I’d heard excited whispers on Twitter about a new BBC programme from Simon Hopkinson called The Good Cook. His name was only distantly familiar to me; I wasn’t directly aware of him.
So I sat down to watch it with little expectation. I became an instant convert. Simple, honest food that is achievable, excellent and done with love.
Just about everything featured is worth cooking, in a programme refreshingly devoid of format, gimmick or travelogue. Only the tiniest scraps of production remain: incessant overuse of funky chart hits, just because the BBC can; and occasional 30 second jaunts to far-flung places showing stock footage of people making cheese.
These are minor quibbles against the brilliance of Simon’s own natural easy going charm and obvious skill. His effortless style makes everything look easy and worth trying. So I’ve started with this, a luscious and rich pasta bake with a few small changes down to what I had lurking around waiting to be used up. It’s absolutely tremendous and really easy. It even encourages the all-in-one roux method which works like a dream to produce a silky and slurpable sauce. Please run to your storecupboards and try it now. You must have some of those dried mushrooms in there somewhere, right?
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Pop the mushrooms and milk in a pan and bring to a simmer, then turn off the heat and leave to infuse for 10 minutes.
Meanwhile make the sauce. Melt the butter in a pan and stir in the flour. Keep it moving about for a minute to cook out the floury taste. Sieve off the milk then add it to the roux in one go whisking all the time. When smooth keep on a gentle heat for 10 minutes, whisking occasionally and allowing to thicken. Check for seasoning towards the end of the cooking time.
Get the pasta on to cook according to the packet instructions. When done, throw the pasta, mushrooms, bacon and a third of the parmesan into the sauce and toss really well to get everything coated. Turn out into a baking dish, add another third of parmesan and bake for 30 mins until bubbling. Top with the remaining parmesan to serve.
It’s an idea that’s bubbled around my head for ages so when I saw this recipe for porcini mushroom rump on Michelle’s site that was the kick I needed to follow it through. And it was everything I imagined. The concentration of dried porcini in beef provides an umami kick that’s hard to beat. Combined with nutty, stock-infused rice this is a real treat.
Porcini steak with mushroom camargue rice (serves 2):
Put the porcini and thyme in a food processor and chop it until it’s as fine as you can get it. Add the anchovy and some black pepper and blitz a little more. Rub all over the steaks with a splash of olive oil and leave to marinate for a couple of hours or as long as you’ve got.
Get the beef stock on to boil and add the rice. Simmer for 30 minutes until the rice is tender.
15 minutes before the rice is ready, sweat the sliced mushrooms and onion in a frying pan with a little oil. Toss occasionally until these are tender, then add the garlic.
To cook the steak, brush off any loose rub ingredients while you get a griddle pan reallllly hot. When it’s smokin’, lay the steak on and cook for a couple of minutes on each side. Make sure you rest the steaks well for beautiful texture.
While the steak rests drain the rice and toss together with the mushrooms and onions. Add a blast of lemon juice to lift it up.
Add a sprinkle of smoked sea salt and a dash of extra virgin olive oil to the steak and serve with the rice.
Being interested in all things food mean I read a whole bunch of other blogs. Today Google Reader says I subscribe to 81 food-related RSS feeds. They range from bylined journalist columns to people just starting to write up their first things that I like the look of. On any given day a rolodex of recipes rolls past me from all over the globe.
Someone I’ve recently latched on to is Going With My Gut. She’s been posting about a recent nose-to-tail pig butchery day and the latest post featured some crispy fried pork chops. Deep frying a really fatty piece of meat sounds insane. AND GREAT. So I did something similar, using lean pork and sliced thin like the Chinese takeaway classic deep-fried crispy beef.
It’s a little sickly so don’t serve too much of it. Very tasty though.
Deep fried crispy pork (serves 4):
2 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
½ teaspoon baking powder
1 egg, beaten
6 pork loin steaks, sliced into skinny pieces the size of your little finger
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
300ml chicken stock
1 litre vegetable oil
First make the batter. Mix the flour, paprika and baking powder together with a pinch of salt. Stir in the beaten egg and add enough water to slacken to the consistency of double cream. Pop in the fridge until ready to use.
