Food

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There are few more tasty and satisfying easy meals than a good beefburger, but as the definitive fast food they're also one of the most abused, stuffed full of gristle, mysterious discarded body parts, mechanically recovered meat and preservatives.

Making your own is a far more healthy option, and biting into a juicy, perfectly-cooked burger you know contains nothing but healthy meat is your reward.

Ingredients (two each for four people)
- Two pounds of beef mince. Most packaged minced beef is very lean and a little too finely ground for a perfect burger, you're better to ask your butcher (or the guys at the meat counter at the supermarket, if they can do it) to take a relatively fatty cut and grind it medium-fine for you. If you have to use lean mince, add a little fat (maybe a tablespoon or two) in the form of oil, or better still beef dripping. You need the fat to add moisture and bind the burger, and to stop it burning instead of browning.
- Half a tennis ball-sized onion
- Salt and pepper

Before you start preparation, let the beef sit (in a sealed container) at room temperature for a couple of hours. If it's fridge-cold, it'll be very hard to get the patties heated through (or cooked through if you insist on well-done, you savage) before the outside burns.

Spread out the beef in a thin layer on a cutting board or worktop, and grate the onion over it. Add a sprinkling of salt (about a tablespoon of sea salt should do it) and a good grind of black pepper. If the beef is lean, now is the time to add a drizzle of oil or dripping. Then knead it all together like dough, and divide it up into eight pieces.

Flatten each piece between your palms into a neat patty, working round and round and using your thumbs to push in the edges to stop them breaking up. Make them as thin as you can - they'll tend to shrink and thicken as they cook through the natural elasticity of the meat.

To cook your patties perfectly, you need either a grill or a grillpan and a good high heat. The ideal burger, IMHO, is well-browned on the outside with just a hint of pink on the inside - although if I'm eating somewhere with really good ingredients and feeling particularly carnivorous I'll go all the way to rare and bloody. However you prefer your meat done, it should be well-browned on the outside to bring out the wonderful flavour of the beef.

Get the heat up, give the grill or pan time to get to smoking, then slap on your patties. Don't be afraid to let them brown and stick a little, that's when the flavour is really coming out, although it's a delicate balance between brown-and-tasty and black-and-bitter. If you're going for well-done, you may need to bring the heat down a little at least at first to make sure they cook through before the outside burns.

If your beef has a lot of water in it (and most modern meat does, sadly), you'll see it sweating out and sitting on top of the patties - they'll also get very plump in the middle. In this case, press down firmly with a spatula or spoon until water stops coming out. You should only have to do this once in the cooking process.

If you're making cheeseburgers, put a couple of slices of good mature chedder on top just before you pull them off the grill (a couple of minutes before, if you're using a grillpan where there's not so much heat on top), just long enough to melt.

Once they're browned to perfection, sling your patties into a nice floury bap with some fried onions, a dash of ketchup or whatever you like, and wolf 'em down. That's the taste of a real burger, my friend.

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Labels: Beef, beefburger, Black pepper, burger, cheese, Cook, floury baps, Ground beef, Meat, real food, Sea salt

This is a really simple recipe you can knock out in 45 minutes if you're reasonably au fait in the kitchen. It's not really satay since it's not barbecued, but the mixture of flavours is the same - hey, it's a nutty spicy thing, why get hung up on names?

Ingredients (for three people)

• A pound and a half of chicken, without bones (as usual I recommend you get free range - apart from the welfare issue the flavour is way better)
• One medium-sized onion (about the size of a tennis ball)
• Four goodsized cloves of garlic
  
• Curry powder, or your own mix of spices, whatever tastes good
• About a cup of water or chicken stock
  
• Soy sauce
• Sesame oil
  
• Four tablespoons of peanut butter
• Salt, and lots of ground black pepper
  

Chop up the chicken into goodsized chunks (it'll shrink in the pan), the garlic into thin slices and the onion as small as you can be bothered.

From 090217 Satay

Get the pan good and hot with a couple of tablespoons of sesame oil, then throw in the chicken and onion together - for some dishes I'd brown off the onion first or at least let it get translucent, but for this one I think the flavour benefits from the sharpness - and sprinkle a bit of curry powder over the whole so the flavour gets cooked into the meat from the beginning.

