Category Archives: Recipe

Recipe: Tarte aux pommes

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

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Ingredients(Pretend this is a list of the ingredients you need to make pastry) OR a packet of ready-made pastry1.2 kilos of apples1 lemon40g sugar140g Apricot jam1 beaten eggMethodOK, let’s cut to the chase. There are three main parts to making a successful French-looking apple tart; the neatly-sliced and beautifully-arranged apples; the smear of apple compote underneath the apples; and the pastry underneath that.I can’t make pastry. Well, I can but only on the understanding that it’s brick-like appearance, texture and taste will be called ‘pastry’ for the purposes of this entertainment. So, in fact, I don’t make pastry. I buy it.There, I said it. You can now buy very excellent pastry made with butter and all that other good stuff for less than a euro a go, ready rolled-out and shaped to fit into a standard tart dish. If you wish to make pastry and like doing so, you already know how to do that better than I do so I leave ‘making your own pastry’ as an exercise for the reader. OK? OK.So, apples. Peel and core them. Cut half into small chunks and stew them in a little water for 15-30 minutes, until they’re just mushy. The small amount of water you add is to stop them burning on the bottom of your saucepan – you don’t need a lot, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan. Add the juice from half the lemon and the sugar.While this is cooking, blind bake the pastry in your tart case – push the pastry into the corners and side of the case, trim off the top, fill with your choice of cheap dried beans/expensive ceramic baking beads and cook for 20 minutes or so. Allow it to cool a little then brush with the beaten egg and pop it back into the hot oven for five minutes or so.While the pastry’s baking and the apples are stewing, cut the other half of the apples into 2-3 millimeter slices. Easy enough? Ha! OK, I’ve done it a LOT so I can do it in about three minutes with a gigantic chaffy-looking knife. You? Maybe not.So, get out that expensive mandoline you bought and use that to slice your apple instead. Once you’ve peeled and cored the apple, cut it in half vertically and then just slice it on the mandoline to an appropriate thickness. And then cut the slices in half vertically and put them into a bowl of water with half the lemon whose juice you’ve squeezed into the water – this will stop them going brown and ugly.So with your compote and pastry cooked and apple sliced, start the assembly. Spread the compote onto the base and then arrange the apple slices attractively on top. Start on the outside and place them in slightly overlapping, concentric circles until you get to the middle. You may have too many/too few slices – just re-arrange as necessary. You’ll also have a few small slices from the edge of your apple – use these to fill in little gaps. The goal is to make it look as regular as possible.Finally, warm the apricot jam and brush it over the top of the apple slices – this will stop them going brown and give the whole thing a nice, professional shine.And, above all, when you serve it moan about how long you spent making this bloody pastry no I don’t buy it only wimps and fools buy pastry pastry is easy you should try it. OK?

