Category: honey

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fish ginger honey noodles

ginger coley with noodles

ginger pollock

I do love fish. Cod and haddock are two of my favourite things to eat. Growing up on the East coast of England we regularly had fish and chips, and the smooth, flaky texture of a piece of white fish takes me right back to my childhood.

But fish supplies are not what they used to be. Certain Atlantic cod is becoming rare, and as haddock and cod swim together they can become easily overfished. You probably recall Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fishfight campaign, which successfully fought to change the European discards policy. But this is only a small part of it – a drop in the ocean, if you will (sorry). Many fish stocks are depleted and we need to change our own buying habits if we want to enjoy these species in years to come.

For more information read the Marine Conservation Society or Sustain Web.

In a bid to get some traction, Sainsbury’s are launching a #SwitchTheFish campaign. They want us to think looking out for sea bass, coley, hake or loch trout in place of the “big five”. In fact on 12th June if you ask for salmon, tuna, haddock, cod or prawns they’ll offer you an alternative for free. That’s right, free. No excuse not to try them out!

As a starter they’ve asked me to come up with a recipe, so here’s my ginger coley with noodles.

Coley is a firm white fish, very reminiscent of cod and takes on flavours in a similar way. In this recipe the hum of ginger is tempered with a sweet-salty dressing.

You can substitute the vegetables for whichever stir-fry veg you like. On a weeknight I like to use those bags of stir-fry veg to speed things up.

Whatever you substitute, make it a meal to remember.

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ginger coley with noodles

Author Gary @ BigSpud

Ingredients

  • 250 g coley fillets
  • 1 inch ginger peeled and chopped
  • 1 garlic clove peeled and chopped
  • 1 tablespoon sesame oil
  • 1 tablespoon miso paste
  • 2 egg noodle nests
  • 200 ml vegetable or fish stock
  • 1 teaspoon powdered ginger
  • 2 tablespoons honey
  • 1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
  • 400 g mixed stir fry vegetables such as cabbage carrot, beansprouts

Instructions

  • Combine the miso, sesame oil, ginger and garlic and rub all over the fish. Leave to marinate for an hour.
  • Mix the stock, ginger, honey, and soy sauce for your dressing and put to one side.
  • Cook the egg noodles until al dente, drain and rinse in cold water, again leaving to one side until ready.
  • You'll need to cook the vegetables & sauce at the same time as cooking the fish so have two pans on the go.
  • In a small frying pan cook the fish over a medium heat. Don't shake the pan or move it about or the fish will break up. After three minutes or until the fish is white halfway up the side, turn over and cook for another two minutes or until done to your liking. Allow to rest for one minute.
  • Meanwhile, get your wok on high and add a splash of oil. Stir frty the veg briskly for three to four minutes until tender, and then add the sauce. Allow to bubble and reduce for a minute until starting to thicken and then toss in the noodles to reheat and coat.
  • Serve the noodles and veg with the coley on top. Garnish with dried crispy onions.
Categories
gammon ham honey

sous-vide gammon with honey

It’s been four years since I last discussed the modernist technique of sous-vide and despite promises I never tried any homebrew recipes. Now, armed with a Sous Vide Supreme and Vacuum Sealer I can have a more serious crack at it. But first, for the uninitiated, what is it? Let’s experiment with a sous-vide gammon recipe.

What is sous vide cooking?

Brought into restaurants in the Seventies by Georges Pralus, the trade took to it as a simple way to cook large batches of ingredients and hold them at the right temperature. A bit like how when slow cooking you can let it go over by half an hour and it makes little difference. It’s a water bath, cooking food held under vacuum in a plastic bag.

Popularised by Heston Blumenthal banging the drum for scrambled eggs and steak, and popping up in just about every cookery show nowadays, sous-vide is now starting to penetrate the home kitchen. Step forward the SousVide Supreme. John Lewis stocked this model in September 2010 and following a wave of Heston-branded publicity, it’s making it’s way on to Christmas lists everywhere. And at £300+ it definitely has the gift price tag.

Why the price? The machine itself is fairly unremarkable to look at, but it’s precision is the key. The temperature must be stable to keep the food safe. Heston has run tests on this model where this was accurate by about 1/10th of a degree over seven days. And if it’s good enough for HB, it’s good enough for me.