From 090217 Satay

Keep everything moving with the heat fairly high until the chicken starts to brown, then turn the heat down to medium and add the peanut butter. Stir it around till the peanut butter's melted through the pan.

From 090217 Satay

Now add the water or stock, a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce and season with salt and pepper. Have a good scrape at the bottom of the pan with a plastic or wooden spatula - there's loads of encrusted flavour down there you want to get into your sauce. Stir everything around, then leave to simmer for about thirty minutes, uncovered. You want it just hot enough to be raising the odd bubble but not boiling the sauce - that'll shred the chicken over time. Take a taste test now, and adjust the flavour with extra salt or soy, spice etc. if you feel it needs it.

From 090217 Satay

Finally the liquid should have reduced to a thick, chickeny, nutty, spicy sauce. Dump on top of noodles or rice and devour.

Recipe time! Hooray hooray. And this is absolutely one of my favourites, as well as a drastically underappreciated dish. It's one of those recipes which turns a cheap, junk cut of meat into something brain-meltingly gorgeous, with very little effort. There's a little bit of an interesting philosophical twist in there as well, because if you can cook great things with the less popular cuts of an animal it's a great way of showing respect to that (once-)living thing and making its death worthwhile. Eating the best bits and throwing the rest away is the way of the destructive, unthinking corporate-encouraged lifestyle. Using the whole animal, nose to tail, is a pretty good way of breaking away from that. [stops channeling Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall].

As with most of my recipes, this is a "framework" set of instructions and ingredients (I hate following a fixed recipe every time). Once you've got the basic technique down you can play with the flavours to almost infinite variation.

Slow Simmered Pork Belly

Ingredients:

• Pork belly - roughly a couple of strips per person. You'll soon learn how much is right depending how thick it's cut etc. As with most cooking, I'd recommend making more than enough the first time, and believe me, it's hard to have too much slow simmered pork belly. It can be skin on or skin off - the slow cooking process will reduce the toughest skin to tender gorgeousness, and it adds extra flavour and brings gelatin to help thicken the sauce. Some has bones, some doesn't - it doesn't matter which you get.
• Soy sauce. Lots of supermarket soy sauces (and more expensive ones) are really really salty. The only one I use is Blue Dragon naturally brewed soy (and they're not paying me to say that). It's beautiful and sweet-tasting, with almost no saltiness.
• Garlic, lots of
• Some or all of: Star anise, 5-spice, Sezchuan peppercorns (roast them first either in an oven or a thick-bottomed pan then crush them), mixed spice.
• Booze. In order of preference: sake (available in most supermarkets now with the cooking ingredients), shaohsing (very similar Taiwanese equivalent, I know it's in some stores where you can't get sake), sherry, cheap white wine.
• Honey. Substitute: Golden syrup, or half and half white and brown sugar.
• A bit of salt. If you can't find a non-salty soy sauce you might not need to add any.
• Particularly optional: Chillies, fresh or dried or chilli oil.

The procedure is very simple indeed. First heat some oil in a pan, and brown the pork well. Make sure it's brown! The fat should be a bit crispy at the edges by the time it's done. Then sling in the garlic, stir around for about a minute more and start sloshing in the liquids. Precise quantities are really really unimportant - for two people I'd use about half a cup of soy, a good two or three tablespoons of the spices, maybe four or five tablespoons of booze, five or six tablespoons of the honey, syrup or sugar. It takes quite a lot of the sweet stuff, more than you'd expect. If you want it spicy, add chillies to taste.

Then add maybe a full cup or two of water, depending on how long you're going to cook it for. Try a spoonful of it once everything's in there, and make sure the mixture of sweet, savoury and spicy is just right - you can always adjust it at this point. The taste test is a drastically underused technique in most home kitchens - so many people just dump all the ingredients in according to a recipe and hope until the cooking's done, making things so much harder for themselves! Just remember that the liquid is going to reduce down a lot, so if the taste isn't very strong it will become more so - the balance is the important thing at this point.

Then you simmer it without a lid on - like the stock it shouldn't be boiling wildly, just a few bubbles rising to the surface. Actually, to be quite honest, belly pork can take quite a bit of bubbling, and if you find yourself short of time just turn it up and let it boil hard till it's reduced enough, it won't really suffer.

