Tofu

I have recently been in the grip of a tofu making obsession. Until a few weeks ago I had never actually cooked tofu myself. I had always loved the silky little slips of it you get in miso soup but that was just about as far as my knowledge went. In fact, when I wanted to cook an Ottolenghi ‘Black Pepper Tofu’ recipe from Plenty I chose to do it with chicken. And FYI, that recipe, if you ever do it, firstly takes HOURS of prep and secondly is one of the most frighteningly spicy things I have ever created. The recipe calls for 8 chillies, but that’s nothing compared to adding 5 tablespoons of crushed black pepper. I was scraping my bleeding tongue in agony.

Anyway, I was keen to redo the Ottolenghi recipe with less pepper and this time with tofu and the result was truly delicious. The soft, blandness of the tofu set off the piquant, sparkly Asian flavours of the sauce perfectly. So this started me along a dangerously long road of research about tofu production. Home-made tofu is virtually unheard of in the UK. There seems to be a very small number of people in the US who make it themselves, and although their advice online is useful for research, it’s not particularly helpful in terms of getting hold of the stuff you need. The line up for equipment looks something like this:

A huge pot (or two big ones)

A cooking thermometer

A fine sieve

Muslin

Blender

A tofu press

Soy beans

Nigari (magnesium chloride)

And here’s a great video explaining what to do, made by a strangely compelling lady. I could watch her for hours (and I did). 

All a bit faffy. But most of the work seems to be associated with extracting the milk from the beans so I thought, in me old brain, that I would just buy some soya milk and start from there. One other hitch though was that despite two hours of googling I could not find a single retailer, online or in London, that sells nigari (the coagulant) at a reasonable price. This place seems alright (£3.58 for a kilo): http://www.naturallygoodfood.co.uk but their postage is £5.60. Maybe I’m tight but I didn’t really want to spend that much on a little bag of salt. I read online that an acceptable alternative to nigari is Epsom salt which can be bought at most chemists. So I went along to the pharmacy and duly got some. My equipment list now looked like this:

One saucepan

One tea-towel

1 litre cartoon of Alpro Soya Milk

Pot of Epsom Salts

Tupperware with holes stabbed through the bottom in place of a tofu press

I put the litre of milk in a pan and heated it for 5 minutes until it was steaming but not boiling. I mixed 2 teaspoons of Epsom salts into a little glass of water and added that. It started to coagulate immediately which was quite exciting but then nothing more happened. 

I added another glass of Epsom salt water and nothing. I heated it up a bit, I stirred it, I left it, but I could not get bigger curds to form. I then added yet another cup of Epsom mixture but I couldn’t get it to separate further and by that time I had probably added dangerous levels of salt to the mixture. Undeterred I poured it into my tea-towel-lined hole-riddled tupperware and let the liquid drain.

I should just mention that is process was utterly un-cost-effective since the milk cost £2. It was still incredibly faffy and without the satisfaction of engaging in a process likely to produce results.

And the verdict: absolutely inedible. The bf, who bravely tasted it, was shuddering with the memory of the flavour for some time. I’m afraid I am having to document an out-and-out failure. It seems to take about 5 hours to make tofu from soy beans and my conclusion, I am sorry to say, is that it’simply not worth it.

Potted Crab

The bf and I stumbled across East Street Market just off the Walworth Road yesterday. It’s great – a cross between the set of Eastenders and a Jamaican food market, and unbelievably cheap. After we had finished hyperventilating with excitement about buying six avocados for a pound we recklessly decided to buy some crabs – three of the little blighters for a fiver, still foaming at the mouth and clicking dismally. Once home we were relieved to discover that two of them had expired in my backpack. But one was still very much alive.

We googled methods of killing crabs humanely and found suggestions that included disembowelment, screwdriver through the brains, a stint in the freezer and a gentle stroke to the top of the head. We were feeling a bit pathetic by this point so we went for the freezer/caressing method and when it still seemed to be wide awake and looking at us with its wandering, googly eyes we decided to be brave and just plunge it into a vat of boiling water.

They weighed 500g each and so we boiled them for 12 minutes and then put them in cold water to stop them cooking further. To extract the meat we followed this method:

Twist off the claws

Grab all the legs on each side and twist them off too

Turn the crab upside down and push the bum of the crab so that it levers off without too much difficulty

Remove the body of the crab

Scrape the remaining innards out of the main shell, avoiding the browny green stuff. The bright orange eggs of the female are fine to eat.

Then cut the body in two and pick out all the little bits of meat.

Crack the claws and legs with the butt of a knife and pull out the meat.

I’m going to be completely honest and say it was a lengthy, fiddly process and three crabs only ended up producing about 330g of meat. But that’s enough for a bit of potting.

This is the recipe we went with, based on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s suggestions. 

330g crab

1 lemon

220g butter

1 bay leaf

½ tsp mace

½ tsp paprika

1 ½ tbsp chopped dill

1)      Put the meat in a bowl and add the juice of a lemon and some salt and pepper

2)      Melt the butter with the bay leaf and clarify by skimming off the white scum and then running it through a tea-towel-lined sieve.

3)      Sprinkle the spices into the melted butter and pour 80% of it onto the crab.

4)      Add the dill and stir it up.

5)      Pot into sterilised pots and top with the melted butter. Refrigerate.

This made 2 full ramekins and half a jar- enough for a starter for about 6 people.

Piccalilli

Not a particularly innovative experiment by me, because I followed, pretty much to the letter, the Jamie Oliver recipe from Jamie’s Great Britain, which can be found here.

