A Short Treatise on Pies

This is a piece I wrote late last year, but never posted. I was reminded of it yesterday when I read an article in the Guardian entitled 'How to Make the Perfect Steak and Ale Pie'. This article is part of a series by the normally-admirable Felicity Cloake; what she does is take a bunch of recipes from well-known cooking folks, makes them all and then figures out which is the best (and it's frequently an amalgam of several recipes). It's a terrific idea, and I have used many of her 'perfect' recipes for various things. However, with her 'pie' recipe, she has been seriously misled by the likes of The Hairy Bikers, Valentine Warner and Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall. All of the recipes she makes are for Things That Are Not Pies. See below; all will be explained...

For many food-related items in the UK, the latter part of the twentieth century saw a tremendous rise in industrialised production, with a corresponding fall in quality. Pies were no exception, and many people who grew up with some of the horrible products on the market at that time have a pretty dim view of the beasts. Fortunately, things have improved somewhat, and pies have been enjoying a bit of a revival. They are no longer looked down on as cheap, grotty products for the proles, although you don't have to look hard to find that kind of rubbish if you really don't care about what you eat.

So, what is a pie? According to the Melton Mowbray Pie Association, promoters of the annual British Pie Awards, 'a pie is deemed to be a filling totally encased in pastry'.

Now that's a fairly tight definition, but it would also allow things like Beef Wellington to be called pies, and lattice-topped fruit pies to be sent to the naughty corner. I understand why they defined it that way, and I more or less agree, because it keeps out Things That Are Not Pies: Pizzas; Flans; Quiches; Shepherd's Pie; Cottage Pie; and the dreaded bastard-son-of-pie favoured by many a pub landlord, the ceramic bowl full of slop with a slice of bought-in puff pastry sitting on top.

I have no doubt whatsoever that the MMPA chose their definition of a pie because of the rival UK pie competition, British Pie Week, sponsored by Jus-Rol Pastry, where Things That Are Not Pies are regularly favoured with awards.

The most popular savoury pie fillings are probably Steak & Kidney, Chicken & Mushroom and Minced Beef & Onion (the item after the '&' is normally there to provide a bit of bulk from something that's cheaper than meat). Unlike Spanish attempts at pies, the meat and vegetable is cooked in a tasty gravy or sauce. You can put pretty much anything you like in a pie, but stew-based fillings tend to be the most successful.

There are no hard and fast rules about what accompaniments should be served with a savoury pie, nor even about what should be in it, but if you visit any of the traditional pie shops in London's East End, your pie will be served with mashed potatoes, possibly peas (mushy or not), and 'liquor'. Now, this is a bit weird - it's basically a fishy parsley sauce and is a hangover from the days when the Thames was swarming with eels and most of them ended up in pies. The liquor was the water the eels were cooked in. These days, eels in the Thames are rarer than hen's teeth, and pie fillings have drifted to the meaty side of things, but the liquor continues.

You may also come across pies served with chips or french fries (and note, there is a significant difference between these things), and maybe with mixed vegetables and/or salad. If you're very lucky, you may be offered extra gravy.

I should mention at this point that not all pies are designed to be eaten hot. The main one in the 'eat-me-cold' category is the pork pie. This contains minced/chopped pork surrounded by a savoury jelly and encased in a fairly hard pastry. Traditionally, these pies are not made in moulds, but the pastry base is 'raised' around a wooden former called a 'dolly'. The jelly is poured in through a hole in the lid after the pie has been baked.

I actually took part in the British Pie Awards a couple of years ago: took a red-eye from Madrid, watched in dismay as airport security confiscated my gel-filled chilling packs, and arrived at Melton Mowbray in the English Midlands with warm and squishy pies that impressed nobody.

I had expected this pleasant market town that claims to have invented the Pork Pie to be in full fête, but none of the people I spoke to had ever heard of the Pie Awards. I'd also been expecting the place to be swarming with fellow pie-makers, and it possibly was, but you can only go up to so many strangers and ask them if they make pies before Social Services start taking an interest. The next day was Judgment Day, and while the public and the Gods of the Art of Pie were welcome to wander around the outskirts of the judging area, there really wasn't much to do until the results were announced at about 5pm.

I retired to one of the pubs adjoining the huge church where the awards were going on (and the vicar had blessed the pies, which I thought was rather enlightened of him), taking a bar-stool directly opposite the kitchen door. As I settled myself, one of the two oldish men in the kitchen put on his coat and announced he was off to pick up his car from the garage, leaving the other one fuming and grumbling out loud 'I'll feckin' killim, leavin' me on my own at lunchtime!' over and over.

I noticed they had Steak & Kidney Pie on the menu, and eavesdropped with interest when someone approached the barmaid and asked about it.
'Does it have pastry top and bottom?'
Aha, I though, a fellow competitor.
'Ooh yes,' said the barmaid, 'it's lovely.'

So he ordered one, and I watched in jaw-dropping, eye-rolling, tearing-my-hair-out horror as the grumbling madman in the kitchen assembled this utter travesty of a pie. He removed two frozen puff-pastry 'pie-shells' from the freezer, defrosted them in the microwave and popped them under a grille to brown. Meanwhile he heated up the S & K filling, put french fries and salad on a plate, and then built the 'pie' - one crust on the bottom, some filling, second crust on the top. I have never in my entire life seen anything so bizarre. Neither, I imagine, had the poor customer who'd ordered it, probably wouldn't be able to bring himself to eat it, but would still have to pay over a tenner for it. And this sacrilege was carried out on the very day of judgment of the British Pie Awards.

