What on Earth is that? Indonesian chicken fried rice, with accompaniments.
In 1970, Nasi Goreng was my favourite dinner in the canteen. It was wonderful, and all I can remember about it was that it was chicken fried rice with a fried egg on top. But we had very good Asian cooks in the canteen, so it must have been OK.
To recreate it, I referred extensively to “Sambal and Coconut“, yet another of the cookbooks I really like.
This is a tomato and chilli sambal, which I think could have done with quite a lot more chilli. Home grown tomatoes made it very tasty, though.
To the left, peanut and lime leaf kerupuk. Centre is the nasi goreng that was not yet on the plates. Right side, a mild pepper and coconut salad, and the sambal.
Here’s my plate, after I had added the accompaniments. It was all tasty, with good contrast between the crunchy kerupuk and the tender chicken. Will make again, with more chillis…
The main problem I have had with Gressingham duck breasts, when cooked in the way described on the package – fry the fat off, bake to cook through – is that the duck breasts always came out much smaller when they were cooked, even though I baked them for the absolute minimum time in the recipe. They also tended to be a little tougher than I wanted, and cooked part way through, rather than nice and medium-rare almost to the edge. The answer to these problems is mentioned in the heading…
Two vacuum packed, seasoned duck breasts.Two duck breasts in the sous vide pan.
The thing about ducks, you know, is that they float. I nearly included a Monty Python clip at this point, but you either know which one I mean, or you won’t understand at all, so I left it out. Anyway. Three hours at 55°C, pushing them away from the heater every once in a while. Then I heated a cast iron pan to what is technically known as bloody hot, gave them enough of a frying to crisp the fat up (yes, I know, a few seconds more would have been even better…) and served them.
Unshrunken duck breast, baked potato, steamed broccoli, and sauce.The shot that shows it was worth the faff…
This is definitely the way I will do those lovely Gressingham duck breasts (can I have some freebies, please, Gressingham?) from now on, only I will flash fry the skin a little more, to render the remaining fat you can see. The meat did not shrink, and it was not overdone at the edges. And the tenderness was noticeable, compared to the traditional method.
I recently bought a new foodie toy, a sous vide cooker, which I hope will be useful to prevent duck breasts from shrinking when I cook them. It should also enable me to cook medium-rare steaks, without the risk of over or under cooking them. I found it on eBay, for £30. Apparently, I could connect to it with my phone, and control it that way, but there’s nothing wrong with the control panel on top, which is what I shall use instead.
As a very safety conscious Walrus, naturally, I have read the instructions carefully. It’s the usual stuff, you know, don’t use this in your sword swallowing act, etc… Later on, I shall be heading out into the World, in order to Read all instructions.
This is part of the instructions what I read.
I already had a nifty device for vacuum packing the steaks, so I seasoned them, and got the air sucked out of the bags. You don’t need this device, really. It’s entirely possible to use Zip Lock bags, and get as much air out as you can, though they may tend to float if you don’t get it all out. But it’s a cooking toy, so I love it. Made by Tayuugo, if you want one like it…
The second steak, about to be suffocated. To the right, one I did earlier.
Next step: fill a big pan with water, clip the sous vide device on, and set it going. The temperature should be 55°C, and up to two hours is plenty of time. It doesn’t take long to get up to the right temperature. Meanwhile, I baked a couple of potatoes, and then fried some mushrooms in butter.
After almost two hours in the water bath, the steaks are cooked, but they don’t look like it. They need a quick flash fry in a very hot pan.
It was a very quick flash fry, and I didn’t take any pictures while I was doing it… but here’s the plated result…
Now, you may call that rare, rather than medium-rare, and you may be right, but it is definitely what I was aiming for. The big difference between cooking the steaks this way, and frying them, is the way they’re not overcooked at the surface, with a smaller pink area inside. Now that I know the process, I will not be using cheap supermarket steaks like these, but really good ones from the friendly local butcher.
Update: This sous vide device died the third time I used it, and I got a refund. My new one is an Inkbird one, and cost twice as much. Let’s hope it lives longer…
This is not a blog post about the morality of eating meat, as I very much enjoy eating several sorts of meat, and I wouldn’t think there was a moral problem, if a shark decided to eat me. After all, I am pretty sure I have eaten bits of shark. But even I have to admit that the production of meat is a serious problem, ecologically. We needed that Amazonian rain forest to create oxygen, you know? And there are health grounds for eating less meat, as anyone who listens to their doctor will know. Besides, it costs a fortune these days.
I’ve always thought it a bit odd that some vegans try to create realistic imitations of meat dishes, when there are a huge number of delicious vegan dishes that don’t look at all like meat. Instead, they look like the vegetables they are made from. They taste great, too, and I enjoy eating them.
But, as a way of saving money, being able to cook something that feels like a steak when I chew it, tastes a lot like a steak, doesn’t force me to go and floss my teeth after dinner, and costs much less than a steak has to be a winner. So, I ordered up some ingredients that were needed, online, and had a go at a recipe from https://itdoesnttastelikechicken.com which, by the way, has an excellent cookbook you can download.
The ingredients I didn’t have to hand were the rather strange sounding vital wheat gluten, and nutritional yeast flakes. This is not a good food for anyone with an actual gluten intolerance. I would also advise against it, if you have a problem with lentils, such as, you know, flatulence.
