A couple of years ago, I bought a pizza oven, a proper one, one that took four people to lift into place. I burn kiln-dried logs in it, and it hits almost 500c. It cooks a pizza in about two minutes, maybe less, and those pizzas are like nothing else I’ve ever tasted. The wood [...]
Portugal is very small, a slim slither of a country clinging on to the side of the Iberian Peninsula, battered along its western coast by the most magnificent of Atlantic breakers, its interior parched under a southern European sun. The strip along the bottom is a tourist haven, its capital, Lisbon, one of the most [...]
I think I eat too much meat. I’ve been trying to cut down recently, have a couple of days a week without any meat, and to eat more fish and seafood instead of just, well, red meat, that sort of thing. My efforts have been moderately successful so far, but I’m hitting a definite limit [...]
One of my favourite cook books from last year was Sumayya Usmani’s brilliant Summers Under the Tamarind Tree, an intoxicating collection of Pakistani food. I’ve cooked from it ever since, and my copy is stuffed with bookmarks to remind me what to do next. Usmani’s new book, Mountain Berries and Desert Spice is its equal, [...]
Hipster hamster food? Not exactly. Maybe. OK, yes. No. That’s not fair. This is a book about the Holy Trinity of preserving, namely fermenting, pickling and drying. Three related but very, very different processes. Kool kids love kimchi? Kool kids do indeed love kimchi. And rightly so. Yes, it’s fashionable right now to ferment anything [...]