But I digress. You get the idea that I am passionate about pies. And so, I hope, are you. May the Pi be with you.

Treasure From England

I were brung up in Yorkshire, where we not only talk the most proper Inglish, we also invented t'world's best cuisine. Tha' knows, Yorkshire puddin, pease puddin, black puddin too, I shunt wonder, and o' course, t'world's best vegetable: mushy peas.

I've searched high and low for the makings of mushy peas (dried marrowfat peas, that's all) here in Madrid, but to no avail. You can get ready-made 'mushy peas' in tins, but these are bright green and not at all how they should be.

On my last two visits to England, trying to buy some marrowfat peas was a fairly high priority, but on both those trips I was in pansy London where you can easily get fancy foreign greenery like guacamole and pesto, but you really really can't get marrowfat peas.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine announced that he was shortly going to spend a week in Liverpool, and asked the usual question - is there anything you want? Normally this question is met with a polite 'no', but this time 'a kilo of marrowfat peas' was out of my mouth before I'd had time to think.

We met the other day so he could hand over the treasure. I offered him Britcoin in payment, but he was happy to accept a minced beef and onion pie instead. I was almost speechless when I saw what he'd got me though.




Four 250g boxes of Batchelor's Bigga peas. Wow. I didn't even think Batchelor's still existed. See, I worked for them one summer, about 1976? They had a factory in Sheffield, and for some reason they liked to hire people from our village and some of the surrounding ones, and bus us to the factory and back. My job was quite straightforward. Me and my buddies had to stand at the end of about four dehydration lines. These 'lines' were up a flight of stairs, and quite long. At the far end, trucks would deliver freshly-harvested things like peas or broad beans onto conveyor belts. Workers would pick out twigs, stones and other stuff that shouldn't be there, and the veg would slowly travel through long, open-ended ovens until they were all dried out.

The dehydrated vegetables would then sit patiently in a hopper until it was their turn to be bagged. This is where us bagging operatives came in. We had to fasten a big strong brown paper sack onto the end of a chute connected to the hoppers, pull a chain to release a bagfull of peas into the sack, unfasten the sack and lug it over to a kind of vertical sewing machine, stitch the top shut and then lug the sack onto a pallet.

And that was all cool and groovy, except when the sacks slipped off the end of the chute, or split when you lifted them, or you didn't stitch them shut properly. Whatever the cause, the result was dried peas all over the factory floor and remedial action involving a dustpan and shovel, and a fresh bag. Let's just say it wasn't terribly hygienic, and I'm sure any stray stuff was removed before the creation of a finished product to sell to the public..

But I digress. The day after I got these beauties, I made fish and chips and mushy peas. Very authentic, they were. You soak the peas for about 12 hours in water. Batchelor's supply a couple of tablets (probably bicarbonate of soda) to assist the soaking process. Strain the peas and cover them with fresh water in a pressure cooker. Bring to the boil, slap the lid on and give them 5-10 minutes. The peas should be soft, and some of them will have turned into an olive-green goo. And that's it, done, although you might want to add a bit of salt because they're somewhat bland if you don't.

Mushy peas. Ooh.

The Long Egg-speriment

This post is about Gala Pies and Long Eggs. If you don't know what either of these, I will now elucidate. A Gala Pie is a long version of a pork pie, typically baked in a bread tin and about the size, shape and weight as a brick. But far more tasty, unless of course, you're a troll. Gala Pies have a boiled egg running through the centre and are designed to be served in slices. Magically*, no matter where you cut the pie, you always get the full amount of egg yolk and egg white.

This is where the Long Egg comes in. Long hens became extinct aeons ago (possibly from exhaustion during the never-ending egg-laying), so these days we have to resort to magic technology to replicate their efforts. It seems that every commercial Gala Pie-maker considers the provenance of the Long Egg to be a trade secret, but my trawling of the Interwebz came up with solutions involving tubes of different diameters and the separate poaching of the yolks and the whites.

I rummaged around the kitchen and came up with a squeezy sauce bottle that seemed to be about the right diameter for the outer tube, so I cut the top off. The inner tube was more problematic, but I found some phallic pet feeder things that were only a little too big for the inner tube (I figured that was okay - more yolk, less white - only doctors like egg white anyway) in the local Chino.

I poured my yolks into one of the blue tubes, but was unable to seal the top so I had to rig up something with toothpicks and wire to keep the tube vertical while the yolks set. When it was done, I placed the long yolk into the wider tube, poured albumen around it and popped it back into the pan until it set. Getting the complete long egg out of the tube was a bit of a disaster, however. I hadn't thought to use any lubricant, and the egg white had become quite firmly attached to the polythene. So I had to cut it out with a knife and ended up with a somewhat mis-shapen long egg.

I had my pastry, jelly and pork filling all ready, and no time (or eggs) to make another long egg, so I chucked it in and baked it.



So the egg didn't look great, but the whole pie tasted fantastic.

