Category: paprika

Categories
cumin food garlic paprika potatoes turmeric

hei hei salt GBK style on sticky wedges

Here’s a recipe for hei hei salt GBK style.

I found myself in GBK at the weekend. It was supposed to be family lunch at Las Iguanas, but a few seconds of appalling customer service had me trundle a few steps down Lakeside’s Boardwalk to the burger parlour.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed it – a tasty “Capital” cheeseburger with standard accompaniments, a choice of brioche or regular sesame seed bun and all the monkey nuts you can eat. But the shoestring fries were great, particularly when you shake over their hei hei salt. Pretty much all American diner-style eateries in the UK coat the fries in a salty concoction, and I’d been meaning to make one of my own for ages. Serving up wedges this week meant this was a great excuse.

Hei hei salt, also known as black salt, is a type of Hawaiian sea salt that is mixed with activated charcoal, giving it a distinct black color. The salt gets its name “hei hei” from the Hawaiian phrase “heihei kai,” which translates to “sea chicken” or “flying fish,” as the salt is said to resemble the color of these sea creatures.

The salt is made by mixing sea salt harvested from the pristine waters surrounding the Hawaiian islands with activated charcoal, which is derived from coconut shells. The charcoal not only gives the salt its distinctive color, but also adds a slightly smoky flavor to the salt.

Hei hei salt is used in a variety of dishes in Hawaiian cuisine, including seafood, meats, and vegetables. It is also popular as a finishing salt, sprinkled on top of dishes just before serving to add a visual and flavour contrast.

GBK’s Hei hei salt appears to be a guarded recipe but appears to be a variation of chicken salt. This is my version based on what I could taste.

If you’re looking for an interesting salty-spicy mix to dust your chips or wedges, this is a great place to start. You can then of course add or remove other spices to your taste – a curry powder or garlic powder would be nice.

There’s two levels of seasoning here; in my experience of roasting potatoes the salt flavour simply disappears (where does it go?). So the initial salt is merely grist to combine the ingredients, whilst the second salting is the true seasoning of the wedges.

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Hei hei wedges

Seasoned potatoes like the ones they serve at GBK.
Course Side Dish
Cuisine Hawaiian
Keyword potatoes, wedges
Servings 2
Author Gary @ BigSpud

Ingredients

  • 4 - 5 medium potatoes Maris Piper or other fluffy variety

For the marinade:

  • 2 cloves garlic
  • ¼ teaspoon turmeric
  • 1 teaspoon cumin
  • 1 ham stock cube chicken would be fine
  • Large pinch salt
  • olive oil

For the seasoning:

  • ½ teaspoon smoked paprika
  • ½ teaspoon cumin
  • ¼ teaspoon turmeric
  • 1 teaspoon salt

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 200°C. Slice the potatoes into wedge shapes.
  • In a pestle and mortar, combine all the marinade spices and pound withe garlic until you have an orangey-brown paste. Add oil until you have a gloopy mixture and coat the wedges liberally. Arrange cut sides down on a baking tray and roast for 40 minutes, turning every ten minutes, until crisp and cooked through.
  • Combine the seasoning ingredients and shake over the fries as you serve. You'll probably have excess seasoning for another day.

Notes

This recipe would work really well in an air fryer or actifry too.
Categories
chorizo food paprika pork potatoes

roast suckling pig with chorizo roasted potatoes

When I told Mrs. Spud to expect a delivery of suckling pig, she wasn’t best pleased.

“What, with the head and everything?”

I wasn’t sure what Grey’s Fine Foods were going to send me. But she needn’t be worried, as what turned up was a boned and rolled suckling pig joint. Perfect for the squeamish! I was a little relieved myself, not because I had to stare a pig in the face but whether it would fit in my oven. The meat they sent was a regular roasting joint size.

How best to treat this lovely bit of pork? A roast with Spanish flavours to bring out the sweetness and juiciness. The paprika here lends it a smoky aroma and fennel seeds are simply the best thing to have with any pork dish.

To make sure your pork – or any meat for that matter – is completely cooked without drying it out, you should use a meat thermometer. I’ve always advocated this. I was sent an ETI SuperFast Thermapen to try, one of the best in the business. You’ll see them being used on lots of cooking shows and I spotted them on Great British Bake Off recently.

It really is a deluxe model, with rotating screen (like your phone!) and instantly turns on when you extend the probe. At the time of writing it’s
£36 on Amazon.

But I wasn’t done yet. Here’s my classic roast potatoes recipe taken to the next level with chunks of crumbly chorizo. I’d usually add more oil or fats to the baking tray but the chorizo will leak out penty of lovely juices to carry on the cooking. Perfect! Best served with chicken gravy swirled through with a mild chilli sauce.

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roast suckling pig with chorizo roasted potatoes

Course Main Dish
Cuisine English
Author Gary @ BigSpud

Ingredients

  • 1.5 kg suckling pig joint boned and rolled
  • 1 tablespoon fennel seeds
  • 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
  • 1 teaspoon dried rosemary

For the roast potatoes:

  • 1 kg Maris Piper potatoes peeled and diced
  • 1 chorizo Sausage approx 150g broken into chunks
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 2 garlic cloves bashed
  • 1 red onion sliced

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 220C.
  • Using a pestle and mortar bash up the fennel, rosemary and paprika with a pinch of sea salt toa powder. Add a tablspoon of olive oil and smother all over the pork. Place into a baking tray and roast for 20 minutes at this temperature toget everything started, then turn the temperatrue down to 1670C.
  • Cook for another 40 - 50 mins until the centre of the pork is 65C.
  • For the potatoes,boil in salted water for 15 minutes. Drain really well and preheat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a heavy based baking tray. Roast for 20 minutes,then add the remaining ingredients. Cook for another 20 - 30 minutes until golden brown, tossing occasionally. Check for seasoning before serving.

