Its as cold as a witches tit here in London at the moment. The kind of cold that gets into your bones, and wont shift until it’s made to. Which is where this chorizo and chickpea stew comes in. A bit of a riff on the Spicy Spanish Stew I do, this is hotter, spicier, smokier and has all the ingredients to give you that Ready Brek glow, but without having to shovel some unpleasant gruel down your neck.

I use Brindisa’s picante chorizo, as I like it the best, but you can use whichever cooking chorizo floats your boat. Don’t use the salami like cured stuff, as it doesn’t really work for this recipe. Lets crack on.

Ingredients (serves 3-4)

6 cooking chorizo

1 onion, finely chopped

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 medium hot red chilli, de-seeded and finely chopped

1 tsp smoked paprika

1 tsp maras biberi

1 tin of chopped tomatoes (400g)

1 tbs tomato puree

1 tin chick peas (400g)

200ml white wine

500 ml chicken stock

Fresh thyme

Salt & black pepper to taste

Chopped flat leaf parsley to finish

Method

Step one is to skin the chorizo. Run your knife along each sausage and peel off the skin, before chopping each one into 5 or 6 pieces. Next get a heavy based casserole dish or sauce pan good and hot on your hob, and then chuck in the chorizo pieces. Your fry these dry, and after a minute or so you’ll see why. The chorizo gives out lots of lovely paprika infused fat, so there’s no need to add any to the pan. Nicely brown the chorizo all over, and then remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and set aside.

Using the chorizo oil left behind, fry off your onion, garlic and pepper. Tear off the leaves of a few sprigs of thyme and add these too. Once your onions are slightly browned, add the tomato puree, paprika and maras biberi to the pan. Give it all a good stir for 10 seconds or so, and then add the white wine.

Return the chorizo, stirring it into the veg and wine, and once the alcohol has had a chance to burn off, add the chopped tomatoes and chicken stock. Bring this all up to a simmer, and then add the chick peas. Give the sauce a taste, and season with salt and pepper if you feel it’s needed. Once you’re happy, cover the pot and let it gently bubble away for 20 minutes or so.

After this time, remove the lid and continue to simmer for another quarter of an hour. You want to reduce the sauce by around a quarter, so it gets a bit thicker, and the flavors intensify. Once you’ve got the desired consistency, you’re ready to eat. Sprinkle with a generous handful of chopped flat leaf parsley, and serve with griddled sourdough rubbed with garlic and olive oil.

Like pretty much anyone with taste buds and a working nose, I love bacon, and having a stab at curing my own is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, in fact ever since I read this article by Tim Hayward a few years ago.

Despite what you think, it’s actually really easy. In fact I’d say anyone blessed with a pair of arms could do it. It requires no culinary skill what so ever, just a very few ingredients and a bit of time. In fact less than a week. Just think, a week after reading this you could be tucking into a sarnie made with your own bacon. Excited? You should be.

I substituted the maple syrup in Tim’s cure for black treacle, as I wanted to try something a bit different, and I used a smaller joint, but the rest of the method is pretty much as described in the link above. The only other thing you’ll need is a tupperware box big enough to accommodate the joint.

Ingredients

1kg loin of pork, skin removed and boned

400ml black treacle

300g unrefined sea salt

Method

Day 1: Go to a decent butcher and ask him / her for a boned loin of pork with a finished weight of around a kilo. Also ask them to remove the skin, but leave the fat on. Take the joint home, pop it into your tupperware box, and then cover in 200ml of the black treacle. Give the joint a good rub all over, making sure it’s nicely coated, and then pop on the lid and stick it in the fridge.

Day 2: 24 hours later, take out the box and then sprinkle 150g of the unrefined sea salt over the joint. The salt I used was ‘Gros Sel’ which I found in a local Turkish shop. It’s grey in colour, contains no chemicals, and is pretty chunky, so I broke it down a bit in a pestle and mortar. If you can’t get your hands on it, use something like this, but avoid using refined table salt. Rub the salt all over the joint, and re-coat with the treacle, before returning to the fridge covered. Before you go to bed, turn the joint once.

Day 3: In the morning, turn the joint again. You’ll notice that bacon transformation has started. The salt has begun to draw the moisture out of the meat, firming it up, and the treacle has stained it a dark brown colour. Tim Hayward comments that the texture of his joint at this stage reminds him of Gordon Ramsay, but mine is definitely more Ray Winstone from Sexy Beast. When the pork has been marinating for 24 hours, its time to change the cure. Rinse the joint and the tupperware clean, and then pat the meat dry. Return to the box and then re-salt and treacle (at the same time this time) with the remaining quantities, again making sure to rub the joint all over. return to the fridge and turn the meat before bed.

Day 4 and 5: Over the next 48 hours, as often as you care to, turn and rub the meat with the salty treacle. As time goes on, you’ll feel the joint become firmer still as the meat continues to cure and more water leeches out of it.

Day 6: You’re almost there. Remove the joint from the cure, and once again rinse the meat and tupperware with cold water and pat the meat dry. At this stage you could start carving slices and eating. Like Tim, my excitement got the better of me, and I tried it, but it was way too salty to be truly delicious, so I decided to soak it to alleviate the problem. Immerse the joint in cold water for around four hours, changing the water after two. Now take out the bacon, pat it dry and then put it back in the box, uncovered this time, and return to the fridge until morning.

Day 7: Triumphantly take out your bacon, cut a few thin rashers (this is the only hard bit of the process – even with a good sharp knife, cutting an even, thin slice of bacon is tricky), fire up your frying pan and get ready to grin like a Cheshire cat.

And thats it. It really is that easy. I’ve already got my second joint on the go, and this time I think I’m going to take the results to the butcher I bought the joint from and see if they’ll slice it on their machine for me.

We moved to South East London a few weeks ago, and last weekend finally made it down to Brockley Market.

It’s only been going for a few months, but the organisers have pulled together a really nice selection of stalls including organic fruit, veg, meat, as well as a few street food style vendors and some great coffee. Special mention should go out to Mike & Ollie for their delicious mackerel wrap, and the Mother Flipper burger I sampled. Brunch of champions.

In general I have a bit of a problem with the prices of farmers markets in and around London, particularly when it comes to meat, so I decided to set myself a challenge. Spend a tenner or less to put together some decent grub. After spying a nice slab of chuck steak at Jacob’s ladder, I hit on the idea of making pasties. I cheated a bit as the flour and butter I already had at home, but including the cost of store cupboard ingredients I probably still only spent £8 or £9, which is pretty decent for 4 chunky pasties.

Ingredients

For the filling

450g chuck steak

1 medium carrot

1 medium potato

1 small swede

1 medium onion

Olive oil

A few sprigs of fresh thyme

White pepper

Salt

For the pastry

500g strong bread flour

250 butter (or you could go half and half with lard if you have it)

5g salt

Approx. 100ml cold water

Egg wash to finish

Method

You want to make your pastry at least an hour before you’re going to get busy constructing your pasties, so sift your flour and salt into your food processor, cube up your butter (making sure its cold), add to the flour, and pulse in a blender until you have a breadcrumby consistency (you can obviously also do this by hand or with a mixer). Add your cold water and continue to process until your dough forms a ball. Pat together any scraps, then wrap it clingfilm to rest in the fridge.

Whilst the dough is resting, prep the veg. Peel the potato, swede and carrot and slice them up. In general you want all the pieces to be roughly the same size which is a couple of millimeters thick and about the size of an old postage stamp. Then chop up your onion relatively finely, and put everything in a large bowl. Tear the leaves off your sprigs of thyme (really as much as you fancy), and then add salt and a very generous quantity of white pepper. Again this depends on taste, but the pasties I know and love from Cornwall have a good peppery punch, so I recon around 7 or 8 grams for this quantity. Add a good glug of olive oil, and then get your hands in there and give everything a good mix around. Give the veg a taste, and then either adjust the seasoning, or set aside.

Now to the meat. Take your chuck, and cut it into dice sized cubes, trimming off anything that looks or feels a bit sinewy, and then place in a separate bowl and give the meat a little sprinkle with salt.

After the pastry has had a chance to relax, take it out of the fridge and divide into four equal quantities. Flour your work surface, and then carefully roll each piece out, as round as you can, until it’s about 25cm wide by 3-4mm thick. You can trim the edges using something like a side plate if you want neater results.

Next place a good quantity of the veg mix on one half of your pastry, and then top this with some of the meat. You roughly want two or three times as much veg as you have meat. Then using a brush (or your fingers) moisten the circumference of the pastry with egg wash. This is going to help seal the edges when you get to the next stage; crimping. I’m not going to lie to you, my crimping needs a whole lot of work, but using your fingers, a fork or however you roll, seal the edge of your pasty as neatly as you can.

Finally give each one a good egg washing all over and pierce with a knife so the steam can escape, before popping in a preheated oven to bake at 190c for 50 minutes until they are lovely and golden brown. And that’s it. You’re ready to eat…well almost. A small word of warning. The insides of these fellas are going to be as hot as Hades, so let them cool off for a few minutes before you get stuck in.

It would have been Elvis’ birthday on Monday (8th Jan), so in honour of The King I knocked up this version of his his favourite grubs, the peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwich.

I first heard about his ’snack’ of choice some years ago whilst watching a documentary about his eating habits. He was a man with a legendary appetite, even persuading his cook to smuggle bag loads of hot dogs into the hospital where he was being treated for the kind of things that a bunch of dogs would really not have helped.

Based around the Fools Gold Loaf created by the Colorado Mine Company that Elvis famously traveled cross the country to get his hands on, there seem to be lots of different versions of this sandwich out there, but the one I recall from the doc is this one based around the four Bs. Baguette, Bacon, (peanut) Butter and Banana.

The King was known to wolf down piles of these in one sitting, but for those of us with a more moderate constitution, this recipe serves two. Oh, and I candied the bacon in maple syrup, as I figure he would have liked that.

Ingredients

1/2 a baguette

2 tbs smooth peanut butter

4 rashers of bacon

1 ripe banana, sliced

1 tbs maple syrup

Butter for frying

Method

First up, get your frying pan on the heat and drop in a large nob of butter. Once it’s sizzling, get your bacon in there. Elvis reputedly liked his bacon crisp, so give it plenty of time in the pan.

Whilst the bacon is cooking, take your fresh half baguette, cut it in half and then spread half the peanut butter on the top, and the other half on the bottom. Next slice the banana, and arrange the pieces on the bottom half.

Now back to the bacon. When it’s good and crispy, pour in the maple syrup. This will bubble away and reduce pretty quickly, so make sure you turn and move the bacon around in the pan so it’s well coated.

As soon as this has happened you’re ready. Take the bacon out of the pan, pop it on the sliced banana, replace the top of the baguette, and then eat like The King.

Happy Birthday Mr Presley.

TCB. RIP.

BUT turkey is a much underused meat in this country, it’s low in fat, and if cooked right is pretty tasty too. So hopefully, this recipe will enable some of you to get your burger fix whilst being a bit healthier in January. Oh yeah, and sweet potatoes are officially a superfood now too. Think I turned that one around…

The long-ish ingredient list suggests that this is quite an involved recipe, but it really isn’t. Once you’ve got everything together, it’s pretty easy. The red pepper relish works really well with the burgers, as does a bit of creamed horseradish instead of ketchup or mayo. I like the robust sponginess of ciabatta with these, but feel free to use whatever bread tickles your fancy.

Ingredients (serves 2)

For the patties

400 g turkey mince

2 spring onions, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

1 tsp fresh thyme, finely chopped

1 tbs parsley, finely chopped

1/2 tsp dried chilli flakes

1 tbs grated parmesan

Salt & pepper to taste

For the relish

1 red pepper, de-seeded & cut in to strips

1/2 large onion, sliced

Salt & pepper to taste

Pinch of brown sugar

Nob of butter

For the fries

2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into batons

Olive oil

Salt & pepper to taste

Tabasco

To serve

Ciabatta

Creamed horseradish

Gruyère cheese

Rocket

Method

So first up, make the patties. There’s no added binding ingredients in the recipe, and I find that the burgers stay together better once they’ve had a bit of a chance to rest in the fridge after making. So finely chop all your veg, herbs, garlic etc and stick them in a bowl along with the turkey mince and Parmesan. Get your hands in there and mix everything together until evenly distributed. If you want to check your seasoning, fry a small amount in a pan and give it a taste. Form the mix in to two equal sized patties (don’t compress them too hard, just give them enough pressure so that they form together nicely) and then cover and pop in the fridge.

Whilst the burgers are chilling, prep the rest of the veg for the relish and fries, and set your oven to 200c. When you’re done doing this, get the fries going. Pop your batons of sweet potato into a roasting tray and slosh over some olive oil, sprinkle over salt and pepper and then add a few dashes of Tabasco. You can add more or less depending on how hot you like it. Give everything a good mix until all the sweet potato is coated and then pop in the oven. The fries will cook for about half an hour, or until they are soft and nicely coloured.

Now turn your attention to the relish. In a frying pan / skillet with a lid (more on this in a bit) melt a nob of butter over a medium high heat, and then add your onion and red pepper along with salt, pepper and a pinch of brown sugar. You want to slowly fry and caremelise the veg until they’ve got good colour and a nice sticky consistency.

When the relish is close to being done, move it over to one side of the pan, take the burgers out of the fridge, and add them to the pan. Initially what you want to do is brown them nicely, around 1 or 2 minutes on each side until they have a good golden crust. Once you’ve got this, add a couple of tablespoons of water to the pan and then pop on the lid and continue to cook them for a further 6 minutes, turning once (NB. when you turn the burgers, stir the relish to make sure its not burning). Putting the lid on with a bit of water will help keep the turkey moist, which is as we know a bit of a problem with the big bird.

Just before the burgers are done, stick a slice of Gruyère on top of each one and then replace the lid. As soon as the cheese is melted, you’re ready to go. Take out the burgers and the fries. Stick a handful of rocket on the bottom of each ciabatta, place the burger on top of this and then top with the red pepper relish. Spread some creamed horseradish on the top half of the bread and then get busy.

Day two of me pulling my finger out is another local hero from our stay in New York late last year, and trades the buttery crusts of pies for another American obsession. Barbecue.

I’ve wanted to visit Fette Sau since I read about it three or four years ago. Last time I was in New York, I failed to get my ‘cue on, so this time I vowed not to fly home without coating my face in barbecue sauce.

Tucked away down a side alley in Williamburgh, Brooklyn, Fette Sau is a temple to meat. The walls are adorned with scrawlings of different cuts of various four legged beasts, knives hang behind the bar, the white tiled walls are all butcher shop, and they sell their wares by weight as opposed to portion, which is great from a trying everything point of view. It also exposed the tactical eaters we overheard rejecting anything on the bone as it’s “…dead weight, man…”, which means no ribs, which is crazy right??

I wanted to try as much as I could, so after much deliberation I pulled together what I figured would be a killer selecta. Black Angus Brisket, Spicy Berkshire Pork Sausage, Pulled Berkshire Pork Shoulder, Duroc baby Back Ribs, Burnt-End Baked Beans and some green stuff to keep my digestive system alive. Now I was pretty pleased with the ribs that I made earlier in the year, but this was some next level business. The words that follow are not going to do what I ate justice, because I loved every friggin’ mouthful so much, but here’s a taster.

Brisket. Dense, smoky, tender with a wicked spiced and charred crust. Spicy Berkshire Pork Sausage. Almost like a Polish smoked sausage, porky, moist with a kick at the end. Pulled Berkshire Pork Shoulder. Just how I like it; not drenched in vinegary liquor, slightly sticky, smokey and nicely spiced. Duroc baby Back Ribs. Sweet, sticky, meaty, again nicely spiced with a great barbecue crust, just like a good rib should be. Burnt-End Baked Beans. Wow. Possibly the best thing I ate. Sweet, tangy, with flavour deeper than the San Andreas Fault, enhanced with a bit of a chilli kick and little hunks of pork. I’d go back just for the beans alone. Insane. You know what broccoli, chilli and garlic tastes like, and you’ll be going for the meat, so I’m not even going to bother.

