or
Check Out The Rack
Despite liking Christmas about as much as your average professional footballer likes crosswords I do like the grub. Well, most of the grub because I’ve never really understood mince pies – maybe because they always come out when food is the last thing on your list of must-do’s. And don’t get me started on turkey…
This year I’ve made an early start on Spiritus Festivitus by trying my hand at some sweets, candied ginger and lemon slices to be precise. Mrs B initiated the sudden interest confectionary by purchasing a small (and very expensive) bag of chocolate coated candied stem ginger. Me being me thought “I must be able to do that” so, sans a bit of Googling, I bought myself a load of fresh root ginger, some cane sugar, some very nice Lindt dark chocolate and some frighteningly expensive Valrhona cocoa powder and hit the kitchen.
In terms of quantities the Chocolate Coated Candied Ginger recipe revolves around:
3 or 4 big bits of ginger, peeled and cut into sugar cube sized, erm, cubes (boiling will shrink them a little)
Roughly the same weight of sugar as the ginger
A 250 gram bar of 70% dark chocolate (quality counts here – don’t go for the cheap stuff)
Cocoa powder for dredging/powdering/dusting or whatever
The ginger is boiled for an hour or so in water until it is tender. Drain it off (keep the water for a mean ginger tea), return to the saucepan with the sugar and a two or three tablespoons of the water. Heat until the sugar is dissolved and boil gently for 1-1½ hours. Do not stir as this can cause the sugar to crystalize, just fidget the saucepan a bit now and again. It may be necessary to add a tiny bit of ginger water if the syrup gets too thick. When tender and opaque (they look like bits of amber when done) drain them off and place on grease-proof paper to cool. The syrup is fantastic with vanilla ice cream by the way.
Now you can either zap the chocolate in a microwave or melt it in a bowl over simmering water (or melt it in your specialized chocolate melter, geek). Then take a few bits of ginger, bung them in the choc, fish them out individually (a fork is a surprisingly useful utensil for this) and place them on a new sheet of grease-proof paper. When they are all coated it’s off to the fridge to set for a bit.
Now, when nice and non-sticky you have a choice. You can choose between going straight to the cocoa coating stage or do the chocolate dip a second time to give a thicker, more intense chocolate armour plating. But whether you’re a one or two dip person your sweets should be rolled in cocoa powder only when cool or else you’ll get too much cocoa sticking to them. I was mightily pleased I pushed the boat out and paid almost £7 for 250 grams of Valrhona cocoa powder as this smells and tastes so much better than the cheaper stuff and 250 grams goes a long way.
What you get is the still-quite-fiery-yet-sweet hit of ginger then the bittersweet chocolate soothing takes over and,finally, when that’s gone the ginger returns. It's magic. And, as my foodie work colleague Jacob put it, ginger is terribly good for you.
So, after the success of the ginger, I put my mind to creating something fruity. It was sort of a request from Mrs B who wanted candied orange peel. I was in our local supermarket and they had some nice (and quite cheap) organic lemons so I got a couple and another bar of Lindt’s and thought “bugger the oranges” (they were overpriced and not very ripe anyway).
My recipe is not really anything you can’t easily find on-line. The bit which makes it MY recipe is in the drying out of the candied fruit. Which isn’t really part of the recipe at all to be honest but for the sake of being thorough this is how I tackled my Chocolate Coated Candied Lemons (and one Lime):
2 organic lemons (and one organic lime found in the fruit bowl)
1 cup of non-organic potable water (we have it on tap)
2 cups of sugar
Boiling water (for blanching)
Frozen water (cubed)
Intermediate water (in a bowl) (where the ice cubes go to maketh chilly)
Ok, the on-line recipes called for thee to thinly slice thou citrus fruits on a mandolin. I’ve had a mandolin phobia ever since I lopped a large amount of epidermis from one of my teenage fingers whilst rummaging around in a kitchen drawer (so much blood) so we own nothing more than a blunt grater. And another recipe used the old two-wooden-skewers-either-side-of-the-lemon trick which is too much hard work for a slouch like me so I decided to slice the fruit thinly using a very sharp knife. Vorsprung Trotz Teknik, so to speak.