That was a couple of weeks ago. I made another long egg this morning, using food-grade polythene tubes that I made myself using my heat-sealer. This one seems to have turned out pretty well, so I'll make another gala pie tomorrow. Wish me luck.

*Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke, 1961

An Interesting Discovery

Having lived in the Middle East, I'm a big fan of hummus, which is pretty much a staple of the diet there. In case you don't know, it's a puree of chick peas (garbanzos) and tahini and a little bit of garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. I have bought hummus once or twice since we moved to Spain, but not been impressed. And I've made it once or twice, but the price of tahini here is incredible - €6 - €8 for a half-litre pot.

I don't know why, but today I had the urge to find out whether tahini was something I could make myself. I'd always thought it was made by some mysterious fermentation process, but a quick trawl of the interwebz proved me (happily) wrong. It is nothing more than ground-up sesame seeds and a bit of olive oil.

I got me a bag of sesame seeds today, so guess what I'm going to make tomorrow!

The Great Juniper Hunt

A friend of mine is going through a phase of liking gin and tonics - the more exotic, the better. He is enthused by G & Ts served with cucumber, strawberry, and whatever else the creative barperson can think of. But the definitive additive is juniper berries. He'd discovered this before Christmas and (as a dude who knows his way around food shops and markets), I promised to get him some. Well, it wasn't unlike the experience of trying to buy a goose - blank looks, shrugged shoulders, etc. We discovered that the bars that had the berries had been given them by their gin suppliers. So I asked my son to get some in London and smuggle them through Customs. He drew a blank too.

And so the matter was quietly laid to rest, until yesterday. I'd delivered the final batch of pies to The Lock Inn for their Burn's Night Pie Night (a stonking success, by the way), and had a couple of hours to kill before the event started. I got myself a haircut, and then wandered up and down Calle Fuencarral in Malasaña, possibly by most favourite street in Madrid. And I happened upon a newly-opened shop called Tiger. I think this is a Scandiwegian chain, but I've never come across it before. I was enchanted. They have lots of really stupid little stuff, but it's all quite well designed and very cheap (a combination of two of my favourite things). They have toys, gifts, cosmetics and bathroom stuff, toys for geeks, general household stuff and KITCHEN STUFF! I got myself a stupid little battery-operated 'milk foamer' which I think will be good for beating eggs and milk for my pie glaze, and then I saw the rack of herbs and spices. And would you believe it, bags of juniper berries. Only €2!

So my mate finally got his Christmas present.

Cooking With Molecules

I've mentioned my brief forays into Molecular Gastronomy, but haven't posted any of my stunning successes yet. Mainly because there haven't been any. If you read the blogs of people who dabble in this stuff, it seems the first thing everyone wants to try is Spherification, and I'm no exception. The basic idea is to create blobs of intensely-flavoured liquid encapsulated in a gel skin that melts when you eat it, leaving a 'taste explosion' in your mouth. The classic example of this technique is Ferran Adriá's olive. It looks like an olive, but tastes more olivey than any real olive ever could. It's also possible to make small spheres of your liquid, and they look like caviar.

The basic idea is to add a gelling agent (sodium alginate) to your strongly-flavoured liquid, and then carefully drop spoonfuls or droplets from a syringe into a bath of calcium carbonate dissolved in water. When the alginate meets the CC, it sets into a gel. So a skin is instantly formed on the outside, leaving the inside liquid, well, liquid. You only leave your blobs in the CC for 1-3 minutes (depending on their size) and then you take them out, rinse in cold water, dry on a paper towel and serve (or throw in the bin, in my case).

We had a load of apples and pears left over from Christmas, so I pulped them and then made a consommé of them using the gelatine freeze-thaw method. This technique requires you to melt some bloomed gelatine into your liquid and then freeze it overnight. When it's frozen, you place it in a filter paper (or cheesecloth) inside a strainer over a bowl and leave it in the fridge for 2-3 days until the liquid has melted and dripped through the filter. The gelatine forms a kind of web that grabs hold of all the solids, while allowing the liquid to drip through into the bowl. The resulting liquid is perfectly clear, with all the flavour and colour of the original goop.

I made some 'caviar' of apples and pears, and also some bigger drops, a bit like small grapes. I showed one to MamaDuck, who freaked out a bit and said she would never eat it (so no apple sauce gel blobs for her tonight!). Some of the early attempts looked like tiny fetuses, most of the bigger blobs were malformed with extra mini-blobs or tails stuck to them, but the caviar looked good.

The main problem I have with spherification is getting the right proportion of chemicals in the solutions. The quantities required are quite tiny (like 1.5 grams), and I have no way of accurately measuring such tiny amounts. My digital scales claim to be able to weigh increments of 1g, but really, they don't. So I need to get hold of some scientific scales, but haven't been able to find any yet.

On a related note, I've been getting a fed up with the unreliability of gelatine for the jelly in my pork pies. Sometimes it's difficult to inject enough jelly into the pies, and sometimes the bloody stuff just won't set. I tried an experiment a few months ago where I poured liquid jelly into the pie case before baking, but it just soaked into the pastry and the meat.

