There you go, I’m being posh and calling it quiche! It’s really a good old bacon and cheese flan. It’s a pity that so many poor imitations of this superb rich savoury egg custard are sold by supermarkets and presented to the world on numerous buffets with cheap frozen sausage rolls and those damn miniature scotch eggs.
Continue reading Bacon and Cheese QuicheI wrote this originally in 2009:
One of my old standbys – based on a recipe from Nigel Slater’s book ‘Toast’. A book well worth buying.
The recipe is simplicity itself.
Cut a chicken into 8 pieces. Put it into a roasting tin with a head of garlic (crushed up a bit) and some onion segments. Squeeze over the juice from two lemons and chuck the lemons in. Glug with olive oil and stuff in the oven at 180°C for ½ hour. Then chuck a glass of white wine in along with a handful of basil leaves. Cook for 15 minutes more and serve…
…dip ya bread in!
This is even nicer done with preserved lemons.
Pauline can’t have wine, so I used chicken stock instead. She’s going to have to go!
Originally posted at Christmas 2009…
This time of year is great for picking up double cream that’s near its sell-by date from the Supermarket. Just after Easter or Wimbledon are also good times.
I make butter using my Kenwood mixer, you could also use an electric whisk, or even make it by hand.
I put the cream in the mixer with a pinch of salt and a small pinch of sugar for every 300ml. I’ve no idea why I use the sugar; it’s just that I saw a lady who had made the butter for Chatsworth house for about 50 years do it. Who am I to argue with her experience?
I originally posted this recipe in December 2007 but it proved so popular at a recent buffet that I make no apologies for re-posting it here.
This cake is great! It’s really easy to make and more or less foolproof. It also feeds a fair number, as it is very rich.
Get the recipe, it’s really yummy…My co-writer, Paul, revised an injection cure to use as a dry cure for beef brisket. He cooked it to eat on St. Patrick’s Day in 2020. I thought of it the other day when we were shopping at a local trade wholesaler, as they had brisket on offer. It seemed an ideal time to make it without risking expensive meat.
I decided to stick close to Paul’s recipe – I trust him in these things. However, I’ve reduced the allspice and increased the juniper to take account of our preferences.
I trimmed the meat:
It’s not pretty now, but see how it turns out…
Continue reading Dry Cured Corned Beef – Preparation
A note for US readers: faggots in the UK are a meatball made from liver. There are two distinct types: faggots without sauce sold by butchers, and faggots with sauce, usually made in factories. I’d just finished the two recipes linked when I posted this.
Originally posted in 2009
There are only so many faggots a man can take. So what’s different that you can do with the masses of pork liver from your half pig? Liver Pâté is the obvious one, but it’s taken me ages to find a recipe that isn’t just too… well, just too ‘livery’.
This recipe is a slightly amended version of the one from Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, and is the best that I’ve found so far. The one I formulated myself was too strong in the liver department and too bitter. In my notes, I wrote, “add breadcrumbs/rusk, add milk product”; that’s exactly what the one in ‘Charcuterie’ does.
Ingredients
1 lb/450 gms pork liver, cut into large chunks
1 lb/450 gms boneless pork shoulder, diced
1 ounce/25 gms (about 2 tablespoons) salt
1 tsp/3 gms freshly ground black pepper
2 bay leaves
2 sprigs fresh thyme
2 Tbsp/30 ml vegetable oil
¼ cup/50 gms chopped shallots
2 Tbsp/30 ml brandy
2 slices white bread, crusts removed and roughly chopped
½ cup/120 ml whole milk
¼ cup/60 ml double cream.
2 large eggs
1 Tbsp/6 gms chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
¼ tsp/0.5 gm ground white pepper
½ tsp/1 gm freshly grated nutmeg
Method
1. Put the meats in separate bowls with half the salt, pepper, thyme and bay in each; mix and marinate separately for 8 hours or overnight.
2. In a frying pan, sear the liver in the oil until brown; add the shallots and cook until translucent; add the brandy, cook off the alcohol, scrape all the bits off the bottom of the pan and put in a bowl to cool in the fridge.
3. Mix the bread, milk, cream and eggs well and set aside.
4. Keeping everything very cold, mince/grind everything except the bay and thyme (which can be thrown away) through the fine plate of your mincer/grinder. (Watch out as the liver has a tendency to squirt through the mixer plate!)
