May 2010 – Gastronomy Domine

27th May 2010

Peach and mango meringue pie

This one’s for my friend Michael and his daughter, who are going in for a pie competition this weekend. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out – it really does taste as good as it looks. This pie is made with an all-butter pastry (none of your revolting shortening here, Californians) which is flavoured with lemon zest, and has a juicy filling that’s very easy to put together. I have been obsessing a bit about meringue recently, and the lovely puffy cloud that makes the lid of this pie is a beautiful and really delicious way to top things off.

Michael and Yael are cooking in the US, where weighing scales are not the norm – unfortunately, cup measures aren’t the norm here in the UK, and I have real trouble using them when I’m baking. As a result, I’ve measured by weight, not volume, below. For those who don’t have a set of scales at home, there is a decent conversion tool here.

You’ll need an 11 inch (28 cm) flan case with fluted edges and a loose base that you can push out, and some baking beans (some use ceramic beans – I just used half a pack of dried butter beans from the cupboard). If you plan on transporting your pie, you may prefer to use a foil dish.

To make one totally fabulous pie, you’ll need:

Pastry
225g plain flour
25g icing (confectioners) sugar
100g salted butter
Zest of 1 lemon
1 egg yolk
3 tablespoons water (approx – see below)

Filling
4 large, ripe peaches (I used white peaches – choose the most fragrant fruit you can find)
3 ripe mangoes (I used Alphonse mangoes, which are my favourite)
2 tablespoons caster sugar
3 level tablespoons semolina (cornmeal for Americans)

Meringue
6 egg whites
225g caster sugar
1 tablespoon white vinegar

Start by making the pastry. Sift the flour and sugar into a large bowl, and rub in the butter with your fingertips until you have a mixture resembling breadcrumbs. Try to keep things as cool as possible as you work; your pastry will be crisper and shorter if it stays cold. (My grandmother used to make pastry in a large bowl placed in the kitchen sink while she ran cold water around it – perhaps there’s a degree of overkill in this, but it does work well to help your pastry along in hot weather.)

Use a butter knife to stir the lemon zest, yolk and water into the mixture until you have a stiff pastry. You may need a little more water according to the weather; the behaviour of pastry varies horribly according to how much moisture there is in the air on any given day. Wrap the pastry in cling film (saran wrap for Michael and Yael) and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes to rest.

While the pastry is resting, turn the oven to 200ºC (400ºF) and prepare the fruit. Quarter and peel the peaches, then cut each piece into three. Dice the mango in pieces the same size as the peach bits (I’m sure you all know the mango trick, but here’s a YouTube video of someone preparing a mango just in case you’ve not done it before). You can keep the fruit around the stone section to nibble off as a chef’s treat. Cover and set aside.

Roll the pastry out on a cool, lightly floured surface to fit your flan dish. (I have a marble slab for pastry that my Mum bought for me at a gravestone shop. Again, this is probably overkill. It’s also a bit sinister, now I think about it.) Line the dish with the pastry, use a fork to prick the base of the pie case all over, and cut a circle of parchment paper to fit in the bottom. Slip the parchment inside the pie and cover it with baking beans. Bake blind – that is to say, without any filling – for 20 minutes until the pastry is golden. Remove the beans and parchment and cook for another 5-10 minutes or until the base is dry and golden too. Turn the oven down to 150ºC (300ºF).

Prepare the meringue by whisking the eggs and vinegar for about five minutes until you have stiff peaks (the vinegar will not add a detectable flavour to your pie, but it will make the peaks of the meringue simultaneously crisp and chewy, like a baked marshmallow), adding the sugar a tablespoon at a time as you go. You should end up with a very stiff, glossy mixture.

Sprinkle the semolina into the base of the pie dish – this will soak up excess juices from the fruit. Fill the dish with the fruit mixture (depending on the size of your peaches and mangoes, you may find you have some left over to make a fruit salad with) and sprinkle over the sugar.

Spoon the meringue carefully all over the top of the pie in a dome, making sure there are no gaps, and use a spoon to tease it into lots of peaks on top. Put the pie in the oven at the cooler temperature (don’t worry if the temperature hasn’t quite settled down yet – a little bit of extra heat at the start of cooking won’t hurt it) and bake for 1 hour – 1 hour 10 minutes until the pie is an even gold colour all over and marshmallowy inside. Serve warm or cold, but do make it as close as possible to serving as you can manage to keep the meringue nice and high and puffy.

