Garlic noodles, inspired by Crustacean

Garlic noodlesThe An family runs a group of Vietnamese restaurants in California. The restaurants have different menus, but the family’s famous garlic noodles are on offer at each of them. I ate a dish of them at AnQi, the group’s newest restaurant in Costa Mesa – a restaurant so swanky it has a catwalk for fashion shows slashing a line through the tables – and discovered that those noodles are justly famous.  (I can also heartily recommend the filet mignon potstickers, the shaken beef and the salt and pepper calamari.)

Those noodles though: stupendous. The An family has cottoned on to this, keeps the recipe secret, and tried to trademark the term “garlic noodles” a few years ago.  Unsurprisingly, this was unsuccessful, but since then they’ve tried again with  “An’s Famous Garlic Noodles”. So I should make the point here that the noodle recipe on this page is not the An family’s jealously guarded secret recipe, but my own (pretty successful) attempt at reverse-engineering the noodles I ate. They’re garlic dynamite, the sort of thing that you should consider eating to repel an unwanted suitor. The garlic is sweet, the buttery sauce gorgeously umami, and the whole arrangement coats the strands of wheat noodle (angel hair pasta is indistinguishable from what the restaurant uses) in a velvet-slick coating of flavour.

The Vietnamese have been working with what we’d now call fusion food for a couple of hundred years, the result of French colonialism. Some of the best Vietnamese food out there is a real mish-mash of cultures; just look at banh mi on rice-flour baguettes, with goose-liver pate spread thickly beneath the Vietnamese roast pork and pickled vegetables. So the use of butter and Parmesan cheese isn’t as barking here as it might look at first glance. This is a very easy recipe, but beware: this dish won’t just make your breath smell of garlic. Your hair, your sweat and the whole of your immediate environment will be curiously pungent for a good day or so after eating. Go with it. It’s worth it.

To make enough noodles to serve four as a side dish, you’ll need:

2 heads garlic
150g salted butter
1 tablespoon oyster sauce
2 heaped tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
250g angel-hair pasta

Peel the garlic and use a large, sharp knife to chop it into very small pieces. If you hold the tip end of the knife in one hand and the bottom of the cutting blade in the other, you’ll find you can walk the knife up and down your board, chopping as it goes. Melt the butter and, over a very low heat, simmer the chopped garlic in it for about 20 minutes, until the garlic is soft and giving its fragrance up, but not browning. Stir the oyster sauce into the garlic and butter, and remove the pan from the heat.

Cook the pasta according to the timing on the packet, but using just enough water to cover the noodles. Drain, reserving the cooking liquid, and place in a serving bowl. Stir 50ml of the starchy water into the noodles along with the buttery garlic sauce and the Parmesan. Serve immediately.

Summer terraces on the Thames

Royal Horseguards Hotel Terrace
Terrace Cafe, Royal Horseguards

I found myself invited to two very different terraces on the Thames Embankment yesterday. The Royal Horseguards Hotel, near Hungerford Bridge, is offering a Wimbledon-themed afternoon tea for the whole of this year’s Wimbledon fortnight – just the ticket for those of us who don’t like tennis, but who do like patisseries. And just off Waterloo bridge, a few hundred yards upstream, the terrace at Somerset House has been transformed for the summer into an open-air restaurant fronted by Tom Aikens, with a spectacular bar and summer-casual menu.

The Royal Horseguards is one of those super-swanky, highly polished, five-star hotels, all harpists in the lobby and marble floors. Doormen and concierges line the halls, and a customer visiting for tea is treated with as much care as one staying in one of the most expensive suites. We were there to visit the very pretty terrace café, shaded by a line of plane trees along Victoria Embankment.

The Wimbledon tea is only running for a couple of weeks, so you’ll have to get in there quickly – and then you can sit back and be spoiled for an hour or so while you work your way through a very generous and gorgeously presented high tea. Proceedings open with a strawberry and grenadine Bellini, to glug your way through while you listen to Big Ben clanging away in the background before a big silver pot of tea arrives.