Recipe: Crème anglaise

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

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Ingredients1 litre milk8 − 10 egg yolks200-250g sugar1 (or more) vanilla pod(s)MethodThis is not, as I repeatedly tell my students now, English Cream. Or custard. Custard is something else entirely more horrible, powdery, icky and comforting.English cream simply doesn’t exist in the way they mean it, so get over that one.So, Crème anglaise is easy once, like so many things, you’ve already done it a hundred times or more. The secret – actually this can’t really be a secret any more, I’ve said it plenty of times already – is preparation. Get all your ingredients out and in place, separate your egg yolks, cut your vanilla pod in half, weigh your sugar all before you start to cook. This one depends somewhat on timing and concentration so turn off the Archers and pay attention.Put the milk and the vanilla pod (scrape the seeds into the milk – they look nice but most of the flavour actually comes from the pod itself) on to boil first. While it’s heating – keep half an eye on it – mix together the egg yolks and sugar with a whisk. The different quantities will give you a thicker (more egg yolks) and/or sweeter (more sugar) sauce. You need to whisk them until they reach the ribbon stage – that is, when you dribble the mixture from your whisk over the surface of the sauce it leaves a trace that looks a bit like a ribbon which takes a few seconds to disappear. Also, it goes whiter than at the start – this is why the French name for this state is called ‘blancher’, whiten. And whatever you do keep whisking, never leave the sugar and egg yolks alone – they’ll ‘burn’ and the sugar crystals will become insoluble as they absorb part of the egg yolk into a ‘skin’ around them.It should take a couple of minutes, and is more or less the time it takes the milk to boil. When the milk does boil, pour HALF of it onto the egg/sugar mixture all in one go, all the time whisking away like mad. If you don’t stir it’ll coddle and go lumpy, so STIR.Whisk it for a few seconds, then pour this mixture back into the milk saucepan, still stirring (always stir in the vessel into which your pouring, not the other way round).Switch to a wooden spoon and reduce the heat under the saucepan so it heats but won’t boil the mixture. You’re now looking to get to about 85C-90C – about the point where the foam which forms as soon as you mix everything together disappears. Also, when you draw a finger across the back of your wooden spoon it should leave a clear mark which the Crème anglaise doesn’t rush to re-fill. Heat it any higher – or boil it – and the proteins will coagulate, giving lumps.When you’re satisfied, turn off the heat. If you’re not serving it immediately, KEEP STIRRING until it’s cooled right down – you can put your saucepan in a sink of cold, even iced water if you like. If you just leave it then the lumps will arrive, with friends.If, because you haven’t paid attention, you do get lumpy custard just attack it with your stick blender and/or push it through a fine sieve. If you do want to keep it, put some cling film directly onto the surface to stop a skin forming. Back in the olden days we’d pour a little melted butter on the surface to do the same thing, but this is what is professionally known as ‘A right bloody faff’, so go with the cling film.And leave your vanilla pod in the Crème anglaise as long as you can, it’ll keep on improving the flavour. You can replace the vanilla with other flavorings – mint, coffee, caramel, whatever. For leaf infusions like mint or lemon verbena, put the leaves into the milk, boil it and then let them infuse for as long as you can away from the heat – an hour or two is good, overnight is excellent.Right. No excuses now – no more packet custards, OK?

Recipe: Velouté Dubarry – cauliflower soup

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

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Ingredients1kg cauliflower160g leeks (white bits only)80g flour2 litres veal stock (see chapter 5 recipe)For the finishing touch you’ll also need:200ml thick cream4 egg yolksA little flourA few cauliflower floretsMethodSo, despite what you may think a velouté, in soup terms, is – and I’m quoting from the official recipe book here – a “Particularly unctuous soup made with a base of veal velouté (white veal stock and a white roux sauce) or a Béchamel sauce in which the appropriate vegetable (cauliflower, celery, cucumber, asparagus, lettuce, etc.) has been cooked. They are finished AT THE END ONLY with cream or a mixture of cream and egg yolks.Now you know.And why DuBarry? Well, Jeanne Bécu, Comtesse du Barry, was the final ‘favourite’ of King Louis XV, who was guillotined a few years after the French revolution in 1793. It was her cook Louis Signot who created the dish and named it after her and, ever since, Dubarry means ‘with cauliflower’. That’s how it works in France – when you’re really famous they name a food after you – cf Brillat-Savarin and Peche Melba.First, prepare your vegetables: break the cauliflower down into small florets and chop up the leek finely, sweating off the latter in a little of the butter and then adding the flour when they’re transparent. This is your roux, which you cook for three to four minutes before removing it from the heat and adding, little by little, your boiling veal stock, stirring continuously. Then add the cauliflower and salt and simmer gently, covered, for 40-45 minutes.Prepare the cream and/or egg yolks by just beating them together (or just open the cream if you’re not using egg yolks – they do add to the unctuosity, though). When the cauliflower’s cooked, mix it with your €9.99 Lidl stick mixer/£199.95 KitchenAid model (this one will make your soup 20 times more unctuous because it’s 20 times more expensive), re-boil the soup (‘cause your mixer’s covered with nasty bacteria) and then, away from the heat, stir in your cream and/or egg yolks delicately, as the official recipe says.Boil again because, hey, pass through a Chinois fine sieve, pour it into your soup dish, add your reserved cauliflower florets as decoration and, if you like, some chervil and voila. The best cauliflower soup you’ve ever tasted. Guaranteed.And, obviously, you call it ‘Velouté du Barry’ to your guests and then look surprised, even mildly, smugly horrified, when they admit to not knowing it’s really cauliflower soup.

