A friend was stuck on the train the other day with a painful dilemma. She had a full bottle of wine and a raging post work thirst, but no corkscrew. What to do?
I immediately thought of this amazing clip of an inebriated Frenchman on the streets of Paris opening a bottle of wine with just a shoe. Not sure how it would have gone down on the train, but incredibly it works, so I thought I’d share it. You never know, it might come in handy in the run up to Christmas.
Vive la France!
My latest, greatest baking discovery is the Dutch Oven I bought a few weeks ago. Recommended by the tutors at the SFBI as one of the best ways to cook bread at home, they yet again have proved they know their onions as it’s already helped me knock out a bunch of consistently great bread in the kitchen of our rented apartment.
The reasons it works so well are two fold. Firstly, the cast iron retains heat brilliantly, and as you’re baking in a sealed vessel your bread is less likely to be subject to any fluctuations in oven temp, which means a good even bake. The second reason is that it the lid traps steam, so there’s no need to fanny about with trays of boiling water or spraying your loaves pre-baking.
You could try something like a Le Creuset, as used baking Jim Lahey’s no knead loaf (where you almost pour the dough in), will work OK, but the Lodge Combo-Cooker I acquired is the business. Firstly, it was about the quarter of the price of a Le Creuset (they are quite a bit more expensive in the UK I’m afraid), and It’s other advantage is that you can invert it using the lid / skillet as the base to bake on which helps give a better crust colour while you’re venting the loaf. NB. You don’t have to have a Dutch Oven to make this formula, but it will give you better results.
After a pretty disappointing batch of rocket planted earlier in the Summer, we’re giving chard a go in our kitchen window box.
We’ve planted some Swiss and Rainbow, both of which seem to be settling in nicely, and all being well should provide us with tasty leaves throughout the Autumn and early winter.
They look pretty good too.
Beyond a Magimix or a hand mixer, I’m not big on kitchen gadgets, but this little discovery has become indispensable in a very short space of time.
The Herb Saver pretty much does what it says on the tin. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of spending above the odds for a bunch of fresh herbs at the supermarket, only to find that two or three days later that they are wilted, soggy and unusable. For those of us without a River Cottage style herb garden and limited outside space, there aren’t many alternatives but to keep buying packaged herbs and dealing with the fact that some will go to waste. Until now.
The Herb Saver gets round the wilting issue by keeping the herbs cool and hydrated. You fill the bottom reservoir with cold water, stand your herbs upright (stalks down) in the water, close them into the ‘chamber’ and then pop into the fridge.
In our experience, the herbs will keep at least three times longer that usual, which has got to be a good thing, right? I’m sure you could achieve similar results with a jam jar, but it also looks good, and fits perfectly into our fridge door.
You can buy the Herb saver on Firebox for £13, which means after a few weeks it will have pretty much paid for itself. Recommended.
It’s been around for a while, but I first read about Jim Lahey’s ‘no knead bread‘ in a Saveur magazine when I was in New York last year. I’d already got the bread baking bug, and the idea of a loaf that required no kneading seemed a bit odd, even a bit sacrilegious. I did a bit of research on line, and found out that everyone raves about the loaf, and it basically put Lahey’s Sullivan Street Bakery on the map.
Anyway, it definitely got me interested. How could a loaf requiring so little work be so good? Life just isn’t like that. So I gave it a go. The loaf is cooked in a cast iron pot, a bit like an Australian damper, so you’ll need a Le Creuset or something similar for it to work.
Ingredients
3 cups (430g) flour
1½ cups (345g or 12oz) water
¼ teaspoon (1g) yeast
1¼ teaspoon (8g) salt
Olive oil
Rye flour (for dusting)
Method
Mix all of the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix together for a minute or so to form a ’shaggy’ dough. Transfer the dough to a larger bowl oiled with some olive oil. NB. the dough will expand to around 4 times the size, so make sure your bowl is big enough. Cover with clingfilm and let the dough develop for 12-18 hours at room temperature.
Having wanted to be able to bake my own bread for a couple of years, I finally got my arse in gear in January and started doing it. To start with I picked up recipes and techniques from the web, and the early results, whilst edible, weren’t exactly great.
Then I came across ‘River Cottage Bread’; a small but sensible handbook on the subject, which has basically become my bread bible. The book contains lots of recipes for breads from standard loaves, to ciabatta, naan and beyond, which are great, but for me the most interesting part of the book is the more practical stuff.
From my limited experience, it seems to me that once you’ve got the basics of making dough down, you can freestyle to a certain extent. But the stuff that is more rigid, and vital to creating consistently good bread, are the techniques and tips, and thats why this book has become so invaluable.
For example, the book explains that you need to try and re-create the conditions of a bakers bread oven as closely as possible in your own home. It recommends that as well as having your oven as high as possible for the initial baking process, that you should also have a tray of boiling water in the oven to generate steam, as this creates optimum conditions for the bread to rise. This is the sort of stuff that you don’t discover by trial error, and kind of need to know. As you might expect, there’s also lots of practical advice on rising, proving, how to prepare your dough properly for the oven and so on. (more…)
For the past couple of years my mate Ollie has been organising a hog roast, and last weekend was what has now been dubbed as ‘Hogfest 09′.
It’s basically a gathering for friends and family at his folk’s place in Shropshire, culminating in a hog roast. I know it all sounds a bit ‘River Cottage’, but for me escaping London and getting primal with a whole pig, a big fire and bunch of booze is my idea of a good weekend. Ollie usually lives in Cairo where this kind of pork based entertaining doesn’t go down too well, so for him I think it’s also rare opportunity to feast on pork with impunity.
The preparation process is relatively simple. The pig gets scored all over with a Stanley Knife, given a good rub down with olive oil, and then sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper. No herbs or any other ‘fancy stuff’. (more…)
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