Butter.

The mere mention of it strikes fear into the hearts of Daily Mail readers. Never in the history of faddy eating advice has one innocent substance been so persecuted, and yet, never in the history of cookery has one substance been so vitally important. Imagine a dry, rasping slice of toast with no smear of melting gold; the springy chewiness of a plain sponge cake without a crown of sugared buttercream. Butter is the base of your sauces, the building block of bakery – it’s in every French dish you can think of. It commands respect.

Butter is made from churning cream until the fat globules separate from the buttermilk and form solid lumps. The lumps are then brought together, washed, squeezed to remove all remaining buttermilk, and shaped into pats. It’s actually incredibly easy to make your own butter – you basically just overwhip cream (and I think we can say we’ve all done that). Darina Allen did an excellent guide for the Guardian here.

A lot of snobbery persists about whether salted or unsalted butter is best – at Leiths we were told that those in the know would always choose unsalted. Well, for eating raw, I’m firmly in the salty camp…how frightfully non-u of me. I don’t think there are many tastes better than properly salted butter, particularly the stuff from Brittany that’s flecked with whole sea salt crystals. Unsalted butter is too much like raw fat for me – the salt lifts it, and enhances at the same time as curbing, its creaminess.

That said, I always have unsalted to hand for cooking – when it comes to seasoning I’m a bit of a control freak, and starting a dish using salted butter makes for an uneven flavour. Salted butter is meant to be used as the French intended it – on proper bread, and in generous amounts. Add a bunch of radishes and a crisp glass of white and we’re good to go.

Funnily enough, considering the French love affaire with butter, it was actually a Frenchman who invented the first margarine. In the 1860s Napoleon III offered a prize for the first person to invent a suitable butter substitute to feed to his troops fighting the Franco-Prussian war. The fabulously named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès responded by blending beef fat with milk and working the texture like butter. He wasn’t terribly successful though, and sold the patent to Jurgens (now Unilever) in 1871. After French and German scientists discovered how to hydrogenate vegetable oils (altering them so they behave like butter), the product we now know and loathe was born.

Thanks to sad cases like this chap, margarine now outsells butter in America (and is pretty close here), and many people mistakenly think that the saturated fat in butter is much more dangerous to your health than the hydrogenated fat in margarine. Sham science aside, I just don’t see how anyone with common sense can think that a natural product made entirely from cream can be more harmful than a laboratory product, stuffed full of chemicals, injected with air and artificially coloured. And despite loudly declaimed marketing slogans, it only resembles butter in the way that Quorn resembles a dry-hung steak. Not one bit.

Just imagine this with deliciously melting hydrogenated fat...

When flicking through other people’s recipes I will automatically discard any that give you the option of using margarine instead of butter. Anybody who thinks that’s acceptable has no right calling themselves a cook, let alone telling other people how to do it. You can spot a cake made with marge a mile off – it leaves a greasy film on the inside of your mouth and has an insubstantial feel when you bite into it. Butter is the real deal – the only thing that will give you that moist, golden crumb and rounded flavour. And yes it is high in fat, but I’m not advocating you eat the whole block – or the whole cake. As with all things in life, it’s all about treating yourself. Have a scraping on your toast in the mornings, and save the heavily buttered croissants (which by the way, are almost all butter to begin with) for the weekend.

So this weekend, throw away the Flora, invest in some proper Brittany butter and just go crazy. Life shouldn’t be about consistent self-denial. I mean, look at Gillian McKeith…

What’s wrong with my cake?!

Enjoy those rice cakes, won't you.

At this time of restraint and edamame beans it might seem cruel of me to be bringing up cake, but I’ve been making a lot of them recently (plus ça change…) so I thought I would write down a guide to what can go wrong, and the reasons behind it. Because from long experience, I know there is absolutely nothing more irritating than watching your beautiful cake rise, become fragrant and golden…then sink into a big flat pancake before your eyes. There have occasionally been tantrums…

The Leiths Bible, which, for baking and patisserie is still my Good Book has a very useful section entitled, somewhat primly, ‘Reasons for failure in cake making.’ Unfortunately, a lot of their reasons are to do with cakes that you or I will almost never think about making (Genoise Commune, anyone?!), so I’m going to aim for a more practical guide here. And then, just because I like to share my enthusiasm with you, I’m going to give you some hints on how to avoid them…

Your cake has sunk

This is probably the most common problem and is so easily avoidable!

