Category: Food

Pastrami 2 – The Softening.

This must seem like a long, boring series of Tesco advertisements, but I promise you, they’re just the nearest conveniently huge supermarket to where we live.

If I’m going to have to tell the truth, the first batch of pastrami I made was not as tender as it should have been. So, I’m making more.

Here’s the brine, being boiled up. Once it’s cool, and the brisket has been trimmed, they join one another in the fridge for five days.


And now I’m hungry…

Hack, slice, chop! Money saved…

Mr Tesco let me have two chickens for £9. That was nice of him.

I sharpened up one of my favourite knives, ready to save some money, and attacked.

The prices below are my guesses, based on the Tesco website.

Four chicken thighs, £2.


Four chicken drumsticks, £2.


Yes, I know they are a bit untidily cut. I’m badly out of practice at this sort of thing.

Four chicken breasts, £4.

Four chicken wings, no idea, as they aren’t sold in such small numbers.
All cling-filmed to keep them separate, apart from the wings, which I am saving up until I have a big box of them packed and ready to cook. And off to the freezer they go!

So, you might wonder, where’s the money saving? Ah, well, you see, all the bits that were left are currently bubbling away cheerfully in the stock pot. There will be quite a bit of stock, and the fat that I will take off the top is lovely for cooking.

Did I forget to mention the Pastrami?

I think I did forget to tell you about this. It started with a nice bit of brisket from the Tesco meat counter, all rolled up, tied, and ready to roast. I took the string off, opened it out, and removed as much fat as I could.
Next, I made up a brine cure, for it, following the suggestions in “Food DIY” for the choice of spices. There’s 200g of salt and 100g of sugar in the cure, all boiled up and allowed to cool. That went into the fridge for six days, with fairly regular shaking to help things along. After that, the meat was drained and dried, before being coated with freshly ground black pepper and coriander seeds.
The next step is to hot smoke the meat over wood chips, until the internal temperature is 75°C. I used a probe thermometer to make sure I got this right. I nearly ruined the roasting tin, while doing this. Since then, I’ve bought a galvanised dustbin, so I can do hot smoking outdoors, and not destroy things. After that, the meat gets steamed for at least three hours.
My apologies for the rather badly out of focus picture of the sliced meat after I steamed it. I was overcome by the excitement, and anticipation of a nice pastrami sandwich. There should really have been rye bread for that, but there wasn’t. Never mind. It was a nice sandwich.

Roy Batty is ready to be eaten!

The Lomo I started on Roy Batty’s inception date reached its target weight yesterday. I’ve cut it into several pieces, and wrapped and frozen most of it. Here are some slices  from the piece I have kept ready to use. I can assure you that they were delicious.

My next project? Probably a real meat pie… or something…

Crab!

Here’s an impulse buy from the last time I went shopping! A cooked crab at an irresistible price. I had never dealt with one before, and was a bit bothered about it, because most of the books that mention crab say that after you have opened the crab up, you should “Remove the Dead Men’s Fingers”, without any clues as to where they might be. One of our newer books, Prue Leith’s “How to Cook”, has pictures that make it quite clear where these disturbingly named features are, and I’ve labelled them above. 
After about half an hour’s work, I had a large amount of broken crab shell, dead men’s fingers, and assorted gubbins, and a small bowl of actual crab meat. A very small bowl.



In the end, I decided to add it to this risotto of butternut squash, beans and asparagus. It made a great improvement to the flavour.

Seedy difference.

This is the “seeded sour” bread from Brilliant Bread. I increased the amount of rye flour, and reduced the amount of strong white flour.
The seeds need to be toasted in a dry frying pan, until the sunflower seeds start to look noticeably coloured. By this time, the sesame seeds are smelling lovely, like toasted sesame oil. There’s enough poppy seeds in this to make you fail a drugs test in America. See if I care…
Good grief, I’ve been using the same cheap plastic bowl for about 37 years. I’m introducing the toasted seeds to the dough here, as you can see.
Let this interesting dough rest for as long as it seems to want. Overnight in the fridge is pretty much a minimum. The recipe described this as a wet dough. I think it’s not particularly wet. I used a tin, and my baking stone. New addition was a dish of boiling water at the bottom of the oven, to produce steam, so the bread could stretch as it cooked.

I am pleased with the look of the result, and looking forward to trying it with a nice Worcester blue cheese I bought the other day. It might even warrant a glass of a decent red wine to help the cheese go down.

