everything is covered in everything else.
How could that not taste good?

It’s the same with food.

How many things do you cook the way you do because that’s the way you’ve always done it, that’s the way you were shown how to do it? Do you ever wonder whether that’s the best way of doing that thing, whether there might be a better way of peeling a whole head of garlic, or shelling an egg, of doing any of the thousands and thousands of jobs and processes that support a working kitchen?

You probably don’t because to do so is hard. It’s easier to carry on the same way as always.

Stepping back from something and looking at it with new eyes is challenging and, in most cases, we find ourselves blinded by our own experiences. We can’t see past what we already do.

A few years ago, we had a new kitchen installed. The old one, the one that was falling apart was arranged in a very traditional way, with units around the edge of the room, overhead cupboards, sink under the window.

Very pedestrian and very predictable.

We thought hard about what we wanted our new kitchen to look like, but subconsciously, our designs and idea followed the groove that had already been cut.

Where else could a sink go, after all, if not under a window? Sinks go under windows, so that you can look at the garden when you wash up. We just forget about that dishwasher over there, the one that means that we weren’t actually going to stand at the sink for any length of time at all, and therefore really didn’t need the view.

Sinks go under windows.

It’s The Way Things Are Done.

Cook the chops in a hot grill pan, eight to ten minutes on each side, basting regularly with more of the marinade.
Pour the rest of the marinade into a small pan and bring it to the boil, simmering for a few minutes until you’ve got an impromptu but zesty sauce.
Serve with salad and bread.
This recipe is from Tim Wilson and Fran Warde’s brilliant Ginger Pig Meat Book

Enter a professional kitchen designer, somebody who builds kitchens for a living and understands the ergonomics of space and the way we’d actually use it.

Suddenly, everything changed.

He turned our thoughts inside out, moving everything away from the walls and centring it around a long island with a sink embedded in the middle, a fridge and dishwasher hiding underneath a massive piece of granite. In practice, it works perfectly, but we would never have arrived at that design, never seen the inherent simplicity of it, how it eases the way we cook.

Stepping back and looking with new eyes is difficult.

There are lots of parallels in the world of food.

Is cooking just too complicated? Do recipes demand too much, to the point where people just don’t bother, or have we just lost skills that we once took for granted, skills that mean that basic cookery tasks aren’t complicated in the first place? It’s a combination of many things…there’s a perception that cooking is hard, or that it takes too long, which steers people towards the ready meal or the over-processed. The irony of this is that, while slamming a ready meal in the microwave is easy, cooking a meal of a vastly superior standard from scratch is hardly difficult, if you’re equipped with the right ingredients and the right ideas, and a bit of confidence on the side.

Cooking should be simple. Everybody can do it. Some people may say that’s a bold claim, but I’ll stand by it – everybody can cook something truly excellent, and the reason for this is because culinary excellence is also very often a product of simplicity.

The simpler, the better.

Leave Heston to the fancy stuff.

On why I bake bread

rich — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 19:46:37 +0000

I made a couple of sourdough loaves yesterday. They started out the night before in a mixing bowl, a ladleful of starter mixed with flour and water. More flour in the morning, salt, kneading, proving, shaping, baking.

24 hours of waiting went into those loaves. Slow food, indeed.

This batch was different from the last. Not as sour, and lighter, with a higher, softer crust and bigger holes, the Holy Grail of the sourdough baker…cutting that loaf open and finding big gaps made my breakfast.

It would have been easier to pop out to the shop for a loaf, even easier if I’d sent one of the kids to get it for me, but speed isn’t the reason I bake bread.

It might sound odd, but bread making is a kind of loose communion for me. It’s a time I use to relax, to reflect. There’s time involved, and structure, and action. There’s space to think. There’s time to just wait. Waiting is under rated. If it’s done with patience and purpose, it can be a means to many ends. Lots of things get worked out when I wait for a bread to rise or as I work through some frustration or other by kneading, pushing, pulling a ball of dough for ten minutes or so.

Bread making is the most elemental form of cooking, it’s an ancient art that’s changed little over the years. Yes, there’s a lot of science in a commercial loaf, but that’s not what I’m talking about, nor are many commercial loaves ‘bread’ in the way I understand it. I cook little else that has such a strong sense of the basic, of the very essence of being, of being alive.

