Rambling in the Kitchen

After one of my ancient bread tins pulled a loaf in half, I bit the bullet, and bought two new ones. They’re a bit smaller than the old ones, and have a non-stick coating. The instructions that came with them say they shouldn’t be used at any higher temperature than 230°C, which is annoying, as quite a few recipes suggest that 240°C is the temperature to use. I don’t know how accurate the oven settings are, in any case, so I will ignore the warning. I’ll let you know if the coating falls off.

I was considering whether to cook something complex for our Christmas dinner, but decided to take the easy route this year, and chose a turkey crown. That will do for a couple of days, at least! We have had a commercial three bird roast in the past, and I was quite disappointed with it, because it had an awful lot of stuffing compared with the amount of actual bird meat, and was impossible to slice neatly. I do intend to do another three bird roast, some day, but I will try to use a minimal amount of stuffing, and use mostly sausage-meat, maybe with some chestnuts.

These chicken wings were cooked in our air fryer, and were very pleasant, but having to put the basket in the dishwasher to remove the burnt spices and remaining chicken fat was a bit annoying. You don’t get that problem when you do chips in them. Still, at least quite a lot of the fat didn’t get eaten, so that’s good.


 As threatened recently, I made a few pastrami on rye sandwiches. It’s supposed to be a classic combination, and they do go together very well. The price of the pastrami in the shop, at £3 for 110g, is ridiculous, though. It’s brisket, for goodness’ sake. I will most definitely make my own, some time. When I do, you’ll see it on here…

Purely Rye Sourdough – Grand Finale

The result is worth it.

















It tastes good, as well as looking good. I think I need to scale the recipe up to make a bigger loaf, though, as it’s going quite quickly. Meanwhile, I am thinking of things to do with the exploded white loaf…

Purely Rye Sourdough – Part 3

Hubris, or something like that.

Have you ever had one of those days where everything conspires against you? The loaf in the foreground, that I was going to bake while the rye sourdough in the background took its time to rise, was looking so good. It was a lovely, bouncy dough, and was rising nicely, as you can see. 

Meanwhile, the rye sourdough has possibly risen by an imperceptible amount. It wasn’t totally inactive, though, as it was able to cast some sort of dreadful curse upon the pretty young loaf in the foreground. 

I clearly didn’t score the top of the loaf sufficiently deeply, or perhaps the cuts somehow managed to close themselves. 

Then, I forgot to throw a cup of water on the bottom of the oven, so that the steam would allow the top of the loaf to stretch, before setting in a nice curved shape. So, the top set flat, and the continuing expansion of the inside eventually cracked one end of the loaf, and the inside attempted to escape that way, resulting in the bizarre shape you see here. 

That was bad enough. I had also forgotten that the loaf tin had been washed, and I neglected to grease it with oil or butter. The loaf stuck itself very firmly to the tin. Sometimes you can cut round them, but with this one, the bottom had stuck like glue, and it split.

Remember, when somebody sets themselves up to write about how to make bread, or do some other clever thing, they may not be as clever, or helpful, as they intend to be.

Maybe I should have quietly thrown this abomination in the bin, started another one, and made myself look good? Well, at least I am being truthful, and there are lessons to learn. Checking the tin to see if it needs greasing, scoring the top of the loaf properly, throwing water into the oven to create steam…

Today, we have learned, or relearned these things. The hard way.

Meanwhile, the sourdough is sitting sniggering. It’s not going near the oven until I am sure it’s completely ready. If it ever is. We can but hope.

Purely Rye Sourdough – Part 2

Day 2

Well, after a night resting in the fridge, the rye sourdough wasn’t looking as if it felt like co-operating. Using lots of flour, and quite a lot of care, I shaped it, and put it in the tin.

James Morton says “This is not like any other bread dough, and doesn’t take kindly to being shaped, so respect it and it will respect you back.”

I don’t know about that. It was reasonably bubbly when it came out of the bowl, but even though I handled it very carefully, it sat in the tin looking very resentful. I now have to rest it at room temperature for four to six hours, until it has doubled in size. From the sullen looks it gave me, I think it could easily take eight hours, or even more.