• Did you open the oven door too early? Tut tut tut. Leave the oven door alone! Blasting cold air into a warm oven will automatically cause your cake to sink if it isn’t set enough. If you must open the oven – if you need to cover the top to stop it burning for instance, try and wait until the cake has been in for at least 30-40 minutes – it will usually have risen enough that it won’t be a problem. Don’t throw it open and bang it shut either – opening and closing gently and smoothly will stop the rush of air and keep the oven temperature more accurate. Gordon Ramsay might kick them shut, but that doesn’t mean that you should.
• Was your oven too hot? An over-heated oven will cause a thick crust to form on your cake before the middle is set, making you think that it’s cooked before it is, so you bring it out and two minutes later you have a cracked top crust and a load of dough on the inside. Buy an oven thermometer to be sure your oven is running at the correct heat – you’ll be surprised by how much they vary. Our testing ovens run 10 degrees low, but our photographer’s oven is high, and my oven just does its own thing most of the time. We can never be completely accurate in our timings for recipes as everyone’s ovens are different, so it’s worth checking that yours runs to temperature. Another neat trick if you’re making a big cake (over 10”) and you’re worried about it rising is to start it 10C higher than you need and after 10-15 minutes turn it down to the correct temperature. The high heat will kickstart the rise and form a crust (which stabilises the cake), and the correct temperature will make sure it stays moist.

Your cake has dried out

We’ve all done it – you’ve forgotten about the cake in the oven and now it’s burned/dry/crusty. It’s still salvageable! Try one of these…

• If it’s burnt – Dark edges are easy to deal with – wait until it cools then shave off the burnt bits with either a sharp veg peeler or (more preferably) a sharp grater or microplane. Stop when you get to lighter sponge, and no one will ever know..
• If it’s dry – If you’re worried it’s going to be dry in the middle, prick holes all over it while still hot, then either pour over some appropriate booze (I once used a whole bottle of PX sherry for a friend’s chocolate wedding cake), or a fruit syrup made with fresh orange/lemon juice, and a couple of tbsp sugar. There’s an orange drizzle cake recipe here with an excellent syrup. Abracadabra, problem solved and everyone will be saying ‘ooh, isn’t it moist, isn’t it just so moist!’
• If it’s crusty – A bit of crispiness is delicious, but if it’s a little too crunchy, either leave it in the tin to cool (it will somewhat unappetisingly, sweat, but it will soften the crust a bit), or turn it out and cover it with a damp tea towel to cool. This works a treat with bread too.

 Your cake is too dense

I’m afraid this one’s just down to laziness and heavy-handedness. When we say to beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy we really do mean it. And that bit about gently folding in the flour isn’t just to fill our word count. Your cake’s fate is sealed the minute you mix butter and sugar together – part of the rise is formed by steam coming from these two melting, so the more you beat it, the more you break it down and increase the surface area, so the more steam you get which means…a lighter cake. And you fold in the flour rather than beating it so you don’t knock all the air out and ruin your hard work. Most recipes will tell you to use a metal spoon – we prefer a balloon whisk – it’s more efficient and has a smaller surface area to bash the mix with.

 Of course, there are hundreds of other things that can go wrong, but I think these are the Big Three. And remember baking really isn’t scary, you just have to follow the recipe, and use a little bit of intuition. God, I sound like Mary Poppins. Oh well, very happy baking to everyone and a jolly marvellous weekend…

The Importance of Kitchen Knives

If you’ve ever been into a professional kitchen, and tried to borrow one of the chef’s knives, you’ll know what I mean when I say that to a professional cook, their knife is like an extension of their hands. On my very first day as a chef I was asked to chop something, grabbed the nearest knife and was drowned in a torrent of abuse and threats, before realising I had in fact picked up the sous’ best knife. The knife his father had bought him. The knife he’d had with him since his apprenticeship. The knife he’d carefully honed every day. He was something of a drama queen.

Easy peasy

Or was he? Admittedly, there was no need to threaten fiery retribution, but he did have a point. Because anyone who is in the least bit inclined to cook should have a good, sharp knife, and should be able to do a vague rolling chop. I’m pretty sure that a lot of people reading this will never have learned how to use a proper chef’s knife, and if you choose to (and I really recommend you do), you’ll discover that what used to be a chore has suddenly become a pleasure.

You know who you are, you who stand for hours in the kitchen, painfully trying to chop a turnip with a 2” paring knife. It doesn’t have to be that way! And I promise it’s relatively simple to learn how to chop properly. There are a few rules – some part of the blade should always be on the chopping board while you’re moving – think of the motion of a rocking chair. Grip the handle with your last three fingers, and straddle your thumb and forefinger firmly over the join of the handle and the blade so those two fingers are tucked into the end of the blade – it will make your grip more steady than just holding the handle. You might find this knife skills video helpful. And practice. Practice unfortunately does make perfect, as my father was always telling me about the piano.