I’ve been baking bread for years, and the small thrill of slicing into one of my loaves never leaves me. What will it be like? Will that little tweak have worked? Will there be holes? Please let there be holes… Its exciting, a small discovery, a little victory. You don’t get a sense of personal triumph by opening a bag of sliced white.

My bread repertoire is fairly narrow. I use a good, basic recipe, that lends itself to white, wholemeal or seeded loaves, and then there’s a reliable sourdough that’s improving as the starter ages. My bagels are pretty good, and I can turn my basic recipe into a passable focaccia or naan.

The best bread I make, though, is a simple French baton, a light baguette with a crisp crust and a deep and earthy taste. It’s worth the eighteen odd hours it takes to make from start to finish, and it knocks any supermarket approximation for a six. That might all be in my head, but that’s part of the point…it’s a good bread because it’s my bread, my baguette, something I made myself, something that has soul.

I’m going to carry on making bread. I hope to do it for the rest of my life. I want to be an old man, kneading a dough in the same way I’ve done for fifty or sixty years. I want to shape a loaf, let it prove, bake it, and I want it to taste the way it does today. I want to be using the same sourdough starter then as I am now. I want that starter to live in my fridge for decades, and, every now and then, I want somebody to take a small part of it and start their own starter, a child of mine.

But most of all, I want our kids to understand where their food comes from. I want them to see the magic of a rising loaf, to plunge their hands into a soft dough, to shape a boule and to eat toast, knowing that they’d had a part in the making, in the process. I want this to be normal, to be the way things are.

And I want them to carry on themselves, for them to show their kids how bread is made, just as I showed them.

I want this to be my gift to them.

Hennickehammar’s toasted ginger cake

rich — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 14:41:38 +0000

This cake is like a lighter version of a Christmas fruit cake…many of the same ingredients, but without the stodge and the months of waiting. It has all the same punchiness and body, but none of the heaviness.

The usual medley of dried fruit is replaced by a single one – dried cranberries, plumped up in lemon juice for that sharp/sweet bite.

The recipe is from Diana Henry’s Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, and she notes that it originated from the Hennickehammar hotel in Filipstad, Sweden. At the Hennickehammar, they serve slices of cake toasted lightly on each side, with a compote of lingonberries.

Dried cranberries are a wonderful thing…small and tart, bursting with sweetness, but with a hint of acidity to them. Soaking them in the juice of a lemon helps to draw that acidity out, galvanise it and give it a bigger stage, so do just that with 125g of dried cranberries, bringing the lemon juice just to the boil, then letting the cranberries sit in the juice to absorb some of the liquid.

Whilst that’s happening, line the bottom of a 1kg loaf tin with greaseproof paper, and make sure the ends of the tin are properly greased with butter.

Getting the cake together is easy. It’s just a case of mixing dry ingredients with wet.

In a large bowl, weigh out 300g of plain flour, 200g of light brown sugar, a teaspoon of ground ginger, half a teaspoon each of ground cinnamon and ground nutmeg, and a teaspoon and a half of baking powder.

Mix together thoroughly, and make a well in the middle for a beaten egg, 200ml of milk, 60g of melted butter and the cranberries and lemon juice. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet, slowly and carefully, until the batter is smooth and silky, the red nuggets of cranberry lost in the spicy mix.

Pour the batter into the loaf tin and bake at 180c for fifty minutes, or until a skewer or knife comes out clean when plunged into the heart of the cake.

To serve, lightly toast slices on each side and sift over a little icing sugar. Vanilla ice cream or crème fraîche wouldn’t be out-of-place.

M’hanncha, or the Moroccan snake

rich — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 19:06:57 +0000

There are times when I hit a blogging brick wall, where there’s nothing left to say, or where the ideas and half-posts won’t form themselves properly.

That happened this weekend, and after binning the third draft of something attempting to articulate what I think of minimum alcohol pricing (short answer: probably good, some reservations, could be collateral damage, but worth it. I’ll come back to that one), I decided that the best thing to do would be to actually cook something.

This Moroccan dessert had a little green Post-It note marking the page, so it must have caught my eye at some point, probably marked out for times such as this. Quick, made with easily available ingredients, obviously photogenic – perfect Emergency Post fodder.

I can’t be the only one who thinks like this, so don’t judge me.

Anyway, m’hanncha, also known as ‘snake pie’ for fairly obvious reasons. It’s like a big Cumberland sausage made with filo pastry and filled with almond and pistachio.