That presents a problem, as there is currently hardly any bread in the house, apart from a corner of the massive miche I made a few days ago. It has been hard work, eating my way through that, even though the crust fortunately became softer, and no longer threatens to break my teeth. [Pro tip: bullet-proof bread can be tamed by putting it in a plastic bag in the fridge, just the way you are supposed not to.]

I decided to go back to my bread baking roots, and make a white loaf, using the recipe I used for many years, before I read “Brilliant Bread”.

Using a pound and a half of very strong white flour [roughly 680g], a sachet of dried yeast, and a pint of water [about 590g] I made a lovely stretchy dough, that I will be able to cook while I’m waiting for the rye sourdough to stop sulking. I’ve rested it for half an hour, since this picture was taken, and will now knead and shape it, and put it in my other tin. Part 3 will be along fairly soon…

Purely Rye Sourdough – Part 1

Day One

I’ve decided to make a loaf of 100% rye sourdough bread. I love the flavour of rye when it’s part of a loaf, and besides, I think “pastrami on rye” sounds like a fine thing to eat. I’ll try it with supermarket pastrami first, and make my own pastrami later…

The recipe is from James Morton’s splendid book, “Brilliant Bread”, which I have been using with enthusiasm, and varying degrees of success, since it came out. It starts with 400g of rye flour. I’m using Dove’s Farm stoneground organic rye, which I bought in Tesco. If you can’t find that make, find something suitably similar. The plastic bowl I use looks tatty, I admit. I realised the other day that I’ve been using it for over 35 years. I probably ought to get a new one. Also in the bowl, but difficult to see, are 10g of salt. I’m a bit surprised by the amount of salt in James’s recipes, as he’s a doctor, and I thought salt was one of the things that gives me high blood pressure. Normally, I halve the amount of salt in his recipes, but for this one, I’m trying to reduce the number of things that can go wrong!

The next ingredients are 200g of rye sourdough starter, which you can see waiting in the jar, in the first picture, 40g of runny honey, and 300g of water. I’m using Greek honey, and Welsh water. Rye has very little gluten in it, which is why making bread from it is such a challenge. As a result, this dough has to be kneaded a lot, if the gluten is to develop properly. I used my little hand mixer for a full fifteen minutes, and followed that with a couple of minutes of stretching the dough with a scraper.

It looks reasonable, I think, but it’s visibly different from the stretchy dough that would result with wheat flour. At this point in the recipe, there are two choices. I can rest the dough for six hours at room temperature, and then continue with the bake, which looks as if it needs at least another six or seven hours, or I can rest it for three hours and then put it in the fridge overnight. The fridge wins.

Cthulhu in the kitchen…

You know how it is, when you are about to move house, and you don’t want to move anything unnecessary to your existence in the new place?

Yesterday, I found we still owned a large box of frozen calamari. I really don’t remember when I bought this. That label shows the old address of Wai Yee Hong, before they moved to their magnificent new building, so it has to be quite old. £4.90 for that amount of squid must have seemed a tremendous bargain, at the time. Maybe I thought I’d be able to separate a few at a time, or something?

It was obvious it would have to go, but I was, perhaps not surprisingly,  unable to find any recipes that had five pounds of squid in them. There was no way I was just going to throw it away; I’m far too stubborn, not to mention mean. 

Anyway, I set about defrosting the little beasties in a bowl of cold water, and after a while, I was able to start easing squids off the edge of the block, and cleaning them. Yes, they had been frozen just as they were, when caught, and many of them were holding tentacles with each other, as well.




Here’s the first attractive little beauty I was able to persuade to separate from the group. The bits you want are the tentacles and the body, without the eyes, guts, and the thing it has instead of a backbone, called the quill. Cut the tentacles off, fairly close to the eyes. The mouth parts are in between the tentacles, and should be removed, a fact I forgot. They aren’t harmful, or anything, but nobody seems to like the idea of leaving them in place. The larger ones have crunchy beak-like parts you might not enjoy eating.

