I love bread

I don’t know why I love bread the way I do, but I can’t help it. Soft warm fresh bread is like a little chunk of baked heaven.

Freshly baked bread is comforting, reassuring, it’s as if it cuddles you from the inside as you are eating it. Bread isn’t sexy, but it feels like a food that wants to make you safe and happy. Eat it warm from the oven and spread thickly with butter, and for me it’s the ultimate comfort food.

The great thing is that I’m not alone in my love of all things granary (or wholemeal, or spelt, or… ), there are plenty of highly influential foodie people who share my view, like:

“Quite apart from the enjoyment you get from the flavour of a good bread (and the danger is that if it is too good, you eat too much of it!), the action of chewing wakes up the taste-buds, excites the saliva and generally heightens your gastronomic awareness.”
Pierre Koffmann – 3 Michelin Starred Chef

“Serve good bread and butter before the meal and all will be well”
Marco Pierre White – 3 Michelin Starred Chef

There are hundreds more such quotes that I could post here, but I simply don’t have the time, I’m off to the bakery!

Melting white chocolate

White chocolate is a weird bugger of a thing, not least because it’s not really a chocolate at all.

It’s also a bit of a bugger to work with, as it has a tendency to split and to burn easily. Melting it is no exception, but there are a couple of simple rules to follow, to not end up with a lumpy mess.

White chocolate should be melted in the same way as any other type of chocolate, in a bowl over gently simmering water. Don’t even think about trying to melt it in a microwave, you might as well just throw the packet in the bin before you start.

Because white chocolate has a very low burning point (about 44°C) you need to be careful about a couple of things. First make sure that the bowl your chocolate is in does not touch the water, and secondly make sure that the water is simmering very gently and not bubbling away madly.

It’s important not to let any water get into the bowl with the chocolate, because this will cause it to turn lumpy and grainy. Make sure that your bowl is dry before you start and don’t cover it with a lid, condensation will form on the underside of the lid and drop back down into the chocolate. If some water does manage to sneak in, then you can re-emulsify the chocolate as below.

The incredibly frustrating thing is that even when you do everything right, the cocoa butter in white chocolate can decide to split and leave you with a lumpy oily mess. If this does happen, don’t panic, remove it from the heat for a minute and whisk in a small amount of butter, until the whole lot re-emulsifies.

Eating seasonally in July

This should probably be called ‘Eating seasonally in July in England’, but I thought that was a bit long. Fairly obviously though, it’s dependent on where you are, what is in season here in the lovely (very rainy right now) English summer, is going to be very different to what is in season in Peru or Japan.

Eating locally produced fresh properly grown (not in a hydroponic greenhouse in Holland) and in season produce is a joy. It’s not just the intensity of flavours in the way that things taste, but just as much the way that they smell, if you can’t smell a tomato through a plastic packet and if a surge of aroma doesn’t come up and smack you in the nose when you cut into it, then something is wrong.

So, with the all of that preamble out of the way, we can get down to a list of some of the lovely things that are in season right now. It’s not an exhaustive list, it’s just things that come to mind, and I’m sure I’ll come back and add more to it throughout the month.

Strawberries, Blackberries, Raspberries
The best known summer berries, as long as they are ripe there is no way that they can taste bad, and they smell like essence of summer days. If you can’t think of anything exciting to do with them, then don’t – just wash them and enjoy, either on their own, or with cream or thick greek yoghurt.

Loganberries
For anyone who is wondering what a loganberry is, or what the hell to do with them if you have some: It’s a hybrid cross between a raspberry and a blackberry. So, basically you can use it wherever you would normally use either of those types of berry.

Gooseberries
When I was a kid I remember eating a lot of gooseberries,I remember picking them as well, from horrible prickly bushes that want to hurt you. For some reason, gooseberries seem to have become pretty invisible lately. You don’t see many of them on supermarket shelves, but when you do spot some, grab them and make jam, or you can convert any lemon based desert recipe to use gooseberries!

Cherries
In my opinion, cherries are competing in a very close two horse race with raspberries for the crown of best summer fruit in the world. Eat them as they are, bake them in a pie, make jam, dip them in a chocolate fondue, or google for any of about a million recipes.

Aubergine
There is something strangely erotic about a nice glossy aubergine, you (well, I) just want to stroke it and caress it. Apart from all of that though, it’s a great vegetable that has a huge amount of uses, don’t be tempted just to stick it in ratatouille all of the time!
When you are picking an aubergine, always go for heaviest one, and look for a glossy and unblemished skin.

Tomatoes
Tomatoes are just tomatoes, except when they are in season and of a nice variety, when they become so much more. There are so many varieties that I wouldn’t even know where to begin with a recommendation, but those that come still on the vine are usually much more full of flavour than those that don’t. Don’t take them off of the vine stems until the moment you want to use them, or if you are roasting them then leave them on the vine and take them off after cooking.

Watercress
It’s green, peppery, tangy, quintessentially English, and apparently a ’superfood’. Not everyone eats watercress, and a lot of people don’t have a clue what to do with it. There are plenty of options though, you could simply use it in a salad as you would use something like rocket, or there is the summer classic ‘Watercress soup’.