I was talking with an ex-chef mate of mine who was skeptical of the safety of the process. He was always taught to get food above 65°C. In traditional cooking methods this makes sense as it only takes 30 seconds at that temperature to kill off the Big Three (salmonella, E.Coli and listeria), whereas at 55°C it takes around 15 minutes. Douglas Baldwin, author of an excellent sous-vide book, has an excellent discussion on this at his website.

What is gammon?

Gammon is a type of cured ham that is popular in many parts of the world, but referring to it as ‘gammon’ is mostly used in the UK and Ireland. It is typically made from the hind leg of a pig and cured using salt, sugar, and other flavourings, and often smoked. A gammon is the bottom end of a whole side of bacon (which includes the back leg), ham is just the back leg cured on its own. Gammon is used as an ingredient in dishes like ham sandwiches, eggs Benedict, and gammon steaks. It is known for its salty and slightly sweet flavour, as well as its tender and succulent texture. Some people prefer to cook gammon with the bone in, while others prefer to remove the bone before cooking to make it easier to slice and serve. In the UK gammon is often served at Christmas or Easter. I like to cook one early in the week and make several dinners out of it.

Cooking sous-vide gammon

I’m used to simmering gammon, but it must be just around the 100°C mark (not that I’ve ever taken a temperature). This was 62°C for six hours and came out great. My aromatics of honey and bay were subtle, but the texture was very firm. Rather than flaky or stringy this was meaty.

Sous-vide really does lock in the natural flavour of many foods. Or to be more accurate, the food never reaches the temperature where the cell walls burst or proteins start to denature, at which point flavour literally leaks or is wrung out. As with my sous-vide gammon, it never hit the point at which it gets to the flaky texture. The gentle cooking, while slower, cooks the food to the most tender point. It’s slightly bonkers, but completely great. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s going to creep into my kitchen more and more.

Here’s a video version of the recipe:

Make sure you check out A Glug of Oil’s recipe for sous-vide gammon too!

Sous Vide Supreme gave me a machine to try. Here’s the Sous Vide Supreme machine that I’m using https://amzn.to/3llT97r

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sous-vide gammon with honey

An unusual way of preparing gammon; held in a water bath for several hours and cooked in a sweet-spiced liquor.
Course Main Course
Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 6 hours
Servings 6 people
Author Gary @ BigSpud

Ingredients

  • 1 kg smoked gammon joint
  • 1 tablespoon honey
  • 1 leaf bay
  • 1 teaspoon fennel seeds
  • 1 teaspoon black peppercorns

Instructions

  • Preheat your sous-vide oven to 62C.
  • Rinse your gammon joint in cold water to calm down the salty taste.
  • Vacuum seal your gammon joint in a food-grade bag along with the bay, fennel, peppercorns and honey.
  • Sous-vide for 6 hours. Slice and serve.

Video

Notes

Reserve the cooking liquor. Boil in a pan to reduce and drizzle over sliced gammon. For a glazed finish put the gammon in a very hot oven and baste several times over 20 minutes until sticky. 
Categories
cake cream eating out food honey

russian honey cake

“Russian tea room”. I’m not sure about you but that phrase conjures no images whatsoever in my mind. When Helen mentioned that she’d scored us a table at Knightsbridge’s Mari Vanna, I had no idea what to expect.

Skirting around Hyde Park I missed it a couple of times. The decor confused me: from the outside I thought it was a florist, and on the inside your Nan’s house. There is a frightening amount of knick-knacks, gewgaws and tat littering every surface. Photos adorn the walls (which we were informed are all staff member family snaps), preserves are rammed into a cupboard, the day’s pastries line the counters.

Bamboozled by choice, we kinda throw a dart into the menu and went for a couple of random platters: the “men’s tea”; and the more classic Russian high tea, whatever that might be. It was a great time to be in there: packed with Olympic tourists, the variety of dialects buzzing back and forth afforded us a great deal of people-watching. After spending a few minutes supping beer and Georgian tea, chatting about the fictional “Mari Vanna” with our host, and admiring the dozen or so doorbells out front, our food arrives.

The platter in front of me is various kinds of salamis, smoked cheese and black olives. The salamis were perfectly pleasant but nothing surprising, Helen found them too strong. The smoked cheese again was perfectly good but nothing to set the pulse racing. That said, I am sucker for almost anything served on a wooden board. The tuft of dill was welcome, and the fragrance was obvious in much of the food that came past our table.