Once beautifully (if not completely uniformly) sliced and de-pipped the fruit is then blanched in the boiling water for a couple of minutes (to remove the bitterness of the pith), removed with a slotted spoon and dumped into the bowl of iced water (I honestly don't know why you have to do this - I got it off a Martha Stewart recipe. It probably has something to do with insider trading). As with the ginger recipe the boiled water should under no circumstances be thrown out as it makes a splendid cordial when chilled then topped up with the lemon syrup (we’ll get to that).
Now the 1 cup of water (by the by, I just used a normal cup of muggish size – not the proper American unit of measurement) and 2 cups of sugar are added to the saucepan and heated until the sugar is dissolved. Luzz in the lemons and lime (or kumquat, orange, or hell, even pomelo slices if you’re in the mood), bring to a gentle boil and cook for about an hour and a half. As with the ginger you should only swirl the contents of the pan now and again – do not stir. You now have ample candied samples in need of a rack. I do not own a proper rack. Well I do but it’s never completely clean and I’d imagine the brown stuff stuck to it would perhaps spoil my beautiful, translucent, yellow pieces of stained glass windows. And I definitely do not own what the American recipes called “non-stick spray” (unless they mean WD40). So I came up with something I think is better than a bog-standard rack. I call it my Candied Samples Gravity Defying Rack. To make it you take a piece of grease-proof paper half as long again as the baking tray (the one you now know you’re going to need). Then you make a harmonica, folding about a centimeter at a time. This takes quite a few minutes but is worth it. When you’re finished you now have the perfect rack. So to speak. It looks like a lot of W’s (WWWWWWWWWW – if you’re in doubt). I taped each end to the ends of the baking tray for added rigidness (a rack needs to be firm yet pliable). You now lay each slice of fruit across the peaks where it all has to dry for about 24 hours. If there are insects about a cold oven is a good place for drying. The citrus syrup must be saved for adding to soft (or preferably hard) drinks.
So, after your 24 hours, the slices are ready for dunking in your molten chocolate. If you only dip half of each slice it saves chocolate and adds visual wowness. The bare lemon can be a tad sticky so if you want to avoid this then coat the entire slice. Place on (flat) grease-proof paper and put in the fridge to set.
I will try the orange slices soon. After the 24 hour drying period I’ll slice them in two for the sake of size. The plan is to do a good sized batch each of both ginger and citrus sweets and give them as Crimbo prezzies. That’s me done and (cocoa) dusted then.
Edit: January 2012. The next batch of chocolate coated whatevers comprised of lemons, oranges, grapefruit, coffee beans and sour cherries (bought in a jar) which I soaked in Kirsch for an hour before dunking. They were all superb. I also sugar coated some halved candied grapefruit slices (pure laziness - I was rather tired of the choco-dipping by this point) simply by chucking them into a bowl of sugar and tossing them about for a bit.
Thursday 24 November 2011
Wednesday 19 January 2011
A Quick Snail Recipe
You would think that if you pulled the shell off a snail it would move quicker. I tried but if anything it made it sluggish.....
Many thanks to our favourite peace artist Mr Gerald Leonardo Salvador Vincent Pablo Dinnage for that one which leads me boldly into my first post of 2011 after totally hurdling 2010 for a variety of reasons none of which were due to the lack of decent nosh which we have lobbed down our gob holes. Indeed 2010 has been the Year Of The Gadget in the Casa del B. We’ve been given a magnificent manual sausage filler by my Godfather. We bought a table top pizza oven (makes unbelievable pizzas in about four minutes), a juice maker, a new rice steamer (wore the old one out), a vacuum sealer, a bread maker and finally coughed up the heady sum of £24 in Ingerlund this Crimbo for a slow cooker.
And to boot I’ve made my own bacon as well as a parma ham, both of which turned out rather well. Next up will be home made black pudding after I bought enough dried pigs blood to make 15 kgs of finished pud.