So now I’ve converted you, which knife to buy…

Well, if you’re feeling flash, and you want to look like Michel Roux Jr. I would suggest a Global. Their blades are second to none, they stay sharp for AGES, and you can chop everything from a ripe tomato to a swede with perfect ease. But they’re very pricey, and I’m not a huge fan of the handles – I find them too hard for my delicate petal-like skin. Plus the corner of the blade is a razor sharp point that looks very smart, but I guarantee you will stab your hand with it within 10 minutes. But men love them and if you have a budding Jamie in the kitchen they make fantastic gifts.

For something more restrained but still a serious chef’s knife, try a Wusthof. They also have lovely blades, not as effortless as the Globals, but their handles are comfier and they’re not quite as pricey (around £80 for an 8” chef’s knife, as opposed to Global’s £115)

And if you really don’t want to break the bank (and I honestly wouldn’t bother until you’ve mastered the chopping), try Salter. They’ve got very comfortable, rubber grip handles and slice with ease – we use them a lot in the test kitchen and I’ve never had a problem with them. And at £20 for an 8” chef’s knife they’re a fraction of the cost of a designer one, so they’re great to get you started.

For a more middle of the road option I really like the new Lakeland Select knives. Again with an ergonomic soft-grip handle, their blades are made from ice-hardened Japanese steel – a process which strengthens the blade and keeps it sharper for longer. I’d happily have paid more for this knife – but the lack of designer name means a lower price. Fine by me.

The size is up to you, but I like an 8” blade. They’re big enough for bulky food but not so big you feel dwarfed.

Once you’ve bought your knife, you need something to keep it sharp. I hate those motorised sharpeners, they gradually wear the blades into serrations. Stay away. Much better, if you’re not confident with a knife steel is this little contraption that I bought after hearing great reports from various chefs. It’s called an Ozitech, and it works just by dragging the blade across its ‘diamond fingers’. It hones them evenly, and doesn’t leave you with ridges in your knife.

And so on to a few final points. If you are using a steel, drag the knife across it at the angle you chop at  – it will sharpen the blade evenly for your particular chopping style. Always do an even number of strokes or you’ll end up with a ridge on one side. Try not to let anyone else use your favourite knife – different chopping styles result in an uneven blade that won’t sharpen properly. Don’t scrape food off chopping boards with the sharp end of the blade – turn the knife over so you don’t blunt it. Never, ever put knives in the dishwasher – the heat and the salt ruins the blade. And remember – you’re much more likely to cut yourself with a blunt blade sliding off food than with a sharp one.

So get down to your kitchen shop sharpish.

Christmas Dinner the Easy Way

For someone of my relatively tender years, I’ve cooked a lot of Christmas dinners. Working as a chef over a Christmas season, it was one every other day in December and when you’re cooking for up to 300 people, you have to learn some shortcuts and cheats. So my Christmas gift to you dear readers, is me sharing them here, in the hope that cooking the Christmas meal will be as enjoyable for you as it is for me. With only the very occasional swear word…. And remember, even if it all goes horribly wrong, there are very few problems that a glass of Champagne and a smile can’t solve.

By next year, I aim to be living here.

A few golden rules

• Always buy the best bird you can afford, and please try to make sure it’s free range and properly reared. Inferior, barn-reared turkeys have virtually no flavour, and because they are killed younger yield less meat, so are actually bad value for money. Our turkey for the magazine was provided by Kelly Bronze  – they hang their birds after slaughtering so they develop the most delicious gamey flavour – well worth the extra money.

• No matter how big it is, your turkey will almost never take as long as you think it will to cook. Believe me, I know! Buy a digital meat thermometer and trust it – if it reads over 72C, your turkey is cooked, so take it out of the oven.

• Remove your turkey from the fridge 2 hours before it goes in the oven to let it come back to room temperature – this helps it to cook more evenly. All the stuffing and trussing can be done in advance so all you have to do is butter it and cook it on the day. Stuff the neck and place an orange in the cavity. An empty cavity heats up like an oven, meaning that the turkey breasts are cooked from the inside and outside which will dry them out. The orange absorbs the heat and steams, to provide moisture and flavour.

