Looking Out To Sea

The year of the cookery challenge has ended now. That’s a whole recipe book, experienced and tasted and documented. I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing you do more than once. There is someone out there who did a year of Rachel Ray’s 365 Day No Repeat Meals book, but quickly gave up after trying another (less strenuous) cooking challenge. With the knowledge it can be done, the actual doing becomes less interesting…

But we are by no means “done” with cooking itself. How could we be? The plan this year, he says tentatively, is more freeform. We have seen what it is to cook a cookery book. But we are still surrounded by recipes that we have never tried — many other cookery books, recipe cards from supermarkets, not to mention the innumerable recipes written on the bags of flour, sugar, spices and flavoured syrups. (I’m not going to include the “serving suggestion” printed on the Honey Loops packet, which amounts to cereal in a bowl with milk. Though sometimes Rice Krispies has a recipe for chocolate krispie cake.)

We intend to reduce our meat intake a bit, because the quantity that Nigella demanded wasn’t really sustainable. It’s expensive stuff if you want to buy meat that’s worth eating. We intend to set up a box scheme to ensure that we have a steady and ample supply of vegetables. Less meat, more vegetables.

The King of River Cottage
© Gary

To add a bit of tension to this plan, we also plan to use the River Cottage Meat Book and Fish Book more fully. You can see how that might not fit elegantly with the plan to consume less meat. But I hope we can spend the money we do on less fashionable meats and less popular fishes. That seems to mean irregular and bony cuts of meat and fish with unknown names that get landed anyway. I’m sure we can find something interesting.

I wander past many fishmongers and a butcher on the way to work, so I feel sure I can pick up some cheap bits of this and that. My only concern is that if I buy something I won’t have a recipe I can consult in order to pick up the appropriate ingredients on the way home that evening. I can’t really justify buying another two copies to keep on my desk at work!

Which leads us inexorably to PDF books. Why oh why don’t all reference books come with a CD? It would be brilliant to have a list of recipes and their ingredients in a searchable format. All those people with PDAs and swanky phones can load them on for use in the shops and the rest of us can keep them on USB pens, hard disks or wherever else we’ll need them. For a very long while Helen had a note pad dedicated to scribblings of recipe ingredients when she was in full challenge mode. How much easier it would be if the list was already on computer. Even my original transcription of the recipe and chapter titles onto the Challenge page would have been quicker and (as it turns out) contain fewer mistakes.

It’s possible to buy some books in electronic format, but that’s not really what we’re interested in. We already own the real thing, and very nice it is too. We just want the hard work of transfer to computer to be done by someone else. And let’s be fair, it’s not like we’re asking for something very outlandish — the data starts on computer in the first place. (Unless you want to convince me that all these books are typeset by hand.) However, it’s probably as likely to happen as CDs coming with usable MP3s alongside the audio.

Now you must excuse me, I have a muffin from a supermarket recipe card to make!

Last night we had a grand Christmas party. We had about 20-odd people in the end, though a few notable exceptions. I’m glaring at you, green jumper boy.

As with all things that happen at the moment, the focus of the preparations was the food. We had a significant list of recipes that we wanted to tick off, and we did fairly well. The only major loss was the mincemeat parcels, but we compensated for that in another way.

Matthew was really kind and agreed to help us out for the preparation work. He came round in the middle of the afternoon and worked hard to bring everything together. It certainly wouldn’t have been possible without his input. If you were there and had any of the mince pies, apple pies or the mulled wine you can thank Mat for them. I don’t know what I will do to repay him, but he certainly deserves our heartfelt thanks.

A few months ago Kirsten emailed me to ask for a cranberry bread recipe to pass to her mother. Until last night I didn’t know how it had worked out, so I thought I would try my hand at a loaf with cranberies in it, because they’re quite the Christmas fruit. I used two of the recipes from Richard Bertinet’s Dough, making something suitably Christmas-party flavoured. I removed the nuts from the Pecan and Cranberry Loaves, and moulded them like Poppy Seed Stars. I didn’t have any proper dried cranberries, but I used the same weight of “craisins”, which is a cranberry-heavy dried fruit mix. The result was very tasty… almost like eating bread that had jam already spread on it.