I’ve made myself really hungry by reminiscing about that meal, so I need to go and eat something before I start dousing my laptop in Tabasco, but needless to say, I can’t recommend Fette Sau highly enough. It won’t be to everybody’s taste, and in my mind barbecue is something that you’ve got to be in the mood for, bit if you have got a hankering for it, and you’re in New York, or indeed North America, get yourself down there.

The first of these is Four & Twenty Blackbirds in Gwanus, Brooklyn. Now, as I’m sure you know, ‘pie’ is an American institution. It’s an old school love affair that has outlived cupcakes, macarons, whoopie pies and whatever sweet thang is currently de rigueur. The Yanks love it, and the queue outside Four & Twenty proves the legend above the door, ‘this must be where pies go when they die’.

Run by two sisters who cut their teeth working at their family’s restaurant in South Dakota, before slinging pies from their apartment in Crown Heights, NY, they set up Four & Twenty almost two years ago, and have been rammed ever since. There’s nothing particularly unusual about the place itself. It’s got all the trademarks of your typical hipster cafe. Bare brick walls, stripped back wood, tattooed serving staff etc, but it has a really welcoming, homely vibe. I guess you could describe it as pie in atmosphere form.

The pie on the other hand is unusual. And in a good way. We tried a selection including the plum crumble, brown butter pumpkin and the salty honey. All the pies are hand made, and come with the same crust, which is totally the right combination of tenderness and crumble, with a great buttery flavour. The plum crumble was amazing. Sweet and crunchy with a tart punch of local plums, all smoothed out with some lightly sweetened whipped cream. The pumpkin was everything a pumpkin pie should be. Dense, deep, moist, pumpkin-ey custard filling spiked with cinnamon and the surprise addition of a nutty richness supplied by the brown butter. And finally, and I have to be honest my least favourite, the salty honey. Richer than Daddy Warbucks, the custard filling was packed with butter and honey, set off with a generous sprinkling of salt crystals on the surface. It wasn’t in any way bad, but just too much for me.

I’m not going to lie to you, Four & Twenty isn’t exactly in what you’d describe as a ‘handy mid-town location’ but Gwanus and neighbouring Red Hook are areas on the up and up and well worth a look around, and I’m telling you, the pie alone makes the trek a no brainer. Special Agent Dale Cooper would be a very happy man.

You may or may not have noticed that things have been a bit quiet round here of late. I’ve been trying my hardest to keep on top of it all, but life has rather been getting in the way. With two jobs, baking lots of these for the guys at Percival, and moving house, I’ve basically had my work cut out, and have been totally shattered. I honestly think my arms may be in the process of falling off.

But I’ve got a week or so off now, so just wanted to say a HUGE thanks to everyone who’s been part of Hand To Mouth over the past year. All the readers, commenters, supporters, lovers and haters. I love you all in a very wholesome way. Nothing dirty. OK maybe I have impure thoughts about a couple of you, but I digress.

So here’s to wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

See you on the flip side, and stay hungry.

F

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.

Like Hot Cross Buns at Easter, one of the things that make Christmas for me are mince pies. I love them. So when my mate Luke who co-runs clothing label Percival asked if I fancied making some for late night shopping evenings at their new pop up in Covent Garden, I was all over it like a cheap suit.

This recipe is a bit of a remix. Inspired by and finished like the mighty Eccles Cakes of St John, the filling is simpler than traditional mincemeat, but the spices, currants, muscavado sugar and rum pack a treacle-like punch, and instead of beef suet, or that horrible veg substitute, I use frozen, grated butter, so the veggies can chow too. I’d recommend making the filling a good couple of weeks before you make your pies. Over time the flavour gets better and better, and if you keep it cool it will last for ages.

This recipe will make 24 or more mincers. I make them in muffin trays with 6 x 3 dimples which gives them a meat pie like appearance after they’re baked.

Ingredients

For the pastry

480g Plain white (pastry) flour

25g Caster sugar

10g Salt

340g Unsalted butter, cold

110-140ml Cold water

For the filling

500g Currants

220g Muscavado sugar

10g Ground nutmeg

10 Ground allspice

100g Unsalted butter, grated from frozen

60ml Dark rum

Zest and juice of 1 medium orange

To finish

1 egg beaten with a pinch of salt

Coarse granulated brown sugar

Method

Making the filling is a cinch. Put the currants, sugar, spices and rum into a bowl. Zest and then squeeze the juice of an orange into the mix (use a sieve to keep the pips out) and then give it a good stir. Take your butter out of the freezer, and using a course grater, shred around 100g of it into the bowl. It will clump together, so now get your hands in there and squeeze and mix everything together. Cover with clingfilm and set aside somewhere cool.

A few hours, or ideally the day before you’re going to make your pies, make the pastry as it needs to rest before you roll out and assemble. Weigh out and sift all your dry ingredients into the bowl or your mixer or food processor, and then cut up the cold butter into centimeter cubes and add to the dry. Mix on medium speed or pulse until you have a ‘mealy’ breadcrumby type consistency.

Turn your mixer back on and add around 100ml of your water. You want to add enough to bring the pastry together, but no too much so it’s wet. If it doesn’t look like it’s going to come together after a 15 seconds or so, add a bit more water until it does. Remove the pastry from the bowl and ‘pat’ together, and then wrap in clingfilm, and rest in the fridge until needed.

When you’re ready to make your pies, take your pastry out of the fridge and let it warm up a little, and then roll it out to a 3mm thickness on a lightly floured surface. Again, it’s good to let the pastry relax a bit before you cut it, so cover with some greaseproof paper and leave it somewhere cool for half an hour.

Next, taking a 90mm and a 70mm pastry cutter, cut out 24 bases and lids from your pastry. Press the bases into the dimples of whatever baking tray you’re using. There will be excess pastry crinkles, but just press these into the wall of the tin. When you’ve lined all the dimples, fill around 3/4 full with the currant mixture.

Moisten the rim of each of your smaller lids with a little water, and then press them down onto the top of each of the pies. The final step is to lightly egg wash the tops with a brush, give them the Eccles Cake trademark of three scores, and then sprinkle some coarsely granulated brown sugar over the top of each one.

Bake at 170c for around 30 minutes until the tops are a lovely deep golden brown, and remove the pies from the tray as soon as you can and place on a wire wrack to cool.

They are best eaten warm, either on their own, with a glass of whiskey, or indeed a good lump of mature cheddar.

Ho Ho Ho.

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!

Anyway, I have managed to pull my finger out a bit, so here are the first couple of things I wanted to share from New York, Smorgasberg & The New Amsterdam Market.

New York doesn’t really seem to have the same kind of street food culture as San Francisco. In SF there were trucks and pop up stalls on every corner, and sure NY has their regulated the hot dog carts for decades, but much less of a mobile scene that pushes the boundaries. That being said, the street food scene is far from undeveloped, in fact it has given birth to something a bit different. The closest thing I can think of to describe it are the Hawker Centres you get in South East Asia. Smorgasberg is one such example, a weekly event on the same site as the famous Brooklyn Flea which collects all manner of food vendors selling some fantastic, and if I’m honest also some not so fantastic, grub.

But I’m not going to dwell on the negatives, as there were two stalls in particular that blew our tiny minds. First up Bon Chovie, which has to be the best food stall name since I saw a kebab van called ‘Jason Donnervan’ in Essex many moons ago. A bit like large whitebait, these guys sell deep fried achovies and boy are they good (picture above). They dip them in egg and then flour seasoned with salt, pepper and paprika , and serve them up with a wedge of lemon, pickled peppers and a smoked paprika aioli. You can eat them head off or on (Jersey style), and they are the perfect combination of crunchy, fishy and salty. They are seriously nice guys too. They give fish a good name.

The other winner on the day, were the doughnuts from the far less imaginatively named, Dough. But what they lack in inventiveness of their name, they more than make up for in their product. The doughnuts come in killer flavours from hibiscus and blood orange, to passion fruit curd and our favourite, coconut. But what makes them so good is the texture. None of the heavy, greasy fairground muck we’re used to. These guys are light, fluffy and pillowy soft. I’d give my left nut, and probably a couple of arteries in the process, for the recipe and technique.

If you’re lucky enough to be in NY or are going soon, I believe Smorgasberg is closed for the season, but will be open again in 5 months or so. But if you fancy a street food fix, I believe there’s something similar going on in Kings Cross now in the shape of Eat Street. I need to go check it out at some point.

New Amsterdam Market is something a bit different again. Part farmers market, part food fair, everyone there is an independent producer of some kind. Bread, chocolate (Mast Brothers have a stand there), cakes, pickles and pork products were just some of the tasty treats on offer. On the Sunday we visited, there was a ‘hard’ cider festival, so we could wash it all down with some booze.

There was so much good stuff to chose from, but again there were a couple of stalls that really caught our eye. the first was Nordic Breads. Baked by a Finnish artisan baker, they sell simple but amazing organic whole grain rye rolls and loaves which have a really good, deep nutty flavour. The stall and branding are pretty awesome too.

The other was Brooklyn Cured. Butchery and all things meaty are definately pretty cool in New York right now. Places like The Meathook in Williamsburgh (which deserves a post all of its own) that offer butchery classes and all the tools of the trade you might need, are testament to this, as is Brooklyn Cured. They describe their business as being inspired by the holy trinity of French Charcuterie, German beer garden and Italian-American pork store, and they make a killer selection of sausages, pates and of course bacon. I was so busy sampling, I forgot to take any pictures.

The classic French fruit tart has to be one of my favourite deserts. The combination of the sweet, crumbly pastry, the vanilla spiked crème pâtissière and the sharp fruit tick all the boxes for me. I know it’s more of a Summer dish, but I got hold of some late season British raspberries the other day, and decided to make it as part of a ‘welcome home’ lunch at my folk’s house.

The other great thing about this recipe is that once all the elements are made, it’s an assembly job. So you can make everything in advance, then throw it all together a the last minute and lap up the applause like it ain’t no thang.  NB. As with most pastry, it’s good to let the pâte sucrée rest in a fridge for at least a few hours, both after making it and after lining the tart mold as this should stop the case shrinking when it’s being baked off.

Ingredients (makes 27cm tart / 8 slices)

For the pâte sucrée

145g All purpose flour

60g Icing sugar

65g Unsalted butter

50g Egg yolks

30g Almond meal

1g Baking powder

1g Salt

1/2 vanilla pod, seeds scraped out

For the crème pâtissière

430g Whole milk

110g Caster sugar

30g Corn starch

85g Egg yolks

50g Unsalted butter

1/2 Vanilla pod, seeds scraped

Zest of 1/2 a lemon

To finish

400g raspberries, or whatever fruit is in season

Icing sugar (optional)

Method

Either the day before or the morning you’re going to bake, make the pastry. Sift all the dry ingredients together into either a mixing bowl or the bowl of your blender / mixer. Cut your vanilla bean in half, and then scrape out the seeds with a blade, and add them too. Then take your cold butter from the fridge, and cut it into centimeter cubes and then add to the dry. If you’re using a mixer use the paddle attachment and mix on medium speed until you have an even breadcrumby, mealy texture. You can do the same with a blender by pulsing the blade, or by hand by rubbing the butter into the flour gradually.

When you’ve got the desired consistency, add the eggs by mixing or pulsing the ingredients until they just come together to form a dough. You really don’t want to over work the dough as you’ll develop gluten, and the pastry could turn out tough. Take the dough out of the bowl, pat it together into one lump, wrap it in clingfilm and get it into the fridge for a few hours.

You’ll have plenty of time on your hands now, so make the crème pâtissière. To the milk add half the sugar (55g), along with the other half of the vanilla pod used above (seeds scraped out and added to the milk along with the husk), and the zest of half a lemon removed with a peeler, not grated. Put this on your hob and bring to a boil.

Whilst the milk comes up to temperature, whisk the egg yolks, remaining sugar and cornstarch together in a bowl so they are combined together, but without incorporating any air. When the milk has just come to a  boil, turn it down to a medium heat and then pour a third of it into the bowl containing the yolk mixture whilst whisking constantly. This process is known as tempering, and should prevent the eggs from scrambling.

Next, add the eggy mixture back in with the rest of the milk, again continuing to whisk. The corn starch will kick in pretty quickly, and the mixture will thicken dramatically and start to gently bubble like lava. Hold your nerve, and continue to whisk whilst maintaining the boil (but not scorching the custard), for 1 to 2 minutes.

Remove from the heat and stir in the butter until it has completely dissolved. Pour the crème pâtissière into a clean bowl, and place a layer of clingfilm onto the surface of the custard to help prevent a skin from forming, and set aside. Don’t worry about fishing out the vanilla pod or the lemon zest now, you’ll burn your fingers.

OK. Back to the pastry. Lightly flour your work surface and rolling pin, and gently roll out the pastry into a rough circle, around a couple of inches bigger than your tart tin. Work as quickly as you can, as the warmer the dough gets, the harder it will be to work with. Roll the dough over your pin, and then gently drape it over the tart tin. Lift the edges of the dough and gently push down into the edge of the tin’s base and lightly press against the side, repeating this process all the way round. Don’t worry if you have a few cracks or splits, you can patch these up with any spare pastry. Now trim away any excess pastry from the edge with a sharp knife, leaving a smooth, clean edge all around, and then put the lined case in the fridge for a good hour or so.

Whilst the tart case is chilling, pre-heat your oven to 180c. You’re going to blind bake it, so once the pastry has rested for sufficient time, remove the tart from the fridge and dock the base all over with a fork. Then line it with greasproof paper and weigh down with rice or baking beans, and bake for 10 minutes. After this time, remove the paper and weights and continue to bake for a further 10 until the pastry is a light golden brown.

Take out of the oven, and as soon as you can, carefully remove the pastry case and leave to cool on a rack. You’ve now got all your elements, and you’re ready to assemble. If you want to be really fancy (if not anal), you could use a microplane or another fine grater to ’sand down’ the edges of your tart case so they are perfect, but this isn’t really necessary.

Take your crème pâtissière and remove the lemon zest and vanilla pod. The custard will have set, so give it a good beating with a spatula until it’s smooth, which will be a lot easier if it’s at room temperature. Transfer your pastry case to the plate you’re going to serve it on, and then dollop the crème pâtissière into the center of it. Gently spread it out right to the edges, until you have a smooth even surface. Then take your raspberries, or other fruit, and arrange on the top. Finish with icing sugar, or any other garnish that tickles your fancy, and then you’re done.

You can keep the tart in the fridge for a day or so, but I recommend leaving it out for a good half an hour so it’s a bit warmer when you eat it.

Divide into 8 slices, and serve each with a generous pouring of double cream.

Having eaten my fair share of sliders in the US, I’ve been musing over the idea of doing an Anglicised version of these over grown amuse-bouches. I hit on the idea of doing an Ox Tail version around a week ago, but didn’t really have the perfect vehicle for the meat. Then the other day, almost as if he sensed my bun based anguish, Dan Lepard sent me a recipe for his slider buns that are in the Hawksomoor At Home book to try. The recipe will appear in this weekend’s Guardian, and you’ll discover that it contains custard powder. Yep, you read that right, custard powder. As crazy as it sounds, it’s actually a work of evil genius as it makes the buns tender, gives them a brioche like colour, and is vegan to boot.