Recipe: Aumonieres Normandes and crepes

19 Tuesday Aug 2014

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Ingredients1 litre milk450g plain flour (type 45 or 55)100g sugar (optional)10g salt6 whole eggs200g butter500g apples10g cinnamonMethodDon’t say pancakes. Pancakes are what you eat with maple syrup for breakfast. These are crepes – light, lacy and French.So. Peel, core and large-dice your apples, fry them until lightly coloured in half the butter and sugar and all the cinnamon. Try not to eat too much of your apple filling, otherwise you’ll have no filling. Duh.For the crepes, there are two schools of thought on how to mix your batter; there’s the Delia way, where you make wells and diligently add eggs and then the milk little by little, always ensuring that the mixture is smooth and lump-free; or there’s the expedient method, where you put everything in the bowl and beat the hell out of it with a giraffe – a stick or hand-blender, as civilians call them. (Cooks call them giraffes in France because they have long necks).I go for the second option because no matter how carefully you do the first method, you still get lumps. So reach for the hand blender anyway. Note, the butter should be melted first before adding it to the mixture. The official recipe calls for this to be beurre noisette, hazelnut-coloured butter heated in a pan on the stove. I think this adds an unwanted, erm, nutty flavour so just melt the butter in the microwave without hazelnutting it.And then, again contrary to Delia, leave the mixture to sit for half an hour or more. This allows the grains of flour to be better absorbed and the gluten to do its thing. Really, it’s science.Now, cooking. You may come from the school whose first pancake is always stuck to the pan and thrown away. You are too impatient. Put the pan on to heat and leave it. A long time. Like, five minutes, at the correct temperature to cook your pancakes, rather than burn them. The reason your pancakes stick is because you don’t let your pan heat up enough. This is the reason many things stick in your kitchen, in fact.I brush on a little sunflower oil or butter or a mixture, using a rolled- and folded-up paper towel dipped into a small bowl of oil, wait a second, then add most of a 5cl ladle of batter, swirling it around the pan and quickly pouring off any extra if necessary. Don’t make your crepes too thick, that’s just not cool.Let it cook for a couple of minutes and then use your spatula to lift one edge to see if it’s browned nicely, then turn it over. Usually this is about a minute or two after all the batter has set. Cook it for a minute more, until the second side is browned enough, and then remove it from the heat.I run two pans at once, because I’m organised, it looks cool and it saves time. Then when I have my stack of a couple of dozen crepes I reheat them in the microwave and serve them.For today’s recipe, you should put your crepe on a plate, add a couple of spoonfuls of the apple mix and fold the edges in to make a triangle or four-cornered hat shape, then reheat and add chantilly cream.Tasty.

Recipe: Petits pois a la française

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Ingredients1kg peas100g lettuce100g spring onions200g lardons or diced baconButterSugarSaltMethodIn the same way that a l’anglaise means cooking whatever in boiling, salted water, cooking something a la française means adding bacon bits, specifically lardons.Now, French people believe, incorrectly, that lardons straight out of the packet are already cooked and that there’s no need for any further cooking. This is, of course, completely wrong. Bacon bits need to be fried off; not, it has to be said, as much as most English people think – that’d be silly and a waste of taste and flavour. But a bit at least.First, cook your peas for whatever is the recommended time on the packet in boiling, salted water (bring the water to the boil first then add the peas). Or if they’re fresh give them 12-15 minutes.While the peas are cooking in a shallow saucepan, fry off your bacon bits. At the same time cook the spring onions very lightly – about five minutes in just enough water to cover them, with a little salt and sugar.Shred the lettuce. Do this by rolling the leaves in bunches of 3 or 4 and slicing them into Swiss roll slices, only thinner. Say, half a centimeter.Time it carefully and as you strain the peas the bacon and onions will be cooked. Don’t completely strain the peas – add them and a little of their cooking water to the pan where the bacon’s cooking.Add the lettuce, onions and the butter and sugar to the pan and scrape the bottom of the pan to get all the bacon-y goodness into the mix. Shake the pan a little and simmer for a few seconds until all the cooking water has evaporated and the peas, bacon and lettuce are nicely coated with yumminess.