You want to give it at least one and a half hours, ideally two and a half of steady simmering, and when it's done you want to have cooked off most of the water so that the sauce has concentrated down to a thick glutinous consistency - the sugar thickens it once it's concentrated enough, and it almost becomes caramelised. This means you might have to add more water as you go along if it's getting too reduced too fast, just don't go crazy because you'll end up being there forever waiting for it to finish.

You'll need to keep a general eye on it, as it'll need a stir now and then to stop it sticking - half an hour is probably the longest you should leave it unattended, and for the last half hour not at all - it'll reduce faster and faster once there's less liquid. Once it's had the longest cooking time possible and the sauce is thick and rich, just dump it out onto some noodles or rice and eat! And be prepared to become addicted to pork belly for the rest of your life, of course.

A sidenote/bonus recipe, because this suddenly struck me yesterday and it's particularly relevent to this recipe. Chilli oil: Don't buy it. Just put 2 or 3 finely chopped fresh red chillies or 8-10 crushed dried ones in a saucepan with some good light oil (veg, sunflower, etc.), heat to just-bubbling, then allow to cool and bottle with the chilli bits still in it. Keeps forever.

Ooookay, that was way too easy.

Labels: cheap cuts, Chili pepper, Cook, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, pork, pork belly, slow cooking, Soy sauce, Spice, Sugar, Wine

Nettles are pretty much the first thing in every wild food or survival book I've found, and I've been waiting for a chance to try them. Apparently they're not worth eating once they grow out properly in summertime (they become very coarse), and the very best nettles (according to every authority) are the new young plants which have just grown a couple of inches from the ground.

So you can imagine my delight when I saw acres of the things as I was out walking the other day. My delight was slightly tempered when I realised that I'd forgotten to bring any gloves. I (briefly) toyed with exhibiting my masculinity by picking them barehanded, then improvised with a thick cloth. Unfortunately this made the picking a rather imprecise science...

	...which is why my glorious nettle harvest looked like this. Mmm...rural.
		Not making the same bloody mistake again. You know, black leather is a tragically underused material in the kitchen...
	After about 15 minutes the nettles are mostly sorted out from the grass, dead leaves and other assorted flora, and rinsed in a colander.
		Can't decide what way to cook them. Ray Mears will know what to do.
	Ray says "Boil them in a bit of water, add butter". This sounds suspiciously easy.
		Simmering the nettles. Another book actually says "Boil them in just the water which clings to them after washing", and that turned out to be pretty good advice. Please ignore the disgusting state of my stove top, incidentally.
	The finished product - I know, doesn't look immediately appetising. I've seen them cooked down to a green slurry, but I wanted mine a bit more al dente. And with a bit of butter and a quick grind of salt...they were delicious! Not crisp exactly but firm, and the flavour was like cabbage but with no bitterness at all, just sweet and fresh-tasting.

I could honestly see eating a lot of these, and they are absolutely everywhere - I think I'll be taking my gloves with me on walks, at least until summer comes around. It's nice to have already found a wild food that's a pleasure to eat - now I just need to expand my repertoire and I'll be living off woodland forage in no time.

Labels: Cook, foraging, nettles, Ray Mears, wild food

Stock. It's another one of those vastly underrated and marginalised kitchen skills. And yet it's the key to some truly awesome cooking, and it is again an incredibly studly thing to be able to make. And since I've got a batch simmering right now, I reckon it's a good time to write about it.

For those raised on stock cubes (and believe me, my shelf used to hold every colour of Oxo available), stock is just another flavouring for meat, or it's gravy. But once you've discovered the joy and power of real stock, you'll see what an extraordinary thing it is.

When we cook, we use a whole bunch of different additives, of varying artificiality - salt and pepper, bay leaves, vinegar, 5-spice, whatever - to alter and enhance the flavour of our dishes. Each has it's own characteristics of sweetness, saltiness, aroma, sharpness, and so on. But stock is like the condensed essence of a whole load of beautiful flavours, all in a compact little package (an ice cube, if like me you freeze it). To make stock, you extract the flavour out of a bunch of good-tasting things, concentrate it down and then have it ready to add to your own recipes. So when you make a great tasting stew with a variety of ingredients, and then throw in one of your stock cubes to boost it a little, it's like you just added the best of a dozen ingredients in one go. That's why it's exciting.

