Food

Chorizo are delicious hot red sausages, strongly flavoured with paprika and fennel. Apparently they're originally from Iberia, but they're popular in lots of Hispanic and Portuegese cuisine. They can be smoke-dried and stored like salami, but they can also be made as fresh sausages (Anthony Bourdain swears by them) and they're easy, fun and very tasty things to cook with.

This is by no means a definitive or "authentic" recipe, but it makes some damn tasty chorizo.

Ingredients

1 pound of fatty pork, roughly chopped
2 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon of salt
1 tablespoon of white vinegar
1 teaspoon of hot paprika
1 teaspoon of smoked paprika (this stuff can be hard to get hold of, but get it if you can. The flavour is absolutely unparalleled - whatever you go through and whatever you pay to get hold of it, the first sniff of that amazing aroma will make it all worthwhile! If you can't get it, just use a teaspoon of mild paprika.
1 teaspoon of fennel seeds
1/2 teaspoon of cayenne
A few grinds of black pepper

Throw it all in the food processor, and mince it down to a fine paste. Then refrigerate the mix for at least three hours (preferably 24) to let all the flavours mingle. Trust me, it's worth the wait. Then the paste can be stuffed into skins and used as sausages or (my personal favourite because it's easy!), you can just roll it into balls.

When you're ready to use them just fry them in a little oil until they're turning brown. I use them pretty much anywhere you'd use meatballs or sausages - particularly in sandwiches (chorizo sub with cheese, anyone?) or with pasta (they go wonderfully well with shellfish and a good vinegary tomato sauce). They freeze well, too.

Labels: barbecue pork, cayenne, chorizo, fennel seeds, Garlic, meatballs, paprika, Pasta, sausage, smoked paprika

This is an extraordinarily easy recipe, barely worthy of the name. Anyone with one arm and at least a third of a cerebral cortex can make pesto. And it is one of the most delicious and handy things to have around the kitchen.

Ingredients:

Two cups of basil leaves, well pressed down. If you keep some basil on your windowsill and you're not a completely deranged pizza and pasta addict, you'll probably find like me that it outgrows your ability to use it.

So what better way to keep the wild basil bush in line than with a regular haircut, and a pesto session?



A quarter cup of parmesan, grated. This is the only bit of hard work in this recipe - parmesan has the texture and density of petrified oak. But you'll have a quarter cup before you know it, and it's well worth it for that amazing flavour.



Half a cup of good olive oil.



Three tablespoons of pine nuts. You can use walnuts, but I always find them a bit bitter.



And finally, three cloves of garlic, topped and tailed and peeled.



Now for the complicated preparation bit. Sling everything in the food processor or blender, and blend it until smoke comes out of the back of the machine. That's a secret signal to tell you your pesto is ready.




By God, doesn't that look good?

Only thing left is to pour/pack it into an ice cube tray and freeze it for all your pesto needs.



And once you have it, this stuff is (green) gold. For starters - it's an instant meal (almost) by itself. Boil some pasta, melt a pesto cube over it in the pan, and bingo - lunch! With maybe a bit of the extra parmesan grated over it if you're splashing out. As an additive, pesto brings new levels of deliciousness to any red sauce (if I have any it always goes in my pasta and pizza sauces). You can melt it onto fish, meat or vegetables, spread a thin layer on toast, add it to sandwiches, or use it in most cases where you'd use fresh basil.

Great, now I'm starving.

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Labels: basil, Food processor, Garlic, Olive oil, parmesan, Pasta, Pesto, Pine nut, Pizza

Another repost, from April 2007

Brisket is a very cheap, tough cut of beef, but when you cook it slow and long those tough fibres soften into tender but firm meat. The flavour, moreover, is heavenly, far tastier than your quick-cook expensive and tender cuts.

Yesterday I got lucky and was able to pick up a brisket piece of Orkney Gold, my local butcher's best grade of beef. It's great meat, from slow-grown grass-fed suckling herds (as opposed to fast-grown, factory farmed cows which are forced to put on weight as fast as possible to get them out of the doors - this has a significant effect on the development of flavour).

To top off a perfect cut of beef Orkney Gold is hung for a minimum of 21 days on the bone to develop flavour and deep-down moistness - most supermarkets (and sadly many butchers) will hang beef for two or three days, a week at most. And how much did this piece of some of Britain's best beef (enough to stuff two people) cost me? Just over three pounds sterling. The cheapest cuts of the best meat - can't beat em.

Beer brisket (for two people)

• Large piece of brisket (about two or two and a half pounds - a lot of it is bone)
• Two large cloves of garlic
• Salt
• Two bayleaves
• One large onion
• Small handful of fresh thyme or (if you must) half a teaspoon dried thyme
• Three quarters of a pint of (preferably) ale - just don't use cheap lager.
• One tablespoon of brown sugar
• One cube of beef or vegetable stock
• One tablespoon of ground black pepper
• One tablespoon of cornflour

Put the brisket in a roasting tin or casserole dish - but first sear it on both sides in a very hot frying pan. Don't wuss out on this, you want it almost blackened when you pull it off the surface. The effect on flavour is major - those little browned bits have as much flavour as the rest of the meat put together, and when they dissolve into the gravy they work magic.