Here’s the same little fellow, after I attacked him. You grab the remains of the head in one hand, and the body in the other, and pull. You should just about be able to see the translucent quill, there in the middle. That comes out quite easily, once you can loosen the end of it. And at the bottom, I have cut the body bag into a few rings and a triangular bit.

So, that was the first one done … I decided to count how many I had, but lost count somewhere after twenty …






It was time to look for recipes. I found an Italian one, for a squid and potato stew, on The Telegraph’s web site. It required a respectable amount of garlic, so I chose it. There’s a fancy Rick Stein one online, as well, but I didn’t have all the numerous ingredients he thinks should go in there.










Once you get going, the stew looks like this. 

After the tomatoes have gone in, it looks like this. After it has been cooked for an hour, the potatoes soften and thicken the stew, and the garlic becomes mild enough for the amount of it to be less terrifying. In fact it’s delicious, and very good comfort food.






In the next post, I tell you how I used the remaining three quarters of the squid.

Problems with recipe books.

I really like recipe books. Lots of people do. I can sit and read them, though I suspect this actually causes me to put on weight. But more people buy them and read them than actually try to make the food they describe. If you have more than a couple of recipe books, and have tried very many of the recipes, you will have encountered one or more of the following problems.
  • Photographs that are nothing like the result you get.
  • Ingredients hardly anyone sells.
  • Ingredients that have not been manufactured for years.
  • Disgusting ingredients.
  • Items missing from the ingredients list but in the method.
  • Items in the ingredients list that are not used in the method.
  • Incomprehensible procedures, and obscure terminology.
  • Steps missing from the method.
  • Preparatory steps part way through the method.
  • Method that is just a solid chunk of text.
  • Ludicrous measurements.


Photographs that are nothing like the result you get.


One of the causes of this is that recipe books often have really terrific photography, which takes time. So the food is actually photographed cold, which stops the picture being blurred by steam. And the photographer often constructs a beautiful composition by arranging the food carefully, which is easier if it is very undercooked. I don’t know if this Phoenix Cold Meat Combination was actually constructed by the photographer or the cook. Either way, it looks wonderful, would probably taste very good, and would be far too much like hard work unless you were trying to impress someone.







Ingredients hardly anyone sells.

That delicious-looking phoenix contains a small amount of abalone. If you want that, you are going to have to go to your favourite Chinese Supermarket. They will have it in tins, but it’s less edible than fresh abalone, according to my favourite Chinese cookery book. It costs a fortune, and you will have most of the tin left over. Do you have a recipe that requires three quarters of a tin of left over abalone? Nor do I.


Ingredients that have not been manufactured for years.


When we lived in Hong Kong, in the early 1960’s, we used to buy Daw Sen curry paste, because it was really good. I have been searching for it for the last five years, in every oriental supermarket I have visited, and on the Internet. (This was written over twenty years ago, and I still have not seen any.) I know how to search, and I know how to look at jars in shops. So it is understandable that I become irritated when I see recipes on the web that tell me to use Daw Sen curry paste, because it is so good. Like this one, for instance, quoted from a tediously Messianic vegetarian web site-
BRYANNA’S HUNAN-STYLE “DUCK” CURRY Serves 4
This is an excellent winter dish. It has all the flavor of a long-cooked stew, but is quick to make. The Chinese generally use an oil-based curry paste ( Daw Sen brand from Calcutta is good), which can be found in most Asian grocery stores, but a good-quality curry powder will do.
So I asked Bryanna if she really knew where it could be bought, and the reply was an airy “oh, just look in any oriental supermarket”. I politely replied that I had looked, and all my messages vanished from their web site. New ones I send don’t appear.

The fact is that these people have copied their recipes from somewhere else (probably “Recipe Hound”, who also mentions Daw Sen curry paste) without bothering to see if the ingredients are actually available. They have never cooked the recipe themselves, they are only interested in selling their faddy diets to misguided vegetarians in order to make large sums of money. Well, their web sites are long gone, but I’m just getting started…


Disgusting ingredients.