The mince pies that Matthew made (from a recipe in Nigella Lawson’s Feast, so it doesn’t count towards the challenge) were made with cranberry mincemeat supplied by Nick. I’ve a suspicion that the recipe he used for that mincemeat also came via Nigella Lawson too. There’s something terribly incestuous about it all.

I’m very happy that so many people brought a decoration for the tree. We’ve got wire-basket stars and baubles now, and gingerbread trees with coloured-sugar windows, and jangly-legged snowmen and even a festive red double helix. On top of that we’ve inherited several bottles of wine and many packets of crisps, not to mention all the leftovers of pies, popcorn, olives and chocolate. We even have a 1.5 litre bottle of white wine which is probably too big to be chilled in the fridge.

Thanks to everyone who came, and especially to everyone who helped out in some way or another. You’re all great.

In an effort to make myself more adventurous (or at least, less reticent) in the kitchen I’ve lately been throwing myself at cooking with abandon. Often I have no idea what I want to eat when I pour the oil in the bottom of the pan. It just comes together as I work out what I’ve got.

This evening I started off with a large frying pan liberally coated in garlic oil, half a green bell pepper cut into strips and a couple of coarsely chunked spring onions. I fried them at some heat until they didn’t need it any more, by which point I had realised I need some protein and found smoky bacon in the fridge. I dropped the onion/pepper mix on a plate, keeping as much of the juice in the pan as possible and fried a couple of rashers of bacon, coarsely cut with a pair of scissors.

I think at this point I realised that I’d need some carbohydrate and bulk, so started boiling the kettle to make pasta. There wasn’t much water in the kettle but I was only cooking enough fusilli for myself, and I’m a light eater. The water went in fairly quickly and was hot enough to throw the pasta in within thirty seconds I think. At the same time I turned off the bacon, while I approached my next problem.

I started to think about sauce. I should really have something to coat my pasta — what I had at the moment wasn’t really crisp enough for a stir-fry, but it wasn’t wet either. I found a jar of stiff Thai paste for making soups, on the top shelf of the fridge door. I threw in a teaspoon of that and tried to get it to dissolve in the bacony garlic oil. After a few minutes I realised it would help if I added heat, which I did.

The peppers and onions went back in while I hunted around for a slosh of red wine to add to the liquid. Couldn’t find any. Oh well, gave up, started clearing up some of the mess. Checked on the baguettes that are proving on the table. Go to put more music on. Find a nearly-finished bottle of red wine hiding amongst the shopping bags on the table. Victory! A bit of that goes in, gently cooking away.

By the time the past is completed, the red wine has formed a slightly sticky, caramel-looking juice around the peppers and bacon. I throw the whole lot into the drained pasta and slosh it around in the pan to coat everything.

This is the disastrous cooking that I do. Honestly, it tastes quite good: spicy but also sweet. There’s probably a million things I could have done better. But it was quite tasty, so I’m satisfied.

I accidentally came across this video yesterday about bread, and the “Real Bread Campaign”. (The video is from the Do Lectures which seems to be something to do with Howies, the clothing company. I haven’t watched any others yet.)

If you can’t be bothered watching it yourself (and honestly, I don’t particularly recommend it) he:

• talks about industrial milling and bread-making
• makes threatening and evidence-free comments about “enzymes” in your food
• suggests you start baking your own bread

I originally thought to mention the enzyme thing more, but it’s just tediously overdone on this blog I think. Just stop using vague science words in the hope you can make things sound dangerous. All it does is diminish any potential credibility you might have had.

I much preferred the last few minutes of his talk, when the subject settled on bread-making, community, and all that rousing stuff. I do like the idea of a Real Bread Campaign as a parallel to CAMRA, the real ale campaign. They are dealing with something fundamentally different though, so I don’t know what lessons can be learned from the real ale movement.

I recently came across this rather nice post about bread making from someone who obviously likes their bread and the process of making it, and explains it all in a cheerful fashion. And finally a short video on how they made bread back in the 1980s:

Sometimes, the denizens of the internet just disgust me with their absurd ignorance and desperate need to wade in with irrelevant advice. So I thought I’d keep my ignorant ravings on my own blog instead.

Today I am talking about Kamikaze Cookery’s latest Normal Person versus episode, testing the idea that celebrity chef recipes are manageable for the “normal” cook. The latest episode covered Gordon effing Ramsay. Go watch Normal Person versus Gordon Ramsay, it’s rather fun in that car-crash way.