Thanks to ETI for the Thermapen and Grey’s Fine Foods for the pork.

 

Categories
chicken creme fraiche food paprika

smoked chicken stroganoff

 

I’m no stranger to stroganoff, usually with beef. But here’s a recipe to ring the changes and try a different technique into the mix: smoked chicken stroganoff.

If you haven’t smoked meat before, you just need a wok with a lid. You add your smoking flavourings to a tin foil pouch, along with some rice to slow the burning process down, and set your meat perched above it. I use wooden skewers as a trivet to hold it over the smoking pouch.

Turn the heat up and leave for as long as you want it smoked. You can apply the same technique to cheese too.

One word of warning though: it can stink up the joint, so make sure you vent your area really well (or even better, do it outside over a gas stove or barbecue).

Check for doneness using a probe thermometer. You’re looking for something in the high sixties, about 68C. It’ll take on a neat bronze finish.

This was a great ingredient for the stroganoff: a powerful smoked chicken against creamy yet sharp sauce.

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smoked chicken stroganoff

Author Gary @ BigSpud

Ingredients

For the smoke:

  • 200 g rice
  • 1 cinnamon stick snapped
  • The contents of three teabags
  • 1 tablespoon coriander seeds
  • 1 tablespoon cumin seeds
  • 1 tablespoon heapedbrown sugar
  • 2 chicken breasts

For the stroganoff sauce:

  • 1 onion sliced
  • 200 g chestnut mushrooms finely sliced
  • 30 ml brandy
  • 300 ml creme fraiche
  • 2 gherkins finely diced
  • Paprika and chopped parsley to serve

Instructions

  • Combine the smoking ingredients in a tin foil pouch. Lay in the bottom of a wok, lay skewers on top and rest the chicken on top of that. Line the wok lid with foil and cover. Turn on a medium heat and leave for 15 - 25 minutes or until the chicken has reached 68C. Put to one side.
  • Get a frying pan over a medium heat and add a splash of oil. Add the mushrooms and onions, and stir fry for 3 - 5 minutes or until starting to colour. Add the brandy and deglaze the frying pan. Add the creme fraiche and gherkins, slice the chicken and add to the pan too. Stir to combine. Cook for another 3 - 4 minutes until thickened, and season to taste. Garnish with parsley and paprika. Serve with rice.

 

Categories
chicken food garlic lemon onion oregano paprika parsley potatoes

chimichurri chicken with patatas bravas

England may be out of the World Cup, but there’s still lots of excuses to throw a football party. For people who enjoy a cooking challenge, it presents opportunities to burrow through the regional cookbooks and get inspired. Will you serve the Nigerian jollof rice? German Bratwurst? Australian shrimp? Ghanaian fufu?

Here’s a pair of great Latin-flavoured dishes in celebration of Argentina and Spain. First up is a butterflied chicken breast bursting with vibrant lemon and garlic, partnered with a herby, sharp chimichurri sauce. And as a foil for for that, some fiery patatas bravas made with Britain’s best Jersey Royals.

These dishes scale up really well for a party, football-flavoured or otherwise: the chicken is a breast per person, and I make mine on a George Foreman grill so there’s always a couple on the go. You can make miles of the chimichurri sauce and leave it out for people to help themselves. And you can make a big vat of patatas bravas which is perfectly good at room temperature.

The brining stage for the chicken isn’t essential; but it does help keep the chicken marvellously moist and is another stage at which you can add layers of flavour.

Want more football-themed party food ideas? Check out Waitrose’s page here. My recipes are inspired by theirs:

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chimichurri chicken with patatas bravas

Author Gary @ BigSpud

Ingredients

For the brine:

  • Water mixed with 8% salt
  • 2 tablespoons golden syrup
  • 10 black peppercorns
  • 1 star anise
  • 4 skinless chicken breast fillets

For the chicken:

  • 4 cloves garlic roughly chopped
  • 2 teaspoons smoked paprika
  • Grated zest of 1 lemon
  • 1 red onion roughly chopped
  • 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

For the chimichurri Sauce:

  • Pinch chilli flakes
  • 25 g flat leaf parsley roughly chopped
  • 15 g oregano roughly chopped
  • 750 g Jersey Royal Potatoes halved
  • 1 onion thinly sliced
  • 190 g chorizo diced
  • 6 tomatoes roughly chopped

For the patatas bravas:

  • 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
  • Squeeze of lemon juice
  • 25 g flat-leaf parsley roughly chopped

Instructions

  • Combine the brine ingredients and leave the chicken brining for 6 hours. Drain and pat dry when ready.
  • For the chimichurri sauce, bash all the ingredients together in a pestle and mortar. Set aside, seasoning with a little salt and a good grinding of black pepper, adding a little olive oil to bring together.
  • Cook the potatoes in a large pan of boiling water for 15 minutes until tender. Meanwhile, in a large frying pan, heat the oil and cook the onion and chorizo together for 10 minutes. Drain the potatoes and add to the pan with the chorizo and cook for a further 10 minutes.
  • Place the chicken on clingfilm over a chopping board and slice through each fillet horizontally, making sure not to cut all the way through, then open out. Add another layer of clingfilm and bash lightly with a rolling pin to flatten further. Scatter over the garlic, paprika, lemon zest then rub in with a little olive oil and salt & pepper.
  • Grill, barbecue or fry your chicken until thoroughly cooked through. Back at your potatoes, add the tomatoes, chilli and paprika and cook for a further 5 minutes. Squeeze over lemon juice and scatter over parsley.

 

Waitrose compensated me for this post and gave me some party stuff to play with.

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