The recipe uses cups, tablespoons, etc, but lets you switch to metric, which is good. However, it then uses volumes for some of the ingredients, instead of weights, so I’m providing weights here. That’s right, I weighed the ingredients, as I measured their volumes. Such is my dedication to the cause…
Recipe websites have a tendency to use beautiful photographs of such things as all the ingredients, arranged artistically in a blender, but cooked lentils are hard to arrange artistically, so you get to see this, instead…
In the blender, you can see –
220g vital wheat gluten
220g cooked lentils
90g water
5g nutritional yeast
25g tomato puree
25g dark soy sauce
5g garlic powder
3g chili powder
3g liquid smoke
1g freshly ground black pepper
The internet suggested I’d need to cook half the final weight of lentils; I cooked a hundred grams of red lentils for ten minutes, and ended up with 280g, and if you think I ate the other sixty grams, you’d be correct. They smelled amazing when I was cooking them, so down they went.
There’s now a delicate balancing act to perform. If you run the blender for too long, all that gluten will form a solid block; not long enough, and there will be unmixed ingredients. As soon as that is done, tip the result out, and knead the lump, bearing in mind that you’ll be toughening it up if you go on too long.
Tip it out!
Cut it into four pieces. Now roll them out until they’re about half an inch thick. As you can see, I failed to do that, and ended up with thickish lumps. Next time, I shall be careful to do this, instead of trying to hand shape them…
They get steamed for about half an hour. After that, they go in a marinade in the fridge, until you are ready to use them, or you can freeze them.
50g water
20g olive oil
20g dark soy sauce
10g maple syrup, which I omitted
I left the maple syrup out because if you fry these in a hot pan, it will burn.
The next picture is what we actually had for dinner, after I made these – a chicken Caesar salad. Because that’s what I was asked for, when I explained what I had made. The next day, I cut up one of the steaks, and used it in a sweet and sour pork recipe, served with rice. I can confirm, these “steaks” are very much like meat to eat, but the flavour isn’t exactly right. I propose to fix that, by including distinctly non-vegan flavourings, like beef stock, the next time I make a batch. I will also roll them out properly!
This actually is chicken, but tasted also of anchovies and Parmesan, as is right and proper.
I salted it, and left it uncovered in the fridge overnight, because that gets the skin dry enough to crisp up nicely when it’s cooked. It only takes about 45 minutes to cook, too!
Dinner plate, with duck leg, wing, breast, veggies, and gravy.
Duck, served with roasted parsnips, fried courgettes, and an orange flavoured sauce.
Nigella Lawson. Author of numerous cookery books. Star of a quite watchable cookery show, which tends not to be difficult stuff. Daughter of an utter git.
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?
You will notice that I annotate recipe books, as how else can you remember how to make the recipe better the next time?
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 after peeling and chopping 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. I already said that, but I wondered if you were paying attention.
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…
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…
Some useful books.
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.
Belly pork, with eight ribs still in.
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.
The ribs, not too closely cut.
Of course, the remaining meat and skin were too big to fit in my plastic brining box, so I cut them in half.
Two pieces of belly pork.
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!
Pork with cure on it.
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.
Both bits of pork, with cure, in a plastic box.
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.
Forgive me Readers (if any) for I have not blogged about food for over a fortnight!
I just received an email from the Guardian’s Rachel Roddy, about mashed potato. Now I know many people think mash comes in a packet, and you just add water, and some of us are old enough to remember the Cadbury’s Smash robots laughing at our primitive way of making them… “they cut them with their metal knives”.
Normally, I might just read it, and perhaps some of the things it links to, but I was rather impressed with the way Rachel Roddy referenced, in one paragraph, all of…
Rachel Roddy mentions an Italian trattoria, that served
the puree di patate con lardo. It turned out to be a small mound of buttery mashed potato topped with three slices of cured pork back fat that had once been white, but was now translucent as it melted into its mountain. It remains one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten and summed up the joy of mashed potato: ordinary and luxurious, silly and serious. Mash, wonderful mash.
Now, I have wanted to make lardo for ages, but hey, it’s the 21st Century, and farmers in the UK are mostly producing damned skinny pigs, because everyone knows fat is dreadfully bad for us, so you can’t even get pork fat a couple of inches thick, even when you go to a real butcher. Part of the problem is that pigs are not kept until they have time to get properly fat before they’re rushed off to whatever food product factory has the contract for them. It’s the same problem when I make bacon, as well, there’s only just enough fat on it to be able to fry it properly. Once upon a time, you would put bacon in a pan, fry it, fry the eggs in the fat that was left behind, and then soak the fat up with a Staffordshire oatcake, and eat the lot. I once made a batch of Staffordshire oatcakes, and they were wonderful. I must make more, as I no longer live in Staffordshire, and nobody sells ready-made ones here in Wales.
Duck is delicious. Sadly, it’s not cheap. But there are ways to make it less expensive.
Buy a whole duck. A whole Gressingham duck currently sells for about £9.
Meanwhile, two duck breasts cost £8, and two duck legs cost £4.50 or thereabouts.
A whole Gressingham duck, removed from the packaging.
Here’s a whole duck. I’ve pulled the plastic bag of giblets out, and put them in the stock pot, along with the wing tips. There will be more in the pan soon….
Giblets and other bits, waiting for me to make duck stock.
Now, with a very sharp knife, and considerable caution, I have cut one breast off the duck. Not very tidy knife-work, but I’m out of practice…
The duck with one breast cut off.THe other breast’s gone, and so has this leg.Here are two legs, and two breasts. £12.50 already, from a £9 duck.
Eventually, one ends up with two duck breasts and two duck legs, for the freezer. When I have collected four legs, I will make confit duck legs.
The duck breasts seem to be smaller than the ones they sell separately. My guess is that they use their biggest ducks for the portions, and sell the smaller ones whole.
Bits of duck, about to become stock.
The rest of the carcase just gets broken up, submerged in water, and boiled for a while, resulting in a delicious stock. What can I use that for, you ask?
Well, I used it for ramen. There wasn’t quite enough duck meat on the carcase for this, so I quickly cooked a couple of chicken thighs, you can see it at the top of the bowl. This was a lovely dish for a cold, wet evening…