Just don’t, whatever you do, read the comments. I don’t know why, but the majority of the commenters feel the overwhelming desire to point out that they didn’t understand the concept of the episode. “Look at me, I’m an idiot!” They berate the Kamikaze people for a bunch of irrelevant things, proceed to give really stupid advice about what a food processor is.

That’s the price you pay for being linked from Boing Boing, I suppose — an infestation of knuckle-draggers.

There is one element of the show that merits a bit more discussion, and that’s their definition of “normal”. In the first episode (versus Jamie Oliver) they used someone who clearly knew one or two things, like how to knead dough. The next episode (versus Nigella Lawson) their normal test subject didn’t admit to doing any cooking since Guides, and even then it was her mother who did the work. But still, she demonstrated surprising proficiency and flexibility. (I know this makes me sound like a pretentious twat, but I was honestly impressed that someone who claims to do no cooking is so proficient anyway.) In the latest episode their normal person didn’t know what a ramekin was and had never seen the phrase “season” in a recipe before. So, not to be too blunt about it, what kind of normalcy are they looking for here? Will the next normal person know which end of a knife to hold?

It seems to be Kamikaze Cookery’s belief that a recipe book should teach you how to cook, which has never been my experience. Celebrity chef books tend to be the very opposite of expositional — minimal instructions, glossy photos, lots of white space. The books which teach cooking are very different beasts and don’t tend to come with glossy photos. To my mind, expecting to learn cooking from a chef’s recipe book is a bit like expecting to learn the piano from a Chopin songbook.

Which of the books that we own would teach the basics (or help people along the complex steps)?

Complete Cookery Course, Delia Smith

Yes, Delia will definitely teach you how to cook. More importantly, she also tells you not to panic if any of a number of common things happen (something curdles, there are lumps, etc) and explains how to fix things.

The River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

I think this book would explain how to handle meat properly but would not introduce a person to meat in the first place. If you’re unsure about getting both hands in to a dead animal then Hugh’s not really your fellow. But if you want to get familiar with the obscure cuts (oh, and read some amazing essays) then it would be useful.

Feast, Nigella Lawson

I’m not sure about this one. There are two recipes I’ve made several times from this book. The mini white rolls were my introduction to breadmaking and were very successful. (Please ignore the batch where I forgot the salt….) The chocolate gingerbread is also a gorgeous beast, but it’s also the most horrifying mess to make. A lot of home cooks seem to be terrified of mess and the notion of dirtying more than one pan at a time seems to bring out the Ramsay-style expletives. Feast is for organised cooks only because all the recipes are so massive.

Nigella Express, Nigella Lawson

This book will learn you to cook by subterfuge. But she doesn’t assume you’re an idiot either. You won’t get anywhere without reading between the lines and paying close attention to the photographs (which are, thankfully, plentiful).

Short-Cut Rhodes, Gary Rhodes

I’ve never done anything from this book but I don’t get the impression that the recipes are very easy. I’ve seen Helen try a few things and they never seem to work out as desired. They’re supposed to be abbreviated versions of traditional recipes but they rarely turn out anything like the originals.

Dough, Richard Bertinet

I can confirm that this book will teach you how to make bread.

This is just the selection from memory. We also have a couple of Usborne kids’ cookery books which are used regularly. They will teach you the basics like no other. Similarly, A Young Cook’s Calendar was what I grew up with.

Helen’s definition of normal is pretty different to that assumed by Kamikaze Cookery, though it’s quite succinct: “a normal person should be able to make a white sauce, a tomato sauce and a chocolate sauce without recourse to a recipe”.

What do you think a normal person can cook?

Nick’s masked birthday party last week had a large cask, courtesy of Stewart Brewery. The beer didn’t all get finished on the night, so Nick ended up decanting the remains into whatever containers were lying around and brought us a two litre bottle of beer when he visited.

It’s flat now, and not very exciting to drink any more but it makes great bread. I used a recipe from Crust, the “ale and yeast poolish”, and made four small loaves. There is still a lot of beer left, so I’ll need some other means to use up the remainder. If there are no better ideas I might try stewing with it.

If I’d been sensible I would have started the poolish for this bread early so I wouldn’t be baking last thing at night. Best laid plans, etc. Whatever the regrets about timing, the loaves turned out beautifully. I haven’t had much practice at shaping loaves, so they were a bit haphazard. But this turned out to be a good thing because the varying shapes of loaves reacted differently in the oven, and I got a much better impression of how the bread reacts in general.