Wimbledon tea
Teatime treats

We were served (underarm) a long glass tray packed with pretty little patisseries, two glasses of a strawberry and Pimms consommé and a bucket of white chocolate truffles masquerading as tiny tennis balls – totally charming, tooth-hurtingly rich, and utterly addictive. Joanne Todd, the hotel’s new pastry chef, is behind this very frivolous and very romantic (seriously – take someone you want to impress, because those tennis balls alone will work wonders) outing; she’s only been at the hotel for a couple of weeks, and if this tea is anything to go by, there will be other good things in the Terrace Café’s future. The little cupcake with the logo was delicately scented with elderflower; that’s a perfectly squishy strawberry macaroon with a perfumed rose ganache hiding behind it, and a strawberry vacherin. The little truffles come with three fillings: champagne, strawberry and a fresh, creamy mint that I could have kept eating all afternoon.

Tennis ball truffles
Tennis ball truffles

It’s just as well I didn’t, because a tray of scones came out next, two plain and two with fruit and spices – along with a ball of clotted cream so enormous you could have played tennis with it. The Terrace Café runs non-Wimbledon afternoon tea for the rest of the year, from £28 for the Champagne tea (finger sandwiches, pastries, a cream tea and all that good stuff) down to £13.50 for the Westminster Tea, a straightforward cream tea. It’s well worth a visit if you’re having a day out. I spotted one of the new intake of MPs and an actress I shall not name because she was obviously trying to have a private moment (not with the MP) while I was scarfing my scones. If you don’t have a date to take, head on over with your Mum to impress her with the crowd you mingle with.

Tom's Terrace
Tom's Terrace

I barely had time to get started on digesting tea before heading over to Somerset House to meet Tom Aikens and sit down for a meal at Tom’s Terrace, a pop-up restaurant overlooking the river. Tom’s Terrace opened at the end of April and will only operate for 22 weeks over the summer, closing in September – it’s packed out every evening, so you’ll need to book ahead. I hate to get all Enid Blyton, but food really does taste better outdoors, and  Tom’s Terrace has been designed to make the most of the unpredictable English summer, with architectural covers over the tables, sculptural heaters (not used on the night I visited, when the weather was positively balmy) and coloured lights punctuating the restaurant.

Coronation crab salad
Coronation crab salad

The menu is short, outdoorsy, unpretentious and simple, full of good ingredients prepared well. There are beautifully selected charcuteries; a whole clutch of summery salads; grilled chicken; a burger cooked to a perfect medium-rare.  (You can see the whole menu on the restaurant’s web site.) There are fat, truffle/parmesan chips, parboiled then fried twice to a shattering crisp outside, with fluffy middles. The coronation crab salad pictured here was sweet, fresh, and perfectly balanced – a dense, marie-rose-type sauce lifted with a very subtle dose of curry spicing, diced mango and toasted almonds had me swiping the inside of the empty glass bowl with my fingertips and sucking them. To top everything off, you’ll find a really interesting range of cocktails (and a short but well thought out wine list), which you can enjoy either at the table or at the bar area at the other end of the restaurant. It’s refreshing to find a bar that pays as much attention to non-alcoholic cocktails as it does to the boozy ones; ultimately, I couldn’t work out whether I enjoyed Tom’s Tequila or the virgin blueberry cocktail, made with floral syrups and fresh juices, more.

Chicken liver and foie gras parfait
Chicken liver and foie gras parfait

This is great summer’s evening stuff, pre- or post-theatre, or for sharing with friends. The staff are great – our table found itself sparking off competition between two bartenders over who could produce the best drink, and the service staff will bend over backwards to explain the menu and make suggestions if you get stuck. I could have stayed for hours longer, bibbing blueberries and ordering more mango rice pudding; I left at 10.30 to get my train with the greatest reluctance.

Many thanks to both restaurants for the invitations, and here’s to a great summer.