So I've been looking at Agar Agar. This substance is extracted from seaweed (so it's suitable for veggies), and has some interesting properties. The ones I'm interested in are the gelling point and the melting point. For a 2% solution of agar agar, these are 38 and 89 degrees C. And the temperature at which minced pork can be declared cooked is 71C, so in theory I could wrap the meat in a sheet of set agar agar jelly and bake it without it melting. Now that would be a super-terrific thing if I could do it. If it worked, I could also put a blob of set jelly inside my albondigas (meatballs) to reduce their density and give a zing of something different in the middle - it doesn't have to be meat-flavoured, even, it could be apple-flavoured. Nom nom.

I'm rambling. Today I went off in search of agar agar. I know I could get this from Manuel Riesgo behind Gran Vía, but I didn't want to go into the centre. I found some powdered agar agar in a local health-food shop, but at €6 a spoonful I thought it was a bit overpriced. But I did notice it came from China and that gave me an idea. There's a street in our barrio that's like a mini Chinatown, so I went up there. The first shop I went to is so jam-packed with stock that there's no room for customers, but I asked them about it and they pointed me at HP Sauce and cans of corned beef (obviously as a gweilo-guiri, what else could I want?). The next one I tried was much better. It was actually big enough to accommodate the massive range of stuff they sell and still leave room for customers. Nice. They did have agar agar, but only in 1-kilo packs about the size of a cushion. I asked them if they had smaller packs, and the guy disappeared upstairs and came back with a 42g pack for €1.40. Marvellous. It's a terrific shop, actually, packed full of mysterious stuff. They have a section at the back that has everything you need to set up a Chinese restaurant - woks by the million, crockery, sizzler plates, cook's clothes, cleavers, knives, chopsticks. And I also noticed they had 1-kilo jars of whole black peppercorns for €6, and stuff like Schezuan pepper salt and other exotica at insanely-low prices. I'll definitely be back there next week.

Anyway, gotta dash, got to play with my agar agar.

Great British Food in Spain

The waiting is over and the website is now up and running. If you live in Central Madrid (inside the M-30 motorway), you can now order our fabulous pies: pork and pickle, chicken and ham, beef pasties, steak and kidney, chicken and mushroom, and a little apple one for your pudding. Oh, and we're also doing scotch eggs.

Great British Food. You know you lurve it.

Say Cheese!

I've never been keen on Spanish cheese, and the English and French cheeses I've bought in Spain never seem to have travelled well. Ho hum. And I've always been interested in the idea of trying to make my own cheese, but it looks pretty complicated, so I never did anything about it.

However, a couple of weeks ago, we had a Greek salad (at a Turkish restaurant - go figure). One of the essential components of a Greek salad is feta cheese, which I love, but I've only ever seen it in one shop in Madrid, at a higher price than I wanted to pay.

But it got me thinking. I looked up feta cheese recipes on the Interwebz, and it seemed fairly straightforward. I went to my local pharmacy and got some powdered rennet (cuajo, in Spanish), and my local Mercadona supermarket supplied some goat's milk. I was a bit worried, because supermarket milk is always highly sterilized / pastuerized / UHTd, and all the recipes say it's best to use fresh milk if you can.

Anyway, I followed the instructions as best I could, but I think I overheated the milk. Whatever the reason, I couldn't get a 'clean break' - it's hard to describe, but basically it's the point where the curds separate from the whey.

I left it overnight, but nothing much had changed, although it did taste like very good yoghurt. I poured it into a large plastic bottle and put it in the fridge, in the full expectation of having to eventually throw it away. But about five days later, my wife noticed some separation of curds and whey. We were travelling that afternoon, but before we went I poured the stuff into muslin cloths and hung them up over a pan, still not expecting much to happen, other than it making the apartment stinky.



But no! When we got back after four days, we had a pan full of whey, and two blobs of something that had the texture of a softish cheese. I cut the blobs into cubes and put them in a jar full of brine for a few days. And yesterday I tried a sample. It tasted just like feta cheese! There isn't a lot of it, and it's all going into a Greek salad tonight. I'd started off with three litres of milk, and finished up with about 250g of cheese, which makes it more expensive than the stuff I refused to buy from the shop, but the sense of accomplishment is indescribable.

I'll definitely try this one again.

Lost In Translation

Patatas Bravas is a fairly common dish in Madrid. It consists of chunks of fried potato topped with a spicy tomato-based sauce. We've been to the café that claims to have invented them, but nobody seems to know why they bear this name ('brave potatoes'). Sometimes, you'll see patatas written as papas. Papa also means father, and there's a Holy Father in the Vatican who is known as El Papa.

So I couldn't resist a little giggle the other day when I read a menu that had English translations. The translation of papas bravas was 'brave Popes'.

Perfect Pork Pie - Part Three

So, here it is:



I'm the first to admit there's room for improvement, but it was still better than edible. The pastry needs to be firmer to help it hold a better shape. The filling I think will be better once I've got me a grinder and can do it with proper meat. I actually put too much pepper in, and it could have done with a pinch of salt (I try to avoid using salt, but sometimes you've just got to). And the jelly, well, I should have left it alone.  Adding the soy sauce and reducing it more just made it unpleasantly strongly flavoured.

So, I may try this again next week. And given that the alternative in Spain is no pork pies at all, I'm quite happy.

Perfect Pork Pie - Part Two

The pork stock jelly finally looked like it was nearly ready - everything in it had disintegrated. At this point, you strain the liquid off, and then put it on a high heat until it reduces to about one-third. Then slap it in the fridge. Now make the pastry.