Summertime, and the berries are yummy (pt. 2)

It is apparently still summer, although looking out of my window, you’d never believe it, but the berries are definitely still yummy.

On the way home tonight, I picked up some Glen Ample raspberries. They are smaller and sweeter than the Tulameens we ate yesterday, strangely they have little if any smell, but they are packed full of flavour and I adore them.
I’m not going to do anything with them at all, apart from just sit here and pop them one after another into my mouth, or maybe drop a few into a glass of sparkling wine.

I also picked up some “English Rose” strawberries, an organic premium variety. They are big and meaty for strawberries, very nice but with an unusual citrus flavour.
I had a couple just to try them out, and am coating the rest in a dark bitter chocolate, then melting some white chocolate with vanilla and wrapping pretty strands of that over the dark chocolate. They look ubersexy, but the taste test will have to wait till the morning.

With strawberries, the real key isn’t the variety (premium or not), or whether they are organic or not, it’s all about ripeness. Strawberries are like brie, they are always going to taste best at the moment of extreme ripeness, and just before they start to go bad. Pick the ripest and bugger the rest, in this case I’d say organic is much more of a moral decision than a taste one.

Food – the most complete artform

Surely there can’t be much doubt or discussion about it, it’s very simple. Food is the most complete artform out there!

Great food excites not just your tastebuds, but also your eyes and nose, your sense of touch through it’s textures, and even your hearing (think of the crunch when you bit into a raw carrot). I can’t think of anything else that comes close to doing that.

Every dish is like a little art installation, on display for one person for one fleeting moment of time. It’s like a private one night show, with hours of work, skill and passion poured into it, for the sole consumption of you, the audience.

No other artist can compete with the chef when it comes to evoking a sensory and emotional response to their work. Not even Tracey Emins bed tickles all of your senses, it might have a smell, but very few people are ever likely to lick it and see how it tastes!

Summertime, and the berries are yummy (pt. 1)

There are some things that can be grown anytime of the year and taste good, there are some things that can be grown hydroponically and taste good, there are some things that can be imported and taste good.

And, there are some things that can’t.

It’s the middle of the berry season here in England, and I’m loving it. I can go to a supermarket anytime of the year, and pick up something called ’strawberries’ or ‘raspberries’, but then I put one in my mouth and find that it actually tastes of absolutely nothing! Why bother, I’d much rather wait for the season and eat the real thing.

This afternoon, we had Tulameen Raspberries and Elsanta strawberries. They are so simply good that you don’t really have to do anything with them at all, a quick wash and just pop one of the juicy little flavourbombs into your mouth.

I served them in individual bowls, sitting on a pool of thick greek yoghurt and with a simple sugar caramel drawn in lines over the top. Where the caramel hits the yoghurt it sinks in and goes all nice and goeey, and where it hits the berries it creates crispy shards across them.

Not only does it taste fantastic, but if you serve it in a dark colour bowl then the contrast between the bowl, the white yoghurt and bright red fruit, and the pretty lines of translucent caramel mean that it is visually stunning as well.

Unhomogenized milk

Right then, where to start.

The vast majority of cows milk that we buy and consume in the developed world has gone through two pretty major scientific processes.

Pasteurization is done for obvious reasons. Unpasteurized milk does taste a lot better (and has an odd yellowy colour), but unless you live right next to a farm, know a bit about the cows that are producing it, and aren’t going to keep it for long, then it’s probably not the best idea to buy and use it.

Homogenization on the other hand has no health or storage benefits to the milk. It’s only purposes are aesthetic and the fact that you don’t need to shake the bottle to mix the cream. It’s a complex process but the simplest explanation is that the fat particles in the milk are broken down into a smaller size so that the milk looks smooth and has no lumps of cream in it.

So, what do I get by buying unhomogenized milk, I get the kind of milk that I remember as a kid. Unhomogenized milk has that cream line at the top, so that everyone (who likes milk) wants to the one who gets to open the next bottle or carton and get the lovely fatty creamy bit.

It’s only fairly recently that homogenized milk has become the norm in the UK. When the majority of our milk came from the milkman then it was all unhomogenized, when we gave up that great institution and started buying it in the supermarket, then we didn’t use change the delivery method but also made a switch to homogenization.

Apart from the creaminess and the nostalgia of it, there are a number of other reasons why I prefer unhomogenized milk.

A lot of people and a few studies believe that there are health benefits associated with unhomogenized milk. Homogenized milk is supposedly easier to digest and there is some evidence that it is more likely to trigger allergies, and that homogenization can contribute to atherosclerosis. None of this evidence is overly strong, but why pass any foodstuff through a process that adds no positive health benefits, and may or may not add negative ones.

In the kitchen, because it has bigger fat molecules, unhomogenized cream takes about half of the time to whip that homogenized cream does, which is handy.

Apart from anything else though, and most important of all, is the fact that unhomogenized milk and cream simply tastes better!

“Food Porn”

I just love the phrase “Food Porn”.