Devilled eggs with bacon and chilli

Devilled eggsA couple of weeks ago, I was footling around in the sun at Ciudad, one of my favourite restaurants in LA, with a Margarita and some devilled eggs. (This goes some way to explain the recent hiatus at Gastronomy Domine; I went away for a week and forgot my laptop, then caught something filthy from one of the insanitary people on the plane on the way home and spent all of last week in bed. To be honest, enforced absence from the internet has been great – I highly recommend it.)

I have some friends who claim they don’t like eggs, and whose idea of picnic hell is a plate of devilled eggs. This recipe, inspired by the two helpings of Ciudad’s spectacular and spectacularly expensive jalapeño and bacon devilled eggs that I ended up face down in, is not for them. If you are a fan of devilled eggs, you’ll be pleased to learn that these keep well, refrigerated, for a couple of days. They’re a great outdoor food – just pack them in the bottom of a plastic box before you go, and make sure you keep it the right way up.

To prepare 12 eggs, you’ll need:

12 eggs
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 tablespoons creme fraiche
½ pickled habanero chilli – or other chillies to taste
6 spring onions, white and pale green parts only
1 small handful each dill, parsley and chives
½ stalk celery
½ sweet dill pickled cucumber
8 rashers smoked streaky bacon (a sweet, dry cure is best here – try to get a reasonably thick cut too)

Start by boiling the eggs. Perfect hard-boiled eggs are as easy as anything – just cover all the eggs with cold water in a saucepan, and bring it to the boil with the lid on. As soon as the eggs boil, remove them from the heat, keeping the lid on, and leave to one side for 12 minutes. Put the saucepan in the sink and run cold water over the eggs for a few minutes until they are cold, then peel.

While the eggs are boiling, grill the bacon until it starts to crisp at the edges. Put all the ingredients except the dill pickle and bacon in the food processor, and whizz until you have a creamy paste.

Dice the pickle finely by hand. You’re chopping it rather than processing it so that it adds a bit of crunch to the eggs. If you’re in the UK, Mrs Elswood pickles, which are available in most supermarkets in the pickles section and sometimes in the kosher section, are excellent. (Like Betty Crocker and Sara Lee, the Mrs Elswood pictured on the label is a fiction – the name is a portmanteau of Elstree and Borehamwood, where the company is based. They’re still damn good pickles.) Dice the bacon finely with a sharp knife, reserving one rasher. Slice that rasher finely to use as a garnish and reserve. Add the diced pickle and bacon to the whizzed ingredients in a large bowl and taste for seasoning. You may find you don’t need to add any salt.

Halve the peeled eggs and pop their yolks out into the bowl with the other ingredients. Use a fork to squish the yolks into the creamy mixture, and stir vigorously to combine everything. Put the mixture in a piping bag with a medium nozzle and pipe dollops into the empty egg halves. Use a squeeze-down-up motion for the best results – you don’t need to twist the bag or nozzle as you work. If you don’t have a piping bag, just spoon the mixture into the eggs or pop it in a freezer bag with the corner snipped off and use that instead – it won’t look as pretty, but it’ll taste just as good.

Sprinkle some herbs and the reserved bacon over the top, and serve cold.

Beef goulash with nokedli

Goulash and nokedliA complicated set of circumstances saw me having to leave China after a week and flying straight to Hungary. Budapest is a beautiful city, but it’s not somewhere I’d recommend for those of you who travel to eat; menus around the city bear identical lists of paprika-heavy casseroles, and there’s not much in the way of haute cuisine. I found two standout restaurants, one in Buda and one in Pest. Café Pierrot, up in the castle district in Buda, is a pricey cellar restaurant with a pretty garden and a French chef, where you’ll find the best foie gras preparations we ate in the city (and Hungary is the biggest producer and consumer of the stuff per capita in the world). And Café Kör, down in Pest by the basilica, has a menu of Austro-Hungarian classics with a really charming wine bar atmosphere.