I don't do quantities, I do proportions, and I reckon you want about 2 parts flour to one part liquid*. Put your plain, ordinary flour into a bowl. Add as much or as little salt as you feel like and mix well. Melt your lard into some water (about the same volume of each). Make a well in the flour and gradually add the fatty liquid, stirring as constantly as you can. You'll eventually end up with a silky blob that doesn't stick to the sides of the bowl. Wrap the blob in clingfilm and stick it in the fridge.

Now you need to prep the meat. Most recipes I've seen have you grinding pork shoulder and pork fat, and maybe some pork belly and some even suggest adding some bacon. I don't have a meat grinder (yet!) so I'm using 'pork burger meat' from the supermarket (minced meat in Madrid supermarkets is always 'burger meat', which is probably a legal term indicating it will be 15% soy protein, 20% fat, 5% sweepings from the butchery floor, 10% breadcrumbs, and the remainder actual stuff from the carcass of a domesticated farm animal (including toenails, bristles, eyelashes and ground-up bones)). I've mixed some nutmeg into it and a LOT of ground black pepper.

The interesting thing about this not-really-a-recipe is the construction of the pie casing. In the video they use a thing called a pork-pie dolly as a former. Obviously I haven't got one of those, so I'm going to use a jam jar to form the base around. Wish me luck, off to try it now...

ONE HOUR LATER
Okay, 4 pork pies in da oven!

Cover the bottom and sides of your jam jar with flour to stop the pastry from sticking. Divide your pastry into bits that look big enough to form the bottom and sides of the pie-case. Roll one of these pieces into a ball. Then place it on your worktop and flatten it with your hand. Enlarge the circle of pastry until it's about an inch and a half wider than your jam jar. The pastry should be about a quarter of an inch thick. Pop the jam jar in the centre of the pastry disc, pick up the edges of the pastry and press them against the side of the jar. It's a bit like turning clay - infuriating at first, but eventually you get the pastry to stick to itself and then you can remove the jar.



The pastry will likely collapse in a heap, but don't worry. Take a ball of your meat mixture and place it inside the pastry case. Brush the lip and inner edge of the pastry base with beaten egg (this is your glue). Flatten a disc of pastry for the lid. Place it on top of the base and crimp the edges - try to have the edge raised slightly above the top of the pie.



Assemble the rest of your pies and preheat your oven to 180C. Now make a biggish hole in the lid of each pie - this is to let steam escape during cooking, and also for you to get your jelly in later. Brush the lids with beaten egg and slap 'em in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour.



Sit down and have a stiff drink. Bloody hell, you've earned it!

At this point, I took my jellied stock out of the fridge - it had set in a perfectly wobbly way, but I tasted a bit and it was slightly weird. Bland, like. So I'm reducing it a bit more and I've added some soy sauce.

ONE HOUR LATER

I think I might have to write a seriously honest cookbook. It'll be called something like 'What To Do When The Fecking Recipe Doesn't Work'. After 45 mins of medium temperature cooking, my pies were pale, uninteresting and probably lethally undercooked. I whacked the temperature up to 230C for fifteen minutes. At the end of which they had expanded horizontally and stuck together. So I've spread them apart and they're getting another fifteen minutes.

(There might well be a gap in the market for a cook-book that tells it like it is. It would have to be a big thick thing. If I was to write down this recipe, for example, it would be a helluva lot more concise than this blog post. Somebody once asked me how I got my spaghetti to taste so wonderful. I probably goggled at her like a goggle-eyed thing. It's astoundingly simple: bring a load of water to a rolling boil, chuck the spag in, stir it a bit, turn down the heat, wait eight point three five minutes, drain and serve. No, she said, how do you get it to taste so buttery? Oh, well obviously after you've drained it and before you serve it, you put it back in the pan with a knob of butter and give it a good ole whizz round and then serve it. Sheesh, do I have to tell you everything?)

And while I was writing that ^^^, the damn porkies were in the oven for another fifteen minutes: sides not done, see.

Any road up, as we like to say in Yorkshireland, here they are:



Nice colour on the tops, rubbish shape, but I expect they'll taste fab (presentation is nothing, do you see). It's gone midnight here. These babbies need to cool down before I try to jellify them, so they're going in the fridge and I'll attempt the jelly thing in the morning. I guess this is why pork pies are made in factories. Anyhoo, look out for Part Three, The Verdict.

And goodnight.

*In retrospect, I'd try 2.5 to 3 times more flour than liquid'n'fat. Stiffer, see.

Mejillones

Say what? Meh-hi-yo-nes. Mussels. I've fallen in love with them again. When we had our visitors a few weeks ago, I made a paella, and bought fresh mussels and langostinos from Mercadona (a supermarket near us: not quite near enough to visit every day, but well worth a trip for special things). I was amazed, nay, gob-smacked, at the prices of their seafood. And yes, I know I should have gone to the Mercado, but we were also after other stuff that the market doesn't have. Get this. One kilo of mussels for €1.80. Insane or what? Admittedly, they are not premium quality mussels: there'll be at least six stiffs in your bag, and the remainder will have beards like Rip Van Winkle and the shells will have more barnacles and fossilised pigeon shit than the Titanic. But inside they are fat, juicy, sea-flavoured lumps of yum (except for the wobbly shiny green bit, and I try not to think about what that actually is).

