Brioche

There’s something about brioche which really dings my dong – like croissants but without all that irritating flakiness. Not that I would ever put down a croissant (literally and metaphorically). This recipe by Dan Lepard for the Guardian worked brilliantly. It was so fun to do and the end result was the most divine buttery loaf, with a texture somewhere between bread and cake, and a little denser than a shop bought brioche.

A few comments…

1) Dan says that this will make two large loaves, but I only had one loaf tin so I loaded in all my dough and made one really large one. It worked fine.

2) I dread to think what the calorie content of this brioche is. It contains An. Entire. Pat. Of. Butter.

3) Of course, the ideal thing is to have the brioche ready for breakfast but that would involve getting up at about five in the morning which I’m not sure is very realistic. For that reason doing it in one day is probably better. And to get that fresh out of the oven feeling microwaving a slice for 15 seconds worked for me.

The recipe in pictures...

  

Ginger Beer

It took four attempts for me to find a ginger beer recipe that I thought worked well.

1) First of all I tried a very simple, non-brewed version by Jamie Oliver. Its advantage is that you can whip it up in about 20 minutes. Its disadvantage is that it is quite frighteningly spicy – not fiery, spicy. Everyone tried to be polite but it was clearly too challenging for the palate for my family. I can’t imagine the child who could drink this stuff. Here's my sister attempting to take the smallest possible sip.

 2) Next I went for a Nigel Slater recipe, one that involves letting the mixture sit around in a bowl overnight. The problem with this one was that it had a pretty lacklustre fizz – I think too much gas was lost during the first hours (although I did leave mine in the bowl for 24 hours instead of 12). In addition, when I bottled it, I ended up with one virtually clear ginger beer, and one incredibly cloudy, milky one because all the yeast and cream of tartar was sitting on the bottom of the bowl. Perhaps I should have swirled it around, or avoided the bottom. Either way, Nigel neglected to advise.

 3) Next I turned to Hugh F-W. I foolishly attempted to use bread yeast so the whole thing smelt like thrush. Sorry.

4) I tried Hugh once more and succeeding in creating a really delicious ginger beer. Not particularly fiery mind but quite winey, refined, fizzy and very drinkable. In the recipe below I suggest adding more ginger to give it more kick. And as long as you strain through muslin there’s no need to peel it.

Equipment

1 plastic 2 ltr bottle (buy some cheap water for the bottle)

Muslin

Funnel

Ingredients

¼ tsp brewer’s yeast

225g caster sugar

4tbsp grated fresh root ginger

Juice of a lemon

1 tsp honey

1)      Put the yeast into the bottle, then the sugar, then the rest of the ingredients.

2)      Add cold water to ¾ full and shake till everything is dissolved.

3)      Top up leaving a 2.5cm airspace in the top of the bottle.

4)      Leave in a warm place for 48 hours.

5)      Strain and put into the fridge to stop the yeast working. Once chilled, it’s ready to drink.

Battenberg Cake

The excellent thing about Battenberg is the ratio of sponge to marzipan. The pink and yellow chequered sponge is, to my mind, just a vehicle for all that almondy squidginess. But it is also visually lovely – a pretty, delicate tea-time cake.

However my boyfriend Jack wanted to take the Battenberg to another level. It was his colleague Emma’s birthday and he had an ambitious vision of a Battenberg that contained an ‘E’ in pink sponge. The result was an enormous, weighty brick of a Battenberg. But although it might have lost some of its traditional elegance, and the sponge to marzipan ratio was not quite what one would hope, this was a very fun cake to make.

We used Sarah Cook’s recipe for the BBC, which we chose because it contains ground almonds, crucial to creating a dense, squidgy sponge. The comment I will make about this recipe is that it makes A LOT of cake. In addition to the ‘E’ Brickenberg that we made, I then made a second Battenberg, virtually the same size, out of just the off cuts, plastered together with apricot jam. My advice would be to either halve the quantities or make two cakes. If you don’t do this then you will end up with a very long skinny cake. A snake, if you will.     

I have re-written and simplified the recipe, and chucked in a few iphone photos at the bottom for reference…

Ingredients

350g soft butter

350g caster sugar

280g self-raising flour

100g ground almonds

1 tsp baking powder

6 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

½ tsp almond extract

Red food colouring

Yellow food colouring

1kg white marzipan

Apricot jam

1)      Pre-heat the oven to 180C and line two rectangular tins with baking paper.