• If you’re pushed for space in the oven, remember that your turkey will keep warm for 1-2 hours loosely covered with tin foil on the side, so don’t worry about putting your veg and extra stuffing in until the bird comes out. This also has the advantage of allowing you to turn the oven up to brown the spuds, without worrying about the turkey. 

• Use your microwave. Peas, greens, cabbage, bread sauce, Christmas pud can all be cooked in it to save space on the hob. If you’re blanching anything before frying it (sprouts for example) you can do that in advance, run them under cold water to cool, drain and store them in the fridge then heat them back up in the frying pan when ready.

• Don’t keep opening your oven to check everything. The rate that heat leaves an oven is astounding, and it takes a long time to come back to temperature. When you do have to go into it, be quick, and remove whatever it is that needs attention rather than adjusting it with the oven door open. The same goes for the fridge – keep it closed as much as you can and store drinks etc in buckets of ice (or outside) to stop people going in there so much. 

• Enlist some helpers to give you a hand prepping and washing up as you go. Don’t feel guilty – a glass of fizz, some Christmas music and suddenly the kitchen is the best place to be!

Don’t sweat the small stuff

• Don’t panic over gravy not thickening at the last minute. Buy or make some good fresh chicken stock and do it the night before (or even freeze it a few weeks in advance), then just add the pan juices from the turkey when you reheat it.

• Your veg (apart from the potatoes) can all be peeled and prepped the day before. Rather than soaking things in water which will make them soggy, wrap them in damp kitchen roll and leave somewhere cool overnight (a garage is ideal and will save space in the fridge.)

• Lay the table first thing in the morning (or the night before) – or better still, get someone else to do it. Child labour in this department is perfectly acceptable and they’ll thank you when they start giving dinner parties of their own. Put all glasses out of your way so that people can help themselves to drinks without getting under your feet.

My time plan – In our house we aim to sit down and eat at about 6pm. We started this tradition as we found that eating at lunch time left everyone asleep by four, and the cooks bad tempered and exhausted. This way, we have a lovely leisurely morning, get the presents done, then start cooking in the afternoon when it’s more appropriate to do  it with a glass of Prosecco in hand. Much easier for everyone and no snoring grannies.

 To serve lunch at 6pm cooking a 4kg turkey that will serve around 6-8 with leftovers (NB. although this is my time plan, it’s hardly ever stuck to as inevitably chatting, drinking and the dogs get in the way. Don’t worry about it if you run behind. Roasted veg will all hold for half an hour easily  and all steaming can be done completely last minute. Don’t panic – just enjoy yourselves.)

• 2.15pm – Heat the oven to 220C. The turkey should be stuffed, weighed and out of the fridge.
• 3.00pm – Butter and season the turkey and put it in the oven (see our turkey recipe here) Check it after 1 hour 30 minutes with a thermometer to see how it’s doing. If the thermometer says it’s done, take it out.
• 4.45pm – Par-boil the carrots and potatoes, heat the roasting fat and prep them for the oven.
• 5.00pm – Remove the turkey from the oven, place on a lipped board to catch the juices and cover loosely with foil. Put the potatoes and carrots in the oven and put the parsnips on to steam.
• 5.15pm – Put the parsnips in the oven.
• 5.30pm – Put the stuffing and chipolatas in the oven.  Warm the gravy and the bread sauce and get the sprouts ready.
• 5.40pm – Put the condiments on the table (except the gravy), ask everyone to sit down, fry off the sprouts, steam the green veg and delegate someone to carve the turkey.
• 5.50pm – Once everything is out of the oven, warm serving dishes and plates – you can use the microwave for this too. Grab three people – two to ferry dishes to the table and one to help you quickly clear up to make space in the kitchen for empty plates. Serve, sit down, and pour yourself a large glass of wine.

Merry Christmas everyone and happy cooking! And if anyone has any burning Christmas cookery queries, leave me a comment and I will help as best I can…

 

 

The Secret Art of Pastry Making

 Since around this time of year, I reckon there’s a fair few people thinking about mince pies, I thought I would write something about pastry. It seems to be a lot of people’s cooking nemesis, and while I sympathise, I ‘ve also learnt a few tricks to make life that little bit easier. So read on, all ye who fear to bake, and I will try to enlighten you.

 First of all, there’s no hiding it but compared with throw-it-in-a-pan cooking, pastry is a nuisance. And while I stood in a 35C kitchen trying to roll a whole block of butter into my puff pastry for the Leiths final exam, fat melting everywhere as the sun streamed down, I pretty much vowed never to touch the stuff again. Certainly when I got my mark sheet back and they declared ‘good rise, but a little too greasy’ I felt like I might just give up altogether. But that was Leiths and their expectations of pastry are frankly impossible, not to mention totally impracticable. For us mere mortals, a lower standard of perfection will suffice.