The Ox Tail gets slow cooked for around 4 hours, so this definitely isn’t a 30 minute meal. In fact some might describe it as ‘a long walk for a ham sandwich’, but I think it’s worth it, and is a great way to use a much under appreciated cut of meat. I’ve served it with a crunchy, sharp, almost Summery slaw to cut through the fatty, sticky meat a bit, but these guys are still definitely winter warmers.

Ingredients (makes 10-12)

For the meaty bit

1 kg Ox Tail

300 ml red wine

300 ml beef stock

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1 onion, roughly chopped

1 carrot, roughly chopped

2 sticks celery, roughly chopped

1 chilli, sliced down the middle

3 sprigs of both rosemary & thyme, tied together

1 tsp Chinese five spice

1 tbs redcurrant jelly

Salt & pepper to taste

Seasoned flour – 2 tbs flour, 1tsp smoked paprika, salt and pepper

For the slaw

1/4 head red cabbage, finely sliced

3 spring onions, finely sliced

1/3 cucumber, finely sliced

Dressing -  100ml olive oil, 50ml lemon juice, 1tsp Dijon mustard, salt & pepper to taste

Method

The first thing to do is get that meat on. Turn your oven on to 160 c, and then in a freezer bag, dump in 2 tablespoons of flour, one teaspoon of smoked paprika and the salt and pepper. Give it a shake to mix it all together, then add the ox tail joints and give it another shake to coat them. Take them out of the bag, pat off the excess flour, and set aside.

Next, in a heavy casserole dish, melt a good nob of butter in some olive oil. Get it good and hot and then brown off the ox tail evenly on all sides. Do this is two batches, and when done set aside again. Roughly chop the veg and garlic, slice your chilli down the center, and add to the hot dish along with the five spice. Stir for a couple of minutes, being careful not to burn the spice and then de-glaze the pan with the red wine and beef stock, and bring to the boil.

Now add the tied herbs, the tomato puree and redcurrant jelly, and once the latter have dissolved, add the ox tail back into the pot (the liquid in the pot should almost cover the joints). Place on the lid and stick it in the oven to slow cook for around 4 hours.

Next make the slaw. Slice the red cabbage, cucumber and spring onions as finely as possible, and then make the dressing with the olive oil, lemon juice, Dijon and seasoning. Give it a good mix and then pour over the vegetables, making sure to coat them all thoroughly. Ideally you should do this a couple of hours before you eat, as the dressing will soften the cabbage and give all the flavours a chance to mingle.

After 4 hours, take the casserole dish out of the oven. Prod the meat, and if it falls off the bone, it’s ready. Remove the joints from the pot, and then pass the cooking liquor through a sieve into a bowl, discarding and bits of herb and vegetable, and then set aside.

When the joints have cooled a bit, remove all the meat from the bones, shredding it as you pull it off. Once you’ve got it all, pop it into the bowl with the liquid, and give it a good stir. You should be left with an unctuous, sticky, very thick, meaty sauce. You’re now ready to assemble the sliders.

Cut the buns in half, and then dollop a generous portion of the meat on the bottom half. Top this with a good helping of the slaw. Pop on the top, and eat. Now wasn’t that worth it?

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.

For the past few visits, no trip to NY would be complete for us without a visit to Egg. I’ve said it all before here, and as pretentious as it sounds, it’s still one of my favourite places to get breakfast in the world. The Eggs Rothko are a winner, the place is mimal in a cosy kind of way, the staff are hot, and it’s consistently good. Nuff said.

That being said, we did find another brunch place that gave Egg a bit of a run for it’s money. Five Leaves in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I have to admit, the joint is styled to within an inch of it’s life, and it’s more hipster than a skinny dude with tattoos, a mustache and fisherman’s beanie perched precariously on the crown of his head. But you forget all that once you start munching. Between the three of us we had the home made beans and bacon, sage scrambled eggs, and the ricotta pancakes (see above), all of which were serious customers. The beans were sweet, smokey and spicy with a poached egg perched on top. The scrambled egg was seriously moist and soft, with a hint of sage, topped with strong cheddar and served in a tender white bap. And then the pancakes. F**k me. Light and fluffy, yet satisfyingly substantial. Slightly creamy from the ricotta, and served with a dollop of this amazing honeycomb butter. Crazy in all the right kinds of ways. They also serve Brooklyn’s own Stumptown Coffee, which is frikin’ delicious.

Whilst we’re talking about Stumptown and sweet thangs, we also popped in to the Momofuku Milk Bar in Williamsburgh. The sister of David Chang’s noodle empire, they also serve Stumptown coffee and a range of baked goods devised by Christina Tosi, who’s currently doing the rounds with the Milk Bar book. The reason I wanted to check it out was their Crack Pie, which I’d heard a lot of good things about it, including that it’s appropriately named. It is a bit hard to describe, but if you imagine a treacle tart and a cheesecake having a very dirty love child, you’re kind of close. The flapjack-esque base is insanely buttery, and the sticky, custard filling packs a super sweet vanilla punch. It’s dangerous stuff. So much so that it’s trademarked and comes in individually packaged doses. If you’ve got the willpower, you can make your own from the recipe here.

But despite all the above, I think my favourite food experience of this trip to NY was the evening we spent in Chinatown. Again it had been a while since we’d been there, but our ever reliable host, Matt, had a couple of places that he really wanted us to check out. The first was the Shanghai Cafe, which is famous for it’s Xiao Long Bao, or soup dumplings to you and me. I’ve got to say they were the best I’ve ever had, and judging by the team of guys at the front of the restaurant constantly filling and crimping them by hand, I’m not the only one to think so. They arrived at the table in a steamer basket wobbling like weebles, and although it’s generally a good idea to let them cool a bit so you don’t burn your mouth off, I couldn’t resist. The wrapper was giving yet chewy in all the right ways, the intensely savoury broth that burst out, delicious, and the porky filling spiked with spring onion a fitting end to the experience. I could have sat right there eaten a few baskets of them, but Matt had other ideas.

We left the Shanghai Cafe and marched about 10 minutes across town to a little Blade Runner-esque  joint under the Manhattan Bridge call Xi’an Famous Foods. Despite it’s size, over the past few years this tiny place has begun to live up to it’s name. They serve Western style Chinese food, which blends traditional Chinese flavours with those of the Middle East, and are famous for their hand pulled noodles. So that’s what we had. I went for their spicy cumin lamb noodles which were rolled, stretched, pulled and boiled before my very eyes and then combined with the lamb which was fried with cumin, some vegetables, chilli oil and lots of other good things. They packed our dishes up in containers, and we again took off on foot, but this time to a little park almost under the Williamsburgh bridge. Here we found a picnic table, and ate our noodles under the stars. And what noodles. They had great bite and chew to them, and the lamb had this awesome smoky cumin meets gamey flavour. The veg was crunchy and the sauce slighty sweet and spicy. All in all a truly memorable evening.

So that was it for our road trip. Gutted that it’s over because it was fucking awesome from start to finish. As I mentioned above, I’ve got a few other New York treats to share with you like Fette Sau and Four & Twenty Blackbirds, which I’ll get round to writing about soon.

So until then, stay hungry my friends.

That’s right, Hand To Mouth is back. Despite missing San Francisco like crazy, and Home Sweet Home not really feeling that sweet right now, it is good to be home. Kind of.

We got back to London a week ago, and its been a hectic. Along with flat hunting and catching up with friends & family, I’ve been lining up a bunch of interviews, meetings and trial shifts at bakeries across London. I had my first trial on Monday and have two more lined up this week, along with a couple of meetings. And I’m also meeting up with an old work colleague who wants to get me involved with a food based iPhone / iPad app he’s developing. Exciting times.

I’ve also got a bunch of posts to write when I get the chance, including a round-up of our New York eatathon, a couple of great finds from the city that never sleeps, and a killer rasberry tart recipe, amongst others.

So I promise I’ll pull my finger out and will be back here very soon.

Until then.

I saw this video about New York based Mast Brothers Chocolate about a year or so ago, and have desperately wanted to visit their shop ever since. As someone who’s interested in starting their own business, I found the approach they discuss really inspirational. I love the romantic idealism of treating their business like a boys own adventure, and striving for something that feels nostalgic and hand made, as opposed to mass produced and uniform.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon I managed to satisfy my desire by paying their Williamsburgh shop a visit. I was hoping to take the factory tour they mention on the site, but alas they aren’t doing them at the moment as they are in the process of expanding their operation. However, when the lovely guy behind the counter saw we were a bit bummed out about not getting to do the tour, he snuck us in to have a look at their new space. It’s a really lovely big, open brick walled warehouse unit, but what hits you first is the smell. It’s like being in a chocolate cloud. I’m pretty sure I started to drool almost instantly. The room is filled will sacks of cocoa beans, a roasting oven, ‘conching’ drums (these heat and grind the beans for 3 days until the chocolate is beautifully smooth), and this awesome mad scientist-esque glass vacuum pump device that separates the cracked beans from the husk. It’s very cool, and feels really nicely old fashioned.

Obviously you can’t visit a place like this without sampling the goods, but as well as trying their small range of bars, we also got to sample a few of their new products including an amazing chocolate pecan cookie, a couple of different types of caramel, and the craziest brownie I’ve ever tasted. It’s consistency was like a ripe soft cheese, and equally as pungent in a chocolatey kind of way. Pretty incredible. When the guy who gave us the tour hear we were from the UK he told us that they are just about to export a shed load of chocolate to Paul A Young for him to make truffles with, which will give those who don’t know Mast Bothers an indication of the quality of their product and their standing within the chocolate community.

But by far the coolest thing that Mast Brothers is doing (which they allude to in the video) is taking their romanticism to the next level by actually sailing their cocoa beans over from their suppliers. The maiden voyage of The Black Seal, a 70-foot cargo ship that they had converted into a three mast shipping schooner, docked in New York a couple of months ago after two weeks on The Atlantic bringing with it 20 or so tonnes of cocoa beans from the Dominican Republic. Amazing. And they are already planning subsequent voyages in the near future.

Maybe I’ve been in the US too long or I’m getting cheesy in my old age, but I’m going to end this post on a Mark Twain quote that I’m sure Mast Brothers are familiar with and I’ll be taking as words of encouragement as I endeavor to set up my own business in the future:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

I unbelievably forgot my camera when we went to the shop, so…chocolate photo courtesy of mastbrothers.com and magazine spread is a photo story on the Mast Brothers that appears in this month’s edition of Edible Brooklyn.

From Nashville we headed for the ‘Low Country’, with a quick overnight pit stop in Atlanta to break up the journey to Savannah. In the short time we were there, we didn’t get much of an impression of Georgia’s capital, but it seems like a modern city that’s expanding pretty fast.

One thing we did get to check out was Varsity, which is (apparently) America’s largest drive in. I was pretty excited about visiting as it’s one of those old school places where they have people bring out your food and do the whole tray on the window thing. Unfortunately we were disappointed. Definitely go and check it out for the spectacle and atmosphere, but don’t go for the food. It was average at best. The burgers were no better than a basic McDonald’s hamburger, the fries were limp, and god alone knows what was on in the chilli on my chilli dog, but I’m not sure it was of this World. Bit of a shame really, because it’s a pretty cool set up.

After a 5-hour drive South East of Atlanta we hit Savannah, which was the first purpose built town in the US and is home to the US’s answer to Delia, Paula Deen. It’s a really pretty place, but as we arrived the heavens opened and it didn’t really stop raining for the 48 hours we were there. Yep, we managed to time our visit perfectly with the Low Country’s storm season. This being the case, we didn’t really feel like killing ourselves to get out there and sniff out Savannah’s more interesting food spots, so I don’t have that much to report, but we did have some really good Italian comfort food at a place called Leoci’s. Great prosciutto, mozzarella and lovely pasta. Just the thing when the hurricane nights draw in.

We were worried that we’d encounter similar conditions two hours up the coast in Charleston, but when we arrived it seemed like the clouds and winds had shot their load, and it was pretty pleasant, in a hot and sticky kind of way. Charleston is where the American Civil War started, so it’s steeped in history. But it’s also steeped in shrimp and grits. I’d got a small taster of this Low Land’s classic in New Orleans, but I had to get stuck into the real McCoy whilst we were here, and I got my fix at a great little place called Hominy Grill. For the uninitiated, grits are a America’s answer to polenta, but is usually white instead of yellow, and generally coaser ground. The grits I had at Hominy were creamy, slightly cheesy, with a tang of Tabasco and lemon,  and served with lovely juicy shrimp, bacon and mushrooms. Serious comfort food. We also tried their fried green tomatoes, another local favourite, she-crab soup, and every Charlestonian’s beer snack of choice, boiled peanuts. Really good stuff.

Whilst we were in town, someone also recommend that we check out a cafe called Dixie, a no frills kind of place known for it’s tomato pie. When we showed up for a late lunch, they were closing up the kitchen, but typical of pretty much all the Southerners we met, the lady and chef who ran the place were very accommodating and let us sit down for a slice before they finished for the day. Made with a beautifully tender dough, and layered with heirloom tomatoes, cheese and basil, it was a really satisfying lunch, especially when served with a nice hunk of sweet potato corn bread. I’ve got to say that it wouldn’t win many awards for it’s looks, but it delivered where it counts. Hmmmmm.

Of course, one of these posts wouldn’t be complete without a mildly terrifying fried chicken experience, and Charleston managed to deliver one of these too, in the shape of Hannibal’s Kitchen. Another little shack, in the rougher North East of the city, we yet again got to sample one of Southern cuisines most famous exports. The chicken was probably the mildest we tasted. Really balanced seasoning, with a small hint of spice, not too dissimilar from the Colonel’s Original Recipe. Fried fresh (we had to wait 20 minutes) and served with sides of corn and collard greens, it was yet another quality feed in less than salubrious setting, even if my greens did come with an unexpected addition of an unidentifiable pig part. If you look closely at the picture below you can see something pink poking out. For a moment I thought it was someone’s thumb, but it was definitely hog based, but no idea from where on the animal. Answers on a postcard please.

So that was the Low Country. I’m writing this from a VERY cramped sleeper berth on the ‘Silver Meteor’ train to New York, New York, our final destination. It’s going to be bitter sweet.

We’re ‘enjoying’ some the South-East coast’s famous storm season weather, so you’re going to get to read another post.

From LA we flew to New Orleans. After seeing all the news about Katrina and subsequent storms and floods, I really didn’t know what to expect, but I’ve got to say we were really impressed. Aside from Bourbon Street which is a bit of an abomination, it’s really cool and interesting place, that literally sweats music and good times from ever pore. We arrived with a fist full of recommendations of places to go from my mate Graison who I met on the  SFBI course and who used to live there, so we set about munching our way through town.

We had three really memorable meals in ‘The Big Easy’. The first was at Dante’s Kitchen. It kicked off in style with some stellar ’spoon’ bread, which is a kind of corn bread, and was absolutely delicious. So much so that I had to know what was in it, and the chefs kindly printed me out a recipe. This was followed by fantastic shrimp and grits and then ox tail. Small dishes, really nicely done. I’d go back in a shot.

The second was at Willie Mae’s Scotch House, which is famous for it’s fried chicken. Very famous. In fact some argue that it’s the best in the US, which may or may not be backed up by the James Beard ‘American Classic’ award they won in 2005. Whatever the case, Willie Mae’s is a tiny white shack in a slightly dodgy part of town (our cabbie warned us not to wonder around too much) but it left a big impression. The chicken isn’t traditional Southern style, it’s coated in a spicy batter (lots of salt and black pepper), not too dissimilar to chippie batter back home. Crispy, salty, spicy, moist and tasty as hell. The green beans side I had was pretty awesome too, but you really go for the chicken. Well worth running the gauntlet for.