The key to great stock is the Three Holy Vegetables - celery, carrots and onion. Carrots for sweet veggieness, onion for that magical combination of sweetness, sharpness and aroma, and celery for magic - those of you who think of celery as a boring salad vegetable might like to know that it contains large amounts of a natural flavour enhancer very similar to the much maligned monosodium glutamate (but without the headaches - if they exist at all.) Tomatoes have some of it too.

I'll post two quick guides here, one for a veg and one for beef stock - they're my two most common ones. I used to make chicken stock too, but sadly my local butchers buy in ready-boned chicken at the moment, so they don't have bones lying around. For beef bones, however, they're wonderful. You just have to get over the fact that they're outside in a box marked "for pets". I pay 50p a bag, if I remember right, and two bags is more than enough for my stockpot. All the amounts are rough, you can play around with them to your heart's content and experiment with additional flavour enhancements and adjustments.

Vegetable Stock (what I'm making today)

• 8 carrots (all about 6-8 inches long), peeled and with the top and bottom cut off.
• 2 large onions (1 would probably be enough), peeled and roughly chopped.
• A bunch of celery (about 10 stalks), washed and roughly chopped.
• Most of a head of garlic, peeled and flattened with the side of a knife
• A couple of tablespoons of tomato paste - not essential but it all helps boost the flavour.
• 2 bay leaves
• 12 black peppercorns
• A handful of fresh thyme and one of basil (my windowsill herbs were looking a bit uppity so I trimmed them a bit and threw these in, they're not essential but everything adds to the flavour).

All the vegetables should be sauteed for a few minutes, until the carrot and onion are a bit browned and the celery has wilted - this brings out the sweetness of the veggies. Then sling everything into a big stockpot (they're suprisingly cheap - I think mine was a fiver), add enough water to cover and let them simmer for 2-3 hours. It's important that you don't let them boil - the heat should be enough that the occasional bubble rises to the surface, but no more. Fast boiling leaches things out of the veggies that you don't want and eventually shreds them into the liquid as a pulp, which can cause a muddy or sulphurous taste (so I'm told from reliable sources - I've always been careful). After the time's up strain all the solid things out of the stock with something like a sieve, and ideally strain again through muslin or an equivalent (I use a J-cloth which has been boiled to take the faint perfume out). Then boil the liquid hard (it's okay now there are no solids in it) until it reduces down to a thick rich fluid. There should be about enough to fill one and a half ice-cube trays, or a little less. The reduction concentrates all the flavours, and the taste should be dynamite!

WARNING: Don't add salt until your stock is fully reduced. If you add it earlier, it will be unbearably salty once it's reduced.

Vegetable stock can go into practically anything. I recommend adding it to bolognaise and other pasta sauces, soups, stews, anything with a complex rich flavour can benefit.

Beef Stock

• Enough beef bones to fill your stockpot to the top (ask your butcher to break them up a bit if they're too big. I usually get them to fit as they are and I always forget to check before I get them home!)
• 4 carrots (all about 6-8 inches long), peeled and with the top and bottom cut off.
• 1 large onion, peeled and roughly chopped.
• About 4 stalks of celery, washed and roughly chopped.
• 12 black peppercorns
• A couple of tablespoons of tomato paste - not essential but it all helps boost the flavour.

You have a choice here - for a brown stock, first roast the bones in the oven. Do it at about 200 degrees (gas mark 6 I think), and keep a careful eye on them and turn them a few times - make sure they're good and browned but don't burn them black anywhere or they'll add a bitter taste. Also sautee the veggies as above. For a white stock just wash everything and put it in the pot. The only real advantage of a white stock is appearance and, some say, a clearer, cleaner taste (honestly my palate isn't up to telling the difference), so for most people's purposes a brown stock is better - it has a richer, sweeter and more powerful flavour.

