Author: Gary @ BigSpud

A bit of a geek who loves food.

Categories
butter beans chorizo food tomato

chorizo and butter bean stew

Popped round a friend’s for dinner. It was supposed to be out for tapas – but it turns out that restaurant was closed. On a Saturday! Don’t worry they said, we have just the recipe. And this is it!

Originally this comes from a Waitrose magazine, but as recipes do they get twisted and transformed along the way until they are just the way you like it. Meaty chorizo gives it bags of flavour, tomatoes are sweet/sour and butter beans are soft and comforting.

It also keeps great in the fridge or freezer, scales up well for a crowd – it’s a keeper! For posterity, I asked for a copy and stashing it here on the blog so I have a copy always on hand. Thanks for the recipe!

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chorizo and butter bean stew

This tasty stew suits any time of year, but especially the tail end of summer when you're clinging on the last of the warmth.
Course Main Course
Cuisine Spanish
Keyword tapas
Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 30 minutes
Servings 4
Calories 369kcal

Ingredients

  • 250 g chorizo sliced
  • 1 onion finely chopped
  • 2 sticks celery finely chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic crushed
  • 1 courgette sliced
  • 150 ml dry white wine
  • 400 g tinned tomatoes
  • 1 tin butter beans drained

Instructions

  • Fry the chorizo in a large, non-stick frying pan until it releases its oil. Add the onion, celery and courgette and cook until softened. Add the garlic and fry for 30 seconds to spread the garlicky flavour around.
  • Turn up the heat and add the wine. Bubble away until there's a thick syrup at the bottom. Add tomatoes to the pan and reduce the heat, simmering for 15 minutes. Stir occasionally to break up the tomatoes, until the sauce has thickened.
  • Stir in the butter beans and simmer for a further 5 minutes. Check seasoning, then garnish with chopped flat leaf parsley and serve with a tomato salad, and crusty bread to mop up the juices.

Notes

Very easy to swap out the beans for any beans or pulses you have that need using up. Puy lentils or chickpeas would be great. This also serves well alongside many things like a jacket potato, rice or tortillas. Serve in smaller amounts with other dishes for a great tapas.
Categories
egg

heston blumenthal’s sous vide scrambled eggs

Recently I ranked all of Heston Blumenthal’s books, and in that I named Heston Blumenthal at Home my favourite Heston book. To celebrate let’s show you a recipe that really typifies his approach: Heston Blumenthal’s sous vide scrambled eggs.

The humble scrambled egg, that anyone can do, often one of the first things people learn to cook. Some people add milk, some people microwave, though if you just go to it in a pan over a low heat you get delicious fluffy eggs packed with flavour.

Heston favours the sous vide method. By vacuum packing the eggs into a bag and leaving in a 75°C water bath. With the occasional massage of the bag the eggs cook slowly but come up to temperature perfectly and they come out magical.

As usual the genius Blumenthal touch isn’t the method – though that is great – but the addition of brown butter at the end is what makes it. The clarified butter taken to the nutty stage adds a layer of flavour that is great with the eggs, simultaneously sweet yet savoury.

This kind of recipe is very representative of Heston – scrambled eggs is dish everyone knows but the addition of a little science and careful thought it is elevated above the norm. Give it a try!

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heston blumenthal's sous vide scrambled eggs

A simple recipe elevated with techniques
Course Brunch
Cuisine British
Keyword eggs
Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 15 minutes
Servings 1 person

Ingredients

  • 3 eggs
  • 10 ml butter melted
  • 10 ml double cream
  • 10 ml whole milk

For the brown butter

  • 10 g butter

Instructions

To make the brown butter:

  • Melt the butter in a pan over a medium heat. Once the sizzling subsides pay close attention to the pan. Look for it to turn dark brown and smell like hazelnuts. Immediately strain through a coffee filter paper or muslin into a bowl or cup and reserve for later.

For the eggs:

  • Set the sous vide setup to 75°C.
  • Whisk the egg, melted butter, milk and cream together along with a pinch of salt until well combined. Vacuum seal the eggs in a bag.
  • Submerge the eggs in the water bath for 15 minutes. Every 4-5 minutes remove the bag and massage to mix (be careful of the temperature, use a towel or gloves).
  • Serve with your favourite toast (I like a bagel!) and optionally garnish with chives. Add a spritz of the melted butter and eat immediately.

Video

Categories
book review food

ranking the books of heston blumenthal

Which is Heston Blumenthal’s best book? Blumenthalophile that I am I own them all, so I thought I’d compile them all in one list. I’ve ranked them from least favourite to most favourite. He’s authored 7 distinct books spanning 20+ years (with a couple of compendiums, deluxe editions and best-ofs) with different themes and ideas.