Recipe: How to cook

18 Monday Aug 2014

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OK, hands in the air, this isn’t really it’s a recipe. It’s how to cook any recipe from any cook book. Anything.Well, most of them anyway.Look. I was a terrible cook who thought I was OK, but I wasn’t. You may be a great cook, I don’t know, but most people aren’t and know it. And many who think they are, aren’t, but won’t admit it.The single most important lesson I learned becoming a professional cook was, “Everything you know is wrong.”Everything.That is not how you peel an onion.That is not how you wash up.That is, above all, NOT how you organise yourself.And it’s that last one I’ll address here (peel onions quickly taking away the top layer; scrape and rinse everything first before putting it in the dishwasher – there, bonus!)The real secret to working in a professional kitchen or giving a good dinner party is planning in advance – well in advance.Say, for example, you want to give a dinner party this evening. You want nibbles, a cold starter (don’t torture yourself here), a hot main, cheese and a whimsical pudding. OK.First, work out what time you’ll be sitting down to eat. Say, 8pm. Your cold starter needs to be ready, therefore, by 8pm. Your hot main course, say, 8.30pm, your cheese for 9pm and your whimsical pudding for 9.30 (we’re serving the courses in the civilised, French order today – not the heathen English version).Let’s say your starter is a gazpacho of roast peppers and tomatoes, since it’s easy and I know how to do that. Your main course is poached fish in sauce bonne femme (see Chapter 7) with steamed new potatoes and French beans (topping and tailing details in Chapter 1…). Cheese is cheese, just remember to take it out of the fridge at about 6pm.And your pudding is, I dunno, creme brulée.So, first tip: start yesterday. Or early this morning at the latest. Yesterday is best. Make your gazpacho – roast the tomatoes and peppers with a little olive oil, peel the skins off, de-seed the peppers and, if you want, the tomatoes, blend together in your needlessly expensive blender (I recommend the €9.99 stick blenders from Lidl personally). Done. Slice up a baguette or two, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with herbes de Provence, bake at 180C for about a quarter of an hour, voila. Croutons.If you did this yesterday you can think about your main course and pudding today. Well, make your creme brulées first. Get them baked this morning and pop them in the fridge, then all you have to do is brulée them with that expensive blowtorch you treated yourself to from that smart cookery shop. Lidl does them too, €9.99.So now it’s 11am and you have all day left to do your main course. If you’re up to it, buy your fish whole and fillet them yourself; if not, buy them whole and get your fishmonger to fillet them and give you the bones. Most fishmongers will be happy to give you a few other bones lying around too, so get enough to make your fish stock and get that made – see the recipe after Chapter 6.This, with a couple of finely diced carrots and onion, will be your fish poaching stock. You’ll need just enough to cover your fillets sitting in a shallow baking tray, a litre or so. You can add water if you don’t have enough.And, if you’ve bought new potatoes all you have to do is top and tail your french beans and you’re good to go this evening.So, 6pm. Take the cheese out of the fridge and put it where the cat can’t get at it. You could, if you’re a masochist, make your croutons at this point so the house smells like you’ve been working hard cooking all day, instead of lying in your garden hammock drinking rosé and reading the latest bonkbuster.Set the table if your lazy, idle partner’s too lazy and idle to do it properly.Have a glass of rosé.Do your kitchen mise en place. This means, get everything out of the fridge you’re going to need to be warm, make sure you have all the utensils and pans prepared and the oven turned on.7.30pm. Put your fish stock in a saucepan with your GA (garniture aromatique – carrots and onions) handy already in the poaching pan with the fish. Cover to keep the cat out of it. Boil the kettle and put your potatoes and beans in the steamer, ready.In between welcoming your guests, turn on the oven so it’s nice and warm. When you pop into the kitchen to collect the gazpacho from the fridge, set the stock to boil, then cover the fish with it and pop it into the oven when you’re clearing the starter bowls. Put the boiling water in the steamer to cook the vegetables.Depending on the thickness of your fillets they’ll take between 5 and 10 minutes to cook. Check after 3-7 – it’s easy to put them back in, not easy to un-cook them. You want them slightly underdone.Take them out of the stock, put them in a warm place (NOT back in the oven!) and put the cooking juice into the original saucepan to boil it like mad – see the sauce bonne femme recipe after Chapter 7 for the details on making the sauce. You can flavour this sauce with, say, some chopped chives, dill or chervil – add the herbs at the very last moment just before napping the fish.Whilst everything’s boiling and steaming you can spend another five minutes with your guests, just so they don’t get to finish off your rosé all to themselves.Back in the kitchen spread the WARMED plates out (put them in the oven when you take the fish out), pop a fillet on each plate, nap on the sauce, add the strained vegetables attractively (towering displays are out this year, very 2007, as is smearing and foaming), serve.Then the cheese.Then brulée the puddings.Planning and preparing in advance – write your timings down is a good piece of advice, I had to do it for my professional exam – is the way to go. Make sure you have everything to hand BEFORE starting any recipe or plating, too.What could go wrong?