But back to the gastropods. Seeing as Mrs B and myself “enjoy” a large lunch each day at our respective places of toil we tend to eat lightly of an evening. I suppose we do supper now, not dinner. Anyway we’d had a punnet of parsley in the fridge which needed using, there was a half a packet of butter that couldn’t have been more than a few weeks past its sell-by date and finally there was a tin of snails in the cupboard (as there often is).
And this is what I came up with, basically in an attempt to use up rather a lot of parsley.
Poor Homeless Garlic Snails With Parsley and Garlic Purée
20-24 or so snails serves 2 for a light meal or 4 as a starter
A tin of snails (always a good idea to have another tin in hand as I opened one once only to find it contained but five snails)
Half a packet of butter
A bag/punnet/big bunch of parsley (flat-leaf or curly) including the stalks
Plenty of cloves of garlic
A splash of white wine
Salt and pepper
Crusty bread or baguettes
Ok, start by draining the snails then leaving them for a few minutes to soak in cold water. If you give them a good sniff before you do this you’ll understand why I do it. They do tend to pong and the soaking in fresh water seems to loosen the flesh up a tad, making them even more tender than usual.
To make succulent, juicy garlic snails warm the butter in a saucepan on a medium-low heat with as much chopped garlic as is legally allowed. The idea is to extract as much garlicness from it without actually frying it. If you keep it gently simmering along you can set this going a good half hour or more before you need it. The garlic will eventually disintegrate which is a very good thing. Then when almost ready give it a spludge of white wine then delicately roll in the snails (or just bung them in). These need but a gentle warming through, giving them enough time to absorb the holy garlicbutteryness but without actually cooking them. Finally season with salt and pepper.
Now for the parsley purée. Wash the parsley well then bung it into salted boiling water with a fistful of chopped garlic for two or three minutes. Then, after draining, lob it in a blender/food processer, give it a blitz, season with some finely ground black pepper (and salt if required).
To serve put a couple of spoonfuls of purée on a warmed plate or, preferably, a shallow bowl and flatten it out in a circular motion leaving a couple of centimetres gap to the edge of said serving receptacle. Place some snails in the middle of the purée then pour the garlicybutteryness around the edge of it all. Serve with crusty bread. This is simply the best garlic snails I’ve ever had. The parsley purée is simply a revelation. And, funnily enough, it’s healthier than your normal escargots a la bourguignonne as you use less butter and more gweenewy. Not that I give a thlying thuck about calorie counting, mind....
If snails don’t thingy one’s dingy then one can use fungi instead. My way of cooking mushrooms is a bit different to how I understand is “the right way” where you fry them on a very high heat. I prefer to:
1) Keep my mushrooms, be they whatever type/breed/persuasion, in large bits/slices/chunks
2) Fry them in a little olive oil on a medium heat, they must not burn.
3) Just as they start to give off liquid remove from pan
4) Make the garlicbutterconcoction from above in same cooking vessel
5) Return mushrooms and reheat through
By doing them this way the mushrooms retain a nice bite and texture. I’ve used normal and brown mushrooms as well as Portobello and chanterelles. One day, one autumn, one year, I’ll get to do a bit of proper mushroom hunting coz I just know ceps would taste fantastic like this.
We’re off to Barcelona for four days of gastronomic exploration at the end of the month. This time we’ve rented a rather nice looking apartment overlooking the harbour in Barceloneta. The idea is that, on top of eating in restaurants and bars, we can buy stuff in the various markets to take home and prepare. Goose barnacles are top of our “must buy” list. Can’t-Bloody-Wait.
Many thanks to our favourite peace artist Mr Gerald Leonardo Salvador Vincent Pablo Dinnage for that one which leads me boldly into my first post of 2011 after totally hurdling 2010 for a variety of reasons none of which were due to the lack of decent nosh which we have lobbed down our gob holes. Indeed 2010 has been the Year Of The Gadget in the Casa del B. We’ve been given a magnificent manual sausage filler by my Godfather. We bought a table top pizza oven (makes unbelievable pizzas in about four minutes), a juice maker, a new rice steamer (wore the old one out), a vacuum sealer, a bread maker and finally coughed up the heady sum of £24 in Ingerlund this Crimbo for a slow cooker.
