It’s getting close to Christmas now, and it’s about this sort of time that I start to panic about stupid things like deciding which type of stuffing to make.

I’ll spend an hour or so scattering cookbooks around the dining room, looking for something new and different to cook on the stuffing front.  There’ll be another hour spent searching the almighty Internet for the same thing.

Eventually, there’ll be one book left on the table.

Delia Smith’s Christmas.

It’ll be open at the page with the American turkey stuffing recipe, and I’ll succumb to the inevitable and start to cook it.

Just like every year.

Delia’s recipe is very easy.  All you need is a frying pan to brown some of the ingredients and a big bowl for mashing everything together.

More this way….

A few weeks ago, I made some pancetta – cured bacon that was then rolled, tied and dried for three weeks to mature it.

Some time later, this comment was posted:

I really think you should research what prauge (sic) powder#1 and prauge (sic) powder#2 are used for before you end up making alot of people sick! If you are dry curing then you sure as hell better be using prauge (sic) powder #2 and not prauge (sic) powder #1

The commenter highlighted something that I’d been very worried about – the use of chemicals in the curing purpose, and more specifically, using the right chemicals at the right time.

Charcuterie and curing can be a bewildering subject to get into, with ingredients that look more at home in a lab than a kitchen and specific and hard to achieve requirements around temperature and humidity.

It’s all a bit overwhelming, really.

What’s the difference between sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate?

Sodium nitrite is sold under a lot of different names, but the main brands are Prague Powder #1 or Instacure #1.  Sodium nitrate is normally sold as Prague Powder #2 or Instacure #2.

This is where things get a little tricky…

Sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate do the same thing in the end, but in different ways, although sometimes, they’re used together.

In general, sodium nitrite is used alone where the finished product will be cooked through before eating, where the drying or maturing process is only a couple of weeks.  My pancetta falls firmly into this category.

Sodium nitrate is normally used where the end result is a fully dried product, like a salami or dried sausage of some sort.  The meat is still technically raw when its eaten – its never been heated right through.

To understand why nitrates are used for fully dried products, it’s important to understand why they’re different to nitrites.

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I’ve had a bottle of Brewdog’s Tokyo knocking around for a while now, and I must admit that I’ve been a little nervous about opening it.

I like a strong beer, but 18.2%?

That’s not strong.

That’s insane.

When Tokyo was first launched a while ago, it led to a storm in a teacup about responsible drinking and the culpability of brewers in the creation of ‘Binge Britain’.  In truth, an artisan beer like this,  sold in 330ml bottles at a very premium price is not the type of product that leads to brawling in the street.

This is Brewdog’s way, though…it’s all part of their marketing strategy.  Since Tokyo, they’ve produced a couple of even stronger beers, culminating in a ludicrous IPA called Sink the Bismark, which weighs in at a mighty 41% ABV.

More this way…

There are things we say in the kitchen, a codified lexicon, that explain some of the kitchen mentality at Ko. “Make it soigne” means make it right and make it perfect.

It’s something you hear a lot in traditional French kitchens.  No mistakes, no misunderstandings. Make it the best.

Do not fuck it up.

It’s a simple thing.

“Make it right”.

Just do it properly. But any cook will tell you that the apparently simplest things can often turn out to be the hardest to accomplish well.

Ever burnt toast?

This simple mantra – “make it right” – underpins much of David Chang’s approach to his breathtaking food, a collision of Korean cuisine with Western standards that’s as inventive and creative as it is audacious.

Momofuku is something that’s difficult to define.  It’s a concept that’s grown out of a noodle bar in New York’s East Village into a small chain of highly regarded restaurants that remain casual and unusual despite their success.  New York Times restaurant critic Peter Meehan calls Momofuku “the anti-restaurant” in his introduction to Momofuku – so many things are at once wrong and right, bucking again prevailing expectations of what a restaurant should be.

This book is Chang’s first attempt to distill the ethos of his restaurant onto the printed page.

And is it good?  Yes, it’s good.  Breathtaking, absorbing, inspiring. Good.

Momofuku is a glimpse behind the door of Chang’s kitchen.  Many cookbooks claim to deliver this, to draw the reader and the home cook into a different culinary world, but few succeed as resoundingly as Chang does here.  I often read cookbooks that are technically good, brilliant, even, but which leave me cold.  They do nothing for me.  They prompt me to think about what I’m going to cook from them, to make little lists of obscure ingredients, to get on the train to Leeds with the sole aim of raiding the shelves at Wing Lee Hong.

They don’t inspire me in the way that this one does.

More this way…