2)      Put the first eight ingredients into a blender and whizz.

3)      Split equally into two bowls and add red food colouring to one, and yellow to another. Stir and add until you have the right colour.

4)      Put the two cake mixtures into the tins and bake for 25-30 mins.

5)      When cooked, leave the cakes to cool.

6)      Slice up the sponge into long square strips and arrange in a chequered pattern or in any way you like.

7)      Brush your cake construction with apricot jam and then roll the marzipan tightly around it. Trim the ends to reveal the perfect Battenberg cross-section. 

Mozzarella Cottage Cheese

I have tried four times and I have not succeeded in making mozzarella. But it is possible to make something that tastes like mozzarella, even if it doesn’t have the right texture. So rather than the documentation of an out and out failure, this post is will present my findings in the business of fresh cheese-making, and the unintended, though delicious, results.

My mozzarella quest began when I saw Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s article on the subject in the Guardian last summer. I wasn’t sure where to get raw or unhomogenised milk from but when I discovered that Selfridge’s food hall stocks Laverstoke Park buffalo milk I sought some out to have a go. (This kind of milk is occasionally and randomly stocked in some branches of Waitrose and Sainsbury’s but it’s near impossible to track down – I tried calling both supermarkets and Laverstoke Park and was advised just to keep an eye out for it on the shelves. But Selfridge’s seems to keep it in reasonably steady supply.) Here is the recipe.

Attempt No. 1:

Done without a thermometer – pretty dumb of me. But it was really delicious. The curds were the texture of cottage cheese and incredibly rich.

Attempt No. 2:

Convinced that my texture-related problems were to do with temperature control, I bought a digital thermometer and had another go. This time I decided to try the recipe with cow’s milk and I used Duchy originals organic whole milk (pasturised but not homogenised). The texture was improved but Hugh’s instructions to “stretch out the cheese, folding it back on itself and working it just until it’s stretchy, shiny and smooth” were no good to me. There was no stretching taking place, just tearing and general disintegration. Very frustrating. So I gave up stretching and simply started moulding the chunks of curd into rough balls. It kiiiind of worked but the balls kept leaking their moisture and gradually became smaller and tougher. I could practically wring them out. And the other consideration was that the flavour of the cow’s milk mozzarella did not come near the complex taste of the buffalo milk.

Attempt No. 3:

I spent hours researching what might be going wrong. Some websites suggested putting the curds in the microwave, others that it was something to do with the Ph levels of the cheese. I finally hit upon a possible solution – Hugh’s recipe calls for ¼ tsp rennet but it occurred to me that he might be using powdered animal rennet which is much more powerful than the liquid VegeRen I had been using. So I followed the advice on the VegeRen packet and used 10 drops for every pint of milk. Of all the attempts, this was the worst. The cheese was tough and almost flavourless. I ate it, but…

Attempt No. 4:

I was completely out of ideas as to what I could do to make my mozzarella recipe successful. So I decided to salvage the fruits of my research to see what I might reasonably suggest as a recipe. I realised two things. One, that the recipe only actually takes about 30 mins to do – it’s very easy. And two, that the best version of mozzarella I had attempted was my very first batch. So I set about recreating it. Here is the resulting recipe:

Equipment:

Sieve

Thermometer

Large pan

Ingredients

1tsp citric acid

2 litres milk, raw or unhomogenised

5 drops liquid rennet

2 tbsp salt

1)      Dissolve the citric acid in 60mls warm water.

2)      Put the milk in a pan and heat very slightly to 13C (if it needs to be heated at all).

3)      Add the citric acid and heat to 30C, stirring gently. It will start to curdle.

4)      Dilute the rennet in a tablespoon of warm water and add immediately to the milk.

5)      Warm the milk gently to 38-39C stirring occasionally.

6)      Remove from heat, add the salt and leave for 15 mins.

7)      Scoop curds out of pan and into a sieve.

8)      Press curds gently to remove a little more whey, but not too much otherwise the cheese will be hard.

9)      Break and crumble the soft curds into a bowl.

Swirl olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper and thyme into the cheese and serve with ciabatta.

Lemon Curd

I feel I have to confess that I did not make this lemon curd myself, although I did witness it being done. And I admit that that is a horribly posed photo with a raw crumpet. But I thought there would be no harm in documenting the process that my sister Cescy went through, guided by good old Nigel S for the Guardian. The recipe and article, which you should probably just read rather than this post, is here.