So, a few good pointers. Mainly, it mustn’t get hot. This is essential, and really the best piece of advice I can give you. If in doubt, stick it in the freezer for 10 minutes, and avoid the temptation to knead it. It’s not bread, it’s not Playdough, so leave it alone. If you’re making shortcrust or puff (which is more hassle than it’s worth), you should chill the pastry once you’ve brought it all together  – it will make rolling it out much easier if it’s cold and firm. You should also chill it once it’s been shaped. It must always, always go into the oven cold – it is the butter melting in the oven and creating steam which, in shortcrust, will help it to stay tender and essentially, short, and with puff, will make it rise (and not be greasy…hmph.) And don’t think if you’ve used bought you can ignore all of this. It’s exactly the same principle, just without the initial mixing process.

Another very important point is that if you’re making pies, then the filling has to be cold when it goes in. A hot filling will melt the pastry, and anyone who has struggled trying to shape soggy, raw pastry will understand. Chill, chill and chill again. It will be worth it in the end. If you’re making a pie that has a bottom and a top shell, always use a metal tin, preferably with a removable bottom. Those ceramic things your granny gave you may look lovely, but they’ll never heat up enough to give you a crisp base and you’ll end up with a grey, flabby bottom. And nobody likes those…

And so on to blind baking. If anyone’s seen this in a recipe and wondered what it was all about, it simply means baking a pastry case before adding a filling. To do this, you have to weight it down otherwise it will balloon and you’ll be left with a very wonky base. Most cookbooks tell you to use baking parchment to line the pastry case before adding the baking beans (NB. These don’t have to be the proper ceramic beans that cookshops charge a fortune for – I’ve used rice, split peas, even flour very successfully – as long as it’s heavy enough and won’t melt you’ll be fine), but we always line ours with tin foil – you get a sharper right angle and the metal foil heats up and cooks the pastry from the outside too. Always use plenty of baking beans – a small scattering won’t do – the case needs to be almost full. Also, always leave an overhang of pastry rather than trimming it to exactly fit the case. Pastry can have a nasty habit of shrinking in the oven, and the overhang will mean that you’re not left with a case that’s only a cm high in some places. After blind baking trim the edges with a serrated knife flat on the edge of the tart. You’ll end up with a lovely, neat blunt edge. Very cheffy.

If the recipe tells you to blind bake something for 15 minutes, it will almost never be long enough. An 8-inch tart case will take at least 25 minutes on about 190C, plus another 10 minutes at 170C with the foil and beans removed. These are just estimates – so keep an eye on it, the pastry should be completely sandy coloured, with no grey patches. Once your pastry is cooked, if you want to be really fancy you could glaze the inside with some beaten egg yolk and return it to a low oven for 10 minutes to dry out – this will form a waterproof barrier, and make sure your pastry stays completely crisp and delicious. I would really recommend this with custard based fillings – quiches and lemon tarts especially.

So there you go, the Truefoodie Guide to Pastry Making in under 900 words. I realise all of the above sounds quite complicated, but I promise it isn’t once you get into the habit, and the difference in your results will be extraordinary. Just don’t try and make almond pastry. If the Roux brothers find it tricky, then the rest of us have no chance…

The Dreaded Set Menu

Watch out for him in the stripy jumper...

It’s that time of year again. The office party creeps round the corner, ambushing you with daytime drinking, organised fun and ill-advised emotional outbursts in front of the boss. Magicians are being booked, set menus passed around, and Secret Santas discreetly swapped with cries of ‘Oh no, I pulled my own name out!’. Don’t pretend you’ve never done it.

Drinking and avoiding Creepy Geoff from Accounts aside, the highlight for many of us at this annual event will be the food. And as I recently discovered when I dared to try and book a table for more than 6 in December, the set menu rules the roost at Christmastide. I can understand this – with kitchens under extra pressure, and 25 people needing to be fed at the same time, it makes sense to limit the choices. Why make the poor commis peel 10 different types of veg if you can get away with just three? From a cost point of view it’s sensible too, as if everyone goes a la carte there will always be some poser who orders the lobster. For the poor old PA who has to sort the bill, this presents quite a problem.

But why, why why why do Christmas set menus always have to include Christmas lunch?! Why does eating overcooked, under-bred turkey six times before the big day sum up the festive spirit? Are Brussels sprouts really that moreish?!

