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?!