There was just one crucial change that we decided to make and that was to strain out the lemon zest. We just don’t like those bitty bits. Abominably fussy, I know. But the zest goes in initially, of course, because it is vital for the flavour.

This seems to be the bit when the sugar was added...

Yep, so that's it really. My only criticism of Nigel's recipe was that it only made one quite large jar of lemon curd and I think it's more fun to make a hefty batch. In our house we also like to keep it in the freezer - the combination of cold, melting lemon curd and hot toast is a real winner. It's a kind of ice cream on pancake scenario. 

Vegetable crisps

Sweet crisps basically. They're pretty sickly but ridiculously more-ish. I very almost bought a mandolin for this activity because I could imagine bothering to peel the veg into wafer thin slices. But at the last minute I discovered that my mum’s ancient magimix has a blade designed for chopping vegetables very finely. She has never used it in all the years she’s had her blender. Check out the retro packaging:

Anyway, my advice is, if you have a blender, to have a look at the attachments it came with because it probably has something ideal for this recipe. I had great fun slicing all the veg up at top speed and arranging it proudly on a platter...

And then I deep fried the whole lot in batches which did actually take quite a long time. I’m sure this would be a lot easier with a deep fat fryer. I know people say you can bake them but I just couldn’t imagine the crisps curling up and cooking evenly that way. Mine were pretty greasy though it has to be said.

We doused them in salt and tucked in over gin and tonics and it was good. Here's the recipe...

Ingredients

2 parsnips

2 sweet potatoes

4 beetroots

2 carrots
Vegetable or sunflower oil
Salt

1)      Slice all the veg up as thin as you can manage.

2)      Deep fry in very hot oil in batches until they curl and crisp up.

3)      Remove with a slotted spoon and put them on to some kitchen roll to reduce greasiness.

4)      Sprinkle with salt and serve.

Orange and Lemon Squash

I am not sure it would have occurred to me to make squash if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was panicking about finding a way to use up a tonne of oranges and lemons. My sister brought back a sack of them from a party where she'd waitressed and, get this, the fruit was just the decoration – it wasn’t even intended to be eaten! An outrage to our puritanical sensibilities.

I’m not sure this recipe would be particularly cost effective if you had to actually buy the fruit, but the flavour of this squash is so sparkly and sunshiney and complex that it's definitely worth the money. The other issue is that it takes quite some time to zest the fruit, and a lot of time to juice it. Just this part of the procedure probably took a couple of hours, so this is an activity for a relaxed day. But in the winter there is nothing nicer than surrounding yourself with a citrusy haze. Although I admit this photo of the carnage doesn't make it look very relaxing:

Equipment: some glass bottles, funnel could be handy.

Ingredients

1kg sugar
1ltr water
Zest of 4 lemons
Zest of 4 oranges
Juice of 10 lemons
Juice of 10 oranges

1) Sterilise your bottles (you can see in the picture how many I used).
2) Put the sugar, water and all the zest into a pan and bring to the boil so that the sugar dissolves. Turn the heat down and simmer for about an hour. The liquid should become a thin syrup.
3) Add the all the juice and heat again until it is almost boiling.
4) Strain the lot through a sieve and bottle.

N.B. I am quite interested in the business of finding interesting, non-alcoholic drinks. I love the idea of the 6pm gin and tonic but I usually regret it whenever I have one - you know it means a bit fat full stop on your productive day. Sometimes that's exactly what you want but often it's nice to actually do things in the evening without feeling tired and groggy. Recently I've been drinking a lot of tonic water with Angostura Bitters but I think this squash will be an interesting addition. I also think a bottle of homemade squash is a really nice present for a teetotal mate, or anyone for that matter.

Turkish Delight

Making Turkish Delight is more chemistry experiment than cookery and for that reason amazingly fun to do. The difficulty is that having made it twice, once with gelatine and once using a traditional recipe, I have not yet succeeding in creating a sweet to rival the shop bought stuff. The problem is texture related. To my mind Turkish Delight should be firmly squidgy but my latest version was described as ‘horribly soft’ – although the cubes hold their shape robustly, the oral experience is a kind of jelly meets paste scenario. Strangely moreish though.