Specifically, the two loaves which were more compact and loaf-shaped developed a really beautiful burst and a tantalising crust. They expanded up instead of out, which is an effect I’ve been trying to achieve for some time. The two that were more baguette-shaped (flatter and longer) spread apart where they were slashed, rather than bursting up the way. I consider this a very tasty and successful experiment. We’re learning here!

I’m still not completely sure how to maintain the crispy crust after I pull the loaves out of the oven. When I made the pain de campagne last week I didn’t care about the state of the loaves because I wanted them to go stale for the fondue. So I just left them out. And the crust stayed nice and crunchy. So should I stop putting the bread away until they’ve had several more hours to cool? Helen reckons that the heat and moisture inside the bread gets trapped when the bread is trapped in a container, and softens this the crusts again. This seems reasonable to me. Or maybe the only reason the pains de campagne had nice crusts was because they were baked for longer? Something to experiment with on the next attempt.

I gave one loaf to Nick, along with the money I owed him for the beer. (Sorry for being late in my debts!) The recipe suggests that it’s good with a cassoulet and a glass of red wine. Helen improvised a not-cassoulet from the wrong type of beans and some very old sausages from the freezer. It turned out rather fantastic in the end.

This is the bread I was talking about yesterday. After last night and lunch today we have less than half a loaf left. But I have more bread in the works.

I was up pretty late last night, baking. I didn’t particularly enjoy getting out of bed this morning (…but when do I ever?) but the bread was totally worth it.

I made two pains de campagne. They’re mostly plain flour with a little rye for flavour and colour. They start off with a ferment, which I tend not to do for other loaves because I’m lazy and it doesn’t easily fit into my day — but I thought I would make the effort this time.

(Mostly I make up a ferment the night before and put it in the fridge until the following evening. But a chilled ferment is pretty difficult to work and the yeast is obviously sluggish. It becomes a trade-off between letting the ferment come back up to room temperature, and not leaving it too late in the day to take the loaf to completion. In future I might try putting together a ferment just before I leave the house in the morning. The temperature is probably cool enough outside the fridge anyway!)

The loaves, in the end, looked rather beautiful and smelled fantastic. I’m sorry I haven’t uploaded the photographs that I took last night. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

At the weekend we got another smattering of recipes knocked off the challenge list. In fact, I don’t know if we’d mentioned this at any point, but we have recently completed three chapters. Other chapters are nearing that final moment. Workday Winners has only one recipe to go. If you want a fairly accurate picture of where things stand, I maintain a list of pending recipes which is basically the same as Helen’s challenge page but with all the completed recipes removed.

The plan as I currently understand it is to get everything not in the Christmas chapter (Holiday Snaps) finished by the start of December. This means November will probably be more hectic than December, but maybe it pays to get the headless chicken impressions done early. Otherwise I fear we’ll end up with a Hogmanay Miscellaneous Foods Party, which I’m sure would be very enjoyable but a bit strange. Not the high point we want to go out on.

In short, this evening has been an excellent evening for breadmaking. I am very pleased with what I produced today. Some notes:

• Rolling dough is a mug’s game. Don’t try to make perfect cylinders by rolling. Fold the dough onto itself lengthways repeatedly to get the length you need. This gives a much more even result. (You can still roll to smooth things out, but don’t try to apply pressure to make your dough longer. The dough will resist.)
• Loading an uncooked, unsupported loaf onto a tray/peel and then sliding it off that into the oven… sounds dangerous and a great way of turning your carefully sculptured dough into a pile of mush. But it really does work. The trick is the light dusting of semolina on your peel before loading on the dough. Then it slides beautifully.
• Quick slashes, slow slashes. Doesn’t seem to make much of a difference as long as you don’t make a mess of the dough when you do it.

• Using a little water sprayer seems to work (£1.50 from the shop across the road). But you can never have enough steam, I think.
• Cooking hot is good. Especially if you’re opening the oven wide to load and spray the insides. I tend to forget about reducing the temperature once the oven’s been preheated and it hasn’t really harmed my breads.
• Get a large enough container to put them in, otherwise you’ll feel like a right doofus. Or eager mouths to feed, of course.