The high tea however was much more interesting: your typical Savoy-style tower of silver dotted with pretty things. There were caviar-topped blinis, for which I was de-virginised of caviar, pirogis that put me in mind of soft and spiced meat samosas, slices of delicate white fish and beetroot alternating with cream cheese…

But the desserts are where it was at: the set milk pudding had Helen and I debating for quite a while how the texture was achieved (whipped egg white folded through milk and set in a bain marie, we guesstimated), although a rather average chocolate cake was ignored. However by a million miles the star of the show was a sweet and caramel-laced honey cake. Goodness how we cooed and ooed and aahed over it’s dozen layers of squidgy sponge and whisper-light cream. It is a staple of Russian houses come Christmas time, and it’s not hard to see why. It was nothing short of brilliant, and I resolved to have at it myself.

I managed to find a decent sounding recipe here, which I’ve bashed about a bit for my own purposes. And the resultant cake, while not the gossamer-fine thing of beauty from Mari Vanna, was still a homely and squidgy teatime treat. I’d aim to get that dough baked thinner next time, and try to really slice it as thin as I can for maximum moistness. I had a really pleasant time at Mari Vanna – particularly this cake – but watch those prices, as Jay Rayner observed.

Thanks to Helen for the invitation.

Russian honey cake (makes a cake about 20cm x 10cm):

For the dough:

3 large eggs

A big pinch of vanilla salt

220g caster sugar

70g butter

60g honey

2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

550g flour

For the cream:

700ml double cream

300ml creme fraiche

180g caster sugar

A generous tablespoon of honey

To finish:

A Crunchie bar (optional)

  1. Preheat the oven to 170°C. Line a large baking tray with greaseproof paper, then give that a little extra grease. Melt together the butter and honey until fluid and then turn off the heat.
  2. Whisk together the eggs, salt and sugar until pale and fluffy. Gradually whisk in the honey butter a trickle at a time, and then sift in the bicarb and flour. Stir until combined to a dough – this will be quite firm, more like a biscuit dough than a cake batter. Using wet hands press this mixture in to your baking tray, as thin as you can. Bake for around 8 – 10 mins, until the it is golden on top and a skewer inserted comes out clean. Peel off the paper and leave to cool.
  3. While it cools make the cream. Whip the cream and sugar until soft but still a touch runny, then incorporate the creme fraiche and keep beating until it just holds its shape. When it’s ready loosely ripple through the honey.
  4. When cool, slice the cake into long thirds. Then proceed to cut in half horizontally, by placing your hand on top and slicing across with your sharpest bread knife. You want a thickness of about 5mm. Save the offcuts for later.
  5. Alternately sandwich cake and cream to make a giddy tower. Be generous with the cream as it is going to get absorbed by the sponge. Smooth some more cream over the top and sides of the cake and leave to set in the fridge for about 12 hours.
  6. Before serving, whizz up the cake offcuts with a Crunchie bar in a food processor and sprinkle over the top. If you have some spare cream, serving that on the side wouldn’t go amiss :-).
Categories
cinnamon drink honey milk rum

boozy milk

A rare evening alone; everyone had disappeared to bed. So I did what every self-respecting man does: catch up on recorded TV, eat crisps and er, flick through the latest cookbook. I’d been sent a copy of Hungry?, the third recipe book from the cheeky chaps at Innocent. It’s a family-friendly cookbook, with loads of great reliable recipes made from decent ingredients. I’ll certainly be featuring a few in the coming weeks. The layout reminds me a bit of Leon’s which is no bad thing (it was my favourite cookbook of last year after all); a scrapbook of memories, stories and kooky odds and ends that give the book real character.

One particular recipe struck me in this witching hour of being exactly what I wanted right at that minute, and I don’t think there can be any greater validation for a recipe book. Essentially, naughty late-night milkshake.

To celebrate the release of their new book, Innocent are sending a van around London all this weekend, selling food from recipes straight from the book. Check out where it is on their Facebook page. If you’re in the area, why not check them out?

Boozy milk (serves 1):

250ml milk

2 capfuls rum

1 teaspoon honey

Cinnamon to taste

  1. Heat up the milk, rum and honey in a saucepan until warm. Whisk briskly, pour into a mug and dust with cinnamon.
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