Mince Pie and Brandy Butter Sausages

Bonkers. But delicious. The suet from the mincemeat, along with the butterfat make these sausages very moist, whilst the fruit and the brandy give them a sophistication that helps to elevate them out of the novelty category. Given that Santa and his band of merry reindeer have buggered off for the rest of the year, they also make a great way of using up any leftover mincemeat.

Start with a 60/40 mixture of minced belly and shoulder. Add two big spoonfuls of mincemeat and a spoon of brandy butter. Then add a glug of brandy. Mix together with some salt, pepper and breadcrumbs until the consistency feel sausagey.

Then pump into some natural casings and leave to rest overnight. Create mini links and serve to unsuspecting friends as mini mince pie sausages on the end of cocktail sticks.

We ate these after a long walk in the frosty Somerset countryside with a cup of tea. To my delight the idea turned out to be far less hair-brained than I had feared. The sausages were moist, sticky, full of festive flavour and universally approved of. The stewed fruit led Cowie to think they tasted like Devils on Horseback. So if you’re keen to use up your mince meat the last dregs of brandy butter, spare them the pastry treatment and ram them inside some pigs intestine.

Gareth from Bibendum suggests quaffing some rich Alsatian Pinot Gri with these, whereas Fiona thought they’d go down a storm with Tawny Port or off-dry Amontillado.

Top photo is from kyz on Flickr via creative commons.

This is part of a series of posts about experimental sausages and a potential sausage-fest

WANTED: Washing Machine for Lateral Cooking Experiments

Normal cooking is boring. Hobs. Yawn. Ovens. Zzzzzzz. Microwaves. Grrrr. It’s much more fun using other bits of kit to cook with such as baths, irons, dishwashers and car engines.

We’ve had a lot of fun recently cooking in bizarre ways. Our experiments with cooking salmon in the bath tub and in the dishwasher have been roaring success. We now want to push the boundaries and try something that hasn’t been done before.

We want to cook pork belly in a washing machine. The flavourings and method are still in development. As it stands the pork itself will be surrounded by star anise, ginger, chilli, soy sauce and spring onion and then encased either in a cooking bag or a pillowcase like you would do with trainers.

We’ll then select a long hot washing cycle on a gentle spin and watch our pork go round and round in the drum of the machine, slowly becoming tenderised as it crashes around. Our hope is that it emerges as beautifully soft, deeply flavoured meat resembling pulled pork.

So if you work for Curry’s, Miele, Bosch, Zanussi or any other white goods company please can you send me a washing machine so I can cook some amazing pork!

And if you don’t then please help to spread the word to people who do. And if you’ve got any feedback on the cooking method, or any further ideas, please let me know. It’s got the potential to be a really fun project and I need your help.

(Image is from Flickr Creative Commons from G & A Sattler)

Battered Creme Egg in Bruton

Wow. I am ashamed to say the fish and chip shop selling these crispy, coronary inducing confections was closed so I haven’t had a chance to sample one. But, rest assured when I next visit Bruton I’ll give one a try and tell you all about it.

I just love the line, “Cadbury’s may splatter ’em, but we batter ’em”. Surely someone from Publicis is behind this!

Dans le Noir

In a sudden fit of bravery we decided to take our wonderful Client out for an adventurous dinner. She is based in the States so we rarely get to see each other face to face.

This will now seem like a non-sequitor…

So we took her to Dans le Noir in Farringdon for a fabulous night of dining in the dark. We are working on a project that is all about sensual experiences, so it made perfect sense to finish the day’s hard work with a meal that would push all of our sensual boundaries.

Arriving at the restaurant we were greeted in the foyer by a collection of very engaging maitre d’s. They made us put all of our kit in a locker so that no mobile phones or watches with illuminated faces could disturb the sheer blackness of the dining room.

I don’t think any of us were ready for the attack on our senese that was to follow. After a quick cocktail to instil a bit of Dutch courage in all of us, we queued up behind a blind waitress/guide and were led into the pitch black room. Some squealed. Others were a bit more stoical. We found our table using our hands and all sat down around what we all thought was a round table, but turned out to be oblong!

