In progress

As updates go, this isn’t actually an update. More an apology for the lack of updates, for the benefit of anybody who cares to check in regularly. Private catering commitments seem to have been taking up every hour recently. But with Spring produce now in good supply and some time for trying a bunch of mentally-filed mad ideas and techniques on the horizon, updates will be forthcoming. Some of them might even be interesting…

Country File

Yet another riff on forests, soils and the like. Playing around here with a few components, flavours and presentation ideas, based – rather improbably – on the The Forest of Dean. Inspiration came from the genuinely wild boar now being supplied over at Restaurant Allium.

Winter Woodland: chestnut+applewood smoked 36-hour rib with sticky birch sauce, oak-flavoured acorn, mimetic bark, herb mousseline, pickled crab apple, yeast+verjus+nut soil, morel + sorrel, roast chestnut cream, brassica moss.

Self-Preservation

Few things make the seasons pass faster than getting older and watching children grow, though attempting to cook in a way that’s true to nature and resisting the urge to buy in ingredients from warmer climes comes a close second. Just as you get used to the fine summer harvest, it disappears to be replaced by autumn fare, and then – in the blink  of an eye – it’s all change again and you’re hurtling headlong into winter.  This time of the year puts a serious crimp on the availability of fresh produce in this part of the world.

Little wonder we all used to be so well versed in the fine art of preservation, using any means necessary – freezing, acid, sugar, alcohol, dehydration, salting, even sand – to add longevity to supplies gathered during brighter days. For anybody serious about food seasonality, tapping into these age-old techniques is imperative. But that doesn’t necessarily mean slavishly following the old rules….

Originality so often comes, not from freshly minted inventions or brand new ideas, but by asking ‘what if?’. The greatest strides can be made simply by taking something out of its comfort zone or placing it in a new context. Everybody wonders what the next big thing will be in gastronomy, without really considering that the most influential chefs of recent times – Ferran and Albert Adria – helped change the face of modern cookery, not by dreaming up convoluted new techniques, but by having the gumption to take processes and ingredients out of the commercial food production laboratory and into the restaurant kitchen…. and then the skill and imagination to be inspired by this new bag of tricks.

Free from the shackles of high-sugar gelling, what else can we make jam, jelly, pickle and marmalade out of? What happens when we go beyond the obvious with acids? And how about alkalis? Are there any new applications for curing? Okay, so we’ve all gone retro and now have a bale of hay in the kitchen – but what else do our collective sense memories suggest can be used for smoking food? And what else can we smoke, for that matter? How best to infuse, what to do it to and how to blend it? Is there more to drying and candying than meets the eye? What don’t we freeze that might actually transformed by the process? And just how do we make use of the fruits of these labours? How about forgetting about sweet, savoury, and any other preconceptions, and using intuition, imagination and maybe a little chemistry to find out what really does pair up well?

Cooking is so often a matter of learning by repetition, of days filled with ‘what next?’. Next time we shouldn’t be afraid to a try a little ‘what if?’. What’s the worst that can happen?

Winter Savory: Savoury Candy Floss

That wasn’t so hard. Took two years to get around to trying out the solution I had in mind, but it works like a charm.

Last time around I simply made vinegar powder as a way to give regular candy floss a sweet and sour flavour to pair with hay-baked lamb. (Visit restaurant allium to try to the Lamb with Hay & Wool dish for yourself.)

This candy floss (or cotton candy, if you prefer), however, delivers the same great texture but with pretty much no sweetness – making it ideal as a vehicle for strong (or subtle) savoury flavours and accompaniments.

Pictured here with salt and espellette pepper seasoning.

Melt In The Mouth

Another culinary trompe l’oeil, for possible inclusion on a dessert-in-progress. The apple and crumble will be real, some of the blackberries less so…

New Forest

This blog began way back in Spring 2011, with a peek at one of several nature-inspired desserts I was developing. A little further down the road and – just in time for autumn – here’s the final dish, tweaked for service and rolling out right now.

Forest Floor: Hazelnut praline parfait pine cone, lemon thyme yoghurt ice cream, malted nut m-cake and chocolate soil, sloe gin berries, yoghurt sherbet snow, sweet cicely.

Visit restaurant allium to find out more…

Sausage Stuffing Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

How to make your own sausages without blowing the bank (or ending up with muscles like Popeye)

Step 1: Go to ebay or your local hardware / fish store.

Step 2: Spend 15 bucks or less on a silicone caulking gun / boilie bait gun with an aluminium body.

Step 3: Fill gun with freshly made sausage or salami mix. Screw tight. Place casing over the end of the gun.

Step 4: Pull trigger. The end.

First Frost

First Frost: mint yoghurt ‘ice sheets’ over rose gel, edible flowers, crisp autumn leaf croquant, freeze dried rocks, chocolate soil, sweet cicely, red-veined sorrel

Sourdough Made Simple

A sequel of sorts to my slightly long-winded look at the science of sourdough, boiling it all down to a few practical pointers for creating, maintaining and baking with your sourdough starter at home. Does the Internet really need another one of these? Possibly not. Also, the idea was to keep this short and sweet. Oops…

PART ONE: Create your starter

1. Mix together flour and water. Any flour is suitable, but the higher the ash content the better, so you’re best off with rye, followed by wholewheat, and then whites such as strong bread flours. Place in a covered container – you want it to breathe, but don’t want flies and the like getting in. A ‘Le Parfait’ jar is perfect.
2. Find somewhere warm – you want an ambient temperature of 25-30 degrees centigrade. This may be in a low oven (or with only the pilot light on), in an airing cupboard, or – if you’re a real fancypants –   in (or on the lid of) a temperature controlled water bath.
3. Leave it for a couple of days in your chosen warm environment, giving it a stir occasionally to aerate. It should start to bubble slightly. It’s alive!
4. Feed the starter every day – add equal quantities of flour and water (around 50g each should be fine) per day. Again rye or wholewheat are best. Aerate each time. If possible, split the feed into 2 or 3 feeds per day. Once per day, discard most of the mix before you replenish it. This gets rid of the exhausted flour and encourages quicker yeast growth.
5. After around 7 days you should have a fairly sweet and mildly sour smelling, nicely bubbling starter. There is, however, always an element of unpredictability when creating a sourdough starter. If it hasn’t worked (see PART TWO first), then throw it away, sterilise your storage jar and try again.