I am reasonably sure I will never want to cook any recipe that contains a “Hershey Bar” or a “Twinkie”, even if I accidentally find out what those things are.


Items missing from the ingredients but in the method.


This is absolutely infuriating. And it is always something you don’t have in the house.


Items in the ingredients that are not used in the method.


This is also quite annoying. At least you now have some of the ingredient in the house. I hope it wasn’t abalone.


Incomprehensible procedures, and obscure terminology.


I know, we all have to learn some time, and then the terminology is no longer obscure. If we are truly committed to this noble art, we must be prepared to learn how to spatch-cock small creatures. Except abalone. But it is annoying to have to stop cooking your steak and find out how to de-glaze the pan.


Steps missing from the method.


What on Earth am I supposed to do with this abalone…


Preparatory steps part way through the method section.


This one is a real pain. Having to stop cooking, take the octopus outside, and whack it against the wall for an hour to tenderise it before you can continue is fairly irritating. When you find out that you must then marinate the octopus for three days, you may wish to tenderise the author.


Method that is just a solid chunk of text.


The author cannot be bothered to make things easier for you with a clear layout. Numbered steps would have been a start. Increasingly, recipe books are “step by step”. Mostly they have four photographs, each with some text underneath. Perhaps some day they will use a sufficiently large number of small steps…


Ludicrous measurements.


I know most American recipe books use cups as the only way to measure things, and I don’t mean to offend the authors very much, but how big is a cup? Also, let us not even talk about recipes where some things are measured in “cups”, unless everything in the recipe is in the same units. Then we can at least determine the volumes of the various ingredients by ratio.

Also, let us calmly throw away recipes that say silly things like “three tablespoons of butter”. Would that be level, heaped or a big block of butter balanced on the spoon? How big is a tablespoon? We have several sizes.

Mixing pounds, grams, cups and tablespoons in a recipe? Hanging is too good for ’em.


So what do I suggest?


I had been re-writing some of my favourite Chinese recipes using a format of my own devising, twenty years ago, intending to use them on some recipe pages. I devised the format when I was trying to write a book with the working title “How to Cook Like a Computer Programmer”. It never got finished, and I have some doubts about whether it would ever have been accepted by a publisher.

The basis of the format is the TV cooks’ ready prepared containers of ingredients, but I found it just wasn’t general enough for every recipe you might want to cook. However, it did work well for most Chinese food, where many (but by no means all) dishes are cooked rapidly from carefully prepared ingredients.

You need a number of containers. Cleaned yoghourt pots are acceptable, but lots of small plastic food containers or glass dishes will be easier to maintain in the long run.

The ingredient list is pretty much the same as everyone else’s, except that I organised it according to which pot the ingredient went in.

The preparation proceeded in a number of discrete steps, each of which resulted in a prepared container of food. These can include cooking steps.

Finally, the containers are all combined during the cooking process, using a method much like the other recipes have.

Sometimes, you have things in your cupboard that no recipe requires…


I was given this tin by my brother Stephen. Eventually, I ate the contents. If you see a tin like this, you might wonder what the contents taste like. I am unable to describe them. They were drier than I expected, and less piquant than I had hoped.


Blowing up ducks, and other matters.

Long, long ago, I lived in Hong Kong for three years, with my parents and the rest of our family. Every so often, we ate meals in really good restaurants there. Some of the meals we ate were so good that I can still remember what the food looked and tasted like.

Later, when I was back in England, I ate in Chinese restaurants, but with very few exceptions, they were a huge disappointment. The stuff the Chinese takeaways sold was almost always even more disappointing.

When I visited Hong Kong later, while working for the Blue Funnel Line, we had some food cooked on a bicycle, and that was good too.