Now don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas lunch. I love cooking Christmas lunch. Let’s face it, given that I start cooking it in August, I sort of have to love it. But I’m not wild about the excessive amounts of food all on one plate. You put all this effort into cooking the perfect turkey, then suffocate it in a mixture of cured pork, chestnuts, stuffings and condiments. It’s American in its excess, and we want to be careful about going down that route, lest we end up with candied yams.

Pass me the baguette and the salad cream.

Christmas lunch is just a bit showy for me. I prefer the more restrained spread of Boxing Day – turkey has a starring role in a sandwich, vegetables are re-incarnated into divine bubble and squeak, and pigs in blankets can be wolfed straight from the fridge. And I think, deep down, most people do prefer the day-after meal. So why this need to eat Christmas dinner in restaurants? It won’t be as good as your mum’s, you’ll feel sleepy for the rest of the evening, and people will glare at you as they get school dinner wafts of overcooked sprouts. If Christmas lunch is such a big event, shouldn’t we save it for Christmas day?

Of course I might be over-ruled. There might be hundreds of people out there who love dry turkey, soggy roasties and bread sauce that looks like a Victorian cure for sickness. You may be on the cusp of ticking the ‘xmas-dinner’ option on the office spreadsheet as we speak. But can I make a plea to restaurateurs nationwide that next year, if they must mass-produce a Christmas feast, can they do Boxing Day instead? It’s a very poor chef who can mess up bubble and squeak.

And as for me at the Christmas party this year, I’ll be tucking into fish and chips. I’m saving my turkey quota for the 25^th, when, surrounded by Christmas joy and sparkle I know that it will taste every bit as good as I remember. From when I ate it back in August.

Salt Beef

Russell Norman. The man appears to be unstoppable. Having brought us Venetian, then American diner, his new venture – Mishkin’s  – opening on Friday promises Jewish comfort food – matzo ball soup, knish, and what I’m most excited about – salt beef. I truly am the grand daughter of a butcher. 

Made from brining and then boiling a rolled beef brisket, salt beef is mainly credited with Jewish origin, although versions of it were around in Britain as early as the 1600s. Tender, juicy and, (you guessed it) salty, there are few things better in a sandwich, slathered with mustard and piled with gherkins and sauerkraut.

Although it’s mainly found in sandwiches, salt beef is surprisingly versatile. To give a for instance, a friend of mine served it at her winter wedding with mash, green beans and gravy. When I first heard about it, my forehead wrinkled a little, but it worked perfectly – it tasted delicious and was a crafty way of serving over 100 people perfectly cooked beef without having to worry about it being pink. It’s fab with fried eggs and chips if you fancy a truck-stop dinner and I also love it in a hash – much the same as you’d have corned beef, or on its own, cold, with bubble and squeak. And gherkins. Always, always gherkins. Salt beef and gherkins are like Pippa Middleton and the Daily Mail. Without one, the other’s existence becomes pretty meaningless…

Salt beef is sadly missing from many menus in London and I can’t understand why, since it’s such a universally popular, cheap preparation of meat. Plus it keeps for ages, so the wastage must be significantly lower than fresh roast beef. But fret not, because it’s extremely easy to make your own. You will need… 

About 1kg beef brisket

200g salt

75g sugar

couple bay leaves and garlic cloves, bashed and peeled

15g mixed pickling spices (I like to use mace, star anise, allspice, juniper, couple of cloves and coriander, but whatever you fancy)

flavourers, for simmering (leek, onion, bay, carrot, thyme etc)

1 Put the beef brisket in a large saucepan with the salt, sugar, bay, garlic and pickling spice. Cover with about 2 litres water, bring to the boil, remove from the heat and leave to cool.

2 Take the brisket out of the liquid, place into a double lined heavy -duty freezer bag and add the brine over the top. Get rid of as much air as possible, then seal the bag and chill for up to 10 days.

3 When you’re ready to cook, remove the brisket from the brine, rinse and pat it dry. Put back in a saucepan with your flavourers (a mix of any of them is fine), then bring to a very gentle simmer and cook for 2-4 hours, keeping the water topped up to cover the meat until you can run a skewer through it very easily. Remove from the water and eat while still hot, or allow to cool and carve. It will keep for about a week.

So while you’re enjoying that at home, I’m booked into Mishkin’s for lunch at the weekend. And since those corporate swine seem intent on closing the lovely nearby Gaby’s deli who’ve been serving salt beef to the stars since the 60s, (try saying that with your mouth full), I hope that Russell Norman can provide me with a suitable alternative. I have faith. And I’ll keep you posted.