So, apart from sticking them in a paella, what can you do with mussels? I just lurve Moules Mariniere. Okay, it's French, but it's dead easy to make and packed with nutrition (no fat, no carbs, just a ton of protein).

You want the recipe? Okay, here goes:

All you need (for two people) is a kilo of fresh mussels, maybe half an onion, some chopped parsley and a couple of cloves of garlic. And some white wine. And some EVOO and/or butter.

To prepare the mussels (this is the slightly pain-in-the-arse, time-consuming bit): slap 'em in a bowl or sink full of cold water for at least half an hour. Throw away any that are open or that have cracked shells. Then de-beard them - grab hold of the beard and tug it towards the hinged end of the shell: don't do it the other way, 'cos that will rip the mussel to bits. Scrape off any crud from the shell with a sharp knife, and give them a good old rinse in clear cold water.

Chop your onion up finely and sautė in the butter/oil until a bit transparent. Throw in your minced / crushed / squashed flat and sliced garlic and stir around for a bit. Throw in some white wine - how much? I don't know: enough - maybe a glass or two - you want about a centimetre of liquid in your pan. Plop in the parsley. Turn up the heat, and when the wine is boiling, throw in the mussels. Turn down the heat so it simmers, cover the pan with a lid or sheet of metal foil, and leave it alone for about ten minutes. At this point you can sneak a look: if all the mussels have opened, they're done: if not, maybe give it a few more minutes. Any that refuse to open at all are stiffs: bin them.

When you think they're all cooked, remove the cover from the pan, take the mussels out with a slotted spoon and pop them into a bowl. Turn up the heat to max and let the liquor reduce to about 50% (there are those who advocate adding cream, in which case you'd want the liquor to cool down somewhat, otherwise the cream will curdle - and you'd have to put the cooked mussels into a warm oven, where they'll turn to rubber). When the liquor has reduced, throw the mussels back in, give 'em a stir round and serve.

This a real simple peasant dish: you can serve it with hunks of crunchy baguette, potatoes dauphinoise or chips and mayonnaise. Hell, you could even have a salad with it.

It's just the best thing.

Richmond

The day after MIL's cremation, those of us who hadn't had to rush off home went up to Richmond in North Yorkshire to scatter the ashes. MIL was a great fan of 'All Creatures Great And Small', and we all felt she would have loved this idea. One of my brother's-in-law had arranged for us to have lunch at the Frenchgate Hotel in Richmond. Despite my Yorkshire/Geordie roots, I'd never been to Richmond before, and I was quite amazed by how beautiful it was.

The Frenchgate in Richmond

David Todd, the owner, always smiling in the face of adversity

The Frenchgate is a small, privately-owned hotel and restaurant. It's a gorgeous Georgian town house that has been lovingly restored. We were greeted and served by the owner, David Todd, whose calm confidence and wicked Yorkshire wit put us at ease immediately. I have to say this was probably the best meal I've ever had in my life, and I have had some good 'uns. I had partridge with potatoes boulangere, chorizo and swede (I hate swede, but this was little roasted cubes and it was perfect). There was also a blob of pumpkin mousse. MamaDuck had lamb stuffed with quinoia. After the main course, David brought the chef out for a well-deserved round of applause.

The lamb

If we can manage the finances and the time, I really want to go back next summer and spend a couple of days there. And if you ever find yourself within a hundred miles of Richmond, you should too. Tell David Richard Branson sent you.

The Frenchgate Hotel's website is here.

Tortilla de Patatas

I posted about my early attempts at making this classic Spanish staple here and here.

A year later, I reckon I'm an expert, so here's how you do it.

You will need:
8 or 9 eggs
about half a kilo of spuds, peeled and sliced thinly
a generous pinch of salt
50% olive oil, 50% vegetable oil
possibly some lemon juice
a proper non-stick 20 cm frying pan
a circular dinner plate
45 - 60 minutes

And here's what you do:
Half fill the pan with the oil. Heat it gently. Put the spuds in the oil, and stir to make sure they are all coated. The idea is to soften the spuds without browning them. It will take about half an hour, and you need to give them a stir every now and again. When the potatoes are cooked, remove them from the oil. If you don't expect to eat the tortilla all in one go, you can sprinkle lemon juice on them - this will stop them from going grey over the next few days (there's nothing wrong with the spuds in your tortilla going grey - it just doesn't look very appetising).

Break your eggs into a bowl, throw in the salt, and beat with a whisk or fork until the egg whites and yolks are thoroughly mixed. Add the potatoes and stir.

Drain most of the oil from the pan, leaving a thin coating. Turn up the heat a little (about 60% of full), and pour the egg and potato mixture in. When the mixture has begun to set, pull the edges away from the pan with a spatula - you're trying to get a rounded shape to the edge of the tortilla.

Now we come to the tricky bit - turning it over. Traditionally this is done by holding an oiled dinner plate against the top of the pan, and turning them over. In Spain, you can buy a thing called a vuelca de tortilla, basically a plastic lid with a knob on one side for holding it.