Once all the ingredients are in the pot, add enough water to cover (if you've used plenty of bones that should be pretty much up to the rim), and simmer on a low low heat, just as with the veg stock - just the odd bubble rising. This is even more important with bones in there, as fast boiling will leach out bitter tasting chemicals. For the first hour or so you'll want to skim the surface occasionally as a grey scum and a layer of fat will accumulate there which will affect the flavour a bit. Beef stock needs about 7-8 hours simmering before you strain and reduce it. Again, it should make about an ice cube tray and a half of very rich stock to freeze. Again, don't add salt until it's fully reduced, if you add any at all - you can always add salt to the finished product anyway.

Beef stock is a bit more limited than veggie - it's pretty powerfully beefy, so it should only go with things that are complemented by that flavour. Chicken is a better all-purpose meat stock, frankly, I just don't have the means at the moment. When I do I'll post a recipe, or for now you can look to the links. Obviously beef stews, pies, etc. are ideal to gain from this stock, but some sauces (a chinese soy-sauce-based sauce for example) benefit surprisingly well from it. Or you can just melt one or two cubes in boiling water and voila! A simple consomme. All French and professional etc. Just tune up the flavour with salt until the beefiness leaps out at you - it'll taste a little bland until you get the salt just right. Just don't overshoot and end up with something like beefy seawater.

The exciting thing about stock, if you're learning about food, is that it teaches your palate. A common characteristic of real quality food versus cheap processed stuff is that the flavours are more subtle, but more complex. A Ginsters pasty or an Iceland chicken wing leap on your tastebuds with the full force of artificial flavours and flavour enhancers, and that can seem pleasurable, but it's a crude taste experience. A soup made with real stock is milder, but the flavours gradually emerge as you move it around your mouth - you can really taste all the ingredients concentrated down into the food, but they're subtle and don't all emerge at once. Cooking with stock has helped me no end in developing my own palate, and it's a really fun way to expand your cooking repertoire. Initially it can seem like it takes up a long time, but once you get over your initial paranoid check-it-every-five-minutes period, it can be prepped in a matter of minutes, monitored occasionally for the first hour if it's got meat in it, then just left to mind itself for the rest of the time. I'll happily go out shopping for an hour while my stock simmers. So it's not all that hard, really...

Labels: Cook, Stock, Taste

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Following on from yesterday's entry about skills (specifically the awesomeness of independent skills), we move on to bread. Making bread is a very much maligned skill in the modern world, mostly down to Hovis et al spending millions of pounds convincing us that what we really need is something squishy in a foil bag which doesn't go off for 6 months.

Bread-making has been safely partitioned off into a category of skills which is very useful to those who don't want us to become independent of huge corporate interests. (Namely - the huge corporate interests themselves. And all the politicians they are buying off.) It's a category for skills that "are, in their own way, wonderful things. But they're old-fashioned. They take too long. They're not really practical in the modern world. They're not really economical. They're the kind of things old people do". And so on and so on.

Throughout our lives we have been trained to believe that people fall into neat categories. You're an executive. Or you're a technology geek. Or you're a mum. Or a blue-collar worker. Or a student. Or a tramp. We are made to feel that these divisions are natural, and that when we cross over the boundaries of our category we are made to feel very uncomfortable. That applies even when the boundary-crossing would be an unproblematically positive thing - a mum who joins an open university course, or a technology geek who gets an allotment.

Once we've crossed a boundary, we feel uncomfortable until we have established a new category for ourselves. It's noteable that the people who are made most uncomfortable by us breaking out of our categories are also the people who sell us so much of our worldview - the print and TV media.

The media like to have a limited set of stories about each topic - geek develops a wacky gadget, executive lives for job, tramp arrested for being disgusting. It's simpler in that way to keep our convenient worldview in shape - they can just keep replaying the stories with slight variations in characters or emphasis, and they know we'll enjoy them, and react positively to them, because they've already told us what we like.

Back to bread, which is of course in it's own safe category as a thing that old people and people in the past did, but which doesn't really fit any of our nice modern personal categories. Mums are too busy, technology geeks can't cook anything except stirfry, blue collar workers eat ready meals unless their wife cooks for them, etc. etc. I'm sure you've already gathered my point, and in case you haven't, my point is FUCK ALL THAT. The very fact that we're not expected to make bread is enough reason to do it. If you need more reasons...