Recipe: Hollandaise sauce

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Ingredients4 egg yolks25ml cold water250g butterJuice of half a lemonSaltCayenne pepperMethodHollandaise, as I learned at school, is a sauce émulsionnée instable chaude – an unstable hot emulsified sauce. Which means, basically, whisk it lots and eat it quick.So, cut your butter into small chunks and clarify it in a bain marie if you’re a wuss, directly on the heat if you’re a manly man’s chef. ‘Clarify’, let’s clarify, means separate out the good oily buttery bit from the nasty milk solids. So you heat it gently without stirring, then skim off any scum from the surface and decant the good, clear, yellow stuff off the top and leave the white nasty bits behind.Separate your egg yolks – don’t faff around with half egg shells or squeeze bottles, just crack it and strain it through your fingers, all right?Put the yolks into a shallow saucepan and add the cold water and either on a fairly gentle heat (manly man) or bain marie (wussy wimp) whisk energetically in a figure of 8 with a supple sauce whisk (the kind that’s about 30 cms long top to bottom). Keep doing this until your mixture is, in the words of my textbook, ‘unctuous and mousse-like’.In practice this means for much, much longer than you’d think necessary. The mixture should be at around 60C – enough to make you go ‘Ouch!’ when you test it with a finger – and each stroke of the whisk should leave a VERY clear trail across the bottom of the pan. Add a little warm water – drop by drop – if you think it’s too thick. Take my word for it, you’ll get the hand of this after your first two or three hundred litres of the stuff. How hot? My restaurant chef’s tip was: Hold your hand on the side of the pan whilst whisking; when you smell burning flesh, it’s too hot.Add in the lemon juice and then the WARM butter drop by drop, whisking furiously all the time. You can add the lemon at the end if you prefer, along with a pinch of cayenne pepper.Again, a few drops of warm water will help if you think it’s too thick.And there you go; ready for your Eggs Benedict (beurck) or to be transformed into mustard sauce, mousse line, Maltaise (blood orange) or Mikado (mandarin orange) sauce.Seriously, this isn’t the difficult sauce to make that many fear – put all your ingredients in place and do this last just before serving the appropriate dish (you can keep it if you can maintain a bain marie at 60C but hey…) and you’ll be fine.Then again that’s easy for me to say, 250 practise litres ahead of you….