Speculoos spread

There’s a small pot of heaven in my fridge at home and its name is Speculoos à tartiner.

Originally from Belgium and the Netherlands, speculoos (or speculaas) biscuits were given to children on St Nicholas’ eve. In England, they appear as the biscuits you get with your coffee in the hairdressers, or in those halcyon days before budget airlines, when you were still given nibbles on shorthaul flights. Caramel brown, spiced with cinnamon, these little Belgian biscuits are irritatingly tiny, just big enough for one mouthful of perfect toffeed sweetness before it’s gone, and all you’re left with is a depressing cup of in-flight tea.

Which is obviously why the lovely folk at Lotus decided to whiz up their speculoos and mix them with volumes of oil I’d rather not think about to create speculoos spread…which brings me back to that pot in my fridge.

The phrase ‘à tartiner’, means literally to spread on bread. I know what you’re thinking  – biscuits spread on bread, that’s the Belgian equivalent of a deep-fried Mars bar, but it is so good, I don’t care about the carbs. And because the biscuits are made with brown sugar and butter, they melt onto toast in a golden caramely mess, clinging to the roof of your mouth like peanut butter and filling it with sweetness and spice. Joy.

But my love affair with this stuff doesn’t stop at toast. Spooned cold straight from the fridge it cures all emotional ills as it slowly dissolves on your tongue, and last night as my housemate and I dipped between the vanilla ice cream and the pot of speculoos I felt like I might have found my new nirvana.

The next stop is cooking with it. I’m thinking molten centres in the middle of the richest chocolate brownies, a layer underneath the topping of a sharp apple crumble to melt and mingle with the tart fruit, or a more sophisticated version of last night’s transgressions – as a ripple through homemade brown bread ice cream. Recipes to come once the new batch arrives in the post.

Which brings me to the downside of all this, you can only buy it online in England. If you’re hopping over the channel, it’s available in almost every supermarket, so stock up  – it keeps forever and you won’t regret the bulk buying. My last two jars have come from a philanthropic friend with a house in Provence, but I feel I can’t trespass on his kindness any longer, so I’ll be buying it here. They even do a crunchy version. Mon dieu.

A cuisine that doesn’t wok my world

Potential for rotten puns notwithstanding, I’ve never been a fan of Chinese food. That is, not sober, anyway. And even when intoxicated, I’ve only ever been able to manage a couple of bites of that cloyingly sticky, syrupy sauce that everything seems to be drenched in before accepting defeat and going to bed. For a good long while I was convinced lemon chicken was an evil combination, having eaten a takeaway once that tasted like misery soaked in Fairy liquid. It was only when I squeezed fresh lemon juice over crispy roasted chicken thighs that I realised it was the stuff of dreams.

I feel the MSG hangover already

But given that I’m so rude about fussy eaters, it didn’t seem right that I could write off an entire cuisine based on a few takeaways and pot luck dinners in Chinatown. After all, you’d be forgiven for thinking British food was beyond the pale if you only ever ate at Wetherspoon’s. And I’ve mentioned before how I feel about La Tasca…

So when I was invited to try out Min Jiang – a very upmarket Chinese restaurant at the top of the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, I accepted immediately. With a new chef straight from Hakkasan and side dishes whose price would make Abramovich shudder, this, I thought would change my mind about Chinese food.

Except that it didn’t.

It started well enough – the restaurant has that expensive hotel air to it that makes you feel like you’re in Lost in Translation – a sort of timelessness that means it’s ok to sit up all night drinking. Couple that with a 10^th floor view over Hyde Park, an excellent watermelon mojito and Matt le Blanc sitting next to us and I was practically Scarlett Johanssen.

The menu caused us few problems, although I did note that I wasn’t thrilled by the sound of any of it and we settled for crispy squid, and crab steamed dumplings with pork broth to start. It may well be my palate’s lack of sophistication but I honestly couldn’t taste the difference between these dumplings and the ones from Ping Pong. They were a little lighter, but the flavours tasted exactly the same to me. And the crispy squid, though perfectly cooked was utterly bland, until you bit into a dried chilli at which point your head nearly came off. These courses were followed by ostrich in Mongolian sauce (made with curry leaves) and double cooked Sichuan pork belly with Chinese leek. We were told we’d need side dishes so we also ordered egg fried rice, four seasons vegetables and noodles with chives.