24th May 2010

Da Dong Roast Duck, Beijing

Duck preparation area - these ducks have been steamed but are not yet roasted. Note koi river.

Chain restaurants occupy a very different place in the foodie ecosystem in China. Here in the West, chains tend to be reliably mediocre (or worse), only worth visiting if you’re away from home and have a particular hankering for that very specific and very homogeneous pizza/burger/pasta thing that they do in the branch round the corner from your house.

In China, though, you’ll find chains (smaller than your average UK effort, but chains nonetheless) like Da Dong Roast Duck and Nan Xiang dumplings (more on them later this week) where the number of branches is an advertisement for the popularity and excellence of the cooking, not a sign of bland uniformity. Several people had suggested Da Dong to me (I’m afraid there’s no English website), so I asked the hotel concierge which branch he recommended, and ended up at the newest, at Jinbao Place in the Dongcheng district.

Jinbao Place is one of those glistening, insanely swanky shopping malls, all Gucci and Burberry, where an emergency shirt to replace the one you’ve spilled hot and sour soup down just before a meeting (this actually happened to one of the people we were travelling with) will cost you RMB 2000, or £200. The whole of the fourth floor is taken up by Da Dong, with its koi stream running through the restaurant, around an open duck prep area; its Scandinavian-style interior decorations; and an awful lot of polished black granite. Despite all the gloss, we only paid RMB 600 (£60) for a battleship-sinking amount of food and an awful lot of beer – this is pricey for Beijing, but the food is so much more interesting than anything you’ll find at home, I’m sure you can wear it.

Menus are printed in English. There’s a very expensive seafood section full of abalone, lobster, sea cucumber and other premium ingredients, where exquisitely photographed pictures of each dish accompany each description, alongside a much more affordable section of traditional Beijing dishes, without photos. We ordered mostly from the non-photo section – and we steered clear of the oxtail soup with a dirty great seahorse (a creature on the Red List of endangered species) bobbing up and down in it. A colleague did order a seahorse by accident at another restaurant without an English menu, and said it was a lot like eating an ear.

At the moment, Euro/American molecular techniques are pretty fashionable in Beijing, so our little starter plates of wind dried ham with tiny sweet peas, quite different from a Western pea with their thin skins and intense sugary flavour, came delicately arranged on a spoon, all accompanied by a frothy little shot glass of something that appeared to be minty mouthwash. A palate cleanser? Whatever it was meant to be, it was a little alarming and a very curious choice of flavour next to those glorious little peas, but it was oh-so-pretty that I feel like letting them off. You can just make out some tea being poured in the background – there’s a long and involved tea menu, and it’s well worth your while exploring something other than the bog-standard jasmine tea.

Some peeled prawns, deep-fried in batter then simmered in a garlicky sauce, which was soaked up by the softened batter, were curious texture-wise, but that limp batter created an incredible vehicle for the flavour of the sauce. A Kilner jar of pork chops, cooked according to a “mystery technique”, was threaded through with sugar cane and grilled over charcoal, then snipped into bite-sized bits with scissors at the table – and was so heavy on the MSG that we got through our glasses of beer very quickly, and needed a top-up for the teapot. Add a really superb braised aubergine, gorgeously dense with thick, sweet soy and aromatic with anise and garlic; and a dish of gai lan (mustard greens) stir-fried with ginger, and we were pretty much full – but it remains my firm belief that everybody has a separate stomach for dessert, and it’s my enormous genetic good luck to be blessed with yet another stomach just for roast duck in pancakes. (I managed to put weight on at a rate of about a pound a day while we were in China, and spent the next week in Hungary – long story – running up and down hills to try to burn it all off, so be warned: gorging yourself like this doesn’t come without consequences.)

The duck at Da Dong is the main event. They claim to have invented a technique whereby the duck is much leaner than other Beijing roast ducks – the skin here is popcorn-puffy and exceptionally crisp and dry, while the flesh remains moist and juicy. Peering into the dark duck prep area, which was manned by chefs in toques and anti-sneeze facemasks (see the picture at the top of the page), I could make out that the ducks were being steamed or boiled in a purpose-built-something that looked like a small well in the middle of the room, then hung on racks before being cooked until a glorious gold in wood-fired ovens.

