All posts by Phil

Baking, General, Snacks, Starters, Soups

Sausage Rolls

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Having made the sausagemeat for rolls it’s a fairly simple task to make it into sausage rolls.

I prefer to use a rough puff pastry rather than a shortcrust or shop-bought puff pastry but these could also be used. I make the pastry using this quick rough puff pastry recipe.

I’ve dropped a clanger by not taking a photo of the sheet of pastry after it’s rolled out but I roll it to approx 250mm (10″) by 400mm (16 “). Square the edge off that’s nearest you. I will make 2 long rolls from this that I’ll then divide each one into 4 individual sausage rolls.

For approximately 100gm rolls use 170gm of sausage meat and roll pieces to form a long sausage to lay along the nearest edge. Then, lifting the pastry, roll it to just encase the meat. At this stage dampen the next inch or so of pastry with water (I think that water is better than egg wash for this) and roll the meat/pastry roll onto this. The roll can be cut away from the sheet at this stage.

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Fresh Sausage, Sausage, Sausage Calculator

Sausagemeat For Rolls

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I love a sausage roll but blimey, you kiss a few frogs before you find a prince! Too many are absolutely dire; the sausage meat is like meat paste and what is it with that pastry that’s neither short nor puff and is similar in texture to cardboard? I guess people tolerate it because they’re relatively cheap and they’re convenient.

As sausagemeat can be made without any fancy equipment they’re a great project for making at home. I would normally mince the pork myself to make these but to illustrate my point I’m using bought pork mince for these. You could get this from your butcher, or as in this case, the local supermarket. If it’s from your butcher ask for 80/20 visible lean. From the supermarket, buy the 20% fat pork mince, not the 5% fat one.

I assembled what I needed for the sausagemeat, most of the spices in the spice dabba won’t be used on this occasion but they do add a bit of colour to the photo!

The ingredients for each kilogram of pork mince are:

280gm Water
180gm Rusk
22gm Cornflour
18gm Salt
4gm Ground white pepper
2gm Ground black pepper
1.5gm Ground nutmeg
1.5gm Ground ginger
1.5gm Ground coriander
0.5gm Ground mace
3gm Rubbed sage

To make things easier, there is a calculator at the end of this post.

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Baking, Vegetarian

Pâte sucrée (sweet shortcrust pastry) and Afternoon Tea

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In 2014, I wrote:

Mum and Dad celebrated their Diamond (60th) Wedding Anniversary in 2014. As well as sending them to a local restaurant for a meal, we decided to have an afternoon tea.

For me, afternoon tea is lots of small patisserie and cake items; oh, and some token sandwiches beforehand. I’m not one for scones and cream as part of ‘afternoon tea’; they’re for other occasions when they can be enjoyed on their own. Now, we’re not ‘The Savoy’, or even ‘The Great British Bake Off’, so I choose just a small selection of simple things: individual lemon meringue pies, fruit tarts, and meringues, along with cupcakes made by my daughter Hannah. The meringue uses up the egg whites left after the yolks have been used for the pastry and lemon meringue filling. Savouries were cucumber, egg, ham, and cheese sandwiches, some even had the crusts cut off!

‘Ere, how come when it’s lemon meringue it’s a pie, but when it’s fruit, it’s a tart?

Never mind, what I do know is that with pies or tarts, it’s all about the pastry – it needs to be strong enough not to fall apart but melt-in-the-mouth when you eat it. My method may not be the proper way but it works and results in a pastry case that’s more like shortbread than pastry.

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Cooked Cured Meat, Cured Meat, Meat Recipes, Smoking and BBQ

Kasseler Style Pork

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Whilst I am a great believer in using locally produced meat from independent suppliers I’m also aware that many people don’t have the income to do this.

I hope to show with this project that you can still make some great products despite this. Many are cheaper than buying them from the supermarket. Yes, the quality may be better with meat produced to higher standards but good products can be made using meat produced on an industrial scale.

This is the piece of meat I bought from a local supermarket that sells pork produced in Britain. It’s around a kilogram of pork loin and cost £4.26 as it was discounted to £4 per kg.

A piece of loin of pork

That still may seem like a lot of money to some but the meat it makes can be used instead of cured ham, fried as bacon or be cut into thick slices to use as pork steaks/bacon chops – all of which would be more expensive to buy.

In Germany, it’s called Kasseler and is usually cured with the bones still in; it’s served as bacon chops. Some online references talk of it being smoked, cooked and then stored in brine which seems an odd way of going about things! However the few recipes I can find all make it in the normal way.

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Snacks, Starters, Soups, Vegetarian

Mushroom and Kale Soup

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Ingredients for soup

I’ve never been really happy with using water instead of stock for vegetarian soup but vegetable stock powder invariably gives a celery flavour to the whole soup and to be honest, even when I’ve made vegetable stock I’ve never been really happy with it.

However, I think that I’ve found the answer, at least for mushroom soups. Dried Porcini absolutely transforms them. I’d never bothered with it until now because of the price. But recently I’ve been looking for things that help to lower my calorie intake and have been surprised, it’s not always the lower-calorie items that are best. For example, you get far more ‘bang for your buck’ from high-calorie Stilton than a reduced calorie cheese. Just try it, tiny pieces of stilton will add flavour whereas you’d need double the amount of a lower-calorie product. Well, when I was thinking along these lines, I also realised that the same applies to using very small amounts of expensive items and there’s no doubt that Porcini is expensive: £60 – £80 per kilo but if you only use 10gm it’s only 60p or about 10p per bowl.