Roast Beef for Sunday

This fine thing is the piece of beef I bought to use during the Christmas holiday, but ended up freezing because there was so much other food we were in danger of bursting.
You may notice the silly bit of elastic that was holding it together has broken. I replaced that with two proper bits of butchers’ string before it went in the oven.
Almost there! The wine’s poured, and the real gravy is ready. This meal was a joint effort, as my lovely wife makes splendid Yorkshire Puddings, while I have no idea how to do them. There are quite a few things like that, but I think I’ll carry on pretending there aren’t….
And I apologise for this shot being out of focus. I was hungry, and wanted to start eating. Yorkshire Pudding with gravy has arrived, all is right with the world.
Yes, we actually had a dessert! This has meringue, ice cream, whipped cream and blackberries, so we decided it was a deconstructed [1] Eton Mess.






















[1] I’m pretty certain that we can’t be the only ones to be annoyed immensely by the way cooks/chefs on the television spread the elements of something like, say, a meat pie around the plate, and announce proudly that they have deconstructed a meat pie. No, you pretentious idiots. You have failed to make a meat pie, and served some stew with a lump of pastry nearby. 

Burns Night comes early in Wales.

Well, Burns Night doesn’t really happen earlier in Wales, but when one of you is going to be away on the actual night, it makes sense. Sadly, I completely forgot to arrange for a piper to pipe the haggis into the dining room, and the food would have gone cold if we had read all of Burns’ ode to the beastie…
I put those sauce jars on the table for no sensible reason, and neither of them got used. The potatoes were roasted in a little olive oil, with a sprinkling of salt. In the dish with them are a couple of Jerusalem artichokes that needed to be used up. To the left, mashed swede and onion; to the right, mashed parsnip and turnip. Simon Howie’s haggis has a plastic skin, but the contents are very authentic, and delicious.
Here’s mine. It was very tasty, but extremely filling. It was a good job I had forgotten to make any dessert!

Sausage sandwich!

Just so that you don’t think I make fancy food all the time, here’s the sensible loaf I made after the most recent sourdough rye saga. 

As you can see, internally, it has a nice crumb. It was ever so slightly under-baked, but we needed sandwiches! Those little rolls of crumb in the foreground are the clue that tells you it wasn’t quite baked to perfection; those don’t happen after a few more minutes in the oven.

Sausage sandwiches! That has reminded me, it’s ages since I made sausages. These were rather nice ones from Mr Tesco’s Finest range, with 97% meat…

Man vs Rye – episode 94

I thought that it might be worth a further attempt at making a sourdough rye bread. I had not realised that rye is actively malevolent, with a vindictive streak a mile wide. Read on, if you can take the horror.

The main problem with the previous attempts, I think, was that there is so very little gluten in the rye flour that it’s well-nigh impossible to give the bread a decent structure. So I substituted 200g of very strong white bread flour for 200g of the rye in the recipe. I left out the runny honey, mainly because that stuff costs a fortune, and added a little extra water because of that. After a considerable amount of work with the dough hooks on my mixer, I ended up with what looked like a reasonably well structured dough. It wasn’t particularly wet, and it held its shape.

Anyway, I added some flour to my nice round proving basket, and put the dough in. I knew it was going to need a long prove, even though, this time, the starter had been very active. I sprinkled it with a little flour, covered it, and left it overnight at room temperature.

Next day, it was still looking good. You can see it has expanded quite well, perhaps not the doubling in size that every bread recipe seems obsessed with, but by a respectable amount. So, I put a wooden board over it, and turned it the other way up. It should have fallen gently onto the board, ready to go into the oven after a quick couple of cuts. Look away now, if you wish to avoid the horror.

In an imaginative new way of going wrong, the dough separated into a main chunk on the board, and a smaller one, which was inexplicable stuck to the proving basket. And you can see that somehow, it had become wetter, and was spreading rapidly. At this point, I may possibly have muttered something like “Sod it!” 

Throwing it away, and becoming a monk, might well have been the sensible next move. Instead, I scraped the stuck bit from the proving basket, stuck it on the dough, folded the damned thing like a calzone, so it would fit on the baking stone, put it in the oven, and added water to make steam. The dough was clearly angered by this, and tried to slide off the side of the stone.

Some of it actually managed to flow over the edge of the stone, and drip into the tray at the bottom of the oven, where it turned into these bizarre things. I’m lost for words to describe them, but I can tell you they didn’t taste pleasant. 

So, here is the thing that I baked. It smells like bread. It has a nicely baked crust.

It can even be sliced, and eaten. The crumb is much better than previous attempts, although it still has a slightly under-baked layer in the middle. And it does taste very good, in spite of its efforts to become some sort of alien life form.


I mentioned these misadventures to my wife that evening (she was working away from home) and she, very sensibly, said “Why don’t you make some ordinary bread, the way you used to?” So that is what I am going to do. Rye is clearly more powerful than me, and I surrender. I will leave it to the superhumans who are able to defeat it, and force it to make proper loaves. I’m even going back to the old recipe I used to use, with a pound and a half of flour and a pint of water. In the event that even ordinary bread goes horribly wrong, and becomes possessed by demons, you will see the pictures here. More soon…