Once it's seared and in the dish, thinly slice the onion and cover the brisket evenly with it. Mix together everything else except the cornflour, and pour a bit into the hot frying pan and scrub about with a spatula or wooden spoon to deglaze it (dissolve the browned bits off the surface) - don't waste that flavour magic. Then pour all the liquid over the brisket in the dish, and wrap the whole thing in foil. Put it in the oven and cook it at 150c for a good four hours.



Unwrap the dish and lift the brisket out - it should look like this. Mmm...unbelievably succulent. It just falls off the bone, I picked it up with tongs and it fell apart. But because brisket has so much texture it stays firm and steaky, not jellyish.



The remaining fluid in the casserole. Scoop the onions out, then mix the cornflour with a little bit of water. Mix it into that pan juice, slosh it into a pan and heat it on the stove, stirring till it thickens to make a nice rich gravy.



With the bones lifted out, the brisket goes back in the dish and you can pour the gravy over it.



And the finished beer brisket is served up, in this case with piles of buttery mashed potato and a spoonful of the onions for me.

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Labels: Beef, beer, Black pepper, brisket, Cook, Frying pan, Garlic, Gravy, Mashed potato, slow cooking, tough cuts

Cover via Amazon

A repost from March 2007

I've never cooked mussels before, always eyed them with interest on the fish stall at the market but never plucked up the courage - to be honest I also thought they'd be very pricy. But last week I finally got round to a proper read-through of Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, noting down recipes which interested me, and he has three very tasty-looking recipes for mussels, so Saturday morning I finally bought a netful.

They turned out to be very economical - just £3.95 for a big net. I didn't count them but there were enough for myself, my girlfriend and a good lump frozen for a future meal (after cooking of course - you can't freeze them beforehand as they must be alive when you cook them).

Naturally I had the usual concerns about freshness, the risk of sickness etc., but the fish guy on Bedford market has never yet sold me anything but the best quality product, so I wasn't too worried. The general rule, for those who don't know, is to throw out any mussels which aren't tightly closed, or which don't immediately close when you tap them. Out of this big batch there was only one which fitted that description, so I was pretty confident.

They're rather beautiful things, with gleaming black shells encrusted with little limpets and things, and a satisfying weight to them. The annoying part is preparing them. Each one has to be "bearded" (they have a hairy strand which protrudes from the concave side of the shell, and which must be pulled off just before cooking), and scrubbed. That takes quite a while, I'd guess about 30-40 minutes to prepare this batch for us. Obviously I'm fairly inexperienced but I don't think you could make it much faster.

All round this dish was ridiculously simple to make, I'd encourage anyone to try it. I mostly used Tony's recipe for Moules Normandes (Mussels Normandy-style), with two major exceptions - I couldn't get hold of any Calvados (apple brandy) at short notice so I just sloshed in some white wine. Didn't seem to hurt. And I couldn't find any shallots so I substituted with garlic and onion (shallots are somewhere in between flavour-wise).

• Mussels, one netful - weighed a bit less than 2 pounds.
• Bacon (I bought a nice cheap pack of "bacon misshapes", and cut off about 6 cubic inches of good chunky stuff) in small cubes.
• 4 tablespoons of butter
• 1 shallot, thinly sliced (or substitute with a bit of onion and some garlic)
• 6 small mushrooms, thinly sliced
• Half an apple, peeled, cored and cut into chunks (I used a bit extra due to not having Calvados)
• 75ml Calvados (or in my case a glass of white wine)
• 1 tall tub of double cream (can never remember how much they hold).
• Salt and pepper.

Prep is simple - just cook the bacon in a pan (no extra fat needed if it's good fatty stuff, which I had) for about 10 minutes till it's well browned. Actually it took about 20 minutes because it was nasty British bacon and it took 10 minutes to cook off all the water. Eugh. But it was nice when done.

Meanwhile in a large pot (I used my stockpot, and this recipe half-filled it) cook the butter over a medium/high heat until it foams, then add the shallot (or whatever) and cook it till transparent. Add the mushrooms and apple and cook it all for 5 minutes, then slosh in the booze, which should deglaze the pan nicely. Stir in the cream and add salt and pepper. Then once it's all boiling, add the mussels and cook for ten minutes, or until all the mussels are opened. Shake it, cook for another couple of minutes, shake again and serve.

Now, that's pretty much how Tony had it. Have you spotted the deliberate mistake? Yup, he doesn't mention what to do with the bacon. Now, assuming he doesn't intend you just to cook it alongside so the aroma wafts into the pot and subtly affects the flavour, I put it in at the same time as the mussels, and the effect was gorgeous so I'm happy. I also added a step which Anthony didn't mention (but I'm sure he would have done himself if he was cooking it) - deglazed the bacon pan with a slosh of the white wine and poured it in. Flavour city.

Tony's recipe actually uses all the same quantities but for 6 pounds of mussels. In that case you wouldn't get the "chowder" at the bottom, it's up to you whether you want to scale up for that reason. One thing I would suggest if you're using my quantities is stirring instead of shaking - it's doable if you're only cooking 2 pounds, and it would mix the sauce through without shaking half of the mussels out of their shells!

Labels: Anthony Bourdain, Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies Recipes and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking, apple, Calvados, Cook, cream, Fish and Seafood, Garlic, mussels, seafood, Wine