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Interesting Ingredients

Henderson’s Relish

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Once in a while, you come across an ingredient that is so superb that you have to write about it. Sheffield’s Secret Weapon, Henderson’s Relish is one of those. How it managed to slip my attention when I spent 9 months of 1975 in Sheffield’s Lodgemoor Hospital, I just don’t know. It’s superb and well worth seeking out.

Henderson's relish bottles

At first glance and taste, you’ll probably think that it’s a copy of Lea and Perrins famous Worcestershire sauce but you’ll soon realise that it’s subtlety different – not so harsh and aggressive a taste. Whereas Worcestershire sauce can dominate, Hendo’s compliments.

Henderson’s relish is also suitable for vegetarians and vegans.

As to its manufacture? Is it made in a factory on Parkway Rise, Sheffield, or does it drip from seams in the local coal mines as suggested by my Yorkshire mate Maurice. Now, I like to think that it comes from a secret well situated under the old Lodgemoor Hospital clock tower and that’s why the clock tower was left standing when the hospital was demolished!

In any case, it’s available from numerous shops in the Sheffield and North Derbyshire area and online from Morrisons and other online suppliers.

Cooked Sausage, Sausage, Sausage Calculator

Irish White Pudding

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Originally posted in 2009:

Some time back I posted about my trials of an Irish White Pudding recipe that I developed in collaboration with my forum mate John.

Now, I have to admit, I can take or leave these Irish delicacies but I believe that this recipe is as close to the commercial ones, as we can get. That is, the ones that I was sent which are made by Breeo Foods of Dublin and sold under the ‘Shaws’ brand name. They’re the ones on the left in this picture:

The final recipe stood up to the ‘John’s mother-in-law’ test and passed with flying colours.

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Baking

Sourdough Bread

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Originally posted in 2008:

Followers of this blog will maybe know of my embarrassment at being ‘famous’ for a recipe that is a clone (albeit superb) of a supermarket soft-bap. They’ll also know that I’ve had difficulty in coming up with a sourdough recipe that fits in with my lifestyle.

I’ve always felt that I’d make better sourdough bread if I had the ‘proper kit’ for proving it: a couche (proving cloth) or some bannetons (linen-lined wicker baskets), preferably the latter. Now the problem with this is that bannetons ain’t not cheap! Nice cane or wicker ones are anything between £12 and £45. Then low and behold, I don’t often get lucky but I was in a local trade wholesalers just before Christmas and they’d got 4 lined wicker display baskets for about a fiver! Just the job – identical in all but name. Having acquired the kit and then making a sourdough starter for a mate, when I watched last week’s “Fabulous Baker Boys” TV show and they made a sourdough loaf, I thought I’d better bite the bullet and have another go.

I decided to use the recipe featured on the TV programme (Fabulous Baker Boys, Channel 4, episode 4) but had major problems with the dough; theirs was a very wet dough, mine made to the same recipe was so dry that it wouldn’t come together. I ended up adding an extra 75ml of water and it was still on the dry side as sourdoughs go. I’ve asked a fellow blogger more used to these types of bread to have a look at it but I’m naturally loathe to say that the recipe’s wrong given that ‘Fabulous Baker Boy’ Tom Herbert has won ‘Baker Of the Year’ and his sourdough has won ‘Organic Loaf of the Year’ 9 times in the last 10 years! You’ll have to try it and see what you think! I’ll give my adaption of the recipe with a note of the changes.

White Sourdough Bread

300ml Sourdough starter
500gm Strong bread flour
275ml Water (200ml in original)
10gm Salt (a pinch in original)

A note about the salt: Tom’s ‘pinch’ of salt on the TV show was about the same as the 10gm that I’ve used. I based mine on the normal ratios of salt used in this type of bread.

I added all the other ingredients to the flour and then mixed it well in the Kenwood Chef and subsequently by hand. I left it to rise for a couple of hours and then shaped it, floured it all over, and put it into a basket lined with a flour-covered linen. The baker brothers then leave this to rise for 8 – 12 hours. I put mine into the fridge for about 16 hours and then gave it a couple or three hours to come back to temperature the next day. The loaf was then tipped gently onto a baking stone preheated in an oven at 240°C, the top was slashed, and it was baked for about 30 minutes, then cooled.

It has the classic thick crisp sourdough crust that demands better teeth than mine and an open textured crumb. It has a well-developed taste without being at all sour. All in all quite a pleasing result.

…and how did I know it would all work out so well? I didn’t, that’s why I baked one of my everyday loaves, just to be on the safe side!

Baking

Sourdough Starter

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Originally posted in 2008:

The fascination of making bread with just flour, water and salt, no yeast, is intriguing.

The secret of success is a good starter. Now, undoubtedly the easiest way of doing this is if someone gifts you some of their established starter but in the absence of such a benefactor you’ll need to make one yourself.

The easiest way of doing this is to mix 50 gm of bread flour and 50gm of water in a preserving jar (holding the lid down loosely with an elastic band rather than the catch) or a bowl with a plate on top – something that will keep things clean but allow airborne yeasts to colonise the flour and water mix. After a day add a further 50 gm flour and 50 gm water. You now have 200gm of flour/water mix. The next day and on subsequent days throw half of it (100gm) away and top it up with 50gm flour and 50gm water.

In a few days, you should notice air bubbles forming and after 4 – 7 days there should be significant bubbling within a couple of hours or so of adding the fresh flour and water.

The starter may smell beery. It may also look split – just mix it together it’ll be OK. In the event of it really smelling not nice – just throw it away and start again.

If you are not going to be making bread every day or couple of days you can store the starter in the fridge and just top it up weekly.

This is classed a 100% hydration starter: that is the water weighs 100% of the weight of the flour. This method of calculating recipes is known as baker’s percentages. They differ from normal percentages in that all ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the flour rather than the total amount of dough.