The third was totally unexpected. We’d been out for a typically light dinner, and headed to a bar called The Maple Leaf to see some live music. When we arrived, the guy on the door told us entry was $10 which included the band and a ’shrimp boil’. We didn’t really know what he was on about, so paid the fee and sat down for a couple of beers.

After an hour or so, we were told that dinner was served and were led through to a room at the centre of which was a 20 ft table literally covered in a mixture of boiled shrimp, local andouille sausage, pork steak, corn and potatoes. Seconds later we were chowing down with 50 people we’d never met before chewing the fat and piles of shrimp, sausage and other assorted delights. It was lip tinglingly spicy from pepper and paprika, salty, smokey and really deeply flavoured. At one point, someone else produced a tray of stewed turkey necks, which I’d never tried before. They were sticky, sweet and gamey. A bit like mini ox tails, and maybe even more tasty. The whole evening was a totally brilliant experience. We felt like we were on an episode of No Reservations.

From New Orleans we got back behind the wheel and headed for Memphis, Tennessee. The birth place of Rock & Roll, realm of The King, and home to some pretty fine ribs too. Gracelands was pretty much exactly what you’d expect, and totally worth the visit. It also gave us the chance to sample one of Elvis’ favourite snacks, the fried  peanut butter and banana sandwich. It wasn’t bad, but on more substantial bread and with a rasher or two of candied bacon, it would have been better. Now, back to those ribs. Whilst we were in New Orleans, on two separate occasions, we were told that we HAD to check out the ribs Rendezvous. So we did. They specialise in dry rub baby back ribs, which I’ll take every time over the wet ones (too sweet and vinegary for my palette), and they didn’t disappoint. Succulent, juicy, and beautifully smoky. I find the strong flavours of US barbecue often mask the taste of the meat, but you could definitely taste these bad boys came from a pig. I could have easily eaten another rack. Turns out Rendezvous’ ribs are also a favourite of Bill Clinton and Barry Obama, and if they’re good enough for them…

The last stop on this part of the tour was Nashville, and I’ve got to say. Did. Not. Get. It. I was expecting (maybe foolishly) that it would be like a bigger Memphis, but that wasn’t really the case. It was more like LA. Really spread out, and fragmented into lots of little insubstantial feeling ‘hoods. But I’m pleased to say there was some good eating to be found. We discovered a really great modern Italian place called City House. Awesome pizza and great starters like octopus with butter beans and breadcrumbs. Super tasty. And it also afforded us another slightly dodgy fried chicken experience at Prince’s Hot Chicken. A good 10-15 minute drive from the centre of Nashville in a rather sketchy part of town lies a tiny kitchen and dining room that, like Willie Mae’s, has a big reputation. The chicken is more traditionally fried at Prince’s, but the key ingredient here is cayenne, and it’s available in Mild, Medium, Hot and Extra Hot. I opted for the medium, and I can’t for the life of me imagine the inferno that the Extra Hot creates because mine was pretty damn spicy, but it was good. Crispy and moist in all the right places, with a really good heat and served with a much needed cup of cooling slaw, some pickles and a couple of slices of dirty white bread to mop up the juices. The fried chicken of my dreams.

That’s it for now. Next stop Atlanta, Savannah and Charleston. See you soon.

So we are exactly a week into our road trip across the ‘States, and so far, so amazing.

From San Fran we drove to Yosemite which is just incredible. I visited the valley before with my folks as a young child, but I didn’t remember much of it. Probably too young to appreciate it, but it’s a jaw dropping place. Everywhere you look, there are unbelievable postcard views. It really is the big country. Food wise we had to pretty much fend for ourselves, firing up the barbie or gas stove at our camp and packing lunches, which was all good ‘back to nature’ stuff.

Next into Death Valley. Everyone had told us stuff like ‘…it’s just a long road…” or “…there’s not much there…”, so we were unprepared for how beautiful it is. That’s beautiful in a kind of brutal way. En route we stopped by Schat’s bakery cafe in Bishop and gorged on his famous sandwiches. The turkey club was the bomb. We stayed in the heart of the valley in a little settlement called Stovepipe Wells, which felt a bit like a theme village you might get at an amusement park. It was as hot as Hades, and the food wasn’t up to much, but the setting was incredible and they had a pool. Nuff said.

We then drove to Las Vegas. What a contrast. From the serenity and peace of Yosemite and Death Valley into the belly of the beast. I think we knew what to expect from Vegas, but weren’t really prepared for how we’d react to it. In short, we didn’t really get it. The novelty of the tacky glitz and glamour wore off pretty quickly, and it just began to feel a bit empty. We tried our best on the food front, but failed to find anywhere with much soul. Vegas has some World class ‘dining experiences’ from the likes of Alain Ducasse and Wolfgang Puck, but fine dining ain’t really our thing, and and all the restaurants seemed a bit personality less, which is a shame. However, there was one highlight we uncovered in the Venetian hotel. The Reuben Sandwich at Tower’s Deli. A seriously delicious oasis in a culinary desert. We could have been in Katz’s.

From Vegas we drove to Venice Beach, LA for a night. It felt good to be back in California, and the beach, skaters and sunset made in a pretty cool place to hang out for an evening. Not much to report from a food point of view. We wanted to eat at this place called Gjelina which did look seriously amazing, but my hangover, the long drive from Vegas and over an hours wait for a table wore me down, so we decided to get some take-out and retire to our hotel room.

Our next leg is going to take in New Orleans, Memphis and Nashville. See you soon.

I’m writing this post with a very heavy heart as tomorrow we leave San Francisco.

The five or so months that we’ve spent here have been so amazing, and the missus and I have totally fallen in love with the city. The hills, the fog, the history, the food, the people, the atmosphere all combine to make San Francisco a totally unique place. Having visited before for a short time as a tourist, I think I was a bit worried about being bored, but far from it. There may not be a huge quantity of ‘must do’ sights, but it has to be one of the best cities in the world for just hanging out and chilling. No wonder the hippies loved it here!

So yeah, we’re basically totally gutted to be leaving, and if things were different with visas etc, I think we would have stayed for a couple of years. But we can’t. C’est la vie. It’s not all doom and gloom though, as we’re heading on an awesome road trip that will take us across country to New York before we head back to London in late October.

So before we bid San Francisco a very fond farewell, I thought I’d give you my top 10 culinary highlights.

1. Mission Chinese Food – I’m pretty sure you’re all sick of me talking about MCF by now, but humour me. I love everything about this place. The food, the venue, the buzz. It’s been wining every time we’ve been there. Wonder if they’d deliver to London.

2. The Burger at Citizen’s Band – The best I tasted in San Fran. There’s something that really works about the combination of the Kobe beef patty, caramelised onions and challah bun. Killer.

3. Outerlands – We only went a couple of times, but this it’s such a cool place in a really interesting part of town. Fantastic bread descended from Tartine’s original recipe, great soups and sarnies, lovely atmosphere.

4. The Bread at Tartine – Three words. Believe. The. Hype. It really is great stuff, and it was an absolute pleasure to spend a few days behind the scenes with the team there. Great product, great cafe, great people.

5. BiRite Market – San Fran’s finest indie supermarket. It ain’t cheap, but it is f**king amazing. Such great produce, and their Brown Sugar ice cream is the bomb.

6. The Sandwiches at Rhea’s deli – Possibly the best sandwiches I’ve ever tasted. Both me and the Missus have felt high after eating The Delores. Maybe there’s something in the mayo.

7. The Swan Oyster Bar – A slice of San Francisco’s culinary history, and an old school classic. Great fresh fish, smoked fish, white wine and banter. Love. This. Place

8. The Temple O’ Spuds at Boogaloos – The true breakfast of champions, especially when topped with a poached egg and served with a side of bacon or sausage and lots of hot sauce. Goodbye hangover. Hello late morning snooze.

9. The Carnitas at Taqueria Cancun – I don’t know how they cook that pork, but it’s magic. Have it in tacos, tortas or burritos, but make sure you have it. Just delicious.

10. Last but not least, The SFBI - I’ve said it all already, it was such a a great and tasty experience. I’m still getting used to not going to school every day. I feel like there’s a quite a large hole in my life, but looking forward to filling it when I get back home and (hopefully) start a new career.

Notable mentions should also go to Delfina Pizza (awesome starters and ‘pies’), the Farmers Markets (’real’ people shop there, not just the wealthy) and Chairman Bao (amazing bun based street food).

So that’s it. Goodbye for now San Francisco. I sincerely hope I’ll be back soon. Very soon.

Every now and again, you get a really good feeling about a restaurant just by walking past it. In our first week in San Francisco, we walked past The Swan Oyster Depot on our way home after a boozy night out. Even through our alcoholic haze we could tell we were going to like it. It had this really lovely old-school feel to it, so the next day we decided to give it a go. As you can probably conclude from this post, we weren’t disappointed, and we’ve been back a few times since.

But before we get down to the nitty gritty, a short history lesson. The Swan has been around since around 1912, and by the look of the place not much has changed since. The original oyster bar was bought out by a guy called Sal Sancimino and his three cousins (Al, Pat and Frank LaRocca) in 1946, and in turn their kids took it over in the ’70’s, and it not surprisingly has a really friendly, authentic family feel to it.

It’s a ‘hole in the wall’ style place, with a long marble bar, original tiles, wood paneling etc and it only sits around 20 people at a time. So if you’re going to pay it a visit, prepare yourself for a wait. Possibly quite a long one. But don’t let this put you off, you can have a drink in the queue, and with a bit of banter from the owners, the time passes pretty quickly. And once you’re sat down eating, all is forgotten.

Now the fact that they serve oysters, and they’re good, local and fresh is kind of a given. So I’m not going to waste time talking about them. But what I will tell you about is their famous Boston style Clam Chowder. Less creamy and heavy than others we’ve tasted (we’re guessing the use milk instead of cream), powered by a really good stock and chock full of clams. The only thing that improves it is a few drops of Tabasco. Winning.

On our last visit we also had the most amazing plate of the Swan’s take on Sashimi. Absolutely beautiful hand cut slices of salmon, scallops, albacore and red tuna, all drizzled with olive oil, capers, shallots, and a little bit of salt and pepper. So delicate and fresh. Bloody delicious.

Once you’ve got the taste for it, it’s kind of hard to stop so we also ordered a plate of their smoked salmon and trout. The salmon came just as I like it, mounted on some buttered brown bread with a bit of black pepper and a couple of generous lemon wedges. The Yanks definitely go in for a heavier smoke than the Scottish style that I’m used to, but it makes a nice change, and if I’ve got a plate of smoked fish in front of me, I’m usually pretty happy. Which brings me to the smoked trout. Served as a fillet with a bit of shredded iceberg and some prawns, a fitting end to our meal, and all washed down with the house ice cold Sauvignon Blanc (I’m not sure what it is is).

The only real downsides of The Swan Oyster Bar are the queue (or ‘line’ as they’d say over here), and the fact that it’s a bit expensive. But for the heritage, atmosphere, banter and the fresh as you like seafood, I’m more than happy to overlook these things.

I hope that it’s still going in another 100 years and being run by the next generation of LaRoccas and Sanciminios.

Gyoza, dumplings, wontons, pot stickers, whatever you call them, I love them. They’ve fast become one of my favourite snacks. One of those things that when you think about them, you’ve got to have them.

I’d never really thought of making my own, but a chance encounter with a dumpling press and a packet of wonton wrappers in San Fran’s China town changed all that, and now I can’t stop cranking them out. Of course if I was a real expert, I’d be wrapping them by hand, but I’m not, and the $6 press does a pretty good job.

This Thai influenced recipe has a pork filling, but you can stuff these little guys with whatever you want really. You could do a variation with salmon or shrimp and chive, or maybe even tofu and shitake mushrooms. The cases we’ve found work best are Singapore style dumpling wrappers as they’re a bit thicker and give the pot stickers more substance.

One more thing, the pot stickers get fried on one side (which is how they get their name) and then steamed, so you’re going to need a wok or frying pan with a lid. Lets begin.

Ingredients (makes about 20)

For the pot stickers

250g pork mince

1.5 tablespoons fresh coriander, finely chopped

1.5 tablespoons fresh mint, finely chopped

3 spring onions (scallions), finely chopped

1 teaspoon fresh grated ginger1 medium red chilli, finely chopped

1 tablespoon fish sauce

1 large garlic clove, grated

Dumpling wrappers, Singapore style

Around 100ml of water, some sesame and vegetable oil for cooking

For the dipping sauce

3 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons water

1.5 tablespoons siracha hot sauce

1 small clove garlic, finely chopped

1 spring onion, sliced

1 teaspoon fresh coriander, chopped

Method

Get the dipping sauce done first, as once the dumplings are made you really want to cook them right away. Chop the spring onion, garlic and coriander, mix in a small bowl with the rest of the ingredients and then set aside.

Now to make the filling. Like the sauce this is a pretty straight forward exercise in combining everything together in a bowl, but make sure you chop everything as finely as you can. Once all the ingredients are chopped, grated and poured into your bowl, get your hands in there and give it a good mix until everything is evenly combined.

Once you’re done with this, set up a bit of a dumpling production station. You’ll need your mixture, your press, the wrappers, and a bowl of water to seal the edges. Get a dumpling wrapper and place it on the center of the press (as pictured), run a wet finger along the circumference, and then place a small teaspoon of your mixture in the center. Close the press tightly, then open and pop out your dumpling. Repeat until you’re out of the mixture.

Next get a wok or frying pan on a high heat, remembering you’re going to need a lid for part two of the cooking. Whilst your pan is getting up to heat, sit all your dumplings on their bottoms, so that the seam is pointing up, a bit like a Stegosaurus’ back.

Your pan should be ready by now, pour in some vegetable oil and a few drops of sesame oil for flavour, and place the dumplings bottom down in the pan (you should be able to fit around 10 at a time). After a minute or so, when the skin on the underside is nicely browned, pour around 100ml of water into the pan, place the lid on and turn the heat down to medium. The water will splutter and steam dramatically, but don’t take off the lid. In fact leave it be for around 5 minutes.

After this time, take a peek. The liquid should have all but evaporated, and the dumplings should look glossy and every so slightly bloated. They’re ready, so get them out of the pan and cook up your next batch. You can keep the cooked dumplings in a warm oven on a lightly oiled plate (they can be a bit sticky) or in a steaming basket over some hot water whilst you cook the others.

When you’re done, serve immediately on their own as a snack with the dipping sauce, or with a big bowl of steamed garlic and soy choi sum as a dinner for 2.

Us Brits may have invented the humble sarnie, but the Americans have taken it to a whole new level. Here the sandwiches are a proper meal, lots of good stuff slapped between whichever kind of bread you fancy. The fact that burgers sit in the same section on a menu kind of sets the tone. Now I’ve tasted the brave new world, I feel kind of sad when I think about the Prets and Eats I used to visit so often back home, especially as most of the really good ones come out of small independent shops and delis.

Anyway, to prove the point, I thought I’d show you the evidence by showing you a few of our favourites (excluding burgers) from the recent months. GET READY TO DROOOOOOLLLL.

The Delores from Rheas Deli

Smoked peppered turkey, spicy cranberry sauce, muenster, bacon, tomatoes, red onion, pickles, pickles jalapenos, spinach on Dutch crunch bread.

The Golden Gate Sandwich from Whole Foods

Smoked turkey, bacon, provalone cheese, avocado, tomato, spinach, sun dried tomato mayonnaise on sourdough.

Fresh crab, cucumber, lettuce, tomato, cress, lettuce, mayonnaise on sourdough

The Korean Steak Sandwich from Rhea’s Deli

Rib eye marinated in soy, garlic, honey & spices, swiss cheese, chili garlic sauce, pickled red onions & jalapenos, fresh onions, lettuce, garlic aioli on an ACME organic roll.

