You know those times when a restaurant creates a bit of a buzz about it? How it gets mentioned often on twitter and facebook and blogged about endlessly? That makes me nervous. There are plenty of places that don’t live up to their hype, plenty of places that just have good PR people cooking up [...]
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 [...]
Pork cooked slowly for a very long time in chilli? Sounds like a good idea, right? Here’s how to do it. You’ll need some dried chillis to start with – two medium anchos and four medium guajillos. Both of these varieties are the work horses of the Mexican kitchen. The ancho has a smokey, mild [...]
We spent a week in Barcelona recently, and walking around the city, you notice little bars and cafes everywhere selling hot chocolate with long, piped doughnuts, ribbons of fried batter coated in sugar and sold in cones or paper bags. Ethan latched onto the idea, as kids do, that he wanted to try churros, but [...]
Guacamole is a dish that doesn’t lend itself to two things – mass production and sitting around. Avocado deteriorates at an astonishingly fast rate, so commercial guacamole has to be packed full of mysterious additions to stop it discolouring. After a couple of hours exposure to the air, an avocado’s natural colour is a kind [...]