I thought it quite odd that a man with a fire in an oil drum, in the street by Stanley harbour, could cook up better food than people in England with well equipped kitchens. He did not have anything more to work with than a very hot fire, a wok that was utterly black, and very fresh ingredients. His kitchen was mounted on a bicycle, and he had a few basic items prepared. We used to walk past and give our order, and go up to the flat. Five minutes later, he would be at the door with the food. He clearly was doing something very different from the restaurants in England. Thinking about it, I would say the major differences were that he cooked each dish from raw when it was wanted, and that he did it very fast to conserve his fire. His other strength was that he only had a few things on the bike, so the number of possible dishes was very limited.

Most Chinese restaurants in England have lots of dishes on the menu, and I suspect the components for these sit in the kitchens for a long time. There is usually a slow flow of customers, all ordering the same range of dishes they feel safe with. The restaurant in England that I remember for being better than the rest is one of the huge ones in Soho, where they serve thousands of meals a day, and the waiters are notorious for trying to rush your choice of food.

A lot of Chinese food is cooked fast, from fresh ingredients. Why? Well, if you don’t bump your chicken off before you want to eat it, it will be bigger when you get to it. And fresher – worth thinking about if nobody has invented refrigerators yet. And there was a history of fuel shortage in China. The wok is a very efficient device, and it works best with a big fire for a short cooking time, which requires you to have the food in small pieces and keep it moving all the time. That is why the steak just isn’t a Chinese dish.


Woks



Often, somebody will claim to have a wok, and it will turn out to be some sort of wide pan with a flat bottom. Or it will have a coating of Teflon. Well, I hope they are happy with their purchases. Those things may be very nice, but they are not woks.

Woks have round bottoms, so you can use a small pool of oil to fry the food. They have bare metal surfaces. If you treat them wrongly, they go rusty. You can buy a real wok from a Chinese supermarket. There’s a high probability it will actually have been made by a company in London, called Hancock’s Woks. I can heartily recommend their woks. It will be oily, to stop it rusting. Scrub the oil off the wok, as it is not cooking oil. This should be the only time you use detergent on your wok, and you must ensure you rinse it all off. Put the wok on the gas ring, and turn the gas up high. Do not forget to light the gas. If you do not have a gas cooker, move to a different house.

Heat it for ages, then a bit longer. Add ground-nut oil, and spread it all over the cooking surface with kitchen towel. There will be a lot of smoke. Heat and oil again, if you like. You just created a non-stick surface NASA would envy, if they didn’t love Teflon so much.

Now, in the unlikely event that anything sticks to the surface you just created, scrape it off with a wooden spatula. Cleaning is done with a damp cloth, and is followed by heating and oiling. If you use your wok at really high temperatures, the food will rarely stick, and you can use metal implements without worrying about scratching the wok.

Preparation.


Here we go. You cannot cook Chinese food by starting something cooking, and going round the kitchen finding things to add, then peeling them and chopping them before adding them. It all needs to be ready to go, the way you see the television cooks do it. Like this…






































These are the ingredients for a four course Chinese meal, part cooked in some cases, and all ready for final cooking. From left to right, we have –
  • Sweet and sour pork.
  • Chicken and walnuts.
  • Chicken and sweetcorn chowder.
  • Beef and black beans with green peppers.
Can you spot what is missing from the photograph? The third column should have had a small tin of sweetcorn in it. I took the picture over twenty years ago, I have to admit, and it’s too late to change it now.


Carefully cleaned plastic food containers are useful, but these days I prefer proper dishes. Three of the tubs contain meat that has already been part cooked in the wok. The shorter the delay before finishing the cooking, the better. So you get it all ready like the picture. And you check everything is present… 

The tubs at the front contain carefully prepared garnishes. Too fancy? I don’t think so, and ten minutes extra work will have your guests amazed by how good the food looks, as well as the taste.


Confession and recipe



This was all taken from my (very) old web site, and I never finished typing all the recipes in. Most of our recipe books are currently in storage, so all I’m going to put here is how to make the Chicken and Sweetcorn Chowder, which is a very popular dish. I served it third in the meal this is about, because the soup doesn’t have to be at the beginning…

Start by making spring onion brushes, as they need to sit in iced water until they open up and look pretty.