The duck is carved tableside, and you’re given the halved head (full of curdy brains and covered with crisp skin), sans beak, to chew and suck on – which I did, to Dr W’s great displeasure. Your first pancake is assembled for you, after which you’re left on your own with a heap of pancakes, two little pitta-ish buns, and dish of condiments – sugar, a duck sauce, pickled ginger, pickled vegetables, crushed garlic, spring onions, radish and cucumbers. You can do what you like with these, but do try a sliver of skin dipped into the granulated sugar – surprisingly, abominably good. A pallid soup also accompanies the duck, but it’s eminently missable. This wasn’t the only Beijing roast duck I ate in our week in China, and there’s definitely something to that technique – the duck is much less fatty and exceptionally crisp, which appears to be more palatable to Western tastes. The accompanying duck sauce wasn’t the best I’ve had – full-on sweet, a little bitter and without the fragrance of fermented soy and rice wine I’d been hoping for – but this seems a minor quibble alongside that shatteringly crisp skin.

A complementary fruit plate arrives at the end to cleanse you of ducky thoughts. It sits on top of a gushing dish of dry ice, which doesn’t make it taste any nicer, but is awfully good fun to look at.

Once we’d finished looking at fruit, we waddled, duck-wise, down past the shops full of diamonds and branded leather and collapsed into a taxi. A great evening, but given my waistline, it’s a restaurant I’m glad that I have to travel 11 hours to get to. One of the branches of Da Dong is definitely worth the visit if you’re in the city.

10th May 2010

Beijing

A quick and dirty picture post today; having spend the weekend doing the tourist thing, I’m spending the day battling with Beijing tailors, braving traditional foot massages and eating congee while Dr W is whisked around a dairy and a pharmaceutical company. (Rather him than me.) We’re staying at the gargantuan (it’s the largest Marriott outside the US) and very plushy Marriott City Wall, which has a superb Chinese restaurant charging prices which seem more London than Beijing, where I’ve been gorging on dim sum. I’m on the hunt for the perfect Beijing duck, which, if everything works out and I manage to avoid accidentally booking one of those cultural show places with no Chinese people in it, I’ll post about later in the week.

Incidentally, if you’re one of my Twitter followers, you’ll find me uncharacteristically quiet this week. The Great Firewall blocks access to Twitter (and to every Twitter client I’ve tried), so I’m not able to update.

Photography is tricky here in the city, because of the smog which hangs over the city and does very peculiar things to the light – it’s useless trying to take pictures with any depth of field because the haze turns everything yellow and blurred. Here, anyway, are three holiday snaps to keep you entertained until I can write about some of the eating we’re doing.

6th May 2010

Rhubarb Pavlova

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been blogging from a Booklet laptop lent to me by the friendly folks at Nokia, who saw me mention on Twitter that my own laptop had died horribly. (It was a long and sad process, the worst part being the fortnight before it gave up the ghost completely, over which period it tried its damnedest to barbecue any lap it was put on.) The Booklet goes back to Nokia today, and I’ll miss it; while the screen’s a bit too small to edit photos and work through piles and piles of text on optimally, its portability has been an eye-opener, and the 3-G-ness is brilliant – it’s been lovely to work on a machine that’s small enough for a handbag, that fits onto one of those pathetic trays on trains, and that I can easily manage in one hand while waving a wooden spoon in the other. Adieu, little Booklet. I shall miss you.

So then. Pavlova. In the dark days of the early 80s, I was set a piece of homework for our “finding out” class, where I was meant to write a short essay on Anna Pavlova. Nobody in the family knew anything more about her than that she was a 1920s ballerina, and so I ended up submitting an essay about meringue instead, which, happily, was something that everybody at home was more than educated about. The Pavlova is a New Zealand dessert which was named after the dancer in the 1920s (a period when naming a dish after a celebrity was a signal honour – like Peaches Melba and Melba Toast, Omelette Arnold Bennett, Eggs Benedict and other eponymous dishes). Being a reasonably easy recipe which looks so handsome, the Pavlova, with its ballet skirt of meringues, is a favourite at Christmas in NZ – I wish Christmases here were sunny, so we could do away with the leaden puddings and have meringue instead. Tart fruits are best as a filling – I’ve made a lemon cream using some home-made lemon curd (it’s quick to make, and it’s a good way to use up the egg yolks, but shop-bought curd will do the job just as well) and some roast rhubarb from my friend’s garden. I’ve used Polish cherry squash to pink up the rhubarb – if you can’t find any, use grenadine or another reddish cordial.

