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.
I love pork joints a lot, but I’m in danger of doing the same thing over and over again: bung it in the oven and roast. Nothing wrong with that, but surely there’s more out there?
Lucky for me The Ginger Pig Meat Book plopped through my letterbox, packed with great ideas grounded in everyday cookery. The Ginger Pig Butcher’s isn’t somewhere I was familiar with before this book, but after reading their story I was smitten. Almost the first third is taken over to their philosophy, their approach to rearing and the disasters and triumphs along the way.
It’s also got some my favourite things – those side-on diagrams of livestock, with all the cuts and joints labelled for butchery. I love these illustrations, giving me a wry smile at the fascinating variety from each animal. Have you heard of pig’s slipper, or jew’s fillet on a cow? I know I hadn’t.
I had a pork shoulder joint in the freezer needing a bit of love, so the recipe here for aromatic melting pork jumped out at me. It’s simplicity bowled me over, as did the use of milk rather than stock for the braising liquor. After hours of cooking it falls to pieces, with chunks of moist, succulent veg round and about. It’s an old-fashioned belter, I heartily recommend the dish – and the book!
Thanks to Octopus Books for the book.
Aromatic melting pork (serves 4):
1 pint milk
1kg boned and rolled pork shoulder
4 onions, peeled and quartered
4 carrots, peeled and halved
4 garlic cloves, peeled and squashed
3 celery sticks, halved
2 sprigs marjoram
2 sprigs thyme
2 strips lemon peel
Preheat the oven to 170°C. In a large casserole heat the milk until it’s just about to boil, then chuck everything in the pan. Make a cartouche out of greaseproof paper, then fit the casserole with a tight-fitting lid an pop in the oven.
After an hour turn the heat down to 150°C. Cook for another 1½ – 2 hours until the pork can be carved with a spoon. Allow to rest for 20 minutes before slicing up and serving with the veg, spooning over the juices.
Nothing teaches you more than sitting there in person watching a pro do what they do best. There’s far communicated more in the tiny details of their actions while they’re in the zone than they could ever write down and explain to you. I’m a hopeless golfer but the few pro tournaments I’ve been to have been fascinating, for observing how a professional sizes himself up, mentally rehearses and pivots their body. And I felt like this when I was up close with Jean-Christophe Novelli while he prepared a simple, rustic dish.
I was invited to Jean-Christophe’s cookery academy by the British Potato Council. He is fronting a campaign promoting the thousands of varieties of potato out there that go ignored. The Many Faces of Potatoes is a great site packed with recipes, nutrition, and most intriguingly the Master Spud competition. Devise a quick, easy and brilliant potato dish and you could be in a TV advert with J-CN himself. An unusual prize!
I was there with Ute, Uyen and Selina, who all seemed to possess amazing cameras. My cameraphone felt conspicuous. I’m fairly convinced I came across as a massive potato geek, but then if you call your blog “Roast Potato” you have to play the game I guess. First Jean-Christophe explained how potatoes important to his life growing up, and how they so easily formed the basis of almost every meal. He then went on to say how wonderful and delicious the ingredient could be when treated with a light hand. He pointed out that recipes for mashed potato containing 1kg of potato to 200g butter are bound to taste nice, but then where has the potato flavour gone! He took great pains to ask not to peel them, as precious nutrients are contained there. I have to admit I was surprised just how nutritious potatoes are. But that’s the point of the campaign -to raise the potato’s status beyond that of just a carb or starch in the meal.
We were then treated to a platter of different potato varieties to really show them off. There was steamed Anyas, bright-red Rudolphs, rustic Desiree and many more. My favourite was the Marabel made into a golden and fluffy mash. The taste was amazing, nutty and buttery yet prepared with only a touch of seasoning. Most shockingly of all this variety is exclusive to Asda!
Then Chef Novelli prepared this wonderful potato dish below. It’s sticky, warming, hearty and dead easy to prepare. I really recommend it for this time of year when it’s still chilly in the evening and lamb is dirt cheap. It celebrates all the ingredients in it and tastes absolutely beautiful.
After the cooking demonstration I pressed Jean-Christophe for his perfect roast potato recipe, which he gladly shared with me. It’s a little unconventional, so I will definitely be trying it out – and of course blogging it – very soon. Watch this space!
Make sure you give the Many Faces of Potatoes site a browse and find a few more varieties for your cupboard.
Thanks to Food Urchin for recommending me to go in his absence!
Heat a little oil in a large lidded casserole dish. Season the lamb all over and quickly sear. Put the lid back on the casserole while it sears to retain heat and contain moisture.
While the lamb sears finely slice the celeriac, onion and potato. Jean-Christophe used a mandoline, but in the spirit of Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals I used a food processor for speed and consistency. Add these to the pan along with the herbs and stir well to allow the flavours to mingle. Again, pop the lid back on.