I really don’t mean to slam paprika-heavy casseroles above (and given that I’ve made one here, you can probably see that I’m actually rather fond of them) – they only get tired after a week or so. I became horribly addicted to nokedli, a spaetzle-ish kind of tiny dumpling, while we were in Budapest. They’re a perfect accompaniment to these rich, dense casseroles, so I swiped a nokedli recipe off the back of a nokedli maker in a Buda craft market (stupidly, I didn’t buy the nokedli maker, which would have meant an easier time for my and Dr W’s ladling arms when it came to making this) and made up a goulash to go with them. If you don’t fancy nokedli with your meal, the casserole is very easy and will go beautifully with rice or with mashed potatoes.

A note on goulash and etymology. The word comes from the Hungarian gulyás (pronounced as we in the UK pronounce goulash – Hungarian is one of those languages where none of the consonants and very few of the vowels do what you think they will), which means cow-herd. If you order a goulash in Hungary you’ll either get a a beef or veal soup, which may or may not contain paprika, or an un-thickened stew with beef, veal and vegetables. The paprika casserole which we in the UK call a goulash is called a papricás (pronounced “paprikash”) or pörkölt – it’s also a dish which originates with Hungarian herdsmen, but somehow the word goulash has come to embrace it over here. I know at least one Hungarian out there (hello Andras) who will probably find something horribly inauthentic about the casserole I’ve made here, but I think you’ll like it nonetheless.

To serve six (it’s worth making plenty – this is an easy recipe which freezes well), you’ll need:

Goulash
1kg beef braising steak, chopped into pieces
3 tablespoons plain flour
4 onions
2 tablespoons sweet paprika
1 teaspoon hot paprika
1 teaspoon sugar
4 cloves garlic
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
3 tablespoons tomato purée
250ml white wine
750ml stock (vegetable, chicken or beef)
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
Soured cream/creme fraiche to dollop
Olive oil/bacon fat to brown the meat

Nokedli
4 eggs
1 teaspoon salt
350ml cold water
500g plain flour

Preheat the oven to 160ºC (320ºF).

Dust the meat with the flour and a generous seasoning of salt and pepper. Bring the olive oil or bacon fat to a high heat in a large, thick-bottomed pan, and brown the meat all over (you’ll probably need to do this in a few batches to avoid crowding the pan), removing the browned meat to a bowl.

Reduce the heat to a medium flame, and in the same pan, sauté the onions until they are translucent. Tip the paprika, tomato purée, sugar, garlic, bay and caraway seeds into the onions and continue to sauté for a minute. Return the meat and any juices to the pan.

Pour the wine over the contents of the pan, and using a wooden spoon, scrape away to deglaze any flavoursome brown bits that have stuck to the bottom. Pour over the stock, and bring to a simmer. Cover with a well-fitting lid and put the casserole in the oven for two hours. Check and stir occasionally, and top up with a little water if you think the stew is becoming too dry.

After the two hours are up, add the juice and zest of a lemon, and taste for seasoning. Set aside and heat up when you are ready to eat.

To make the nokedli, put the eggs, salt and water in a large bowl and use a hand whisk to beat the mixture thoroughly. Add the flour a couple of tablespoons at a time until it is all incorporated. You will have a thick, wet dough.

Bring a large pan of water to a rolling boil. If you have a spaetzle or nokedli maker, now’s the time to bring it out. If you don’t, don’t panic; just get a colander out, spoon a ladleful of the mixture into the bottom of the colander, and use the ladle to push the mixture through the colander straight into the boiling water. It will snake out of the colander’s holes in little pieces, which will swell as they hit the water. The colander process can take a fair amount of elbow grease (this is why you might want to buy yourself a nokedli maker), but I like to think I’m mindfully burning off calories in advance of eating far too much. Most of the calories that got burned off here belonged to the chivalrous Dr W, who was probably getting tired of the swearing coming from the kitchen, and took over after a few minutes.

The nokedli are ready as soon as they float to the top of the boiling water. Fish them out with a slotted spoon and keep them in a bowl in a warm place as you work your way through the mixture. You can serve the finished nokedli as they are, or warm them through in a knob of butter in a frying pan, without browning.