Once you have the tortilla on the plate, slide it back into the pan and continue cooking and shaping the edge. Turn it two more times, so each side gets cooked twice, and when you have a nice golden colour on both sides, you're done.

It's important not to overcook the tortilla. I prefer ones that still have a little bit of runniness in the centre, but more sensitive souls prefer them to be cooked solid. Let it cool for a bit, and then cut yourself a wedge and serve with a hunk of crunchy baguette and a caffe con leche. Perfect!

Haggis

I'm not usually one for Burn's Night, not being Scottish, an' all. In fact it usually passes me by without me noticing it at all. This year is different, of course. It's the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robbie Burns, who wrote lots of unintelligible stuff like this:

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

Now the thing you have to have on Burn's Night is a haggis (and also bashed neeps, tatties, lots of wee drams and a piper for the dancin'). Haggii were fairly easy to come by in Dubai, believe it or not. You could get frozen Sweeney's, or you could get a canned version. But here in sunny Madrid, not a chance. I thought, fleetingly, that I might make my own, and so I looked up some recipes on the interweb. Easy! All you need is a sheep's pluck, and its stomach. Hmmm, and what's a sheep's pluck, exactly? Well, it's the heart, lungs and liver. You chop 'em all fine and mix 'em up wi' some onions, oatmeal and spices. Then you sew them intae the stomach and boil fra long time.

Bleaghhh! I don't know if I'll ever be able to eat haggis again, now that I know what goes into it.

Winter in Madrid

Winter arrived with a vengeance yesterday. At approximately 4.40 in the afternoon. MamaDuck had arrived home from work at 4pm, and reported the weather to be fairly pleasant. I arrived home from shopping at 5pm, absolutely chilled to the bone. Horrible, it was.

Northern Spain has had snow overnight, and forecast temperatures for Madrid for the next five days don't get higher than 10°C, and go down as low as 2°C. Brrr.

So this is definitely Cocido season. Cocido Madrileño is a wondrous thing: soup and stew, all in one. Warming, filling, and almost healthy (it contains all major food groups except chocolate), it's absolutely perfect for lunch or dinner on a cold winter's day. Basically, it's a big ole stew. It contains scrag-end of unnamed meat, big lumps of fat, chorizo, morcilla (black pudding), potato, carrot, onion and cabbage, and loads of garbanzos (chick peas). There could also be a chicken in there. These are all stewed together for a few hours, and then some of the stock is drained off. You cook up some noodles in this stock, and serve it as the first course. And then you serve the meat and veg as the main course.

I've had it several times as a menu del dia, and usually been disappointed, mainly because the main course is bone dry, and I likes a bit o' gravy with me dinner. I had one today though, and it was very nearly perfect. They bring you a bowl with some cooked noodles in it, and an earthenware jug that contains everything else: you decide how much liquid you want with each bit of the meal.

Marvellous!

Wacky Food Meme

Jayne With A Why found this totally pointless but irresistible waste of time: 100 things you may or may not have eaten. It comes from Very Good Taste.

Copy this list, embolden the items you have tried, add sarcastic comments to taste. Then go to Very Good Taste and add to the millions of comments on that post.

1. Venison

2. Nettle tea (nope: I really only like tea that's made out of, like, tea)

3. Huevos rancheros (sounds Spanish - must o' done)

4. Steak tartare (only once though...)

5. Crocodile

6. Black pudding (fried and crunchy)

7. Cheese fondue (why?)

8. Carp (don't think so)

9. Borscht (beetroot, yeuch!)

10. Baba ghanoush

11. Calamari

12. Pho

13. PB&J (peanut butter & jelly) sandwich

14. Aloo gobi

15. Hot dog from a street cart

16. Epoisses (???)

17. Black truffle 

18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes

19. Steamed pork buns (how bizarre)

20. Pistachio ice cream

21. Heirloom tomatoes (???)

22. Fresh wild berries

23. Foie gras 

24. Rice and beans

25. Brawn, or head cheese (yueck: used to sell it when I worked on the deli counter at Sainsbury's - it was only ever bought by Martians)

26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (hottest chilli on the planet, thank you but NO!)

27. Dulce de leche

28. Oysters (snot on a shell - not doing it again)

29. Baklava (not doing that again either)

30. Bagna cauda 

31. Wasabi peas

32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl

33. Salted lassi (?? Lassi I think, yes)

34. Sauerkraut (yes, but, why)

35. Root beer float (root beer with a blob of ice cream? Yepp)

36. Cognac with a fat cigar (don't do cigars)

37. Clotted cream tea

38. Vodka jelly

39. Gumbo

40. Oxtail (one of my favourite Spanish dishes is rabo de torro)

41. Curried goat (half a point - roast goat, not curried)

42. Whole insects (no fucking way. Filleted is okay)

43. Phaal (not knowing)

44. Goat’s milk (made into cheese, yes)

45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more (wasted on me - I'd only put Coke in it)

46. Fugu (poisonous fish? feck off)

47. Chicken tikka masala (England's national dish - of course!)

48. Eel (not knowingly)

49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut (bleuch)