And to boot I’ve made my own bacon as well as a parma ham, both of which turned out rather well. Next up will be home made black pudding after I bought enough dried pigs blood to make 15 kgs of finished pud.
But back to the gastropods. Seeing as Mrs B and myself “enjoy” a large lunch each day at our respective places of toil we tend to eat lightly of an evening. I suppose we do supper now, not dinner. Anyway we’d had a punnet of parsley in the fridge which needed using, there was a half a packet of butter that couldn’t have been more than a few weeks past its sell-by date and finally there was a tin of snails in the cupboard (as there often is).
And this is what I came up with, basically in an attempt to use up rather a lot of parsley.
Poor Homeless Garlic Snails With Parsley and Garlic Purée
20-24 or so snails serves 2 for a light meal or 4 as a starter
A tin of snails (always a good idea to have another tin in hand as I opened one once only to find it contained but five snails)
Half a packet of butter
A bag/punnet/big bunch of parsley (flat-leaf or curly) including the stalks
Plenty of cloves of garlic
A splash of white wine
Salt and pepper
Crusty bread or baguettes
Ok, start by draining the snails then leaving them for a few minutes to soak in cold water. If you give them a good sniff before you do this you’ll understand why I do it. They do tend to pong and the soaking in fresh water seems to loosen the flesh up a tad, making them even more tender than usual.
To make succulent, juicy garlic snails warm the butter in a saucepan on a medium-low heat with as much chopped garlic as is legally allowed. The idea is to extract as much garlicness from it without actually frying it. If you keep it gently simmering along you can set this going a good half hour or more before you need it. The garlic will eventually disintegrate which is a very good thing. Then when almost ready give it a spludge of white wine then delicately roll in the snails (or just bung them in). These need but a gentle warming through, giving them enough time to absorb the holy garlicbutteryness but without actually cooking them. Finally season with salt and pepper.
Now for the parsley purée. Wash the parsley well then bung it into salted boiling water with a fistful of chopped garlic for two or three minutes. Then, after draining, lob it in a blender/food processer, give it a blitz, season with some finely ground black pepper (and salt if required).
To serve put a couple of spoonfuls of purée on a warmed plate or, preferably, a shallow bowl and flatten it out in a circular motion leaving a couple of centimetres gap to the edge of said serving receptacle. Place some snails in the middle of the purée then pour the garlicybutteryness around the edge of it all. Serve with crusty bread. This is simply the best garlic snails I’ve ever had. The parsley purée is simply a revelation. And, funnily enough, it’s healthier than your normal escargots a la bourguignonne as you use less butter and more gweenewy. Not that I give a thlying thuck about calorie counting, mind....
If snails don’t thingy one’s dingy then one can use fungi instead. My way of cooking mushrooms is a bit different to how I understand is “the right way” where you fry them on a very high heat. I prefer to:
1) Keep my mushrooms, be they whatever type/breed/persuasion, in large bits/slices/chunks
2) Fry them in a little olive oil on a medium heat, they must not burn.
3) Just as they start to give off liquid remove from pan
4) Make the garlicbutterconcoction from above in same cooking vessel
5) Return mushrooms and reheat through
By doing them this way the mushrooms retain a nice bite and texture. I’ve used normal and brown mushrooms as well as Portobello and chanterelles. One day, one autumn, one year, I’ll get to do a bit of proper mushroom hunting coz I just know ceps would taste fantastic like this.
We’re off to Barcelona for four days of gastronomic exploration at the end of the month. This time we’ve rented a rather nice looking apartment overlooking the harbour in Barceloneta. The idea is that, on top of eating in restaurants and bars, we can buy stuff in the various markets to take home and prepare. Goose barnacles are top of our “must buy” list. Can’t-Bloody-Wait.
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