It’s that time of the year again. No matter how hard you try, you can’t outrun Christmas. The overweight man with the odd red clothes and the bushy white beard will get you in the end. FACT.
So in the spirit of giving, here’s Handtomouth’s Yearly Christmas wish list should you be struggling to find the food lover in your life something to buy, or if any readers out there are feeling generous.
1. I totally fell in love with Lodge cast iron cookwear whilst in the states, and this double sided griddle is on the top of my Christmas list. Heavy in both senses of the word.
2. Penguin’s ‘Great Food’ box set. A collection of 20 of so titles celebrating food writing from the past 400 years. From David to Roden, Dumas to Waters this would be a handsome collection for any food lovers book shelves.
3. Sigg Heritage water bottle. I love Sigg’s precision engineered aluminium water bottles, but have never actually owned one. This one could change all that.
4. Labour & Wait Bib Apron. Going into one of Labour & Wait’s shops is like going back in time. In a good way. They have a really nicely curated selection of stuff with a practical, utilitarian bent, of which this apron is a perfect example.
5. Dan Lepard’s ‘Short & Sweet’. What Dan the man doesn’t know about baking, isn’t worth knowing (probably). As I’m sure you know, this is his latest book, and by all accounts it’s a winner.
6. I found these Cheese Making Kits in a similar post on Mrs Marmite Lover’s blog and thought that they were a great gift idea. I love the idea of making m own cheese, now all I need is a cave to age it in.
7. I really want one of these Opinel Bread Knives. I’m a big fan of all their stuff, and if they’re good enough for Richard Bertinet, they’re good enough for me.
8. Hahn Fish Corkscrew. I came across one of these recently having not seen one since I was a nipper. They actually work really well, and I’m pretty sure could be described as a design classic.
9. Sipsmith’s Damson Vodka. Their sloe gin was on my Christmas list last year, and I got a bottle from my old dear. So maybe I’ll have the same luck this year. With tasting notes including plum, cherry and spicy cinnamon, this sounds like just the thing to be slugging back in front of the fire.
10. Subscription to Lucky Peach. It may be almost painfully hip, but David Chang’s food magazine is a great read, beautifully designed / illustrated, and it’s got cojones.
So…….back in time a few weeks we hit the last stop on our trip, New York. It’s been a couple of years since I was last there, and to paraphrase DOOM, it still is a hell of a finer town. Knowing we only had a few days of our adventure left, we rolled up our sleeves and ate our way right to the core. I’m probably going to do some longer posts on a couple of other discoveries, and I didn’t make it to The Dutch which I REALLY wanted to check out, but here are a few highlights.
Where to start…hmmmm. The first time I went to NY, probably back in ‘97, my mate Matt took me to The Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. I vividly remember sitting in the back room saloon surrounded by brash New Yoikers shouting at each other and guzzling plates of oysters whilst I sat slurping a New England Clam Chowder in a happy jet-lagged daze. The wife and I decided to pay it a visit this time, and I’m happy to say nothing’s really changed. It’s certainly a tourist attraction, but it is still rammed with every shape and size of New Yorker having lunch, doing deals and chewing the fat (oysters). We sucked down a couple of zinc-ey Long Island Bluepoints, a bowl of that creamy, soothing chowder and a very tasty crab-cake sarnie all, washed down with a couple of glasses of super chilled Sauvignon Blanc. As far as classic New York lunches go, it’s hard to beat, and good to see an institution like this still chugging away.
Week 15. More cake. But as the title of this post ‘hilariously’ suggests, we moved away from the predominantly flour based sponges and in to mousse cake territory.
Most of these cakes followed a similar format. Some kind of sponge base, ‘inserts’ made either from more sponge or set crème anglaise based layers flavoured with anything from lemon and raspberry to mint, surrounded with some kind of mousse set with gelatin. These cakes get finished with different techniques. Glazes, cake walls, ‘pate decor’, we even got to get the chocolate spray-gun out.