NOTE: Creating your very own starter can be fun, but for guaranteed results and a better chance of longer term starter stability you’re better off nabbing a healthy bit of sourdough from elsewhere – a baker, a friend or the Internet. All it takes is a spoonful or even a piece of starter that’s been frozen or dried out, added at step one above to get things going in the right direction.

PART TWO: Dealing with a faulty sourdough starter

1. So your sourdough has gone belly up or your attempt at creating a starter from scratch doesn’t seem to have worked? Don’t throw it away just yet. First, sniff it and look at its colour. If it smells awful or there’s yellow, green, or obvious signs of mould then chuck it, otherwise…
2.  If it looks muddy then that just means it’s separated and that it probably needs a good feed. Check your storage temperature (lower is better for yeast), make sure you feed the little guy three times a day for a while, and try adjusting the flour to water ratio to form a wetter starter for a while.
3. If your starter smells too vinegary, then either make it wetter, try raising the storage temp (but not beyond 35 degrees C) or do both. Feed and see how it is after another 3 or 4 days.
4. If your starter smells like nail varnish remover, then lower the storage temperature and, again, feed for a few days more.
5. Your starter is yeasty but doesn’t seem particularly sour? Time to raise the storage temp a little. Also consider making the starter a little more fluid for a few days.

PART THREE: Long-term sourdough care

1. If you’re going to make bread every 4-7 days then keep your sourdough in that warm storage spot. Try to feed it three times a day for 2-3 days before each use, otherwise once a day should keep it happy. Remember to check the smell and adjust the heat and fluidity as required (see PART TWO).
2. If you don’t need the starter for a while then you can put it in the fridge. Yeast and lactic acid bacteria activity will slow right down and eventually halt. When you need to use it again, bring it back out a few days in advance, and either stir all the gunk back together or discard the dirty liquid at the top. Go back into intense 3 times a day feeding mode just to get it nice and bubbly/sour again.
3. For ultra long storage you can try freezing or dehydrating your starter. All you need is a couple of spoonfuls. To dehydrate it, simply spread it thin onto a plate and place in the fridge for a few days until dry. To bring it back to life go back to step 1 in PART ONE, and add it as you would a sample of somebody else’s starter.

NOTE: It’s worth freezing or dehydrating a portion of a healthy sourdough, just to give yourself a backup plan in case your lovely starter take  a turn for the worse somewhere down the line.

PART FOUR: Using your soudough

1. If you’ve been changing the fluidity of your starter to tweak its properties then you want to adjust the mix just before usage to get a 1:1 ratio. This will then work with any sourdough recipe you choose, or at least make it easier to calculate the correct amount.
2. Been feeding your starter rye or wholewheat but want to create a pristine white sourdough loaf or baguette? Just make sure you switch to white flour for the last three days before usage, remembering to discard most of the old mix each time.
3. Don’t forget that sourdough takes much longer to rise. Adjust the first and final rise times accordingly if adapting a recipe with baker’s yeast, and also remember that you’ll need to cook at higher temperatures to get the same level of browned crust.
4. Remember the bit about throwing away most of your starter every day? You don’t have to chuck it in the bin. It can be added to a basic bread recipe alongside a (reduced amount of) baker’s yeast to make a sort of hybrid loaf. Even better it can be use as the basis for a superb batter for fish and pretty much anything else you want to deep fry.
5. You can check to make sure your starter is healthy enough to bake with by mixing a tablespoon with 100g of flour, 70g of water and 2g of salt, and checking to make sure it rises by 50% after around five hours.
6. The ideal ratio of sourdough starter to fresh ingredients is 20 percent. Most recipes stick roughly around this area. Here’s an example recipe…

BASIC SOURDOUGH BREAD (technique shamelessly adapted from Dan Lepard)

Ingredients: 200g of sourdough, 500g of flour, 320-340g of water, 10g of salt.

Roughly mix together by hand or with a mixer. Leave for a few minutes and then form into a ball on a floured or oiled surface Push the dough, fold it back over, turn again and repeat a few more times. Leave it for 10 minutes more and then do it all again. Do this 3-5 times in total and leave until expanded by 50% from original size. Shape your loaf (watch this youtube video for some techniques), leave until risen by 50% again. Place in an oven pre-heated to 220-240 degrees centigrade for at least an hour, placing a pan with freshly boiled water underneath in the oven. If possible don’t use fan-assisted heating, at least not for the first 10-15 minutes. Turn down the heat to 200-200 degrees at this point. Cook for a further 20 to 35 minutes, depending on whims of your oven and final desired crust, consistency and moistness.

AND FINALLY: Go buy yourself some good bread books. Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf or Short & Sweet (bread and much, much more), Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, plus Dough and Crust by Richard Bertinet are all worth your time and money.

Intermission

71% Valhrona shell, liquid sloe gin centre. Never gets old…