The Walrus Blog

Nigella Lawson. Author of numerous cookery books. Star of a quite watchable cookery show, which tends not to be difficult stuff.

Rather than writing about her, I thought I’d just post some pictures of this morning’s bakery – pear and ginger muffins, from “Nigella Express”, a favourite in our house.

If Nigella, or her publisher, object to me showing this one example recipe, will they please tell me?

To save time this morning, I did the preparation last night.The bowl contains flour, sugars, baking powder, and ground ginger. The jug was in the fridge all night, and contains vegetable oil, yoghourt and kefir (instead of sour cream), honey, and two large eggs.

Muffin cases onto baking tray. The oven is already pre-heating by this point.

Pour the jug into the bowl, peel and chop the pears.

Mix it all together, and spoon the result into the muffin cases.

Sprinkle brown sugar on top, and put them in the oven for 20 minutes. You may have noticed that I annotate recipe books. It’s a good way to remember little details that make things work even better when you use the recipe again.

Hmmm, not too shabby! Thanks to doing the preparation the night before, I was able to do this even without having a coffee first. They do go rather well with coffee, for breakfast.

Sometimes, I just don’t feel like cooking a formal “meat and two veg” dinner. So we have what we call “bits”. Here we have stuffed vine leaves from a tin, a selection of charcuterie from Tesco, a few bits of artichoke, and four dips. The orange coloured one is made from our home-grown carrots, with yoghourt in the middle. Then there’s hummus with dukkah sprinkled on it, a beetroot dip I think I invented, with pine nuts on it, and (probably) an aubergine dip.

Clearly, what’s missing is bread and wine. See below…

Why?

Well, we ran out of the last bacon I made, a while ago. Even worse, Mrs Walrus bought some shop bacon, which we know just isn’t as good as the home made kind. You might suppose making bacon is difficult. You might even suppose it’s something to do with an old, vulgar joke, but that’s up to you. How come I know how to do it, then? Simple. I stand on the shoulders of giants…

How?

Well, I had to nip out to the shops, as I had no mozarella, and it is Pizza Saturday. After that, I nipped into the butcher’s shop near the supermarket. (I would have given you a link to Deri Page, St Clears, but I don’t do links to Facebook pages.) There were only a couple of people waiting, and I enjoyed the conversations about their relatives who never eat minced beef, and make that two kilos, please, and what on earth is going on in Laugharne? Then I bought a nice bit of pork belly, complete with skin and ribs.

I used my favourite Sabatier boning knife to separate the ribs from the belly, trying not to cut too close, because when you’re eating ribs off the barbecue, it’s best if there’s a good amount of meat on them. I left the skin on, other bacon makers remove it now. That might give them a quicker cure, but I like the choice of whether to fry the bacon with or without it.

Of course, the remaining meat and skin were too big to fit in my plastic brining box, so I cut them in half.

The cure I used is mostly cooking salt, with some dark brown sugar mixed in, and this time, about half a teaspoonful of ground white pepper. Some of it gets rubbed fairly firmly into the meat, while the rest is kept handy to use as the curing proceeds in the fridge, which is usually about two weeks. I look at it daily, draining the liquid from the box, and checking that no mould is trying to establish itself. If it does, I wipe it off with vinegar soaked kitchen towel. It never comes back from that!

I used to put far more cure than this on at first, but it really doesn’t need that much, and you can end up with bacon that’s too salty.

There are actually two plastic boxes in the picture, the inner one has holes in it for the liquid that emerges from the pork to drain down into. It’s tipped out daily, more cure is added as necessary, and the meat gets turned over. If anyone knows a proper word for that liquid, please enlighten me!

End of part one…

Part the Second

I have washed the cure off, patted the meat dry, and put it back in the fridge, propped up on chopsticks to dry out for a week or so. Then I’ll smoke it. There will be pictures.

Part Three

A day ago, I set up the ProQ smoker, filled with oak sawdust, in its specially optimised smoke chamber (it’s a galvanised dustbin from B&Q), hung the bacon up, and started the sawdust smouldering. I don’t mess with little candles to light it, a blast from my blow-torch does the trick. It burns for about twelve hours. Today, I went and got the smoked bacon. I’ll be slicing it tomorrow, and vacuum packing the results, before freezing them. I may also have a bacon sandwich.

And, finally…

I have a bacon slicer. It’s not a very good one, but it’s better than my previous one, which was Chinese, and had internal gears moulded roughly from steelmaker’s slag, or possibly something worse. The gears wore out within weeks. Anyway, I’ve sliced the bacon into a range of rashers, rough chunks, and indescribable bits and pieces. They will all taste lovely. And, in order to store portions without continuing to make everything smell like smoked bacon (I’m not saying that’s a bad thing), I have used this lovely little vacuum packing machine.