I have not given up a finding a good Turkish Delight recipe, but I thought I would document my experience up to this point nonetheless. Research indicates that what I might be missing is mastika, a resin found in trees and traditionally cultivated on the Greek island of Chios. Apparently this is what chewing gum used to be made of so it can be used to provide a chewy bite to sweets. Although you can buy it in capsule form from health food shops in the UK it seems pretty impossible to get hold of the raw resin. So I’m planning a trip up to Green Lanes in North London to see if the Greek shops there might be able to help. I’ll update as soon as I can for all those that aren’t tempted by horribly soft Turkish Delight. Here’s a traditional recipe anyway.

Necessary equipment: electric whisk, sugar thermometer

Ingredients

800g sugar
120g corn flour
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp rose water
1 tsp cream of tartar
Few drops red or pink food colouring

For dusting
150g icing sugar
30g corn flour

1) Oil an 8’x8’ (roughly) tin, line it with baking parchment and then oil the parchment too.
2) Put 375ml water, the lemon juice and the sugar in a pan and bring to the boil whilst stirring.
3) Heat to 115C stirring all the time. Turn off heat and set aside.

4) Put 500ml water, the cream of tartar and the corn flour in another pan and bring to the boil whilst whisking all the time with the electric whisk. When it has formed a thick, gluey paste, stop.
5) Bit by bit add the sugar syrup to the corn flour paste and whisk in each addition until it is incorporated. You might want to scrape down the sides a couple of times during this process.

6) Bring the mixture to a gentle boil whilst stirring and then cook it for an hour over a low heat stirring every five minutes or so to prevent it from sticking.
7) Take off the heat and stir in the rose water and colouring.
8) Pour the mixture into the tin and leave to cool and set for a few hours.

9) Once cool remove it onto a work surface dusted with icing sugar and cut into cubes.
10) Store in Tupperware filled with icing sugar and cornflour.

After a couple of days my Turkish Delight started to lose liquid and seemed to be slowly disintegrating into a weeping, sugary morass. I rolled it again in fresh icing sugar to keep the cubes separate. I don’t quite know what the answer to this problem is, or to the question of the bizarre pasty texture, but I will keep investigating and will update soon.

Blackberry Wine

In autumn I normally make sloe gin but there’s no denying it is an expensive endeavour. This year I have been a bit skint so I thought I might try my hand at fermentation. And this time create some free alcohol! And who can resist a forage in the country in the autumn sunshine?

The recipe requires a few specialist ingredients and equipment for wine making. I went to the Home Brew Shop which sells everything you need at very reasonable prices. I bought the majority of the stuff listed below for under £20 (a lot cheaper than buying six bottles of gin for sloes).

Equipment

10 litre fermenting bucket

Two 5 litre demijohns – I just used the cheap plastic ones.

Length of rubber tube (any hardware store sells this)

Muslin (I never used to know where to get muslin from until I discovered you can buy them in the baby aisle of the supermarket)

Funnel

Ingredients

2 kg blackberries

1 tsp pectic enzyme

1.4kg wine sugar

1 tsp yeast nutrient

Wine yeast

1)      Put the blackberries in the fermenting bucket and pour over 4 litres of boiling water. Give it a mash and then put the lid on.

2)      Once cooled, add the pectic enzyme to help it clear and cover again.

3)      One day later add the sugar, the yeast nutrient and the wine yeast, according to the packet instructions.

4)      Cover again and leave for five days, stirring every day.

5)      On the fifth day strain the liquid through a muslin lined funnel into the demijohns.

6)      After about six weeks ‘rack off’ into fresh demijohns. The aim of racking off is to purify the wine by leaving behind the sediment that will have sunk to the bottom. All you do is put your rubber tube into the wine, avoiding touching the very bottom, and give the other end of the tube a brief but firm suck. The second the wine starts to flow, jam it into your fresh demijohn (this can be a pretty tense process). Once the flow is established it will keep going until all the liquid has been sucked up. (Boring NB: with only two demijohns you may have to rack off into the fermenting bucket and then back into the freshly cleaned demijohns.)

7)      Leave for another six weeks or so and then transfer to sterilised bottles. (I saved up a few screwtop wine bottles during this time to have them ready).

Issues:

During the five days that I was stirring my wine I started to notice a pretty horrible sulphurous smell emanating from the blackberry mixture. I was worried the wine had spoiled but I was reassured by a bit of online research into this problem and strained the wine into the demijohns nonetheless. Six weeks later, when racking off, the smell had completely vanished and there’s no hint of it at all when you drink it.