We groped around the table looking for water glasses and bottles. The only way you can pour everyone’s wine is to put your finger in the glass and keep pouring until your finger gets wet! Not very hygenic. But great fun.

We all spoke very loudly to begin with as we acclimatised to the dark. Towards the end of the meal our voices became more calm and we shouted a lot less! It’s bizarre just how reliant we all are on our sense of sight.

I found it really hard to determine what I was eating and to be honest can’t quite remember. Memory works very badly when you remove the sense of sight. My starter may have involved something resembling spring rolls filled with what I thought was minced chicken and somebody else thought was tuna – which turned out to be duck.

Likewise I got terribly confused by my main course which I still swear to the this day was lamb, but turned out to be a mixture of ostrich fillet on one side of the plate and venison on the other. But we all recognised the distinctive smell and flavour of the truffled risotto that acted as a division between the two meats.

Personally I loved the whole experience. There is something very liberating about being in the dark. It may have been the amount of wine I was drinking because I was thirsty and couldn’t find my water glass… but I found myself saying things at a work dinner that I would never otherwise have said. I’ve never had so much fun chatting a joking around a (now clearly rectangular) table. Everything seems funnier in the dark.

Be careful about coming here if you know people are claustrophobic or are a bit strapped for cash as it isn’t cheap. But remember you are coming here for an experience and not simply a meal. In many ways this is the idea of a restaurant pushed to the extreme. It’s not about the food. It’s about opening your mind and having an entertaining time. We learnt a lot about each other during the course of the meal and feel like we all bonded along the way.

Will any of us return? Unlikely. But not in a bad way. We’ve all been talking about the experience ever since and won’t ever forget that crazy meal we all had in the dark! It’s a great place to come if you want to break the ice.

Why do celebrity chefs pose like this?

What is it about celebrity chefs that makes them pose with their arms crossed on the front cover of their books? I saw these books by James Martin and Wozzer side by side in Waitrose and wondered whether it was a trait that other chefs had too. You can see below that Jamie has also dabbled with the arms crossed technique. But not in anyway near the way that Wozzer and James Martin do.

If you have a look at Jamie’s other front covers a patern emerges. The arms crossed thing is a bit of a red herring. In all of his front covers he looks relaxed. Informal. Making cooking look like a piece of piss. He doesn’t need to do the whole arms crossed thing to look important or commanding.

Maybe you could say that Jamie’s got his arms crossed to add a bit of gravitas to his “Cook” book. And in the Jamie at Home book it’s a fairly relaxed bit of arm crossing afterall.

Gordon’s front covers are interesting too. But a bit harder to decypher. It seems that he’s gone from being a bit shy about his face by covering up his chin and not looking to camera to a place where he is now very happy to act as a model – almost like Tom Cruise in Cocktail. See what you think…

During the course of Gordon’s rise to fame loads of girls have fallen head over heals with Gordon for his gruff, assertive masculinity. His contoured face has become iconic and he’s stopped hiding it away.

Hugh’s front covers are the most consistent of all. Very Hugh. You get a picture of Hugh eating or holding whatever sums up his latest book. Simple. So Wittingstall.

It all goes to show that celebrity chefs are major brands these days. The same rules of branding apply to them as they would to any of the brands I work on. The look and feel is crucial and consistency of image is really imporant too.

I hope my amateur interest in body language hasn’t bored anyone too much!

Salmon Teryaki

Inspired by our delicious salmon teryaki at Roka and remembering my first encounter with dark, salty, sweet, soft salmon at Sosumi in Cape Town, I was eager to create the perfect version of it.

The beauty of it is that it is so soft, almost raw. Bright pink yet salty and deep with flesh that falls apart at the seams. Just like it should. You touch it with a chopstick and it yields.

I put my Heston hat on and decided to give the salmon a good burst of marinating. A combination of teryaki sauce, shallot, galang galang, chile, coriander, mirin and a drop of sesame oil worked its way into the firm fillets for about 3 hours before I popped them in their own little Baco sous vide bags.