The Eggbert from Saul’s Deli

Organic egg salad, olive tapenade, shaved fennel, arugula (rocket) on toasted challah.

Mayoose’s CA-BLT from Ike’s Place

Bacon, avocado, jack, lettuce, tomato, dirty sauce on Dutch crunch.

So that’s it. It’s over. 4 and a half months, 18 weeks, 90 days, 720 hours, 43,200 minutes of hardcore baking action. We graduated from the SFBI Professional Bread & Pastry Programme last Friday, and I’ve go to say it was a bitter sweet occasion.

In the week running up to the graduation, as a group we made over 160 products, and most of them in multiple numbers. We were split into four groups as usual, with two groups concentrating more on bread and the other two predominantly on cakes and pastry. It was a full on week of late nights, early mornings, little sleep and lots of coffee. We all started on pastry, prepping stuff to be frozen and items with good shelf life, and the production schedule steadily ramped up over the week to fever pitch, particularly on Thursday and Friday for us bread people. It was full on, but hugely enjoyable. I have to admit, I felt pretty emotional as I scored the very last loaf that went into the oven.

The graduation ceremony itself was a fitting end, with a great turnout. Michel gave a fantastic speech, after which we each had to talk about our favourite product from the 18 weeks. I managed to forget why I’d chosen mine (I blame lack of sleep and having to stand near those bloody ovens), but think I pulled it back in the end. We were then treated to a bit of a skit / awards ceremony that two of my fellow students, Anthea and Justin, had put together. Each classmate was given a ‘Golden Baguette’ award, of which I received ‘Most Likely TV Chef’, which was flattering…I think. We then feasted on all that we’d made, as well as fresh pizzas from the wood fired oven, and a well earned drink or three.

Overall the course was a fantastic experience. It was pretty much everything I hoped it would be, and more. I’ve learned so much, and genuinely feel prepared and ready (or as ready as I’ll ever be) to take what I’ve learned to the next level. I’ve got to say a final big thanks to everyone at the school, but in particular Frank, Mac, Juliette and Le Grande Fromage himself, Michel. They run a pretty unique programme at The SFBI, and it’s been a great privilege to have spent the last few months in their company.

I’ve also made some great new friends from all four corners of the globe. I’ve got high hopes for each of them, and hope that they go on to do great things, and realise their hopes and dreams. Christ, I sound almost American! It must be time for me to come home.

So on that subject, what’s next? Seems odd that a few months ago, I thought that quitting my job and actually getting out here was the tough part, but I guess it’s the tip of the iceberg. I’ve got a couple of weeks work experience at Tartine before we leave, which is great, but when I get back to the UK at the end of October I’ll be looking for work. So if there are any bakers who need an extra pair of hands, or anyone who wants to help me fulfill my Golden Baguette award, you know where to find me.

If you want to see more pictures from the graduation week, click here.

ICEBERG DEAD AHEAD!!

The poor old Iceberg lettuce is a pretty unfashionable leaf these days, but the Americans still have a lot of love for it, particularly when it’s served in big old wedges and drenched in blue cheese dressing. This twist on the American Classic uses a local Californian goat cheese called Humbolt Fog, which is lovely and creamy, and has a blue-ish tang to it. Paired with some applewood smoked bacon candied in maple syrup, and a few thinly sliced red onions, it’s pretty much the perfect starter. It’s pretty easy to throw together too. Lets begin.

Ingredients (serves 4)

1 large iceberg lettuce

200g Humbolt Fog, or your favourite mild blue cheese

300g Buttermilk, or sour cream

Juice of 1/4 – 1/2 of lemon, to taste

1 teaspoon Tabasco

Salt and pepper, to taste

4 rashers of thick cut streaky bacon

1 tablespoon maple syrup

1/2 small red onion, very thinly sliced

Method

First up, make the dressing. It seems to taste better when it has a bit of time for all the ingredients to get friendly.  Pour the buttermilk (or sour cream) into a bowl, and crumble the cheese into it in small chunks. Then with a fork, give it a quick whisk to mix and break down the cheese a bit more, but don’t over do it, you want your dressing to have a bit of texture. Next add the Tabasco, lemon juice and seasoning and give it a taste. It should be creamy with some bite from the cheese, and a bit of heat from the pepper sauce.

Next, prep the bacon. Dry fry the rashers in a hot pan on both sides until it’s got some good colour and caramelisation, then pour off the excess fat. Turn the heat down, pour in the maple syrup, and toss the bacon in it until it’s all nicely coated and shiny. Remove the rashers from the pan to cool.

You’re now ready to prep your veg. Slice your red onion as thinly as you can, use a mandolin if you’ve got one, and then sprinkle with a little salt. This helps mellow them out and soften them up a bit. Then take your iceberg. Peel off any ugly outer leaves, chop into 4 equal quarters, and remove the heaviest part of the stalk from each wedge.

Place a wedge on each plate, scatter a few onions on top of it and then generously spoon over the dressing. Finish with a chopped rasher of the maple bacon per serving. Then eat.

Apologies for the radio silence. It’s almost been a week since I finished the course at the SFBI, and I’ve been enjoying a few well earned days off. I’ve got a bunch more posts in the bank to write, so if I can pull my finger out, I’ll get to these very soon. AND I’ve also got exciting news about some work experience that I’ve hopefully lined up here for the next couple of weeks.

But back to this week. It was something lurking in my in my in-box on Wednesday that has tempted me back to Wordpress, and that was the launch of the new Big Apple Hot Dogs site. I mentioned it briefly in this post, but I worked with the very talented chaps over at Nation on the site before I left for California.

I helped out with some thoughts on the design direction and food branding in general, and wrote the copy, and it’s great to see it all come to life, in particular the dog-sliding-into-bun animation (parallax scrolling, bitchez). Sweeeeeet!

If you’re ever in the vicinity of Old Street, and you want to treat your taste buds to something a little bit special, you really should go and pay BAHD a visit. Abiye, the guys who runs it, is not not only a thoroughly nice bloke, but he’s got the skills to pay the bills in a quality line-up of meaty treats developed with his secret weapon ‘The Sausage-Meister’, a butcher operating out of an equally secret location in London. I’ve also got love for the man because, like me, he used to have a desk job working for a big corporation, and decided that there was more to life, and Big Apple Hot Dogs is the result.

Anyways, go and have a look at the site and then go buy a dog. It’s that simple.

Last week felt like a pretty quiet one compared to the previous 16. I kind of got the feeling that our tutors were taking it easy on us as next week is graduation when we’ll be making pretty much everything we’ve made on the course. But in one week. That’s right. One frikkin’ week. We’re going to be busier than a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest.

The earlier part of the week, we spent prepping and making ‘baked custards’ of the world. France was repped by the crème brûlée and crème caramel, Italy by the panna cotta, and the good ol’ US of A by a rather tasty baked cheesecake. But where was the British custard tart I ask you? Nowhere. A bloody outrage!

The above was the pre-cursor to the plated deserts section of the course, which we were led through by Frank and Juliette, both of whom have worked as pastry chefs at some pretty fancy places. And it showed.

We learned a bit about what a customer expects, some thoughts on seasonality, how to come up with a desert including flavour combinations and then ideas on how to name it and put it together on a plate. All pretty interesting, especially as it felt more like cooking than baking, which is a different perspective to what we’ve been up to over the rest of the course. But enough of that, here are a few of Juliette & Frank’s creations:

Caremelised pineapple crepes with vanilla ice cream, candied hazelnuts and tuille baskets.

Pain Perdu with strawberry sorbet, mascerated strawberries and brioche coutons.

Caremelised apple tarts with sorrel and cinnamon sabayon and panna gelato.

Sable Breton and caramelised fig tart with strawberry sorbet and frozen yoghurt ice cream.

Chocolate mousse and anise marshmallow tarts, with tapioca, micro greens and crispy, caramel croquant wafer.

Caramel and vanilla poached pears, vanilla ice cream and  pastry crumble.

Pistachio frangiapane with fresh mint parfait, white chocolate ice cream and pistachio dragees.

So that was our penultimate, and I’ve got to say it, very tasty week. Next week’s the big one, and I’m sad to say, the end of the course. I have a feeling its going to get a bit emotional. Until then…

A real mixed bag last week at SFBI. Monday & Tuesday were dedicated to making all kinds of Petit Fours, Wednesday & Thursday we were set a two day practical, revisiting the pastry section of the course, and then on Friday we rounded off the week with a tour of the great and the good of the Bay Area’s bakeries. Tell Tale, ACME, La Farine, Semifreddi’s and Firebrand.

So, rewind selectah to the beginning of last week. A big part of Petit Fours is chocolate based, from mendiants and molded chocolates to truffles, you need a lot of the stuff, and being more accustomed to eating it than making it, I wasn’t really aware of one of the key skills of the master chocalatier, tempering. I’ve got to to tell you, it’s a tricky business.

If chocolate isn’t tempered properly it lacks gloss and sheen, and doesn’t set properly, so it’s more prone to melting. For properly tempered chocolate, you need your choc to have a concentration of the right kind of crystals (I’m not going to get into the science, so you’ll just have to trust me), and this is achieved through the combination of time, agitation and temperature. Whilst tabling is a valid method, for us this equated to A LOT of stirring. And don’t I know it. My right arm is still aching, and not from self abuse for once! I think I’ve contracted Tempeperer’s Elbow. But once you’ve got your chocolate right, you can create some pretty tasty morsels, as you can see. But it wasn’t all chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. We also made caramels, more macaroons, a rather unsuccessful peanut brittle, marshmallows, and some mouth-wateringly delicious passion fruit pâtes de fruits. Diabetes alert!

As mentioned above, we then had a two day practical. We revisited a lot of good stuff from the not too distant past to make sure that we’d grasped the main concepts, and again we were able to run our own schedule for a couple of days, which was cool. Our team was a pretty well oiled machine, but it was a hectic two days. Amongst other things we made choux, including a re-appearance of the Paris Brest which I was happy about, pies, tarts, puff pastry creations like the Pethivier, cookies, scones, muffins and so on. All in all, I was really pleased with how we did. The guys at Lost Weekend Video seemed to approve of the haul which we exchanged for Step Brothers (terrible film, don’t bother), and my pie got the thumbs up from my buddy Matt, who is a total pie addict.

Then on Friday, we had what can only be described as a dysfunctional, but very enlightening school field trip to visit a bunch of bakeries. I found it a really inspiring and eye opening trip, and whilst I’m not going to go into too much detail, I thought I’d mention the things that I liked about each of them.

Our first stop of the day was Tell Tale. They are a relatively new outfit, with mostly wholesale accounts. The space that they’ve set up is pretty incredible. Lots of space, great machinery, and from what we tasted, great products. Their croissant and financiers were the bomb. They also have really good branding, which was good to see.

Next up, we went to ACME. We were really privileged to be given the tour of one of their facilities by one of the founders, Steve Sullivan. He talked a bit about he got the baking bug, and how his business grew from it’s humble beginnings to the baking tour de force it is today. Really cool guy.

Next we went over to La Farine, a more customer centric operation with four outlets in the Berkley area. We met with the operations manager, Stan Dodson, at the Fruitvale location and what impressed me about La Farine was how they produced so much bread from such a small kitchen, and how involved they are in the community. It really is a customer business, and thats what makes them tick.

Our next stop was Semifreddi’s. Again like ACME, they have come from humble beginnings, but they recently moved to a new facility which is like a spaceship. A huge space, very clean, and runs like clockwork with a combination of automation and craftsmanship. The majority of their bread is still shaped by hand, but they have a bunch of labour saving devices that keeps them running a smoother, and from what we could see, a more pleasant operation for their staff.

Our final stop was Firebrand, a small wood fired bakery in deepest, darkest Oakland. It became pretty clear that the life of the wood fired baker is a hard one, and to a great extent it’s a lifestyle choice. Despite the style of baking not really floating my boat (I’m far too lazy), I was really encouraged by the fact that they have succeeded in making a business out of it, and that they had done so with such a small range of equipment and resources. Good on them.

So all in all, a varied and interesting week. Next week is plated deserts, before we batten down the hatches for the final week of hard core production in time for graduation.

For those of you that read this blog regularly, or follow on twitter, you’ll know that Hand To Mouth has a BIG restaurant crush on Mission Chinese Food. So when we saw that the guys behind it had written a sort of cookery book and were having a ‘food and chat’ style book launch, we were all over it like a rash. So much so that we bought tickets #1 and #2.

The book, Mission Street Food, is the brainchild of Anthony Myint and his wife Karen Leibowitz, who despite their tender years and relative inexperience, have already left a pretty sizeable legacy on San Francisco’s culinary map due to their DIY approach to the restaurant trade. As a couple who are also thinking of opening a food-based business, we were as keen as mustard to hear them speak about their experience, and basically get inspired.

Their story begins in late 2008 when Myint (previously a consultant who re-trained as a chef) was working as a line cook at Bar Tartine, the restaurant arm of SF’s famous bread emporium, and was looking for a more creative outlet in his down time. So he sub-let a Guatemalan taco truck on Thursday evenings and launched Mission Street Food, slinging phenomenal sounding gourmet sandwiches to a hungry and ever growing crowd of San Francisco foodies. Pork belly and jalapeño (PB & J), Pigs trotter and cornichon, 40 clove chicken, fried catfish and kimchi are among some of the sarnies listed in the book (I’m gutted I wasn’t around to sample them) and before long MSF had become as hot as Hades and demand was outstripping resource.

So Mission Street Food ditched the truck, and moved in to a rather scabby looking Chinese Restaurant in the Mission district called Lung Shan. The deal that Myint and Leibowitzt struck up with the restaurant owners was that they’d take over their dining room on Thursday and Saturday evenings, sharing the kitchen with the restaurants existing chefs who would still be knocking up take-away for deliveries. A pretty improbable arrangement, but it seemed to work. With an already strong social media fueled fan base, they were packed from the first night they opened, and despite what they described as a pretty shambolic opening, they served more food to more people than they ever could with the truck.

Over the next few months, MSF went from strength to strength, but it also continued to evolve. Myint was still working at Bar Tartine, and Leibowitz as a lecturer at Berkley University, which made planning, preparing and cooking for their weekly extravaganzas challenging to say the least. So they threw ‘their’ kitchen doors open to other chefs, inviting them to contribute to the weekly menus, whilst taking a bit of pressure off.

As a couple who seem to have a constant desire to innovate, Mission Street Food was never going to be a permanent fixture, and in June of 2010 it served it’s final meal. But it wasn’t game over for Lung Shan as Myint handed over the reigns of the dining room to friend and co-conspirator Danny Bowien and Mission Street Food became Mission Chinese Food. Since then the couple have been busy consulting, opening other restaurants (Commonwealth) and pop ups (the now closed Mission Burger), developing links with food based charities and writing a book. Slackers they are not.

As we hoped, hearing their story was really inspirational. I’m not sure what the other people at the event took away, but our feeling was that, talent aside, their success is due in great part to a few key factors. Neither Myint or Leibowitz had that much experience, but they had (and still have) a desire to do something different, and they went for it. Secondly, they were flexible in realising their goals. Without this flexibility, they probably would have run themselves into the ground, but they saw the benefit of switching things up, working out deals, finding collaborators and so on. Our third observation was that San Francisco played quite a big part. It’s a city that LOVES food and supports this kind of ‘can do’ attitude, and not just on a faddish level. I wish I could say the same of London. Finally, we were impressed with the idea of the democratisation of fine dining. As I’ve mentioned many times before, I’m no fan of fine dining. The snobbery, fussyness and atmosphere of fine dining restaurants don’t sit well with me, but part of Myint and Leibowitz’s mission was to apply the classical techniques and traditions of such places to food that is more accessible to the general populous. Smart thinking both from a point of view of keeping costs down, but also in terms of keeping their army of fans happy.