Here are a few examples (for some reason I didn’t get as many pics as usual):
This may not make me any friends in San Francisco, but we’ve found eating out here a bit hit and miss. I think it’s great that the food scene is so vibrant and entrepreneurial, but it feels like too often that food takes the back seat over gimmicks, word of mouth and social media buzz (liquid nitrogen cooled ice-cream, anyone?).
If I’m honest, a lot of the places people rave about, we’ve just found a bit ‘meh’, and thus far, there have been very few places that have really blown us away. But Mission Chinese Food is one that we could eat at every week.
The guys who set it up used to go under the name Mission Street Food and (from what the internet tells me) were like high end food truckers, blending classical and modern culinary training with street foods from all over the world. Around a year ago, they decided to set up something a bit more permanent, and like a hermit crab set up in a shell of a former run down Chinese restaurant in The Mission, and Mission Street Food became Mission Chinese Food.
So goodbye folding shed-load of butter into dough, and hello……folding a truck load of butter into dough.
We started our first week of pastry by making three different kinds of puff. The classic, which is sheeted and folded in a similar way to croissant dough, but gets a few extra folds to give it the lift that I’m sure you’re all familiar with. So called ‘blitz’, which is a quick puff that you make by hand, which gives you less predictable layers and is more suitable for more rustic products. And finally, the big dawg. Inverted puff.
Inverted puff is crazy. Not only do you add in 50% more butter than average puff, but your ‘beurrage’ (the butter you fold into the dough through various folds) is mixed with flour and wrapped around the OUTSIDE of the dough as opposed to locked in as with croissants and classic puff. Not sure who the first person to have done this would have been as it’s basically counter-intuitive, but he or she must have been an evil genius as the resulting pastry is pretty frikkin’ amazing. Melt-in-the-mouth-buttery-taste-sational. And before you ask, yes that is a word. Go look it up.
A couple of weeks ago it was East 17, and now blam! I’m hitting you with an Ultravox reference. High brow shizzle I think you’ll agree. And why did up this 80s relic? Because last week we started the Viennoiserie section of our course.
Viennoiserie is the name given to all kinds of yeasted, enriched doughs. From croissants, to Danish pastries, sticky buns to brioche, we’re talking about doughs enriched with sugar, eggs, milk and butter. Lots of butter. I’ve never seen so much of the stuff than in the past week.
We’re going to be getting in to lamination next week, the technique for making croissants amongst other things, but the breads we made last week were mixed in a similar way to what we’ve become familiar with, even if the formulas were in some cases a lot more complicated.
We started off the week slowly, making a range of products based around brioche and sweet roll doughs. With most of these we had to adjust our mixing to incorporate the sugar and butter after the dough had developed in strength in the mixer. The reason for this is that both inhibit the development of gluten, and if added at the beginning you end up mixing for bloody ages and your dough comes off the mixer too warm, which in turn effects fermentation. Best avoided in other words.
More tasty food based beats and rhymes, this time courtesy of LA based MCs TiRon & Ayomari.
I don’t know much about these guys, but like a good recipe, article or food porn, this vid made me hungry. Oh yeah, and one of them rhymes Parmesan with Marzipan, which made me smile. Enjoy.
Well it’s been a full on year, so I’m looking forward to heading to my folks in Cornwall, kicking back, eating some tasty Christmas food, drinking some good wine, and hopefully receiving a few choice gifts too.
Hand To Mouth will be back in early January with more food related shizzle, but until then I’ll leave you with probably my favourite Christmas tune, The Waitresses’ ‘Christmas Wrapping’.
Hand To Mouth is a blog about food. Eating it. Cooking it. Reviewing it. Reading about it. And everything in between.
I’ll be regularly posting recipes, reviews of some of my favourite places and opinion about anything food related that grabs my eye. Hopefully there’ll be a few laughs along the way, and I promise not to cut the cheese.
If you like what you see please let me know, and equally don’t be afraid of throwing a few rotten tomatoes my way if you don’t.
BIG thanks to Tom Hardcore at Nation for the blog design.