Sterilisation: Incredibly boring but it has to be done. Don’t attempt to sterilise plastic demijohns with boiling water – I succeeded in melting one of mine into a bizarre shape. The easiest way to sterilise glass is to put it into a hot oven for 20 minutes.

Soda Bread

This is incredibly simple, and a genuine option if you realise at the last minute that you have no bread and can’t be arsed to go out and get some. Soda bread does not rise in the conventional way with yeast, but an interaction takes place between the bicarb and the buttermilk which gives it a rise in the oven. For ultimate impressiveness, this is best made in conjunction with whipping up some homemade butter because a waste product of butter production is buttermilk, which can be used to make soda bread. The butter that I made using 1.2 litres of cream produced exactly 400ml of buttermilk. How very satisfying is that?! Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall saw me through this one. Recipe here.

500g plain flour

2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp salt

400ml buttermilk (or live yoghurt)

1)      Pre-heat the oven to 200C.

2)      Sift all the dry ingredients into a bowl.

3)      Make a well and add the buttermilk.

4)      Stir it all up. It may be quite wet but don’t worry if it is. If it’s dry add a tiny bit of milk.

5)      Flop it out on to a floury surface.

6)      Kneed for a minute, no need for longer.

7)      Mould into a round shape.

8)      Cut a deep cross into the surface.

9)      Bake for 45 minutes.

Butter

Making butter has been on my to do list for some time now, ever since I saw Darina Allen’s piece in the Guardian about how easy it is to do. I knew that to make butter all you have to do is get some cream, whip it and then keep on whipping. And that really is all there is to it. Here is the process for making unsalted butter that worked for me*. I used smaller quantities than Darina which are a bit easier to handle- unsalted butter doesn't last longer in the fridge than a few days so you also need to think about how much of the stuff you're actually going to be able to consume. It's vital to keep all your equipment as cold and sterilised as possible.

*When I say it worked for me, I really should be crediting my sister Cescy, who took the lead on the butter production, and whose freezing skinny fingers you can see in the photos. Here she is doing some whisking in her coat:

1)      Put a large mixing bowl, your whisk attachments and a sieve into the fridge a couple of hours before you begin.

2)      Leave 1.2 litres of cream out of the fridge for a couple of hours as well.

3)      Pour the cream into the cold bowl and start whipping. After it has past the stage of looking like stiffly whipped cream, it starts to become more yellow and begins to look like pale scrambled egg. A faint sloshing sound starts to be heard as the buttermilk is released, becoming more audible until the whisk is clogged with thick globules of butter.

4)      When you feel you can whisk no more, pour the whole lot through the sieve with a bowl underneath to collect the buttermilk (this has its uses, particularly in making soda bread).

5)      Put the butter back into the bowl and whisk for a minute more to release even more buttermilk. Drain again.

6)      Fill the bowl with very cold water and squeeze the butter to release as much buttermilk as possible. Drain and repeat until the water in the bowl remains clear.

7)      With cold hands and as quickly as possible, form the butter into pats.

To make salted butter you need to seek out some dairy salt which is just a very pure type of salt. I have done some cursory googling but I’m afraid it doesn’t seem very easy to come by so I’m inclined to advise keeping homemade butter unsalted. But there are all kinds of flavours you can add to your butter – herbs, garlic, brandy – if you can bear to sully its pale beauty. 

Scotch Eggs

This is such an easy one and a recipe that reaps an ordinate amount of glory. Scotch eggs are such showstoppers at a picnic but they are truly divine hot and straight from the oven. You can buy sausage meat and season it with herbs, but I think that stuff is often pretty low grade, so I tend to buy some nice sausages and squidge them out of the skins.

Pack of 8 sausages
6 eggs
2 slices of bread

1) Boil the eggs for 4 minutes (put them into boiling water, not cold).
2) Blitz the bread in a blender till crumby.
3) Once cooked, plunge the eggs into cold water and peel them.
4) Pack the sausage meat evenly round them.
5) Roll the sausage covered eggs around in the breadcrumbs
6) Bake for 20 minutes at 180C.

Sometimes the sausage meat splits a little bit along the join but it doesn’t really matter, they just look even more rustic. If you want perfect scotch eggs, it helps to place them on the baking tray with the seam of sausage meat on the bottom, so that the top doesn’t split open.