Speaking of being kept happy, over the course of the evening we were also served a very tasty three course meal by Myint. We started with a beef carpaccio, featuring very thinly sliced beautifully seared rib eye steak (cut against the grain – a technique he elaborates on in the book), a mozarella mousse dispensed from a C02 charged siphon (natch), a very tasty relish of olive, caper, pistachio, parsley, shallot, lemon juice and olive oil, and some insanely spicy crisps. A slightly odd combination, but it all worked well together.

The main course was a chicken Caesar salad, which was pretty traditional, but had some nice little touches. The chicken was ‘confited’ in chicken fat, before being grilled, and was served with some chicken skin crisps (if only Walkers would make these). There were also a few slices of avacado, a couple of boquerones and a generous shaving of Parmesan.

The meal was rounded off with a dish created for one of MSF’s theme evenings, Breakfast For Dinner, their take on Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Made with a doorstep slice of ACME’s pain de mie spread both sides with butter, and then dredged with sugar and cinnamon before being brûléed with a blow-torch and floated in a pool of condensed and regular milk. Sounds odd. Tasted great.

So, a great evening with plenty of food for both body and mind. Towards the end of the evening, were lucky to have the opportunity to have a good chat with Leibowitz as she helped her hubby dish up the desert, getting more on her perspectives on starting a business amongst other things. But I’ve written far too much already, so this may have to wait for another time.

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):

Fresh Fruit Charlotte: Lady finger base and walls, separate lemon and berry inserts, diplomat cream, all topped with fresh fruit. One of my favourites of the week.

Lemon & Blackberry Mousse Cake: Full on presentation on this one. Dacquase sponge base, blackberry insert, lemon mousse, a cake wall of biscuit jaonde decorated with pate decor, finished with a marbled neutral glaze. Pheeeww.

White Chocolate, Pistachio and Raspberry Mousse Cake: Pistachio and raspberry sponge base, raspberry insert, white chocolate mousse, finished with a half scollop motif, tinted white chocolate spray, and white macarons, which we started making this week, but will do more of next.

Vanilla Bavarian: Muscavado sugar sable Breton base, vanilla sponge insert, vanilla mousse all coated in white chocolate, again applied with the spray gun, and again tinted.

I’m going to be honest, the majority of the cakes left me a bit cold. Don’t get me wrong, the ingredients are all great (cream, sugar, fruit, booze, cake – whats not to like?), but I think I’m basically not that fond of the texture that the gelatin. Also, and this may not make much sense as all the individual elements have to be made, but for me these cakes felt like they were more assembly jobs than anything.

They are also not really my bag aesthetically. Making them was fun, and it was definitely good to learn some new techniques, but most of them look to me like they could be at home on the open seas on a cruise ship circa 1987, or in a slightly pretentious restaurant. I guess I just don’t find ‘modern’ presentation that appetising.

Next week, our penultimate week of study, covers macarons, chocolate, confectionery and petit fours followed by a two day practical and a bakery tour. It’s gonna be big.

But there’s gold in them there wedding cake shaped hills, so I manned up and took on the challenge. We made two cakes, one traditional with all that white butter cream, pipe work and hand made fondant flowers (see below), but for the other we had more of a free reign.

So I decided to have a bit of fun and make a Mr & Mrs PACMAN cake. I’m not going to say its a new idea, I basically copied it off the internets, but this is my take on it, and it took quite a lot of time and effort, so you’re going to see the pictures, and you’re going to enjoy them. Capisce?

…to me!

I realised yesterday that I missed Hand To Mouth’s second birthday.

Seems crazy to think that two years have passed since I first put finger to keyboard.

Whilst its sometimes tough to muster the energy to write, particularly at the moment when so much other stuff is going on, I’m still enjoying the blogging and living my Hand To Mouth existence.

So a big thanks to all you out there who’ve read and supported what I do here, and to the rest of you, go f**k yourselves (only kidding!).

Here’s to another year.

Cheers

Fergus

Feels a bit odd writing about cake when there’s all this shit going down in London, so to that end I’m going to do what I promised in my last post. Be brief.

So another week, another cake mountain. The cakes last week were definitely more technical than the week before. We compared and contrasted the differences between fat based and egg based sponges, including Génoise and Chiffon, as well as making a bunch of different fillings and icings.

Here are a few highlights:

The Fraisier – a light vanilla sponge sandwiching fresh strawberries and mouselline, all topped off with a marzipan disc. Summer in cake form.

Black Forest Gateaux – a modern twist on the German classic. Kirsch spiked chocolate sponge sandwiching a filling of Chantilly and brandied cherries, covered in cherry cream. Das ist gut, ya!

Sachertorte – from Vienna with love. A dense chocolate and almond sponge, a bit of apricot jam, all smothered with a pretty thick layer of chocolate. Always served with a dollop of whipped cream.

Opera – my winner of the week. Thin, dense sponge soaked in sweetened coffee. Two layers of chocolate ganache, one of coffee buttercream, all topped off with a chocolate glaze. Moist, sophisticated and tres tasty.

The Concorde – alternating layers of chocolate meringue and chocolate ganache surrounded by and topped with ‘cigarettes’ of chocolate meringue. Richer than Donald Trump, but with better hair.

The final two days of the week we made wedding cakes. Yep, you heard me right. Wedding cakes. In fact we made two, one more traditional iced with buttercream, and the other we had more creative license.

Here are a few of the results. And yes that is a Pac Man cake. And yes it’s mine. More on this in another post.

So thats it for week 14. Next week we’re doing yet more cakes, and moving into chocolate and confectionery. Until then, I hope all you Londoners are well. Don’t let the buggers get you down.

We’ve got a busy month ahead with family and friends visiting SF, and I’m already behind with my posts. This may not end well. Thinking I’m going to try and make the next couple as brief as possible so I can catch up. More photos, less words. Capisce?

So the week before last was week 13. Unlucky for some, but not for us, as this was the week we started to make cake, and as always, lots of it.

The week started off in a not entirely cakey way with baking a bunch of scones. Being the cosseted Englishman that I am, I didn’t realise how popular these tea-time treats are with the rest of the world. The Yanks and the Aussies in particular seem to love them. But unfortunately no jam or clotted cream was harmed in the making of these recipes, as they tend to be filled with dried fruit and nuts over here, and eaten dry. Also, the scones over here are almost universally triangular shaped, as they are cut from a circular slabs. The heathens! We made them in two ways (butter and cream based formulas) and in a whole range of flavours, including walnut and apricot, lemon and poppy seed, white chocolate and cranberry, currant and so on.

We then moved on to what are known over here as ‘quick breads’. Simple cakes of the kind you’d cook in a loaf tin. We made banana bread, pumpkin bread, marble cake, cake aux fruits (or fruit cake to you and me), and pound cake. I like a good banana bread, but most of them seemed a bit bland to me. My favourite was probably the pound cake, baked in a bundt pan with a simple lemon icing. It could definitely use more lemony zing taking a few lessons from my Mum’s lemon drizzle cake, but it’s a cake with some potential for sure.

‘Coffee Cakes’ came next, which are not to be confused with a coffee flavoured cakes. Believe you me, this stumped me for a while, I was tasting cakes thinking ‘yeah it’s nice, but I can’t taste any coffee’. Yes, these are cakes which are simply to be enjoyed with a cup of coffee. We made a couple of these, one with a jam filling and a streusel topping, and the other jam packed with apples, which was the better of the two in my humble opinion. A good balance of sweet and tart.

The cake making went up a gear towards the end of the week , starting with the rather curious ‘Angel Food Cake’. Again this was a new one on me. Essentially a meringue cake, it’s made from a shed load of egg whites and sugar, with a tiny bit of cake flour throw in for good measure. Insanely sweet, white and fluffy, I don’t really get the point of it, but they are hugely popular here being sold in their millions from Wholefoods to Safeway.

To make up for this cake abomination, we then made (IMHO) the two best cakes of the week. A classic carrot cake with a cream cheese frosting, and the chocolate and hazelnut dacquoise. The former needs no introduction. Moist, sweet and a bit nutty as it should be, but the dacquoise is more of a complicated beast. Two layers of chocolate sponge, one layer of hazelnut dacquoise style sponge, filled and covered with a praline flavoured butter-cream. Pretty intense, but pretty damn tasty too.

Over the course of the week, we also got re-acquainted with the dreaded piping bag with a number of boot camp style piping sessions. Learning different shapes, styles, borders and techniques it became clear very quickly that it’s a real skill, one which I’m pretty sure I wasn’t born with. But I’m getting better. We also started writing in chocolate, which is another matter altogether. The example pictured on the cake above came from the hand of Frank, our instructor, as I’m way to embarrassed to show my own efforts, but lets just say that if a report on them was written by my old school master they would have been described as ‘infantile’.

So that was week 13. I tried to be brief, but it seems I failed. We’ve got a whole more cake to come next week, so bring a fork and a plate people.

Going back in time a bit, on the last day of the bread section of my course we had a flat bread day. We made pitta, pizza, lavash and naan breads. Knowing we were going to make them, I thought I’d give my course mates a little taste of ‘home’ by making some spiced fillings for a few of the naan. Well everyone knows how much us Brits love a curry.

The breads are made with a whole wheat biga, which is a (typically) Italian stiff pre-ferment, although I imagine the Indians would use hunks of ‘old dough’ to add flavour and a bit of leavening. As the biga is made of whole wheat and has a wee bit of yeast in it, you don’t need to make it the night before, just a few hours before you make your final dough, which has a 3 hour bulk ferment, so you’ll need to get a bit organised.

I made the meat (keema) filling for the carnivores and a vegetarian version for the herbivores and we baked the breads in the schools wood fired oven, which I’m guessing most of you out there don’t have. Don’t worry, you can cook them in your oven at home. Just make sure it’s as hot as Hades, and that you bake the naans on something solid and heat retaining like a pizza stone or heavy roasting tin.

Ready?

Ingredients (makes 4)

For The Bread

380g White Bread Flour

30g Whole Wheat Flour

170g Water (temp of around 26c)

16g Ghee or melted butter

12g Salt

1g Instant Yeast

160g Goat or regular low fat Yoghurt

225g Whole Wheat Biga (see below)

More Ghee / Butter for brushing the bread with

For The Keema

400g Minced Beef

1/2 Onion, finely chopped

1/2 Hot Chilli

2 Cloves Garlic, Finely Chopped

1 teaspoon Garam Massala

1/2 teaspoon Ground Coriander

1/2 teaspoon Turmeric

1/2 teaspoon Chilli Powder

1/2 teaspoon Ground Cumin

Handful Chopped Fresh Coriander

Squeeze of Lemon Juice

Salt and Pepper to taste

For The Vegetarian Filling

2 Medium Onions, sliced

2 Cloves Garlic, finely chopped

1 teaspoon Cumin Seeds

1/2 teaspoon Ground Coriander

1/2 teaspoon Turmeric

1/2 teaspoon Salt

Method

So, the first thing to do is make your biga, which you should do around 4 hours before you’re going to make your dough. Simply mix together 140g of whole wheat flour with 90g of water and half a pinch of dried yeast. Give it a good old mix, cover and place somewhere warm.

When you’re ready to make your dough, put all the ingredients, including the biga, into a bowl. If you’ve got a mixer with a dough hook, mix on the lowest speed for 4 or so minutes to combine all the ingredients, and then turn it up to speed two for around 2 to 3 minutes. You’re looking for the dough to have a good level of tenacity. If you don’t have a mixer, combine all the ingredients in a bowl and then knead on a floured surface for around 8 to 10 minutes until your dough reaches the same strength. When ready, turn the dough out into an oiled bowl, cover and set aside for 3 hours.

While you’re waiting, prep the fillings as you’re better off using them cold. It’s all pretty easy. For the mince, fry off the spices for a minute or so being careful not to burn them, then add the garlic and onions to the pan. Fry these until they’re soft, and then add the mince. Keep cooking on a medium heat until the mixture dries out, and then stir in the chopped coriander. Set aside to cool, and then make the onions. Again fry the spices, fry the onions and garlic until caramalised and dry-ish, then set aside.

After three hours, remove your dough from the bowl and divide into 4 equal portions of 250g each. Take each piece, de-gas gently with the palm of your hand (don’t smash the dough, just reduce the volume) and then pre-shape into a rough triangle by folding over two sides to form a point a bit like you’d fold a paper plane, and then fold over the base. Flip each of the triangles over (see picture above), set aside and cover for 45 minutes for the final prove and then set your oven to as hot as it will go (preferably 260c +).

After this time, take each of your pieces of dough and cut in half. Flatten each half into a long, thin triangle using the tips of your fingers. On one, place half the mince / half the onion mixture leaving a clear border of at least half an inch around the edge. Then moisten this with some water, before placing the other half on top. Seal the edge by pinching the two halves together, and then using the tips of your fingers again, push the two layers together. This is what gives the naan the classic dimpled effect. You can afford to be quite firm, just try not to puncture the dough.

You’re now ready to go. Get your bread on some kind of transfer peel (it’s probably best to bake only one or two at a time), and then slide them into your oven onto your stone / baking tray. As the oven is so hot, they should cook in around 10 minutes, but keep an eye on them. Take them out when they’re golden brown and have puffed up.

Once they’re out of the oven, brush them with ghee or melted butter and eat immediately. Either alone, with a curry, or a bit of raita.

Using the left over Pâte à Foncer and the vanilla Sucree, as well as a chocolate version made for us by our instructor, Juliette, we made a trio of tasty treats. The first was a Pear Bourdaloue. A rectangular tart filled with frangipane, jam and topped with artfully sliced pears. Right up my ‘rue’. Next, using the chocolate sucree, a salted caramel tart. Quite a lengthy process this one, as it involved making a salted caramel with which we lined the base, a chocolate ganache which formed the bulk of the filling, all topped off with ‘black glaze’, which contrary to it’s name isn’t a new tone from Dulux, but a silky chocolate flavoured glaze which gives the finished tart a shop ready sheen.

The final tart of the trio was a creamy passion fruit tart, which had a tasty curd like filling similar to a tarte au citron, topped (slightly un-necessarily in my opinion) with blow-torched Swiss meringue, to give a nicely burnished effect. Or at least that’s the theory. For most of us, this was the first time we had used a piping bag to finish a desert, and there were some mixed results. My effort (not pictured) wasn’t too bad, but lets just say Pierre Hermé hasn’t been knocking down my door to offer me a job.

The following day we got busy making choux pastry, hence the HILLARIOUS title of this post. The good news is that choux is, comparatively speaking, a doddle to make. The bad news is that you have to pipe it to make your creations. This being the case, we started off slowly making croquembouche (choux puffs covered in pearl sugar) and a cheesy version on the theme called gougères. Luckily, both just involved piping a small ball of the pastry onto a baking sheet.

More choux shenanigans followed with the Paris Brest (pictured above), a pastry created to commemorate the cycle race of the same name which is the warm up for the Tour De France. Made by piping a circle (or as close as one can manage) of choux, filled post baking with a praline flavoured cream, and topped with flaked almonds. I love anything with praline, so I was a fan. I imagine Lance Armstrong eats a bunch of these every day when he’s training. We also made éclairs later in the day, but for me these were eclipsed by the Brest. No laughing at the back.

Wednesday was almost entirely dedicated to baking and assembling the Gateaux Saint Honoré, a French cake named after the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs. The cake has no less than 6 separate elements. 1 – a puff pastry base. 2 – a choux pastry ring running the circumference of the base. 3 – choux ‘puff’ balls filled with 4 – Mouselline and dipped in 5 – caramel, finally the centre of the cake is filled with 6 – chantilly. Complicated, but seriously good stuff.