The inside of a proper Pavlova reaches that lovely marshmallowy texture thanks to the addition of a little vinegar and cornflour to the meringue – when you have meringue, which magically turns itself from yellowish, wet egg-whites into glossy clouds, then into a simultaneously crisp and chewy nest, who needs molecular gastronomy?

You’ll need:

Meringue
2 tablespoons melted butter
8 egg whites
330g caster sugar
1 teaspoon spirit vinegar
2 teaspoons cornflour, plus extra for dusting

Filling
450ml double cream
100g lemon curd
5 fat stems rhubarb
2 tablespoons cherry cordial
200g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 120°C (250°F). Lay greaseproof paper out on two baking trays, and brush each with melted butter. Dust the buttered paper with cornflour and shake off any excess – this will stop the Pavlova from sticking.

Beat the egg whites with an electric whisk or stand mixer, adding 330g sugar a little at a time, until they form soft, glossy peaks. Add the cornflour and vinegar to the mixture, and beat in gently.

Fill a piping bag fitted with its largest nozzle with the meringue, and pipe in a spiral straight onto the floured paper, starting in the centre, going round and round until you have a solid circle of meringue measuring about 7 inches in diameter. Be careful to leave some room around the meringue, which will swell as it cooks. Repeat on the other sheet of floured paper. You’ll have a little meringue left – use this to pipe a wall of meringue around the edge of one of the circles – this will be the bottom piece, and the lip of meringue will help to hold the filling in place.

Bake for 30 minutes, then turn the heat down to 100°C (210°F). Bake for another 40 minutes – the meringue should now be nice and dry, and should crack when you press it gently. Turn the oven off and cool the meringue in the oven with the door cracked open.

Once the meringue is cool, it can be covered and kept, without the filling, in the fridge – you can also freeze it successfully at this stage.

To prepare the filling, chop the rhubarb stems into pieces about an inch long, and put them in a large roasting tin, sprinkled with the sugar and cordial. (Use grenadine or another red cordial if you can’t find cherry – mine was from the local Polish shop.) Roast at 170°C (340°F) for 20 minutes, until tender and collapsing. Remove to a bowl and chill.

Whip the cream until it forms stiff peaks, and fold the lemon curd in with a spatula. Chill until you are ready to serve.

To assemble the Pavlova, spread half the lemon cream onto the base piece of meringue, leaving a bit of a hollow in the middle so you can really heap up the rhubarb. Spoon over the rhubarb (you won’t use all the juice, but it’s delicious, so keep it to one side to slurp at later), dollop the rest of the cream on top, and put the meringue lid on. Serve immediately.

4th May 2010

Riverford Farm

Veg display in the Farm Kitchen - this is representative of what was in my delivery box this morning.

A couple of weeks ago, I rattled down to Riverford Farm in Devon in a very drinky minibus full of bloggers. Riverford is celebrated not only for their organic vegetables and meat (you may well know somebody who gets weekly vegetable boxes from them), but also for the Field Kitchen, an outstanding restaurant using products raised on the farm, that sits next to a few acres of rhubarb and plum fields.

For once, I’m going to be brief on the restaurant part of the visit. You may well have read any of a number of glowing reviews of the Field Kitchen, and its reputation is well-deserved. We ate like kings from the farm’s own produce – tapas-style starters including a wild garlic tortilla, some simply gorgeous bresaola, a beet salad, and a house-cured gravadlax. The farm’s lamb made an appearance in the main course in two presentations, pressed and roasted, alongside sweet purple-sprouting broccoli in an anchovy butter, and spring greens. Five desserts, of the proper English sort – all sticky toffee pud, rhubarb meringue and that sort of squashy nursery goodness.