Recipe: Fondue de tomates

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Ingredients100g shallots500g confit tomatoes2-3 garlic bulbs250 ml veal stock (optional)SaltHerbes de ProvenceOlive oilA few pinches of sugar (optional)MethodThis is nothing like a meat fondue where you dip chunks of meat into boiling oil; nor is it a sauce tomato, one of Escoffier’s five Sauces meres, mother sauces.It’s more like a tomato jam which you can use as a base for savoury tarts, or spread on croutons for a cocktail snack, or anywhere you fancy a smear of tomato-ey goodness.Begin by confiting your tomatoes. Confit means preserve, usually in this case by drying them. Except you don’t want to completely dry your tomatoes, just get rid of some of the water from them. So, cut out the hard stalk base and then cut them in half horizontally and using your finger tips, scoop out the seeds and as much juice as you can. Put them cut-side up, salt them and sprinkle lightly with mixed herbs from Provence (dried basil, thyme, rosemary, whatever – it’s all good). Fresh is fine too if you prefer. Pop them into a low (80C) oven for two or three hours, until they look somewhat shriveled but not completely dried up.Turn them over and pinch the skins between your thumb and forefinger and you’ll find the skins should just pull off. If they won’t come off you’ve not cooked them for long enough, so cook them a bit more. This avoids you having non-chewable bits of tomato skin in your sauce. Proper cooks do this by ‘monder’-ing their tomatoes – dunk them for a few seconds in boiling water, then into iced water, then peeling off the skin, then cutting them in half and removing the seeds. This is best attempted when you have that vital piece of kitchen equipment a ‘stagiaire’ – a work experience kid or intern.So. Chop your shallots up finely and put them to sweat in a little olive oil in a hot pan. Oh, a tip here: put your pan on to heat first then, when it’s hot, add your oil. Do this so the pan is already thoroughly hot before heating the oil – otherwise the pan will have cold spots which will cool down the food you add, and you don’t want that. Even cooking is what we’re looking for.While your shallots are sweating roughly chop up the tomatoes and add them to the pan. Sweat them whilst hacking them into smaller bits with with the edge of your wooden spatula.Or you can cut out all the complicated bits above and use a tin of tomatoes. Your choice.Add the sugar at the end if the sauce doesn’t taste sweet enough.You can also add the veal stock if you like to give your fondue more body. This also works well for a sauce, e.g. Tomato sauce for a bolognaise. If you do add the stock, add it a ladleful at a time, reducing each ladleful down to almost nothing before adding another. This improves the flavour by not drowning the tomatoes and boiling them inside the stock.You reduce the whole thing down until it’s the consistency you’re looking for – a bit more runny for a tart, perhaps, stickier for a spreading constituency. Up to you.

Recipe: Sauce Bonne Femme

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Ingredients250ml fish stockSplash of Noilly Prat200ml thick cream100g unsalted butterMethodThis is a good example of where your preparation and mise en place come into their own. Having previously made your fumet de poisson, fish stock – see Chapter 6’s recipe – you simply reduce some of it down and then thicken it with cream and/or butter.This is, in fact, a prime tenet of nouvelle cuisine as originally championed back in the 1950s by Fernand Point. He, rebelling against the Age d’Or cookery of Escoffier which had dominated the first half of the century, refused to thicken sauces with flour. “Beurre, toujours du beurre…Butter, always butter” he said, shortly before dying of a heart attack a plump, middle-aged man.So. Take a suitable quantity of your fish stock – for four people think a quarter of a litre.After cooking your fish – say, pan-frying some filets of rouget, red mullet – deglaze the pan with a little vermouth – Noilly Prat is the French cook’s weapon of choice here. Deglazing means splashing in a little liquid, barely enough to cover the bottom of the pan over a high heat and then scraping furiously at bottom of said pan with a wooden scraper to dislodge all the nice bits stuck to it. Nice bits caused by the famous Maillard Reactions, which have nothing to do with a duck.Once you’ve deglazed you add your stock and reduce it as quickly as possible to a syrupy consistency. Don’t faff around here, boil it like mad. Then, add 200 ml of thick cream, reduce the whole by half or more until it’s nice and thick. Then whisk in your butter in small cubes straight from fridge, away from the heat. Serve immediately spooned over your fish fillets.

Recipe: Fish stock

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Unlike veal or beef stock, fish stock needs hardly any cooking. Even less than chicken stock in fact, and that only takes an hour.Ingredients600 grammes fish bones – flat fish are great (sole, turbot), also cod, halibut, that sort of thing. Don’t use bones from oily fish like salmon or mackerel – they make oily stock, which you don’t want at all.150 grammes mixed diced carrots, onions, bits of mushrooms, herb stalks for a Garniture Aromatique (GA)1 litre water100 ml white wineA splash of Noilly Prat or some other vermouth.Cracked pepperMethodBreak up the carcasses a bit and leave them in a bowl under running water until you’ve removed any blood. Rinse thoroughly. Simmer your GA in a little butter, add the fish bones and sweat them for a few minutes. Cover with the water and the (optional) alcohol.Bring it to a boil and allow it to simmer VERY gently for 20-25 minutes, skimming off the scum from the surface regularly. Add the pepper a few minutes before the end.Pass through a fine sieve or muslin cloth, cool quickly.