Be Excellent To Each Other

Just finished cooking my turkey, 6 hours on S with foil on, 3 hours on 1 with no foil! Ready for the big day!

Malc

Five Guys burgers (the East Coast answer In-n-Out) are INCREDIBLE.

Can I eat one now? No?

THEN WHAT USE ARE YOU?

The 7-bird (wood pigeon breast in a partridge in a mallard in a poussin in a guinea fowl in a duck in a turkey, with bacon on top, a sage and onion layer, a sauagemeat + lardon layer and a black pudding layer) roast worked pretty damned well.

As did this year's christmas pizza - pigs-in-blanket, cranberry sauce, sprout and stilton on a sherry and cinnamon sauce.

Yesterday's Festive Fajitas were excellent for a "five bottles of beer" idea too - mild fajita seasoning for the turkey leg meat, yogurt+cream cheese+butter-fried-shredded-parsnip dip, sherry-cranberry salsa and the piece de resistance: sprout and bacon guacemole.

I salute your demented inventiveness!

Cheers. I'll get the photos online at some point.

Astonishing!

I'm in here to ask why the heck Rice and Peas recipes don't include, y'know, PEAS?

But now I've read Bik's Fajita masterwork I'm going to make a veggie one of them instead.

I believe them Caribbeans call kidney beans 'peas'.

In the caribbean, red pigeon peas would be used to make it. You can't get those in North America or Europe, and red kidney beans are apparently the closest approximation. Rice and Peas never had what we would call peas in.

Um. If people are going to try that I should expand on it.

My brother got me a slow cooker for Christmas. Going shopping later. Anyone got any banging stew recipes? Or anything for that matter? I want to give it a whirl.

Main thing to remember is that veg doesn't cook very well - the temperature isn't high enough to break down the starches and cellulose. So give veg a parboil before sticking it in the slow cooker. Otherwise, just go for it and bang stuff in!

Ah, cheers for the advice!

New Year's dinner.



Clockwise from top left:
"Tuna Nicoise" - Seared tuna, poached quail's egg, topped with olive, caper, and shallot powders
Steak tartare on dripping-fried toast
Smoked salmon parfait with caviar
Poached trout and black pudding

Main course was 24-hour short ribs, beer braised ox cheeks, and truffle mash.

Yeah well I had takeaway so in your face.

Also, I discovered today that the port we've been merrily throwing into bolognese etc. is actually sixteen years old. Er - oops.

We had turkey soup made with new and old stock. Our slow cooker seems more than capable of breaking down vegetables. Half a dozen drops of my last hot sauce (did I mention Tabasco Nightmare on here?) made my portion way too hot. Then cheese and biscuits, then yule log with maascarpone and nutella cream. OM NOM.

I notice you cooked four. I assume the other ones are for me and Danielle and are frozen for us to come home to?

Sure. When you turn up at my house with a Zingerman's and a big-ass hotdog.

Craster, I saw these photos over on O:S! when I woke a few hours ago, and they made me so hungry that I had some cereal which was completely unsatisfying. Now I'm here and they've made me hungry again, dammit.


Um...

That hyphen was very carefully placed there. Nobody wants a big ass-hotdog.

Just ordered at The Purple Pig, a Bib Gourmand restaurant devoted to "cheese, swine and wine". Looking forward to this.

We broke into a bread that'd fermented in the fridge for a day and a half, last night. It tastes something like Pain de Campagne, and is a really light and fluffy texture. Great success.

The other half of that dough is still in the fridge, so will have had a further 48 hours.

What I have learned is this: if rising dough in Pyrex, for god's sake don't use Pyrex. Or grease it first/use greaseproof paper. Getting it out post-bake was quite traumatic (albeit eventually successful).

Is that like soda bread, Bik? I was living with an Irish girl for a while last year and she'd just come down with plates of warm soda bread some evenings, served with beautiful salted butter. Amazing.

I keep meaning to get a starter going to do some sourdough, then never getting round to it.

I make quite a bit of bread (chilli and coriander is my "best" one). It's far more science than it is art, so I can do it

Soda bread uses bicarbonate of soda to rise it instead of yeast. I think you mean sourdough, which is different again, and something I want to get in on but, like Craster, haven't yet.