50. Sea urchin (bleuch)

51. Prickly pear

52. Umeboshi 

53. Abalone

54. Paneer 

55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal 

56. Spaetzle

57. Dirty gin martini

58. Beer above 8% ABV 

59. Poutine (sounds good though - gotta lurve dem trans-fats)

60. Carob chips

61. S’mores 

62. Sweetbreads (I'd rather die)

63. Kaolin (strangely, yes (with morphine, right?))

64. Currywurst (made-up food)

65. Durian ('the smell evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust...')

66. Frogs’ legs (the waitress who served it was a vegetarian friend, and she explained exactly how they got the legs when she took the order: first and last time)

67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake 

68. Haggis 

69. Fried plantain

70. Chitterlings, or andouillette (despite liking haggis, I couldn't stoop to chitterlings)

71. Gazpacho 

72. Caviar and blini

73. Louche absinthe 

74. Gjetost, or brunost 

75. Roadkill 

76. Baijiu 

77. Hostess Fruit Pie (???)

78. Snail 

79. Lapsang souchong

80. Bellini 

81. Tom yum 

82. Eggs Benedict 

83. Pocky

84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant

85. Kobe beef 

86. Hare 

87. Goulash 

88. Flowers (the beer, yes, the plant product, no)

89. Horse (not knowingly)

90. Criollo chocolate (???)

91. Spam 

92. Soft shell crab (too much effort)

93. Rose harissa 

94. Catfish 

95. Mole poblano 

96. Bagel and lox

97. Lobster Thermidor

98. Polenta 

99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee 

100. Snake

I don't know how they could have omitted the pinnacle of Scottish cuisine:

101. Deep-fried Mars Bar

There is a Pie

Long-time followers of this blog and my Dubai blog, will be aware of my fondness for 'proper' steak and kidney pies, big hunks of roasted meat and incidentals like Yorkshire Pudding and roast potatoes.

You need an oven for all of these things, and our mini-kitchen does not include one. We used to have a combi-oven (microwave, grill and convection oven) that we shipped from Dubai at great expense. But it stopped working about a week before Christmas. I couldn't figure out any way to get it fixed, and so everything I've cooked since then has been boiled or fried.

I've had a couple of attempts to get a steak and kidney pie in Madrid: once at the only 'British' chip shop in central Madrid, where they had microwaved it (this is an extremely bad thing), and once in an Irish bar where it was actually described as a 'meat pie' (unnamed meat, of course, and I still haven't worked out what animal it came from). The unnamed meat pie came without pastry. It was just some cubes of unpleasant-tasting meat, covered in mashed potato, mushy peas and gravy. Crap. Absolute crap.

I have searched in vain for a combi-oven in Madrid. There are plenty of microwaves kicking around, many of them with grills. And lots of DeLonghi Italian free-standing ovens. But no combis. Actually I did find some combis in an El Corte Inglés a few weeks ago, but the cheapest was 325 Euros.

But there is Good News! Yesterday, I took delivery of a brand-new combi oven, courtesy of UK Shopping in Spain. They will buy/order stuff from shops in the UK and arrange for it to be shipped to Spain. So the combi that I chose came from Curry's. The cost of the oven and the shipping was about 180 Euros, and it took about 11 days to get here. Once I'd unpacked it to check that nothing was broken, I rushed off to the shops to get some steak, and some kidneys, and some frozen pastry. Unfortunately we had a vegetarian buddy coming round for dinner last night, so the pie was delayed. But I did use the new toy to grill some goat cheese with cinnamon and brown sugar, and that was grand.

Disappointing

We were wandering around Malasaña yesterday, and happened upon an Arabic restaurant round the corner from Plaze de Dos de Mayo. It looked very pleasant, so in we went. The lack of customers should have sent us a signal - this was three o'clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon, so the place should have been busy.

We ordered hummus, tabbouleh, lamb tagine and lamb couscous. Waiting for the food to arrive, I began to feel a bit nostalgic for our Middle East days. But the food soon cured that. The hummus had cumin in it, but it was ok. The tabbouleh was 80% burghul with a few flecks of parsley and mint, the reverse of the quantities that I'm used to. Never mind, I thought, maybe that's how they do it in Morocco. I imagined they'd definitely be able to do an authentic tagine - a rich, spicy, zingy, meaty stew.

So I almost fell off my chair when the waiter removed the conical ceramic lid from my dish. There was a small lamb shank, surrounded by chips. No vegetables, no sauce, no spice and definitely no zing. It was just unbelievable.

However, it's inspired me to go hunting for the ingredients of hummus and tabbouleh so I can make my own - in Dubai I would usually have a bowl of one or the other in the fridge: it's good healthy stuff, has a reasonable fridge-life, and goes with more or less anything.

Getting There

I made another tortilla today, after investing in a plastic tortilla flipper (I think it's called a vuelca tortilla en Español). Definitely 1 Euro well-spent.



This thing made the flipping flipping easy. In today's experiment I left out the onion, and I didn't par-boil the spuds; just sauteed them for about a month. I'm not sure that the spud-cooking method made much of a difference, so I think I'll revert to par-boiling next time. And I used eight eggs instead six, and was really stingy with the heat. The result, I declare to be about 85% perfect.





I got a nice shape to the edge, perfect colour on the top (ok, I admit, the underside is a little browner), and a pleasing moistness within (that sounds almost pornographic, doesn't it?). I'm pretty pleased with this effort, and if there's any left by the time MamaDuck gets home tonight I'm sure she will be too!