4. If you want an even finer pâté, put the lot in the freezer with your food processor bowl for 20 minutes or so. Then process until very fine. Check the temperature with a thermometer regularly – don’t let it exceed 15°C. Food processors heat food very quickly, so watch out – or omit this step.
5. Line a mould with cling film, greaseproof paper, or baking parchment and fill it, pushing the mix into the corners. Cover the pâté with the chosen lining and then with foil.
6. Put in a bain-marie (roasting tin of hot water) in the oven at 150°C, 300°C, gas mark 2; test with a thermometer after about 1-1½ hours – remove when it’s been above 65°C for 10 minutes.
7. Put weights on top of the pâté and cool.
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In 2008, I wrote:
In this country, we are used to corned beef out of a tin. The corned beef I am making is more like an unsmoked version of Pastrami. It gets its name from the ‘corn’, grains of coarse salts that are used to cure it. Traditionally made with brisket it can also be made with other cuts – in this case, a piece of topside weighing about 3lb.
In 2013, I wrote:
It’s quite amazing how certain foods are so local that even though you live in the County bordering those where they’re made you’ve managed to get to 56 years old without ever having them.
The Derbyshire or North Staffordshire oatcake is such a one; it wasn’t until about 6 weeks ago, on a visit to Hartington, that I had tasted my first oatcake. I’ve hardly stopped eating them ever since!
I’ve been making this sausage for while now. It first came to my attention when a recipe was posted on the sausage-making forum by member Wittdog. His was an amended version of one in a book by Rytek Kutas.
Continue reading Smoked Polish Style SausageOriginally posted in June 2009.
It’s not been a very productive week, however, I managed to start off a Lonzino Stagionata. I think this is the correct term for what is a cured air-dried loin of pork, Italian style.
It’s basically like a parma ham but from the eye of the loin. Expensive, but superb.
I started off with 4½ kg of pork loin from Joseph Morris’s. It was boned and the eye of the loin removed yielding 1½ kg of meat for the Lonzino and a further 2¼ kg of meat/fat that will be used in chorizo.
Now for the cure, what should I use? I am at something of a disadvantage here as I’ve never tasted Lonzino. Online recipes, of which I found only two from trusted sources, varied considerably in the spices used so I was left with making up my own interpretation from the (little) information available – it’s turned out as a sort of combination of the two online recipes. Whether it will be anything like the original is anyone’s guess! Anyway, here it is:
For 1 kg meat I used:
Salt 34gm
Sugar 10gm
Cure #2 – 2.4gm
Black Pepper 5gm
Fennel Seeds 4gm
White Pepper 3gm
Garlic Powder 2.5gm
Cinnamon 1gm
Mace 1gm
1 Clove
Grind the spices and mix with the other ingredients. Rub cure into the loin then put it into a food grade bag or vacuum pack it.
It will cure for 10 days or so.
The Lonzino was cured for 12 days. I washed and dried it and put it into a 90mm collagen casing. The casing was tied (badly!) and pricked to aid drying.
I left it drying at 10 – 15°C in a humidity of 60 – 70% (ish) until it lost about 40% of its weight.
The black wires in front of the Lonzino are from the humidity and temperature sensors in the fridge.
In late August I sliced some of it Getting to that stage was not been without its problems what with a new fridge set up for the drying it’s been a case of juggling things about to get the humidity at the correct levels – not helped by the weather we had at the time.
It’s a little dry around the edges, surprising as if anything the humidity was a little high in the early stages of drying. I dried it to a 36% weight loss. Next time I’ll dry it less and test for water activity to make sure it’s safe. I don’t think the drying was helped by the small size of the loin or the fact that I de-cased it after about 20 days as some undesirable moulds were starting to form under the casing – I obviously hadn’t got it tight enough around the meat. The mould? I brushed that off, rubbed the area with wine vinegar to kill any remaining nasties, and sprayed the meat with Penicillium Candidium – the white mould that is seen on Brie and Camembert cheeses. Within a few days a nice coating of white had appeared:
Pauline really likes its fennel overtones; I’m not as keen. Yes I like it, but think I will do a Lomo next time – basically, Lomo’s the same thing but with paprika flavours – Spanish as against Italian. That said it’ll make a nice addition to the growing charcuterie store.
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