So the restaurant is marvellous. If you’re in the area (Riverford is just outside Totnes), book a table and make an evening of it – I defy you not to love its honest, clean presentation of perfectly fresh produce. But what I really want to talk about here for a bit is the operation of the farm itself.

We were lucky enough to be invited to tour Riverford with Guy Watson, the farm’s founder. He’s a fabulous cross between a gimlet-eyed businessman in orange Converse and the sort of straw-haired, welly-wearing, salt-of-the-earth type I remember from the farms that surrounded my grandparents’ little bit of land in Lincolnshire in the 70s; Guy was in this organic stuff well before it was a twinkle in anybody else’s eye, and his passion for this way of growing and eating is palpable. He’s been successful. The business has expanded so far that one farm alone is unable to meet the volume requirements of all those boxes, so a co-operative sort of arrangement is set up with organic farmers all over the country. Riverford itself remains very much the base of operations, though, and the box that arrived on my doorstep from them this morning included produce from here in East Anglia (celery around here is famously good, and there’s a handsome bunch in there which came from Yaxley, near Peterborough, with leeks, a kohl rabi, onions, carrots and some lovely muddy potatoes), alongside little bits and pieces from other farms; I recognised the mixed salad and purple sprouting broccoli from stuff I’d seen growing in the fields in Devon, and the bag of wild garlic leaves is Devon all the way down to its pungent bottom. There are mushrooms, a cucumber and tomatoes too – the large box is enough for four people for a week, but veg enthusiasts (I’m one of them) will find that two people can easily make their way through a box in that time.

Piled into the back of Guy’s rickety Land Rover, which, like Proust’s Madeleines, took me right back to my childhood and days with my Grandad (although unlike Proust, what I was smelling was wet dog and whatever it is they stuff the seats of Land Rovers with), we took a trip up to the edge of Dartmoor to survey some of the fields, stopping briefly at Guy’s house to pick up some preserved artichokes he’d made last year to snack on.

The long winter this year means that some spring vegetables are arriving late this year, but it also means that there have been some bumper crops of certain produce. Purple-sprouting broccoli, which I love for its sweet stems and the tips’ ability to soak up any sauce you might choose to use it with, was going like crazy when we visited, and we picked our own straight from the fields and ate it raw, sugar-sweet and with a dark brassica bite. (Guy is less keen – he says that to his mind, purple-sprouting has an air of farts about it even before you eat it.)

Purple-sprouting broccoli is one of several crops that has to be picked by hand. The word “organic” brings ideas of primitive farming methods to mind, but nothing could be further from the truth at Riverford. Where possible, crops are brought in quickly by machine, which gets them into the cooling rooms fast, keeping them as fresh as possible. Fleece is spread out to keep seedlings safe from frost; polytunnels are used for tender leaves like the bitter, coppery dandelions that make part of the mixed salad. The difference from conventional farming lies in the enrichment of the soil, which is done with old-fashioned crop rotation, tonnes and tonnes of well-rotted manure, and “green manure”; crops like rye grass which are grown specifically in order to be ploughed straight back into the soil again. No pesticides are used, which means that hedgerows around the farm look the way hedgerows are meant to, dense with primroses and violets. The farm has experimented with biodegradable soap sprays against aphids and other pests, but found that predators are also killed by the soap; the best results against pests were achieved, says Guy, by leaving nature to achieve its own balance and encouraging predatory insects. And it’s true – I spotted very few pests on our farm tour.

We pulled leeks out of the soil to take home in the minibus, and picked plenty of rhubarb (one of my favourites). But best of all was the little ash wood at the top of a steep hill, where a huge crop of wild garlic had been seeded. It’s been an enormous success in the box scheme (Riverford recommend it in omelettes and risottos – I have a recipe here on Gastronomy Domine for a pancetta and wild garlic-wrapped chicken dish), and several other woods have also been seeded for a massive crop.

We were lucky with the weather, volcanic haze aside, but for my tastes, the wooded hills, the flowers growing in the fields alongside the farm produce all untouched by herbicides, the smell of garlic wafting in the air, and the views across the tops of the fruit trees over Dartmoor are about as close to Eden in April as England gets. More power to Riverford’s elbow. This is how as much of our food as possible should be produced, and I’m delighted I got a chance to see the farm in action.