1. It's always tastier, at least compared to your basic bag-bread sliced loaf. By a considerable margin.
2. It's cheaper (not dramatically so, but it is cheaper. I did the sums.)
3. At first it's really fun to do. And once the novelty wears off you can make it damn easy - my basic loaf requires about 10 minutes of actual work, interspersed with various periods of waiting in which you can do anything else you feel like.
4. It makes way better toast than any bread you'll buy. Seriously, this toast will make you question your religious beliefs.
5. Once you realise how long real bread lasts, you're going to start getting creepy thoughts about what they're doing to a loaf of bag bread to make it last anything up to 3 weeks practically unchanged. Bread is meant to go off, it is the circle of bread life. Bag bread is the starchy equivalent of Cher. Only it makes marginally better toast. I assume.
6. It is unbelievably hardcore to be able to take some seed dust, a bit of fat and water (at the very simplest level) and make your own tasty civilised food.

A sidenote: Bread machines. Absolutely nothing against them in principle. Some people just can't be bothered with that 10 minutes of work, or believe they don't have time. And the bread they turn out is every bit as good as what you could make by hand. But to me, there's still that niggling thing that you're not actually learning a skill, at least not an independent one. Thrown out in a more primitive society, your ability to pour ingredients and push a button would have no use. Real bread skills work without electricity too.

Breadmaking sites:

Rustico article, explaining all about the science of breadmaking. Really good stuff.
Flour Advisory Bureau (don't laugh) article, with more excellent general tips.
About.com's terrifyingly thorough bread recipe section.

And of course....a basic bread recipe.

Which requires a brief disclaimer. My basic crusty white bread recipe was tried and tested, indestructible, bulletproof and worked every time, literally week after week in a row. Until I broke it. I started mucking about with the volumes trying to get a bigger loaf and just couldn't get it right, the consistency went all to hell. Then I lost the original bulletproof version [sob]. So this is currently recreated from memory, and has only been tested once - it came out pretty much okay but didn't rise all the way. I think that was my yeast though.

Hey, I never claimed bread was always easy, just worth the effort. Try it and see. But first read the Rustico and Flour Board articles. If something goes wrong, they will help you understand what and how to fix it.

Recipe

This recipe uses a mixture of plain flour and bread flour, which I've found gives a consistency I really like (soft inside, good texture, nice crust). You can play with the quantities as you wish once you get the basic idea down.

* 1 tbl of dry active yeast (or a packet of the quick-n-easy stuff)
* 1 tbl sugar
* 1/2 cup warm water

Mix those up in a bowl, and let them sit until a big gob of gunk floats to the top - that means your yeast has bloomed. Meanwhile, whack all the following in a bowl and mix together, or if you're doing it the easy way dump them in a food processor and run it for a minute or so:

* 1 tsp salt
* 2/3 cup milk
* 1tbl butter
* 1 egg
* 2 cups bread flour

Once the yeast has bloomed, pour that mixture into the bowl or food processor with the rest of the ingredients and mix a bit more. Then add 1 and a half cups of plain flour, and either mix or turn out and knead on a floured surface for a good few minutes. This is the important stage, where you're developing vital elasticity in the dough.

Now oil your bread tin, shape the dough into a sausage shape about the length of the tin and put it in the bottom, and put it somewhere warm to rise. If you don't have somewhere warm, turn on the oven for a minute or so then turn if off again (how many times have I forgotten to do that!) and put the tin in there. Preferably put a container of water in there with it, to make sure it doesn't dry out too much.

Give it roughly an hour, then punch it down (literally thump it a couple of times with your fist - if you wet your fist first you don't get dough stuck to it) and give it another half hour to rise again. Then bake it at about 200 on an electric oven, which I think is about gas mark 6. I won't give you a cooking time, the only way to tell it's done is when it's a nice deep golden colour, and if you turn it out and tap the bottom it sounds hollow. It takes somewhere around a half hour usually - your oven may vary.

Then give it at least a full hour on a wire rack or improvised equivalent to cool right through. If you cut into it while it's still warm (and it will be tempting the first time!) all the crumb (the soft inside) will squash and come away from the crust and your bread will be ruined.

Okay that's enough about bread now.

Labels: Baking and Confections, Bread, Cook, Flour, Food processor, Yeast Breads