Video version of this review here:

As a big fan of Heston Blumenthal I made a list of how I rank his books.

7. 📚 Heston’s Fantastical Feasts: the menus and themes are fun, but all of it is so out there you’re never likely to do it. It’s all very specific. My full review here.

Buy on Amazon

6. 📚 Family Food: written in 2002 and it is definitely a reined-in Heston. There’s lots of recipes and discussion but very little of it has the wizardry we associate with him, besides a few standouts like Herve This’s chocolate mousse.

Buy on Amazon

5. 📚 Is This a Cookbook?: it’s an adorable book (and nice to have one ‘normal’ size!) with beautiful David McKean illustrations, and lots of ruminations from Heston on how a recipe works. There’s also a whole chapter on cooking with cricket powder which is… different.

Buy on Amazon

4. 📚 The Fat Duck Cookbook: a proper labour of love, much like the restaurant. The first section is a history of the venue, the second detailed breakdowns of significant recipes, and the third a science of food. A very heavy read with small font and it weighs a ton! Read this to get inside his mind, but otherwise it’s a curio. My full review here.

Buy on Amazon

3. 📚 Historic Heston ever-fascinated with the history of recipes in the UK, this is a timeline of dishes that he has found with his methods to modernise them. You’re very unlikely to cook anything from it, but you understand a lot about how he cooks and how to adapt recipes. My full review is here.

Buy on Amazon

2. 📚 In Search of Perfection: from the TV series of the same name, this remains very enjoyable and readable where he recreates a classic dish from the ground up. The core concept was to keep the recipes achievable for the home cook so there’s lots to attempt if you’re up for a challenge. I also get the sensation he’s really enjoying himself.

Buy on Amazon

1. 📚 Heston Blumenthal at Home: strikes the balance right between recipes and food theory. Excellent photography, a real deep understanding of how a recipe works, and the feeling that these genuinely are things he enjoys cooking.

Buy on Amazon

Do you own one of these cookbooks? Which is Heston Blumenthal’s best book? Let me know in the comments!

Categories
food steak

how to cook a t bone steak

I’d never cooked a t bone steak before, and searching the web found a mass of conflicting information. I read and watched all I can find and I figure out the key of how cook a t bone steak: nobody talks about the thickness.

If you already know how to cook a steak, you can cook a t bone. The difference is the thickness of the steak. The surface can be done, but the interior will need more time – so transfer it to a hot oven. Additionally, the bone doesn’t conduct heat as well as the meat itself, which mean the steak stays cooler nearer the bone so be prepared for it being less well done in the middle compared to the edge.

I say this all the time with meat cookery and especially steak that you need to use a probe thermometer. Test it when near done and get the temperature where you like it using my handy guide.

Where does the T Bone come from?

The T-bone steak is a classic cut that shares similarities with the porterhouse steak. It consists of both the top loin and sirloin, along with the tenderloin (fillet), connected together by the bone, which is intentionally left intact.

Its name is derived from the bone’s shape, often resembling the letter ‘T.’ The bone in a T-bone steak is actually the lumbar vertebra, which is halved to form part of the cow’s spine. The flesh surrounding this bone comprises the muscles from the spine, contributing to the dense marbling and providing ample fat coverage on the cut.

Although T-bone and porterhouse steaks come from the same region of the cow, they can sometimes be mistaken for one another. The key difference lies in the proportion of fillet present within the cut. To be classified as a porterhouse, the steak must have a larger portion of the fillet, measuring at least 3.1 centimetres in width.

Buy a probe thermometer for perfect steak

Want something to go with it? Here’s my recipe for beef dripping sauce

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t bone steak

How to cook the generous steak
Course Main Course
Cuisine American
Keyword beef
Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 5 minutes
Resting time 5 minutes
Total Time 15 minutes
Servings 2 people

Equipment

  • probe thermometer

Ingredients

  • 1 t bone steak
  • plain oil
  • butter
  • seasonsings as desired

Instructions

  • Make sure your steak is room temperature before you start, and get a heavy pan on very hot. If your steak is 1 inch thick or more get your oven on very hot too.
  • Salt your meat generously, add a little oil to the pan and cook on one side for a minute. After that flip it over and cook for another 30 seconds. Add some butter to the pan and start basting for 30 seconds.
  • Start testing the temperature of the meat and once it is within 5 degrees of your desired temp (55C for medium rare) remove it. If it is starting to colour more than you'd like and the temperature is not there, transfer to the oven for a few minutes and continue to test. Rest the meat for 5 minutes before serving.

Video

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