When we’ve tried the boil in the bag method before we’ve had great results in terms of taste but have tended to slightly over do the cooking. To avoid this we used a far bigger pan and used the lowest flame. To keep the temperature down even more we added a handful of ice cubes to the warm/hot water so that it wouldn’t even think of overcooking whilst we had a bath.

I got a bit carried away with the whole water bath thing and went to check on my salmon with a towel wrapped around me. For a bit of a laugh I gave Cowie a shock by bringing one of the salmon parcels up to the bath with me and dropped it in the bath! Cowie was shocked! And even more so when I got my camera out!

But it makes an interesting point. The bath was at the ideal temperature to sous vide my salmon. It was probably at a better temperature than the pan on the stove!

When the flesh went from being firm to yielding a little when I poked it we whipped it out of the pan and opened up the pouches and drained them both into a bowl. The flesh was perfectly rare and they were deeply coloured and still, thankfully, in tact.

I took the fillets out of their juice and seared them skin side down on a griddle so the skin crisped up. There are few flavours I love more than crispy fish skin. Delicious.

In the meantime Cowie created a masterful stir fry featuring a variety of oriental mushrooms, seared pepper, sweetcorn and other oriental nibbles.

And it was stunning. Slow cooking, marinating and sous vide are the way forward. Especially when you get a bit of searing in there as well.

For our next trick we’ll be cooking venison on our car engine!

Poor old Ainsley

Nerdy Cup Cakes

Amazing cup cakes from Hello Naomi on Flickr via Boing Boing.

Here are some choice cup cakes from Clapham. Not quite up to the sheer style and quirkyness of Pacman and Mario, but good nonetheless.

Salad: The Silent Killer

Cowie… you’re not going to like this. But we aren’t allowed any more salad. Apparently it’s deadly because it is full of toxins. From Serious Eats.

Steaks and kebabs it is. Norris will be delighted!

"Take her up the Oxo Tower"

One of the best set of restaurant reviews you are ever likely to come across. Sent to my by Gilly.

A genuine set of reviews from London Eating:

“I took my work colleague up the OXO Tower recently; let’s call him Andy for the sake of anonymity, as a thank you for work well done during the previous year. Having been there many times before with other people, I was a little surprised at the nervous trepidation clearly displayed by Andy before entry. But the nerves soon subsided after the first course. We were joined later by some friends and Andy was clearly into the swing of things by this point.

The Oxo Tower is often underrated but never overstated. Highly recommended.”

George

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“When my boyfriend told me he wanted to take me up the Oxo Tower for my birthday, I was a bit hesitant at first because I didn’t really think it was my scene. How wrong I was! I mean, yeah, so it’s a bit of a strain on the old back pocket, and I admit I did feel a bit uncomfortable initially. But a couple of cocktails helped me relax and soon I was really getting into it – we carried on well into the night. It was a great experience and I really loved it – so much so that I won’t let my boyfriend take me anywhere else now! So if anyone ever wants to take you up the Oxo Tower, just throw caution to the wind and go for it!”

Rachel

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“I agree with Rachel – Last Friday evening I tried to take my girlfriend up the Oxo Tower but unfortunately we found it was completely full, so despite our best efforts, we just couldn’t get in. I even greased the odd palm in the hope of slipping in without too much of a fuss, but I didn’t want to push it. .

The next weekend we planned ahead and I have to say, the whole thing was much smoother. Of course, it was still a bit of a tight squeeze, but we took our time, didn’t rush in, and to my delight, we got inside.

One piece of advice: if you’ve never been there before, you might be a bit put off by the surroundings – sometimes you might find a few rather unattractive-looking hangers-on near the entrance but my advice is just keep your eyes firmly on the front door and before you know it, you’ll be safe inside.

So go on – give it a try. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but I know we’ll be going back as often as we can.”

Jason

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I wish I could think of something that was as funny as these… Bugger.