Squash and peel the garlic and add that to the pan as well. After a minute or two, add enough chicken stock to the pan to barely cover everything. You want enough to be soaked up a little, not to dilute what’s already there. Lid back on and leave to simmer for 20 minutes.
The veg should be knife-tender by now. Use a fish slice to lift off a chunk of the stew, poke the whole cheddar block (don’t bother slicing or grating) in and let the stew drop back on top of it. Let the stew cook for another 5 minutes and check for seasoning. Serve a big scoop of it with some green veg on the side.
*A low fat cheddar is preferable as the oils should remain contained within the cheese and not split in the casserole.
I was asked to devise the ‘perfect onion gravy recipe’ and that’s a challenge I don’t take lightly.
So what should it be? For me rich and nourishing, with sweet and complex flavours. The onions are obviously key, but the stock makes a massive impact. Above all the gravy should positively drip umami. Lots of full, rounded savouriness.
I used a couple of resources to nail the perfect solution. I had to look at how the star of the dish, the onion, was treated. First, which onions? You can get good gravy out of red onions but not for the longish cooking time that I was after. No, it has to be the medium British brown onion. Perfectly round with appealing ivory skin, with a balanced sweet/sharp flavour, it has to be British onions, supporting British farmers. As for the cooking, I stumbled over this fascinating article at Serious Eats which really picked apart caramelizing onions. I gave it a try and I definitely had to incorporate elements of it in the final dish. It allows for delicious, sweet onions with perfect colouring.
I looked to my old pal Heston Blumenthal and his chicken gravy technique, involving roasting off a chicken carcass, separately frying off mushrooms and onions and combining in a pressure cooker with white wine. Personally I wanted a beefier, herbier background so that gave me ideas to use beef bones in the stock. This provides the structure of the dish. Chat up your butcher for some beef bones – if you can’t I find may supermarkets with an instore butcher will sell them for a nominal fee, 20p or so. You don’t need to make the stock yourself necessarily (it’s a bit of a time-hog) but if you have the time it’s amazing.
There’s also an alcoholic backnote I wanted to include: red wine is fairly typical, as is a stout, or my old chum marsala. But I recalled a great onion soup recipe from Giorgio Locatelli where cider was included And it’s perfect because it’s tangy and boozy with fruity hints. It’s the final element that crowns the gravy.
It’s rich, it’s sweet, it’s irresistible. I served mine with a steak and it sure didn’t last long.
Perfect onion gravy (makes about 1 ½ pints):
For the stock:
4 or 5 beef bones
Tablespoon of tomato puree
4 or 5 chestnut mushrooms
1 stick of celery, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
3 onions, halved
Sprig each of thyme and rosemary
Preheat the oven to 170°C. Put the veg in a heavy baking tray and lay the bones on top. Smear the bones all over with tomato puree, then tuck the herbs round and about. Roast the lot in the oven for 30 minutes to give a rich intensity to the stock.
Transfer the lot to a deep pot and cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 1 ½ to 2 hours with a loose fitting lid. Remove the lid and boil hard for half an hour to reduce it down. Transfer to a large bowl or jug and chill until needed.
For the gravy:
1 teaspoon sugar
3 British onions, halved and sliced into half-moons (I recommend using a food processor with medium slicing attachment for uniformity)
1 tablespoon butter
1 star anise
¼ teaspoon baking powder (rarely for me, I advise you to be careful with this measurement as if you overdo this it will be bitter and chemical-tasting)
1 sprig rosemary, finely chopped
300ml Aspall’s organic cider
1 teaspoon English mustard
1 tablespoon flour
Beef stock as above (or 1 ½ pints of your favourite organic beef stock)
In a wide frying pan heat the sugar over a gentle heat until it turns to liquid, and quickly before it burns add the onions, baking powder and butter. Turn the heat up to medium and stir well to coat the onions in sugar and butter. After a minute add the star anise and rosemary. Cook for a further 8 minutes or so until the onions start to turn a lovely shade of brown. Keep stirring to ensure they don’t burn.
Start to deglaze the sticky stuff from the pan with the cider a splash at a time. Don’t add too much as it will reduce the heat in the pan each time. Once the liquid goes add the next splash until it’s all gone. The onions will now be glazed with a gorgeous appley shine.
Add the mustard and flour and stir well to incorporate for a minute. Once all the white bits of flour have gone add the stock and bring to a simmer. Cook for at least another 5 minutes and then reduce until it is the desired consistency, then check the seasoning. Salt and pepper here are crucial, and perhaps a splash of red wine vinegar to balance the tartness. Remove the star anise before serving.
