Tag: gordon ramsay

Categories
food pork

porchetta salad with parmesan cream and spinach

Inspired by a fantastic starter I had at Union Street Cafe, this dish is a great light meal. The porchetta itself makes a fantastic roast joint. The porchetta as a roast serves 4 as a main dish, but save a couple of slices and serve cold for this recipe which would make a perfect starter portion.

Here’s the Gordon Ramsay’s Union Street Cafe version:

A light and tasty starter plate of food made with wafer-thin slices of porchetta. The radish was gossamer-like, and the gentleness of the parmesan made it a refreshing dish. It was part of a celebratory meal I had at the Gordon Ramsay restaurant in the Southwark area of London. It has a breezy, laid-back atmosphere with lots of mid-week specials (if you want high-end, try Petrus) and has the feel of a trattoria. We had a great meal, sampling the gratinated eggs (would be perfect for brunch), a fresh, summery sea bass with new potatoes, roast chicken with pea puree and lots more. The focus is on fresh seasonality, with the menu changing quickly as stock becomes available.

I’d also recommend asking to view the kitchen – I’ve never seen such jolly chefs happy to see you and carry on with service!

Anyway, back to the porchetta dish. Porchetta is an indulgent stuffed pork loin, often flavoured with garlic and lemon turned into a stuffing and roasted like a Sunday joint. It’s well worth trying. But I wanted to take this and try my starter with thick slices of roasted pork. It’s just as tasty but more satisfying, taking it in a different direction

Want something more warming? Try suckling pig with chorizo potatoes.

Print

porchetta with parmesan cream and spinach

Course Starter
Cuisine Italian
Servings 2 people
Author Gary @ BigSpud

Ingredients

For the porchetta:

  • 2.5 kg pork loin joint
  • 100 g stale bread
  • Grated zest of 1 lemon
  • 6 black olives
  • 2 sprigs rosemary
  • olive oil

For the garnish:

  • 100 ml single cream
  • 10 g parmesan
  • 50 g spinach
  • 4 radishes
  • 20 ml white wine vinegar

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 200C.
  • Begin by butterflying the pork loin. With the joint fat side up, using your sharpest knife slice horizontally along one side, so it can be opened like a book. Season the pork liberally with salt and pepper then make the stuffing.
  • In a food processor combine the stuffing ingredients. Add enough oil to form a paste. Spread this paste along the middle of the open pork. Roll the pork up and tie around the joint with string. Place in a sturdy roasting tray, drizzle with oil and put in the oven.
  • After 15 minutes turn the oven down to 150C. Continue cooking until the pork is at least 55C when tested with a probe thermometer. If eating now, allow to cool for at least 15 minutes before serving. Otherwise, allow to cool and refrigerate until needed.
  • To pickle the radishes, sprinkle salt and sugar into white wine vinegar until it tastes quite sweet. Add the radishes thinly sliced and leave to macerate while you do everything else.
  • Now make the parmesan cream. For best results whizz up the parmesan in a food processor to make small rubbly pieces of cheese - they melt unevenly and make a pleasing texture. Gently warm the cream with half the cheese but don't boil, you just want the cream to melt the parmesan.
  • Lay the spinach in warm serving bowls. Drizzle over some of the parmesan cream so that it wilts. Add a thick slice of porchetta, garnish with radish slices and a little more cream. Scatter over the remaining parmesan and drizzle with a touch of balsamic vinegar if you like.

Notes

Always test roasting joints with a probe thermometer. They're dead cheap and the safest, surest way to prevent over or undercooking. Buy one from Amazon.
Categories
scallops

scallops with bacon sabayon

Here’s a neat little starter for when you want to have something rich and indulgent. Some lovely sweet scallops on a savoury bacon sabayon. Just remember it’s not a hollandaise sauce OK? Nothing to fret over, just some egg and oil mixed together slowly over heat 🙂

This is inspired by something I ate at Petrus:

Mine isn’t a patch on the refined beauty of this one, where the sauce tasted like eating smooth bacon and eggs! But it’s a substantial starter to show off with. Read my full review of Petrus here.