It uses a sourdough starter, which is bread flour, water and a bit of sugar mixed. All flour has natural yeasts, which feeds on the sugar, then starts feeding on the flour. Keeping it in the fridge inhibits the yeast a bit, but it still needs flour and water top-ups occasionally. Take a bit of the starter out (and top up the remainder), mix it with the normal bread ingredient quanitites, and it'll work like dried yeast, but have a sour tang because of being natural.

What I (and the Doc I think, who mentioned fermenting pizza dough the other month, the copycat) have started doing is leaving a "normal" dough in an oxygen-starved state (mine are closed up with cling film) after it's risen - the yeast carries on feeding and reproducing, but the alcohol by-product of the reaction can't evaporate. It changes the texture of bread, the dough goes gloopy and elastic, and something about it changes the taste too.

I don't know what it was, but it involved leaving buttermilk to turn sour boot a few days, which you then use to make the bread. Tasted amazing.

Yeah, I do a cold fermented pizza dough based on the Cook's illustrated recipe. Took me a long time to get my eye in but I'm pretty good at it now. I've been meaning to try bread for a while -- the Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day method looks good.

I'm the opposite, for some reason. I don't bake, because I don't like the fact that it's too much based on precision, so you can't improvise.

I bake because it tastes awesome and is remarkably low effort

Well, that rather depends what you're baking/cooking. I'm pretty sure there's not anything you can bake which is less effort than cooking a steak.

Touche.

There's a knack to it? Really? I just go with "leave it until I can't be arsed any more, but it definitely has to at least look all shiny and weird before the air gets back at it." Though honestly, the 3.5 day one is probably pushing it and I won't be terribly surprised if it fails.

First time I accidentally fermented dough, I'd got a pizza dough out of the freezer to defrost, then left it in the fridge for a couple of days. It looked weird so I thought I'd give it a sniff to check and got a really unpleasant lungful of CO2 and alcohol.

Used it anyway, thought it was ace.

I found it tough, initially, to get the consistency right. Pizza dough is unforgiving of slight variation in dough/water mixture, as too little water will be inelastic and too much will be too sticky to work with. I've found the line between "too little" and "too much" to be only about a tablespoon or so. All my early batches were too watery. I'd imagine dough for a loaf of bread is more forgiving as you're not trying to stretch it out the same way.

It could also be that I'm not a great baker. Like Craster, I prefer to improvise when I cook.

Don't put yourself down, I think you're a master baker.

Don't fix water, fix flour. Dough is far more forgiving of too much of the latter. The way I do pizza doesn't really seem to care so long as there's enough flour. Fermentation gives massive elasticity anyway. Or stretchability. Or something.

Come on then, Doc. Did you take any pictures of all this food you've been munching in the US or what?!

That sounds like something I'd like to try, care to share the recipe?

I think 3.5 days is too long, but Helen really likes it. Split the loaf in half getting it out of the Pyrex annoyingly.

Obviously. But they are all on my proper cameras as RAWs and I'm too busy doing stuff [1] to post-process them on the iPad. There's a few pics in my Instagram and a few more I Danielle's; some of those are on Tumblr and Twitter.

[1] "stuff" may include last night's activity of hanging out with our friend, watching the Inbetweeners movie via my new Apple TV whilst eating some fabulous artisan cheese and bread. It's not all go-go-go.

I'll try, but it involves using a measuring cup that came with our breadmaker, and I don't know if it tells me the size of the thing.

Well we still have the one that came with ours, I'm guessing they are both American, so worth a shot.

Good stuff! I'll wait for the extended director's cut edition of your photos, then.

In other news, I bought some mini macarons this afternoon. Absolutely delicious. Pistachio ones were the best. First time I've ever had them. I expected them to be dry and flaky all the way through. How wrong I was.

I fucking love macaroons.

They're awesome!

I've had to ban myself from using cafe brera or staff meetings due to the availability, delightful ness and price of their macaroons.

Next meeting was held at Belgique, turns out they sell macaroons which are more delightful. And pricey.

I encouraged the wife to level up baking at Christmas.