Cream together 375g each of butter and icing sugar until thoroughly combined, then carefully beat in three large eggs, one at a time. I nearly chucked everything away at this point, but persevering with the gentle mixing started to bring the rather unpromising mess together into a vaguely loose textured mixture that perked up enormously when I added 375g of ground almonds.

Carry on mixing gently, and add four tablespoons of rose water, a heaped tablespoon of plain flour and the zest of a lemon and an orange. As a last flourish, mix in 50g of roughly crushed pistachio nuts.

Next, the assembly line.

Lay out nine sheets of filo pastry on a clean surface, short side towards the edge, so that they overlap by about four or five centimetres. Keep an extra sheet in reserve for running repairs.

Carefully spoon the almond mixture along the length of the pastry, about eight or ten centimetres from the bottom edge, and leaving at least ten centimetres clear at either end. Fold the ends over the filling, then lift the bottom edge over until the almond paste is completely encased. Now just roll the pastry away from you to form a big Moroccan cigar, keeping the pastry tucked in nice and tightly, so that the roll is neat and tidy.

When everything is rolled up, take one end and very carefully start to coil the roll up. Be very gentle – the pastry is delicate and will split. When it does, hold your nerve and patch up the gap with some more filo and maybe some melted butter as glue.

Slide the coiled pastry onto a large baking tray, which is much easier said than done. My pizza peel helped.

Bake for forty to forty-five minutes in an oven pre-heated to 180c, or until the pastry is a rich golden colour. The pastry may burst around the edges a little in the oven…if it does, just cut away the overflowing filling with a sharp knife when the cake comes out of the oven.

Allow to cool a little, dust liberally with icing sugar and serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

This recipe is from Jamie Oliver’s Jamie Does…

Mexican chorizo, standing by in the fridge

rich — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 18:27:11 +0000

I’ve come close to attempting to make dry-cured sausages a couple of times, but never been able to get the right equipment together to make it happen. The sticking point is controlling temperature and humidity properly, so that the sausage cures without developing any nasty surprises, like botulism.

To get good results safely, I’d need a curing chamber, but that’s another project. A wholly achievable project, so maybe…maybe…

If you side-step dry-curing, there’s still plenty of charcuterie inspired things to do, and this Mexican version of chorizo is just one such thing. It scores on several levels:

1) it’s quick to make

2) it keeps well, for at least a couple of weeks

3) it’s a flavour bomb, an instant hit of spice and heat that can be used as a background layer or up front as the star of the show. Versatility is the key.

First, some background. Mexican chorizo and the Spanish version are not the same thing, and need to be handled quite differently.

Spanish chorizo is a cured sausage…it’s ‘cooked’, so you can slice a piece off and eat it without any problem.

Mexican chorizo is raw and therefore needs cooking before eating. Think of it like a heavily spiced and seasoned minced meat, and just think of what you could do with just such a heavily spiced and seasoned minced meat. It’s sometimes stuffed into sausage skins for storage purposes, but more often, it just sits in a plastic container in the fridge until a spoonful or two are needed.

A combination of pork cuts are needed – 500g of shoulder and 250g of belly. The shoulder provides bulk and substance, the belly brings fat.

Chop the shoulder up into small pieces, about pea-sized, and coarsely mince the belly. Combine the two meats together and get heavy with the spices and seasonings…two teaspoons of cayenne pepper, and two of sweet paprika, with a teaspoon of ground coriander, half a teaspoon of dried thyme and a few gratings of nutmeg.

Add two finely chopped cloves of garlic and splash over three tablespoons of wine vinegar. Finally, add 15g of salt and mix everything together thoroughly with your hands, squeezing the seasonings into the meat and making sure that everything is well blended.

Keep the chorizo in a sealed plastic container, in the fridge, for up to a fortnight. Leave it for a day before using, to let the flavours develop.

This type of chorizo is an incredible standby…a couple of tablespoons fried in oil with some onion as the basis of an omelette make a simple meal outstanding. Try it with broad beans, fried pieces of chorizo shaken in a pan with barely cooked beans, or in a similar way with shellfish.

It adds a punch to a bowl of fried potatoes and a small amount goes a long way as the basis of a simple vegetable soup.

This version is from Hugh Fearnley-Whittinstall’s River Cottage Meat Book.