It doesn’t work for me in the same way as “Human Porn” doesn’t work for me, but that isn’t because food isn’t sexy. It’s because food like sex is a multisensual thing.

It’s not just about the way that it looks, it’s the way that it smells, the way that it tastes, even the sound of it.

There is also the fact that if you are a good enough photographer, then you can make anything look fantastic and exciting.

Having said all of that, I still love the concept, and I still get hungry flicking through the pics. So, here are some of the best Food Porn sites out there.

foodporndaily.com
foodgawker.com/
fpdaily.net/
photograzing.seriouseats.com

Passion

This started out being a post about Eggs Benedict, and now it’s not.

I don’t watch very much television, in fact for most of the last 5 years I’ve lived without one. Currently we are staying with some relatives of mine, who love their TV and who virtually never switch it off. For the majority of the time this just winds me up, sometimes it even makes me want to throw things through the screen as a way to bring an end to the inane bullshit that I’m subjected to. Even if I don’t watch it, I can hear the bloody thing wherever I am in the house. Why people watch utter drivel that doesn’t even really interest them is beyond me, but millions of people seem to, so maybe it’s me who is odd.

Despite the fact that I think the majority of stuff on TV is a pile of crap, there are moments when it inspires me. Most of these moments are to do with food, this evening was the final of masterchef on TV, and watching the kitchens working and the dishes coming out of them in some 3 Michelin starred restaraunts had me close to tears. This is how we should be cooking and eating, this is food as art, this is beautiful. It was seriously beautiful, and I say that without even tasting or smelling the food.

The ingredients, the thought, the skill and most of all the passion being poured into the dishes coming out of these kitchens leaves me in awe. I don’t mean the diluted American sense of the word, I mean real awe: an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like.

If we don’t aspire to that kind of level, if we don’t want to cook and to eat food like that, then who are we to call ourselves foodlovers, or cooks, or ‘foodies’, or ‘gourmets’ or any of the other terms that people love to apply to themselves.

The best food in the world has the power to make us laugh, or cry. The best food in the world can make us aroused. That’s the food that I want to eat, and that is the food that I want to produce. That is what I’m going to do.

Why do we settle for throwing frozen crap down our throats when there are such fantastic ingredients available out there, why do people eat anything that involves a microwave when it is so simple to create real fantastic food without it taking hours or costing a fortune.

I’ve had it with mediocre crap, I’m not eating it anymore. Why should I waste my time?

This is the 4th or 5th day of this blog, and having just looked through what has preceeded this post, I realise just what a load of bollocks it is. It’s not about passion, or how I feel about food. It’s not about me at all, it’s me trying to be clever, trying to show off, googling for the history of a classic dish, then throwing a very simple recipe at the end of it, and thinking that I’m clever and am educating people about food. That’s not what this was supposed to be about, and from here on in, it’s not going to be. The existing posts will probably stay here, if for no other reason than to remind me what I shouldn’t be doing (that isn’t to say that they won’t get a substantial edit though).

From today though, there will not be any more of that kind of posting on this blog. That’s crap, anyone can google and find a hundred recipes for Hollandaise sauce, or the history of the Lardy cake.

What you will find here is a diary of my progress towards my dream. It’s a dream that grows more concrete by the day, by now it involves certain chairs, a certain colour of candles, the kernel of a menu, and the realisation of just how far there is to go, and how much of me there it to be thrown into creating the atmosphere and the food that I want to serve in it.

Mimosa (Bucks fizz to the English)

Bubbles, bubbles, little tiny dry citrusy bubbles rising up and exploding at the top of the glass, or preferably on your tongue as they pass it by.

I’m sitting and writing this with what I normally think of as a very breakfasty drink in front of me. The truth is though, that’s just when I drink it most often, but acutally it’s fantastic anytime.

Being English I always thought that if you mix champagne and orange juice together, then what you end up with is Bucks Fizz. It’s only quite recently I realised that in the rest of the world it’s called a Mimosa.

Whichever name you know it by, it’s a great combination. The orange juice really heightens the flavour of the Champagne, it’s refreshing, and feels somehow decadent as it slides down your throat. There’s the extra bonus that not only does it taste fantastically good, but it’s also fantastically easy. Double the joy!

Take a champagne flute, or whatever other glass you have to hand, it doesn’t really matter but the champagne flute is best aesthetically because you can watch those gorgeous little bubbles rising up through it.

Into this pour a mixture of three parts champagne to two parts orange juice.

If you either can’t afford or just don’t want to spend money on Champagne then you can substitute any dry sparkling wine, the drier the better and made in traditional method, i.e. not carbonated artificially. There are a lot of very good Spanish cavas (right now I’m using Marques de la Sardana), which also taste great.

Apart from that about the only thing to think about is making sure that both the wine and the orange juice is really well chilled.

The Mimosa was apparently invented at the Ritz hotel in Paris sometime around 1925, but after you’ve had a couple you probably won’t be too bothered about it’s history.

If you are feeling highly extravangant, then you can always whip up a Grand Mimosa (also called Morning Glory), which is the same thing, but with a tablespoon of Grand Marnier added.