After three days of sweet architecture, the rest of the week was comparatively mundane, as we made cookies, muffins, meringues and what we would call ‘tray bakes’, brownies and ‘lemon bars’. Thats not to say it wasn’t interesting, as it’s been good to get to grips with different techniques and learning the right way of doing things. A special shout has to go out to the peanut butter cookie. Biscuit crack.

So that was last week. This week its cakes, cakes and more cakes…see you then.

Anyways, I remember seeing an episode of one of his shows a while ago (I think it was the one where he met up with another survival legend, Les Hiddins aka The Bush Tucker Man) where he cooked foil wrapped bananas with cocoa powder in the dieing embers of his camp fire.

Hardly haute cuisine I think you’ll agree, but they looked tasty, so the next time I had a barbie I thought I’d give it a go, and they’ve been a fixture ever since. So I figured if some guy from New Orleans called Foster can have a banana dish named after him, why can’t our Ray?

These ones are a posher remix of Ray’s iron rations, using dark chocolate and a bit of booze, but I’d like to think the man himself would approve.

Ingredients (per person)

1 ripe banana

2 squares of dark chocolate

1 tablespoon whiskey (25ml)

Method

Take your banana (stem side up), and carefully insert a sharp knife through the upper skin through into banana itself all the way to the skin on the underside. Slide the knife along, so you cut the banana end to end, being careful not to pierce the underside.

Break each square of chocolate into two, and then carefully prying the cut banana open, insert the pieces of chocolate into the banana so they sit end to end, all the way along the cut.

Now take your foil, place the banana on it and make a rough parcel, with enough excess foil to continue wrapping the fruit when you’re done. Pour the whiskey into the incision, and tightly wrap it up in the foil. Toss the parcel into the embers of your barbecue and leave to cook for 5 minutes.

And that’s it, when they’re done, unwrap, and serve with some quality vanilla ice cream or a good glug of double cream, and scoop out the chocolaty, boozy flesh with a spoon.

Probably better than a mug of pine needle tea.

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.

They describe their style as ‘Americanized Oriental Food’, and there’s definitely a nod towards Szechuan style, but whatever you call it, it’s frikkin’ tasty. I think we’ve munched our way through around half of the menu to date, and we’re planning on completing the set as soon as we can. On our last vist we had the Char Siu Pork Belly (again), which is almost like a take on bacon and eggs. The mildly spiced belly comes in super tender, tasty chunks with a nicely crispy skin, and is served with soft boiled eggs, noodle rolls and hoi sin sauce. Amazing. Really good.

The last time we went, the dumplings were sold out, so we got stuck in to a portion of the fish dumplings that are made to order by one of the owners,  Danny Bowien, in the window of the restaurant. The casing was a bit tough for my taste, but the filling was delicious, and the broth the dumplings came bobbing in had a healthy ginger kick to it.

We followed this with the Xi’an Lamb soup and the Mongolian hangar steak. The soup combined braised lamb cheeks, merguez sausage and ramen style noodles, swimming in a spicy, full flavored soup. Another hit. The steak was cooked medium rare with lots of onion, some bell pepper, a really tasty salty soy style sauce and a whole heap of chillies that were as hot as Hades. I got on the wrong side of one of them after a couple of bites, and it almost blew my head off, but not at the expense of the taste of the dish. One thing that is impressive about the food at Mission Chinese Food is that with all the dishes, even the hot ones, the spicing is done with a deft hand. Nothing overpowers the key ingredients. You can really taste the meat, which is a pretty neat trick to pull off when you’re dealing with full on flavours.

I’m not going to deny it’s a bit of a hipster haven, and I guess the idea of a modern Chinese restaurant setting up in the guys of an old-school Chinese is a bit of a gimmick, but f**k it. It works for me.

(Apologies for the quality of the pics. It’s a bit dark and very orange in there).

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.

What we did with our puff was a kind of who’s who of French pastries, including palmiers, cheese straws, turnovers, tarte tatins, galettes, Napoleons (or mille-feuille as I knew them before), and a couple of more elaborate creations in the pithivier and the jalousie. The latter two were filled with pistachio frangipane and boozy cherries, sported hand finished ‘lids’ and were made using the inverted puff. Tasty stuff.

We then let the Yanks have their say by making a load of pie dough. Just like Special Agent Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks, the Americans love their pie, and whilst we didn’t get to make any cherry pie (which I was a bit gutted about) we did nail a few American Classics. But before we got to the filling, we had to get to the dough…ing (or something).

American pie dough is pretty similar to what we’d call ‘flaky pastry’ back home, but we made it three alternate ways to show how working the ingredients with different techniques yields different results. The hand mix, like with the blitz, gives you the most inconsistent, most flaky end product. Again ideal for the more rustic products. The classic flaky we made in a kitchen aid mixer and worked the cold butter chunks in the mix down to a pea size. Finally the ‘mealy’ variety made in the big mixers in which we broke the butter down so it forms a breadcrumb-like texture with the flour, which gives a firmer end product.

With these doughs we made three classic American sized pies. Pecan, berry and deep filled apple. They were all good in their own way, but fears for my ever increasing girth meant that the wife and I had to find an alternative home for them. So we’ve come to an arrangement with our local DVD shop (the awesome Lost Weekend Video) to trade sweet stuff for rentals. A fair trade methinks.

Later in the week, the French then got back in the game with tart doughs. These doughs are more enriched, smoother and more ‘consistent’ as they use warm butter (along with the other ingredients) that gets more fully incorporated with the flour. Again we made several variations. The French version of a standard pie dough, the Pâte à Foncer, the sweetened Pâte à Sucree, and the sablé Breton from Brittany, which uses salted butter and bakes a bit like shortbread.

I’m not going to go into mixing techniques as I’m tired and my bed is calling me, but with these we baked the pastry shells (aside from the Foncer which we’re saving for the next week) and then filled them once they’d cooled. With the sucreee we made a few little fresh fruit tarts, filled with pastry cream and topped with different kinds of berries. My kind of tart. The Breton got topped with a similar cream used for the Napoleons (pastry cream whipped with butter) flavoured with geranium oil and topped with fresh strawberries. If I’m honest, the geranium oil gave the otherwise tasty cream more than a whiff of grandma’s knicker drawer, which isn’t top of my list of flavour profiles when I’m picking out a tart.

So that was the week that was. We’ll be doing more tarts next week, and also moving on to choux pastry. Until then…

A week or so ago on a rare, but none the less slightly grey and grim San Francisco Saturday, we headed to an area of the city called Sunset. It’s a part of town bordered by Ocean Beach (the local break for a lot of SF surfers) and the Pacific Highway that on paper has a lot going for it, but seems to have become a bit neglected, a bit like a faded British seaside town.

We’d read that the area is on the up again following a small cluster of new(ish) and interesting places opening up down there, one of which is a cafe / restaurant called Outerlands. I’d first heard about Outerlands from a Tartine Bread video that features the owner, David Muller. David had met Chad Robertson through a love of surfing, and Chad taught David how to make the bread that he now serves at the cafe.

We pitched up at around late lunch time, and it was busy, busy. So we put our names down and sat on the little bench outside and happily watched the world go by. After half an hour we were beginning to get a bit chilly, but before long we were sat inside the warm, wood clad interior perusing the simple but delicious sounding menu, most of which is based around David’s excellent bread.

Over a glass off red wine and a Black Butte Porter (served in Ball jam jars, natch) we quickly decided on the soup and grilled cheese combo. The delicious broccoli and potato soup had a little island of sauteed borage on the top, and was lightly spiced with either cumin or ground coriander. Properly warming and hearty stuff. Perfect food for the weather.

The grilled cheese sandwich was a thing of beauty. So simple, yet so effective. The bread was ‘toasted’ by being brushed with garlic olive oil and then seared on a skillet to give it this toothsome, super tasty crust. The twin cheese filling was a combination of (we think) Cheddar and Colby, and was melted to perfection. So tasty, and went brilliantly with the soup.

As you’ll know, I’m a lover of simple food done really well, which Outerlands seems to have pegged, but for me one of the greatest and most encouraging thing is how it has been instrumental in kick-starting the rejuvenation of an area of town. Sure, Sunset isn’t all surf breaks and hipsters, but along with places like Woodshop, Mollusk, Tuesday Tattoo and The General Store it shows how good food and a bunch of like minded people can make a difference.

A local hero in the truest sense, then. We’ll be back to sample the dinner menu.

‘Barbecue’ is a bit of a national obsession in the US. From what I can gather there’s a bit of rivalry between the North and South in terms of style. I forget which, but one part of the country favours the dry, and the other the more saucy, but whatever side you meat falls on, it can be some tasty shizzle.

This recipe is a culmination of a bunch of different barbecue recipes we’ve read and tasted since we’ve been out here. A lot of the more recent ones seem to favour balsamic vinegar and going heavy on the sugar as part of the sauce, which to my taste is a bit sweet, and you end up with almost Chinese style ‘candied’ ribs. I prefer a bit more of a balance between sweet and savoury, so have used apple cider vinegar. But be careful not to go too far the other way or you’ll end up with something that will strip the enamel off your teeth.

The ribs get a double dose of flavour from a  dry rub (which you should allow to do it’s work for a good few hours; or ideally overnight) and a wet barbecue ‘mopping sauce’ that you douse the meat with whilst it cooks on the barbecue.

Right, lets get our grill on.

Ingredients (serves 2-3)

1.2 – 1.5 kg rack of baby back (loin) ribs

For the dry rub

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

1 tablespoon soft, dark brown sugar

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon ground allspice

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon salt

For the barbecue sauce

1/2 onion, finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, finely chopped

120 ml tomato ketchup

60 ml cider vinegar

60 ml water

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons bourbon (whiskey)

1 tablespoon soft, dark brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

Salt and pepper to taste

Method

First up, get all the dry ingredients for the rub together, dump them in a bowl and mix until they are evenly distributed.

Then take your ribs and rub them all over with the mixture. Once you’ve got good coverage, pack the rest of the rub mixture wherever you can on to the meat, cover with foil and then refrigerate for a minimum of 5 hours, preferably over night.

The next day, an hour or so before you cook, take the ribs out of the fridge and allow them to get to room temperature. You’re going to part cook the ribs in your oven before you get them on your grill, so set your oven to 180c, put the ribs in a baking tray, and cover it tightly with foil, and then pop them in the oven for an hour.

Whilst they’re cooking, prep the barbecue sauce and get your grill fired up. For the sauce, start by frying the chopped onions in some oil with the garlic and allspice powder in an oven proof pan (this is kind of important as you want a pan that can be placed on top of your barbecue so you can mop the ribs with the sauce without running back and forth to your kitchen). Once they’ve got some good colour on them, de-glaze the pan with the bourbon and then add the rest of the ingredients and simmer for around 10 minutes. You should end up with a sauce which is both sweet, savoury and deeply flavoured.

When you’re ribs are cooked, take them out of the baking tray, add the cooking juices to your barbecue sauce, and then wrap them in foil. You want to arrange the coals on your barbecue so they’re set up to provide ‘indirect heat’. This means either scraping all the coals to one side, or creating a valley by scraping them to either side. You’re going to cook your ribs on the part of the grill that isn’t directly over coal with the lid on.

When you’ve done this, bring your barbecue sauce back to simmering point, and move your operations barbecue side. Put your pan and ribs on the grill and then give the meat it’s first coating with the sauce. Cover with the lid, and repeat the process every 6 or 7 minutes. You obviously want to avoid burning the ribs, but the sauce will caremalise, giving you layer upon layer of flavour each time you brush the ribs.

After around 30 minutes, the ribs will be done. Take them off the grill, cover with foil and allow to rest for 10-15 minutes. Serve with the remaining barbeque sauce, and whatever else you fancy. We had ours with barbecued corn (cooked in their damp husks so they steam steam, and then stripped finished on the grill) and a simpler, cleaner version of this coleslaw (substitute the hummus for more yoghurt, leave out the maras biberi, and just use parley instead of the other herb combo).

Eat whilst listening to the Deliverance soundtrack, and squeal like a piggy!

Bit of a funny week last week. We returned to college on Tuesday after the long 4th July weekend, and everyone seemed a bit lacking in vim and vigour. Think maybe there’s a bit of course fatigue going down. It’s been a pretty full on ten weeks, so it’s not surprising, and it was also our last week of Viennoiserie before we move on to pastry.

We started the week week working on more croissants, continuing our lamination education. It was great to get a few more batches under our belts. Getting more used to the sheeters, tidying up our lamination techniques, and working on our shaping. As part of this, we also made a couple of batches of croissants using some more exotic flours.

Firstly, a teff variation using 60% teff flour pre-cooked into a rubbery porridge which we made into traditional shapes and pain au chocolat. And also a dough made using a buckwheat poolish. As noted here before, I’m not a huge fan of teff, but the croissants actually tasted pretty good, better in fact than the pain au chocolat variation, which is odd. To my palate, the buckwheat didn’t offer a great deal, although the danish-like shapes we filled with a mix of mashed potato, goats cheese and spring onions did taste pretty damn good.

We then delved into the murky world of competition Vienoisserie. A couple of the people at the SFBI have been involved with the US team for the Coupe Du Monde de la Patisserie, the World Cup of pastry chefs held in Paris each year. From this, a few formulas with rather exotic names like Swirling Duo, Triple Crown and Imagination, have been added to the syllabus. These combine some of the doughs and techniques we’ve learned over the past couple of weeks, and elevate them to culinary works of art. I’m pretty sure I won’t be making any of them again (I’m not holding my breath for a call from the UK team), but it was cool to see some of the techniques, and have a think about how they could be applied in other ways.

The last two days of the week, we had a practical assessment. In our groups of four, we had to run our own schedule for Thursday and Friday, making and baking a a range of Viennoiserie products, all of which we had made over the previous couple of weeks. Thursday we were tasked with making batches of sticky buns, stollen, pain au lait and Danish, as well as prepping mixes for the following day. Friday we baked croissants, both regular (traditional shapes and pain au chocolat) and whole wheat (mini traditional and ham and cheese), pumpkin and regular brioche, and the rather formidable Pan D’Oro.

Aside from a couple of hitches, a bit of over proofing here and under proofing there, we did a pretty stellar job. The majority of the products looked great, and we were all really pleased with the lamination on our croissants and Danish. It was also good to run our own schedule again, which gives you a small insight into what it might be like to do it as part of your own business.

So that’s it for Viennoiserie. We’re moving on to pastry now. So long, and thanks for all the croissants. Until next time…

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.

The following is adapted from one of my favourite formulas we made during the bread section of the course at the SFBI. It is basically a no knead recipe, with the dough strength being developed over a series of folds. The formula assumes that you’ve got a liquid starter on the go. If you don’t have one, there’s a whole world of bread advice out there on line, so just search, but you’ll need a week or so to get it moving. The toasted wheat germ in the recipe isn’t a deal breaker, but it adds extra flavour and colour to the crumb. I’m not sure how easy it is to get in the UK, but if you can’t find it, just sift some whole wheat flour in a fine sieve and what you’ll have left in it is the germ. Toast it in a hot oven (200 c) for a few minutes until it gets slightly darker, but don’t burn it.

Right, lets get busy.

Ingredients

For the levain (makes 189g for  final dough)

63g Strong White Bread Flour

21g Whole Wheal Flour

84g Water

21g liquid starter

For the final dough

474g Strong White Bread Flour

326g Water

12g Salt

189g Liquid Levain

5g Toasted Wheat Germ

Method

12 or so hours before you mix your dough, you need to mix your levain. So weigh out your dry and wet ingredients, mix them together well and then leave at room temperature for the allotted time. When you re-vist your levain it should have at least doubled in volume, be good and frothy and smell like there’s plenty of fermentation activity.