My first observation when everything came out was that it was all, down to the last stick of celery, fried or coated in oil. This is my main problem with Chinese food – there isn’t the balance of flavour you get with, say, Vietnamese, where their sticky, rich sauces are off-set by pickled vegetables, fresh herbs and limes. There’s no let up, nothing fresh to counterbalance the sickliness and very soon everything starts to taste the same. The dishes were technically well executed – the ostrich incredibly tender and the pork belly thinly sliced to exacting uniformity, and there was something interestingly seaweedy amongst the veg that gave me some relief, but after eating less than half I was already feeling rather sick. The boy fared a little better, but he gave up soon after me. By the time it came to pudding I devoured the faultless passion fruit ice cream, mainly happy that it didn’t taste like the inside of a wok.

So what to conclude…I don’t want to do the restaurant down, because aside from my prejudices the staff were helpful, the wine was delicious and it was so squeaky clean I would have eaten in the loos. I can’t fault it for not being authentic either and it was quite buzzy for a fancypants place on a drizzly recession Monday, and not just with expense account diners. I think that, however unwillingly, I have to surmise that I just don’t like Chinese food. And this doesn’t make me picky, it just makes me really like fresh herbs. And salads. And citrus juice. And steamed vegetables…

Breakfast like a king…

I’ve often thought that dragging myself out of bed for breakfast with friends before work is a good idea. A coffee, a croissant and a good gossip would start the day off the right way, as opposed to the usual routine of dropping toast crumbs all over my dressing table, or worse, the keyboard of my desk. But more often than not, as the alarm goes off, the duvet’s charms are just too great, and the snooze button is pressed futilely every five minutes for an hour.

But not this morning. This morning, the lure of breakfast at the new branch of Hawksmoor dragged me out of bed at 6.30, into a rainy and dark street and a rush hour journey from hell.

Since I reviewed the last Hawksmoor at Seven Dials, the British steakhouse chain has gone from strength to strength, and has recently culminated in a) a new book, and b) a new restaurant in Guildhall.  Undeniably designed to cater to the city crowd, this vast polished wood dining room, unlike its brothers, also opens at seven for breakfast. We shuffled in at 8.30, wet and bad tempered from the tube, and were greeted with a warm welcome and an espresso so strong I felt like I was drinking a shot.

It feels a little like a public school dining room, but in a good way

The menu is, as you would expect, pretty meat heavy. There’s a steak and eggs section, as well as the full English, but also pancakes, pastries, yogurt and granola, which I imagine is for the dainty ladies on the arms of the city boys. But I am no dainty lady, and so my city boy and I plumped for the Hawksmoor breakfast for 2.

Deep breath…smoked bacon chop, sausages made with pork, beef and mutton, black pudding, short-rib bubble and squeak, grilled bone marrow, trotter baked beans, fried eggs, grilled mushrooms, roast tomatoes, toast and HP gravy. Oh, and hash browns. Don’t tell anyone, but we ordered those on the side.

Service was friendly, quick and efficient, and within 10 minutes we were sitting in front of an embarrassing amount of meat. 8 different types on one plate to be exact. The bone marrow, I could have done without – I love it in the evening with salad, but in the morning, it was just too much for me and I gave up after a small bite. (Although apparently the gin in the Buck’s Fizz I also ordered in the morning wasn’t too much for me, so I’m not sure what that says…) The bacon chop was an experience – done on the charcoal grill for a lovely smokiness, but the size defeated us somewhat. The sausages were unbelievably meaty and full of flavour and the hash browns were guilty perfection. The short rib bubble and squeak was divine and the star of the show for me – both crisp and fluffy, with melt in the mouth beef morsels running through it – I could have eaten a whole bowlful with just the homemade ketchup to accompany it. The trotter baked beans were also very tasty, although we were divided on this – he felt that something as sacred as baked beans shouldn’t be tampered with. But I have to disagree. My main criticism is that the toast needed to be much more toasted – done on the grill but not for long enough it was pretty much warm bread, and with such delicious sourdough it’s a pity not to treat it with proper respect. But it hardly ruined the meal, and the (quite large amount) we couldn’t finish was happily bagged up by the staff, and as I write the fashion team are tucking in with glee.

Overall conclusion -  excellent. Possibly a little too much meat on one plate for my taste, but I think they know their audience, as every other table in the restaurant (mainly men) ordered the same thing. The cocktail list is eye opening and had I not been working, would have been happy to sit there and get merrily trashed before lunch. I just hope it catches on…but with bubble and squeak that good, I can’t see how it can fail!