It worked just like he said it would, although I would stress that splitting the vegetables down to a manageable size is vital- you’ve really got to imagine what size of broccoli stem you could tolerate in your sandwich. This is apparently ridiculously good in a ham and cheese sarnie. Although piccalilli is a great example of traditional east-meets-west preserving, I think it’s probably best that we don’t toast British imperial rule whilst we eat it. Was I alone in wincing at the TV screen when Jamie Oliver forced his camera crew to hold their drinks aloft and cry ‘to the Empire!’?

Mango Chutney

So after much research I went with Delia for my mango chutney recipe. Here it is:

I like the fact that this recipe doesn’t call for any fresh chilli. I wanted to make a sweet and sticky chutney like good old Sharwood’s. Spicy chutneys stress me out, especially if you’re eating them with a spicy curry. For me, Indian condiments are more tempting when sweet or cool or sour, just not too hot. Delia’s view is that mango chutney should be full of large, visible chunks of mango but I’m the kind of person that doesn’t like bits in her orange juice so I decided to cut my mango up nice and small.

I’m not sure if the size of my mango chunks had some bearing on the colour of my chutney, but it came out utterly brown, not like Sharwood’s at all, and not like the picture on Delia’s website.

I’ve got no idea how they make their chutney orange – as soon as I added the malt vinegar and the brown sugar, it was obvious my chutney would be dark brown. Lighting perhaps. The flash on my camera made it look slightly more appealing:

But wowzers does it taste good! You’re supposed to leave it to mellow for two months after jarring up. We cracked into ours after about 3 weeks and it was already through-the-roof delicious.

A brief footnote: Ottolenghi writes in Plenty "Everybody knows now that the undisputed king of mangoes is the Indian Alphonso. It is intensely sweet and has an unbeatable perfumed aroma. I’d go as far as saying that you haven’t tasted a real mango until you’ve tried an Alphonso…" Veeeery interesting. I wonder if a mango chutney made from Alphonso mangoes would be even better, or perhaps the perfume of the fruit would be lost during three hours of cooking. I can’t seem to find a definitive answer to this online so I think an experimental Alphonso chutney might have to be made in April when the season comes round.

Sweet Chilli Sauce

So I like totally innovated on this one. But I was kind of forced to by the fact that the thick, sticky consistency that I was hoping for never quite materialised despite a lot of manic boiling and bubbling. As a result, the biggest addition I made to the recipe was quite a large quantity of cornflour. But the sauce came out fine – not cloudy at all.
10 long red chillies
6 garlic cloves
250ml rice vinegar
300ml water
300g sugar
6 tbsp fish sauce
4 tsps cornflour

1) Blitz the chillies and garlic cloves.
2) Add the vinegar, water, sugar and fish sauce.
3) Bring to the boil and then reduce to a simmer.

If the sauce is not thickening after about 10 minutes, mix the cornflour with a bit of water and add tentatively until it has reached the right consistency.

This sauce is eye-wateringly potent, especially during the simmering stage, but it doesn’t turn out especially spicy. I’ve been fantasising about slathering it on to a pork mince burger. MMM. I want to go to there (little quote for the Tina Fey fans among you).

Grainy Mustard

I am not a huge lover of mustard, except in salad dressings and in any scenario when it comes into contact with honey (on little sausages, on gammon, on chicken breasts… etc.) but my sister Emily loves it so much that the only souvenir she brought back from a recent holiday to Sweden was a tube of a certain kind of mustard that she had fallen in love with.

So for Christmas I decided to make her a few jars. I went with Jamie Oliver’s Beer and Honey Wholegrain Mustard and the recipe looks like this:

Jarful of black mustard seeds

Jarful yellow mustard seeds

Jar and a half of ale

1 tsp dried tarragon

1tsp dried dill

Honey

Salt

Red wine vinegar

Put the mustard seeds ale and herbs into a bowl and leave to soak overnight. The next day blend it all with the remaining ingredients until it looks like mustard.

Jamie suggests draining off some of the ale before blitzing but all of my ale had been absorbed. In fact the mustard seeds seemed thirsty for more- some of the black ones were still a little crunchy. As a result it was not immediately delicious. But after a few weeks in the jar, during which the black seeds could swell a little more, the flavour is much, much better. One other point to mention is that buying those little pots of mustard seeds from the supermarket is a pretty expensive way of making mustard, and plus they often don’t sell black seeds. If you live in an area with lots of ethnic cornershops you can often buy big packets for pennies. I went to Tooting. I bloody love Tooting.

Preserved Lemons

This is dead easy but it looks so impressive and is such a fun foodie present I think. The trickiest part is finding a nice kilner jar to put the lemons in that is not a massive rip-off. The best option I found was actually this jar from the Sainsbury’s website – a 2ltr glass clip-top jar for £4 and you can go and pick it up from the shop which saves on postage (the big problem when ordering such a heavy thing online).

So to fit a 2ltr jar I used:

16 unwaxed lemons

250g salt

A mug of water

A few bay leaves

A few peppercorns

Two star anise

1)      Chop the lemons in half and deeply score a cross into each half with a knife.

2)      Pack the lemons with the salt

3)      Put into the jar with all the rest of the ingredients and any remaining salt

4)      Shake it up

They’re great in middle eastern dishes and tagines but apparently you can use them for a lot of things that require fresh lemons- like putting lemons inside your chicken before you roast it. So that’s quite handy. I’d be quite interested to try slices of preserved lemons in a gin and tonic but perhaps that would be unbearably salty and repellent. It sounds kind of amazing though. Am I right?!