Serve the goulash over the nokedli, with a generous splodge of soured cream spooned on top. A sprinkling of oregano and parsley can give this dish a lovely lift, but you may well find you don’t need it.

Nan Xiang dumplings, Shanghai

Xiao long bao
Xiao long bao

Xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, are an emblematic piece of Shanghai cuisine. They’re a testament to the chef’s skill – ideally, the dumpling will have a thin, thin skin which gives instantly to the teeth, but still has enough integrity to hold in a spoonful of soup alongside the dense pork filling. That soup doesn’t appear until the dumplings are cooked; it’s created when a jellied stock, which is solid when cold, is mixed in with the meat filling, melting with the heat from steaming.

There’s a bit of etiquette involved in eating a Xiao long bao. Pick the bun up by the “knot” on the top with your chopsticks, dip it in the black vinegar and shredded ginger mixture on your table, and place the bun in your little spoon. Use chopsticks or teeth to make a little hole in the side of the bao, allowing the rich soup to leak out into the spoon. Eat the dumpling (carefully – if cooked properly, it should be hot enough to fetch the skin off your tongue) and slurp the soup from the spoon.

Xiao long bao are available all over the city, and some are much, much better than others on offer. I had some surprisingly good ones alongside some surprisingly bad ones at the surprisingly grotty Hilton (unfortunately, while they’d turned out enjoyable, if somewhat MSG-tacular dumplings for a couple of days, they screwed up on our last morning and the few I had there for breakfast on our last day turned out to be tepid, resulting in an 11-hour flight spent developing a close relationship with the airline toilet. Learn the lesson I didn’t – don’t eat a tepid dumpling).

Queues of locals snaking out of a restaurant are a great sign. If you’re visiting the People’s Square or the excellent Shanghai Museum, head for Jia Jia Tan Bao – you’ll spot the restaurant long before you get there from its queue. My favourites were the dumplings at Nan Xiang (sometimes transliterated as Nanxiang), probably Shanghai’s most celebrated dumpling stop.

Dumpling chefs
Dumpling chefs at Nan Xiang

Nan Xiang is an institution that the city is so proud of that a canteen-style branch has been set up at the 2010 Expo, in the middle of a very satisfying food court arrangement. It’s well worth locating if you’re visiting the 5.28 square kilometres that make up the largest ever world’s fair – you’ll need the fat, carbs and protein to get you to the other end.

In the city proper, you’ll find Nan Xiang near the Yu Yuan gardens in the Old Town God’s Temple precinct. No matter when you visit, there will be a queue. Check whether the queue you have joined is for the take-out window or for the restaurant itself, which is upstairs. As you work your way higher and higher up in the restaurant, you’ll find the offerings on the menu become more complicated, so we queued for the third floor, where crab-roe buns are the speciality. If you’re not too fussed about crab roe and just want to sample the pork buns, stop at the second floor, from which you’ll get a great view of the zig-zag Jiuqu bridge.

There are photographs of the dishes on the wall you’ll be queuing alongside, which is helpful in the face of the eccentric English menu (the buns are referred to as “characteristic dessert” – they’re characteristic, but they’re sure as hell not dessert). We ended up with a big steamer full of the traditional pork buns, some crab roe, vegetable and tofu parcels deep-fried to a marvellous lightness (the menu calls these spring rolls), and a plate of superb baked rice-flour and sesame buns filled with cashew nut and garlic chives, all flavoured with a rich sauce.  Someone at an adjacent table was wrestling with a giant, fist-sized bun full of crab roe and pork with a straw sticking out of the top to suck the soup out with, which convenience left him howling as it precision-poached his soft palate. Exercise caution with hot substances and straws.

You’ll find yourself paying RMB 15 (about £1.50) per bamboo steamer. Plus the air fare, of course. If you’re in London and find you simply can’t manage without a plate of xiao long bao, head for Leong’s Legends in Chinatown’s Macclesfield St – they’re no Nan Xiang, but they make the best I’ve found yet in the UK.