Put a frying pan on a medium heat, and a pan with the vegetable oil on a very high heat. On a large chopping board sprinkle salt, pepper and marjoram. Roll the pork shreds in this mix so they are well coated. Add a splash of oil to the frying pan then fry the pork in batches. If you’ve cut them small enough you should only need to cook for a couple of minutes on each side until they are white all over.
While the veg oil is getting smoking hot, add about a teaspoon of flour to the frying pan and stir well. Deglaze with the stock and allow to bubble away while you deep-fry the pork.
Once the oil is smoking, dip the pork in the batter and straight into the pan. It will go golden brown in about 30 seconds, so fry in batches and drain on kitchen paper. Sprinkle with sea salt and serve with the reduced chicken stock sauce.
This competition is now closed. Many thanks for all your entries, there were some really fantastic ideas! The winners have been notified by email.
Image copyright HestonBySalter.com
Like most people who love being in the kitchen, I enjoy a good gadget. But better than that is a good gadget you use more than once. There’s the key. And this digital measuring jug by those clever folks at Salter is the business. Heston’s seal of approval has made this a very canny device. Yes, yes, it’s a measuring jug, but it’s more than that. It’s a measuring jug that can gauge liquids of different types (milk, oil, etc.), but it can manage weight too. And in a bunch of different units. One after the other. Let me explain.
I’ve made a bunch of things with it recently, such as white chocolate and blueberry muffins. The cool part is making it all in the one jug. Add your flour, zero it. Then add your sugar, zero it, change to liquids and off you go adding milk, zero, etc. etc. Similarly chocolate and rosemary ice cream was made by measuring stuff as I went along, adding and pouring out, then zeroing and adding something else to the jug. Less washing up and the mixture’s all there in one pot ready to go. Put simply – it’s a measuring jug and add-and-weigh digital scale in one gadget. Genius.
The good folks over at Salter have kindly passed on some of these measuring jugs for me to give away. Want one? Enter below.
In addition to the current range, there’s a brand new selection of Heston Precision products coming very soon. I had a chat with Caroline from Salter who gave me an idea of what it’s like working with Heston Blumenthal and what new products we can expect to see:
How did Salter get involved with Heston Blumenthal?
When we first started thinking about working with Heston and his team, we felt that it was important to understand the brand values for both Salter and Heston to ensure that the partnership had integrity behind it. While Salter has been around for over 250 years, and Heston is very much a forward thinking modern chef, the good news was that our values of Precision, Trust, Excellence, Innovation and “Britishness” bought the two brands together and ensured that our collaboration would make sense to our combined audience.
We approached him with a proposal, and he was very agreeable to collaborating from the start as he knew the Salter brand and was comfortable with our values and ethics. It took a while to decide the range, as we wanted to make sure that it most definitely wasn’t just a celebrity endorsement, rather that it was a range that reflected the methods and tools that Heston would use in his own kitchen.
Heston and Caroline
To what extent has Heston and his team been involved with development?
From day one we have had access to Heston and his amazing team at the Fat Duck. The whole process has been remarkably easy as they are a truly passionate bunch, and Heston is a genuinely nice chap. He is both interesting and interested – he makes time for us, and I always look forward to our development meetings as we are always looking ahead to see what other products we could develop that would help people cook like Heston, at home.
What’s involved in developing one of these products and to what extent does Heston have sign-off?
Product development is a fascinating process as it involves a lot more thought and time than perhaps many people realise. If we know that we have a new category to think about, we will look at it from both consumer and catering viewpoints. We will get together to brainstorm new ideas and talk each one through – taking into account the brand values, and especially how true the product is to Heston’s processes. Once we have a firm idea of a product that we would like to bring into the range, I work with our in-house design team to come up with concepts, showing how the product could look and function. These are then taken to Heston and the team for reviewing and refining. Once we are all happy with the product concept we can get going on the manufacturing process. With any product that Heston is putting his name to, it is important that us that he is delighted with the product and that he has full sign off. Whilst people usually ask for his signature as an autograph, I ask for his signature in order to bring another great product to market!
There’s a new range coming in 2012, what can we expect to see in the future?
All I can say at the moment is watch this space… we are working on a 3 year product plan which will result in many more truly exciting products that will help people achieve great results in the kitchen.
Keep an eye on the HestonBySalter website for more info. Until then though, it’s competition time!
How to enter
There’s five ways to enter, and you can do all of them if you like:
Leave a comment below answering the question what unusual ice cream flavour would you like to make?