In your saucepan, put –
  • 2 Tablespoons of groundnut oil
  • 900 ml Chicken stock
  • 2 Teaspoons of Chinese rice wine (Shao Xing)
  • 350g Can of sweetcorn, drained
Don’t start cooking yet! In your first little dish, marinate these things –
  • 50g Uncooked boneless chicken breast meat, finely chopped
  • 1 Teaspoon of ginger juice
  • A few drops of Sesame oil
  • 1/2 Teaspoon of sugar
  • Salt and pepper
In the second little dish, mix up 3 or 4 teaspoons of cornflour and just enough water to make it into a fairly thick paste.

In the third little dish, put a beaten egg.

Now you can start cooking! This is going to be quick, so have your serving dishes, spoons and spring onion brushes ready.
  1. Bring the contents of the saucepan to the boil.
  2. Stir in the marinated chicken, and keep stirring for a minute, at most.
  3. Stirring continually, pour the cornflour paste in slowly. Stir until it has thickened.
  4. Keep stirring, and pour the beaten egg in as slowly as you can, so that the egg forms long, thin strands.
  5. Stop stirring, and serve the chowder, garnished with the spring onion brushes.


Lobster thermonuclear

Lobster thermonuclear

Yes, I know. Much too silly. I mean lobster thermidor, which is named after the month of Thermidor in the new calendar of the French revolution. It’s a dish I’ve eaten in Greek restaurants, and it truly is among the foods of the gods. Tavernas don’t have it, as it’s much too posh for them.


I happened to spot two frozen lobsters in our local Tesco, marked down from £8 each to £4 each, and pounced on them straight away. Obviously, I needed a recipe, and I found one on the BBC food site. Here it is.

The recipe starts with lobster that is already cooked, but these ones had only been blanched, which apparently separates the flesh from the shell.

They were supposed to take twelve hours to defrost in the fridge, but that wasn’t anywhere near long enough, and I eventually ended up defrosting them completely in cold water.

There were two possible ways to cook them, boiling or steaming. Boiling would have required a big pan full of boiling water, so I steamed them instead – much more energy efficient – and that took eight minutes. The claws fell off when I took the lobsters out of the cold water, but it made them much easier to fit into the steamer.

Being a moderately efficient cook, some of the time, I started the sauce while the lobsters were steaming. I also put the oven on to heat up. The grill here is useless. If you have a decent grill (or a broiler, if you are to the left of the Atlantic Ocean) use that, it’s what the recipe says.

To the left, you can see a couple of chopped shallots cooking in butter. By the time the picture on the right was taken, I had added the fish stock, wine, and cream to the sauce, and boiled it fairly hard to reduce it until it was fairly thick. 

At that point, I added the mustard, chopped parsley, and lemon juice, and a quick grind of black pepper.



The next major operation was cutting the freshly steamed lobsters in half, which was easier than I had thought it would be. Perhaps the steaming softens the shells? The only difficulty at this point is that the lobsters are too hot to hold easily. Scoop out as much lobster meat as you can, remove the meat from the claws, chop it all up, put it back into the lobsters, and pour the sauce over it. Add the grated parmesan, and grill or bake until they look done. This one looks done!


Serve, eat. Drink wine. 

It tasted pretty much as it should have done. We enjoyed it.

The only real problem was quantity. There really isn’t much meat in a lobster of that size, sadly, even when you get the meat from the claws.




In fact, all too soon, this was all that was left!

The frozen lobsters are only just good value when they are marked down to half price. If I’d paid the full £8 for each, I would have been pretty annoyed with them.

Still, there is a lot of lobster flavour on that plate, so I put all the remains in a stock pot, and boiled them up for an hour or two. I broke all the shell pieces up, so I got all the goodness from the legs and other tricky bits. After straining the results, I had a stock with an astounding flavour of lobster. It made a fish soup that I really enjoyed.


I’m thinking of making a different Thermidor dish, using a large bag or two of prawns, with the sauce and cheese poured over them. It won’t have all the flavour of lobster, but it should be pretty close…