Print

scallops with bacon sabayon

Course Starter
Cuisine English
Servings 2 people
Author Gary @ BigSpud

Ingredients

  • 1 rasher smoked bacon
  • 100 ml plain oil such as rapeseed
  • 2 egg yolks
  • Lemon juice to taste
  • 12 - 16 baby scallops
  • chives to garnish

Instructions

  • Get a frying pan over a high heat. Fill a saucepan with some water and get it on to gently boil. Put a bowl on top of this saucepan to make a bain marie.
  • Trim the fat from the bacon and add to the frying pan. While it renders and curls up, dice the rest of the bacon and add to the hot bacon fat. After two or three minutes the fat should start to go into the pan. Once the bacon is crisp, decant the fat to a shallow bowl and discard the bacon (or eat it, I won't tell anyone).
  • Put the egg yolks in the bowl and whisk to break up. Add a few drops of the bacon fat and whisk until disappeared. Keep adding a tiny splash of bacon fat and whisking in until you've run out of fat, and then start adding rapeseed oil instead. Keep whisking the whole time to prevent the eggs gathering at the bottom of the bowl and scrambling. Keep whisking and adding oil until it reaches a creamy-custardy consistency. Taste for salt (the bacon will have added quite a bit) and tone it down with a zip of lemon juice if you think it needs it. When it's done remove the bowl from the heat and put to one side while you prepare the scallops.
  • As the sauce comes together put the pan back over a high heat and fry the baby scallops. They take 2 - 3 minutes to cook on both sides. Season with salt before they leave the pan.
  • Ladle some sauce on to a plate, dot with scallops and scatter over chives to serve. Eat immediately.
Categories
food restaurant review

restaurant review: Petrus

Spoilers: it was great.

Gordon Ramsay the character is not a very appealing person but that’s a shame as it can mask what a bloody good chef he is. There’s a number of his techniques I turn to first when cooking: his Wellington, his scrambled egg, his duck breast. I rewatched some of his programmes from the early 2000s and despite formatting of the time – jump cuts! Aggressive music! Booming voiceover! – his presentation style is confident yet assuring, ‘you can do this, just follow along.’ I wish he did more straight food programmes, but I guess the drama of his ‘reality’ shows probably pays the bills better in residuals time after time.

Pétrus is Michelin-starred dining with a French inspired menu. It’s in Knightsbridge and wears this on its sleeve: subdued entrance, glass wine room, lush carpet. But despite the opportunity to be stuffy, instead it feels extremely welcoming.

I had a landmark birthday recently, and was treated to dinner here to mark the occasion. On a weekday we were given the option of the tasting menu or a la carte. I love a tasting menu, but seeing a take on Black Forest Gateau on the a la carte sealed it immediately. It’s my favourite dessert by some distance and I will pick it above everything.

Some amuse bouche to start: crab cakes, puffs of fish so light they disappear. Then an earthy pea veloute, topped with a buttermilk foam. The acidic hit here is perfect.

Then bread. I could’ve eaten this by itself all day long. Sweet, savoury, moreish, chewy, crusty, slathered in creamy salted butter I desperately wanted another helping but wanted to save myself!

Starters proper then. I had a tian of crab, dressed with sour apple and radish. Very good, but I immediately had starter envy when my dining partner had dish of the night: scallops on bacon sabayon.

What a triumph. A fat, juicy scallop perfectly browned outside but melting in the middle. A savoury konbu dressing with a huge savoury punch. A scattering of grassy chives. But the sabayon was out of this world. Like diving into a custard tasting of bacon, I could’ve lapped up bowls of the stuff. Seriously clever cooking.