You’re now ready to mix your dough. Put all your ingredients in a large bowl, and get your hands in there and mix it up. You want to make sure that everything is well incorporated together, and there are no floury patches. It’ll be a bit messy, but it’s a small price to pay. One thing to note is that you want your mixed dough to be at around 26 c when you’re done, so if the room is cold / hot you can try adjusting this with your water temperature.

The dough will look pretty shaggy at this point, but fear not, it will come together. Scrape out all the dough and transfer to another well oiled bowl, and cover with a lid / cling film and set aside somewhere at room temperature. As this dough hasn’t been mixed or kneaded, it needs time to develop and ferment, which is going to take about 3 hours.

Over these three hours you’re going to fold the bread every 45 minutes (3 times in total), and I’ll explain what I mean by this now. If you imagine your ball of dough as a square, you’re going to take each side of it and stretch it slightly, and then fold it on top of itself. So you do this 4 times, and then you flip the dough over so the folds you’ve made are now underneath. The dough is pretty sticky, so make sure your hands are oiled or wet when you do this.

After each fold, you’ll notice small changes in the dough that show it’s gaining strength. It will become less ’stretchy’ and more ‘elastic’, it will start to get gassy, and also smoother and silkier. By the time you’ve done your third fold it should be slightly shiny and ’sitting up’ in your bowl with a domed appearance. Set aside and cover for the final stint.

After the full three hours, and you’re happy with your dough, turn it out onto a floured work surface, sprinkle the top with a light dusting of flour and then de-gas the dough with the palm of your hand before shaping into a tight-ish ball. Leave the pre-shaped dough on your work surface, covering it with your inverted bowl, and leave to rest for half an hour.

Return to your dough half an hour later, de-gas again, shape into a tight ball again (or what ever style you want) and place it seam side up in a well floured proofing basket (these are cheap and easy to get on-line) for it’s final proof. You now have two choices. You can either stick the dough and basket in a plastic bag for it’s final three hour proof, or pop it in your fridge to retard over night (up to 16 hours), which I would recommend as it helps develop flavour amongst other things.

Either way, and hour before you’re ready to bake, set your oven to 26o c with the Dutch Oven inside so it gets up to temperature (if you’ve retarded your bread take it out half an hour before you bake). After an hour, take out the Dutch Oven, open it and invert the proofing basket onto it. If you’ve floured it properly, the dough should fall out and sit proudly on the skillet. Now slash the top with a diamond pattern (or whatever style works for you), making sure not to cut too deep, or go too far down the side of the loaf. Now place the ‘lid’ over the top and pop back in the oven.

You’re going to bake the loaf with the lid on for 30 minutes. After this time remove it and continue to bake (or vent) for a further 10-15 minutes. This helps set the crust, and will develop it to a deep golden brown colour.

When you’ve got your colour, remove the loaf from the skillet and place on a rack to cool. Contrary to common belief, you should never eat bread fresh from the oven. It’s still cooking when it’s hot, and develops more flavour as it cools. But when it has cooled, get stuck in and enjoy the fruits of your labour. The crumb should be open with plenty of air bubbles, and have an almost translucent quality.

I know all this sounds like a bit of a faff, but once you’ve done it a few times you’ll see that it’s not much effort, and all it really takes is a bit of time and organisation. Plus, when you slice through that crust and taste that hand made, home made loaf, you’ll realise it was all worth it.

Oh and (sorry to brag) but Dan Lepard saw a (rather blurry) picture of the loaf above on Flickr and commented ‘Excellent!’. Now if that isn’t a ringing endorsement for the Dutch Oven method and this formula, I don’t know what is.

Since arriving in San Fran, we’ve heard quite a few people say that In-N-Out burger are the cream of the crop when it comes fast food. In-N-Out are the originators of the ‘drive-thru’ phenomenon, having opened the first one ever in 1948, and as a result most of their outlets tend to be in not very handy locations to those without cars like us. So when we passed one on the way home from Tahoe last weekend, we seized the day.

When we got in there, the first thing that struck us was the size of the menu. They only really have 6 things on offer. Three kinds of burgers, fries, shakes and soft drinks. That’s it. It’s pretty refreshing to have such a limited choice, and must have been a pretty bold decision for a country like the US where people are used to having things their way.

In-N-Out are also obviously pretty serious about the quality of their ingredients. I’m sure a fair amount of it is bluster, ‘hand leafed lettuce’ anyone? But they do seem to take pride and care in the selection and procurement of their meat, cheese and veg, claims that I’m sure a lot of the other big burger chains couldn’t back up.

I opted for the Double-Double. Two beef patties, two slices of cheese, lettuce, tomato and onion. Now, I’m not going to say it was a Meatwagon-esque, life changing moment, but they were pretty damn good. The burgers themselves tasted fresh, meaty, well seasoned, and weren’t greasy. The bun was pretty good too, and the veg nice, crispy and clean tasting.

We also had a tasty vanilla shake, for me a good yardstick for any diner style place. The only thing that was disappointing were the fries. I can’t really put my finger on what was wrong with them, but they just seemed a bit dry and tasteless. Meh.

But the fries weren’t enough to put us off. Next time we hire a car, we’ll be going In-N-Out again.

Croissants and Danish Pastries are the new baguettes. FACT. We made a shed load of them last week as we finally got stuck into laminated doughs.

Laminating doughs with butter is one of the key skills of Viennoiserie, and it can be pretty tricky. Get it right and you end up with beautiful, flaky, buttery pastry. Win. Get it wrong and you can end up with greasy products or a clogged up sheeter. Lose.

As before, the doughs are yeasted and mixed in a very similar way, but the new techniques came into play after the initial proof. One of the most important things with lamination is to keep everything cold. You want your butter and dough to be almost frozen with a ‘plastic’ like consistency. This enables you to sheet the dough thin and ‘lock in’ the butter over a series of folds creating alternating layers of pastry and fat.

It’s been pretty hot here in San Fran recently, so this has made the whole lamination process a lot tougher. We’ve been heavily relying on the blast freezer to quickly chill our doughs in between folds so we can work on them without the butter melting, or the dough getting too soft.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but once you’ve got lamination down (not that I’m saying I’m quite there yet), you’ve got a whole host of tasty shizzle at your finger tips based around croissant and Danish pastry formulas.

We made a range of different croissants both with and without pre-ferments. Plain ones, whole wheat ones, ham and cheese ones, almond ones, and pain au chocolat, all different kinds of Danish, lunettes, bear claws, snails, a CRAZY Breton pastry called koign-amann which contains enough butter and sugar to kill an army, and thats just the tip of the iceberg.

In creating all this new sweet stuff, we’ve learned a bunch of new techniques. Using the sheeting machines, different types and styles of shaping, making fillings for the pastries. It felt a bit like we took in enough information for a month, let alone a week.

Oh and it wasn’t all lamination, lamination, lamination. A special shout has to go out to an AMAZONGGG cake that we made at the end of the week. The mighty Bienenstich or ‘bee sting’ cake. It’s a brioche based dough, filled with diplomat cream and topped with a molten mixture of honey, sugar, butter and almonds that sets hard. Properly delicious stuff. If you ever see it on sale, buy it. You’ll thank me.

Next week we’re finishing up Viennoiserie, finishing the week with a two day practical. Wish me luck.

As you’ll see form the previous post, American Independence day fell over this weekend. So for the 4th of July, we rented a cabin up in Lake Tahoe, which gave us the opportunity to do something we’d been gagging to do since we got here. Get our grill on.

We cooked a bunch of stuff on the barbecue which came with our weekend digs including ribs (recipe soon), steak, corn, s’mores and this great little clam recipe that the missus spotted on the New York Times website a few weeks ago.

It’s a really simple and easy, a bit different, and makes a perfect starter.  We approximated the quantities as we didn’t have any on-line access whilst there, but I think we winged it pretty successfully.

Ingredients (serves 2)

20 clams (about 10 per person)

100g buter

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Small handful chopped flat leaf parsley

A wedge of lemon to finish

Method

It all happens pretty quickly, so you’ll want to get all your bits and bobs prepped before the clams hit the grill. First up, soak the clams in ice cold slightly salted water and let them chill out and ‘de-silt’ for half an hour.

Whilst this is going on, get your barbecue going. Seeing as these guys are going to cook in a couple of minutes flat, it may not be worth firing up a barbie just for these, so you’ll have to think of something else to cook afterwards (more on this soon).

So, now you’ve got the barbie going, prep the sauce. Stick the butter, chopped garlic cloves, pepper and Worcestershire sauce in a pan on the heat and melt it until it all sizzles together to form a smooth, silky sauce. Take it off the heat after a minute or so, add the freshly chopped parsley, and stir it in.

Next, drain the clams, pop them on the barbecue and close the lid. You want to get the heat intense so the mussels steam themselves cooked. They’ll pop open once they’re done, so after about 90 seconds take a look under the hood. If they’re all open, you’re ready. If not, close the lid again for another 30 seconds or so.

By now, they should be done, so take the clams off the grill retaining as much of their cooking juices as possible, and place on a plate (discard any un-opened ones). Using a spoon, carefully drizzle the sauce into each of the clam’s shells.

Squeeze over the lemon, and serve immediately with some good sourdough.

Dear America,

Happy Independence Day.

Yours sincerely

Hand To Mouth

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.

Day one we made a bunch of straight brioche rolls, and learned how to make the classic ‘Brioche à tête’ shape, some glazed with pearl sugar and others just washed with egg. The following day, we really stepped it up, particularly in terms of sweetness. Diabetes alert. We made cinnamon rolls, pain au lait braids and the stars of the show, so called sticky buns, and these great little sweet rolls called Gibassier.

The sticky buns are basically cinnamon buns, but cooked like upside down cakes with a glaze made with brown sugar, butter, honey, cinnamon, vanilla and pecan nuts. Sticky, insanely sweet, but very good. The kid of bun that only the Americans could make. The Gibassier were a bit more restrained. A French sweet roll made with olive oil, anise seed and candied orange peel and then dusted with sugar after baking. Not particularly obvious flavours, but awesome.

Day three we got festive with a range of ‘holiday breads’. We made the German favourite, stollen. A sweet dough further enriched with booze soaked dried fruits, shaped like Mick Jagger’s lips, and then coated in powdered sugar to resemble snow-fall. A savoury Austrian bread called Kugelhopf, which we made with lardons, Swiss cheese, sauteed onions and rosemary. It was pretty delicious. Lovely, soft, rich dough with a great combination of flavours. We also made an American interpretation of the hot cross bun, which I’ve got to say was pretty average. I prefer the version I make.

Then we made something called Bostock, which was a bit of a revelation. I guess it’s nearest explanation of it would be if French toast mated with a bakewell tart and had a tasty baby. You take inch thick slices of brioche (a great way to use stale loaves) and toast them on either side. Then dip both sides in flavoured simple syrup (in this case rum) before spreading one side with frangipan, and sprinkling with slivered almonds. Bake for a short time, dust with powdered sugar and then eat with a dirty great grin on your fizzog.

Things started to get a bit more technical, and oddly Christmasy, towards the end of the week when we made Italian festive favourites pannetone, pan d’oro, and columba di pasqua. These doughs are so enriched with butter, eggs and sugar that they have to be ‘built up’ in stages so that they are strong enough to take all the inclusions. Surprisingly, the resulting doughs are actually really light and delicate, so much so that the pannetone has to be hung upside down after it leaves the oven so it doesn’t collapse on itself. Not surprisingly, with all the sugar, butter and candied fruits, they also taste amazing. But you can also understand why most Italians only eat them once a year.

So, another killer week, but I’ve got to say I’m seriously worried about my already troubled waistline. I might make a pre-emptive application to Biggest Loser now.

Last week bought with it mixed feelings. It was our last week of studying ‘pure’ bread. This week we’ve moved on to Viennoiserie, and whilst I am totally relishing the fresh challenges and new techniques we’re getting to experience dealing with enriched doughs, I’ve got to confess, I’m missing the bread ‘lab’ quite a bit.

The week was basically a review of all the techniques and baking concepts we’d covered over the past couple of months, and started where we began with baguettes. It was really good to revisit our French friends, as it helped cement a bunch of stuff that wasn’t really glued down. I guess in those first few weeks there was so much information flooding into my brain that I couldn’t really grasp hold of it all, and with baguettes being one of the most challenging breads, there was a lot to remember.

So we did a good day of mixing, shaping, rolling, scoring and baking the buggers, and I was relieved that aside from a few howlers here and there, I was pretty happy with how they turned out. For me, in many ways the scoring is the trickiest thing. You need to get the angle and depth of the cuts just right to get that spring and the famous baguette ears. I changed my technique after a bit more of an in-depth critique of my first batch, which improved results, but I’ve still got a lot of practicing to do.

Day two was all about re-visiting sourdoughs, and further crystallising the techniques and concepts around baking them. We did an interesting (again I guess this term is relative depending on how into bread you are) experiment with four almost identical sourdough formulas where the only variable was the percentage of (2 feed schedule) starter added. We made breads with 10, 20, 30 and 40% in the mix, baked them off and compared the results.

Obviously, the breads with the higher percentage were ’sourer’, but was was also interesting was the balance and depth of flavour. The lower percentages were a bit bland, and maybe could have used a bit more salt to make them more interesting, but the 40%, whilst having a pleasing twang lacked the depth as the sourness seemed to override everything else. The 30% was probably my favourite with a good balance of both, but like with many things it life, it’s a matter of taste.

We also mixed a ciabatta (revisiting the idea of  double-hydration) and a hand mixed sourdough which was probably my favourite bread of the course so far. It used 50% liquid white and whole wheat flour starter and a small amount of toasted wheat-germ in the final formula. The strength was developed through a a series of 3 folds every 45 minutes, it was pre-shaped, then final shaped in baskets and then retarded over night for baking the following morning. The results were awesometown. I made a 1.5 k loaf which came out brilliantly and made me a very happy man. Hmmm I can still taste it now.

Day three we moved in to uncharted territory. A land known as gluten flee. It was an OK place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. As with the ancient grains, through various consultation projects the SFBI have pioneered improving the quality of gluten free breads. We made various loaves with sorghum, buckwheat, teff and rice flour, which was in many ways a bit more like making a cake than baking bread. The results were better than anything gluten free that I’ve tasted before (not that I’m much of an expert), but I have to say I’m glad I don’t need to rely on them for my daily bread.

Moving swiftly on, Thursday was a mixed bag of various breads. We re-visted a bit of German rye, a bit of ancient grain action, some whole wheat, a roll recipe and another of my favourite loaves of the course, the Miche. The Miche is a classic French sourdough loaf weighing in at around 1.5 to 2 kilograms, the most famous of which is made by the peeps at Poilâne. Those that know me know that I’m a HUGE Poilâne fan and have blogged about their legendary bread before, so was pretty excited about baking this bad boy.

The loaf used high extraction flour, a high percentage of starter (almost 70%) and water, as well as a bit of toasted wheat-germ. We also autolysed the flour (there’s a pretty good explanation of the process here) to improve the flavour of the loaf, and developed strength with folds before shaping and retarding over night. Again I was a happy man. The higher extraction flour gave a tighter crumb, but a great flavour and a great sourdough tang. Trés bon.

The final day of the week was a bit of a party. The wood fired oven was stoked up again, and using the direct fire method (where there is is still a fire burning at the time of baking) we baked a bunch of different flat breads. Pita, naan (more on this in a post all of it’s own soon), lavash, and of course pizza. It was a great day, and a fitting farewell to the bread section of the course.

So that was seven weeks of bread. Big thanks to Frank and Mac who held our hands so brilliantly over the past 7 weeks. Onwards to the pastry lab…