For main course we both elected for fillet of beef with ‘charcuterie’ sauce, a new one on me. Kinda like a pastrami sandwich in sauce form; a rich gravy with pastrami and gherkin. It was everything you want from fillet of beef, loose texture, huge umami hits and little sweet notes from the scattered onion leaf garnish.

At dessert it all went a bit bonkers. Having clocked it was my birthday they served the aforementioned Black Forest (excellent), along with a rum baba (boozy) and a birthday teacake (rich). Bloody hell I was full. Even before you pretend we didn’t have two petits fours on top.

Earlier on we clocked that the head chef was Russell Bateman, and we’d both spent time with him before. He took us on a tour of the (surprisingly small) kitchen and he bowled me over by remembering us meeting him.

You should know, despite writing about food far too much, I very rarely eat at fancy places. So was I taken in by the grandeur of it all? Highly likely. Was I having a great time with my son? Yeah, that’ll influence it. As far as I’m concerned food is 95% atmosphere including your dining guests, so by that logic it was always going to be good.

Check out my take on the scallop dish here.

Categories
cloves gammon ham honey

honey-glazed christmas ham

I absolutely adore a ham or gammon at Christmas. My Mum always had one hanging around the house from Christmas Eve onwards, and it’s something I still do every year. I favour twice-cooking, a long boiling followed by a fierce blast in the oven with a sticky sauce dribbled over the top. I spotted Gordon Ramsay’s recipe from this year’s and knew I had to give it a try.

One of the key things that makes or breaks a dish like this is the quality of the meat. Start from a poorly-reared, not-looked-after anonymous pig and you’ll end up with a bland pointless dinner. It’ll probably be watery, tasteless and feel like a massive waste of time. Do you and your family a favour when buying gammon (or any other meat for that matter) – go up a level in the quality of meat you buy. Put the Basics range to one side and get something a little better. More expensive yes, but with a fuller flavour and the peace of mind that your animal had a decent life. Freedom Food, outdoor reared, outdoor bred, free-range or organic – these are the labels to look for.

If you’d like to learn more about pig welfare, please visit the RSPCA’s Think Pig Facebook page.

This recipe, based on Gordon Ramsay’s, was great. The key is to repeat the glazing over and over, every ten minutes or so. This will help deepen the flavour and form a beautifully sweet and tasty crust that’s irresistible. Aside from as a roast dinner, I also ate this with some bubble and squeak, as a sandwich and with some chutney. Then I also got a wicked stock to make a soup from, so although the meat is expensive in the first place it’s a dish that keeps on giving.

Adapted from a recipe by Gordon Ramsay. The original honey glazed ham recipe is here.

Honey-glazed Christmas ham:

2.5kg unsmoked gammon joint

4 carrots, roughly chopped

2 celery sticks, roughly chopped

1 onion, quartered

4 cloves of garlic

1 tablespoon black peppercorns

1 tablespoon coriander seeds

1 cinnamon stick

3 bay leaves

A handful of cloves

For the glaze:

100g golden caster sugar

50ml Marsala

25ml sherry vinegar

125g honey

  1. Put the gammon in a large pot along with the veg, peppercorns, coriander, cinnamon and bay. Barely cover with water, bring to the boil and leave to simmer for about 3 hours, or until you can easily sink a knife into it. Every so often skim and scum that floats to the surface. Allow the meat to rest in the liquor for at least half an hour, but any more or less wouldn’t hurt.
  2. Pre-heat the oven to 180°C. Melt the glaze ingredients together gently in a saucepan.
  3. Remove the skin from the gammon and score the fat in a pretty diamond pattern. Stud each diamond with a clove. Very gently trickle some glaze over the meat. Take your time and make sure the whole surface is covered. Pop in the oven.
  4. After 10 minutes take the ham out and repeat the glaze, again gently. Do this every 10 minutes until the gammon has cooked for 40 minutes, when the joint is a gorgeous golden brown. Allow to rest for 10 minutes before carving. It’s amazing, and brilliant cold too.
Exit mobile version