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Beautiful burgers

The rain stopped for a whole hour today, long enough for me to wheel out the barbecue and do a quick dance of appeasement to the cloud gods.

I love a good beefburger. Sadly, a good beefburger is a thing seldom found in burger restaurants, which usually fob you off with a pallid and distressingly regular disc of frozen and reheated, mechanically recovered goo. There, are, however, exceptions. Americans with a branch of Fatburger nearby should put down the computer now and run out of the door, pausing only to gather enough pocket change to purchase a burger and some onion rings. The Fatburger is a sweet and juicy beast, made fresh out of minced steak on a toasted bun. I understand that In ‘n’ Out is pretty good too; unfortunately, the In ‘n’ Out and Fatburger franchises haven’t spread much outside California. California is about 6000 miles away. I’m going to have to make my own.

Remarkably (especially given that we’re cooking burgers here), this is a very low-fat recipe. Such things are not the norm on this blog. Take the opportunity to cook in a relatively fat-free fashion in both hands, because it doesn’t come along all that often round here.

For burgers for four, you’ll need:

1 kg lean minced steak
1 red pepper
1 large onion
1 egg
8 sun-dried tomatoes
3 tablespoons ketchup
1 handful parsley
1 handful marjoram
5 cloves garlic
Salt and pepper to taste

Hopelessly easy method, this; just throw everything except the steak mince into the food processor and whizz until chopped. You are aiming to chop here, not to reduce everything to a ketchup-coloured slurry, so exercise restraint with the whizz button.

Add the chopped mixture to the steak mince in a bowl, and use your hands to bring it all together. Then form patties. I find I can get about ten good-size burgers out of this amount; you may prefer smaller or larger burgers.

Barbecue over hot charcoal until cooked through. (Today, a drizzly day when my charcoal just refused to give off much heat, this took about ten minutes on each side. Under ideal conditions, it should take about four per side; check your burger regularly.) If it’s not barbecuing weather, these burgers are excellent put under a hot grill.

I don’t serve these with a fluffy and pasty burger bun, but with robust slices of ciabatta and a dressed salad with pine nuts.

I leave you with a photograph I took at Fatburger in Heavenly, on the border between California and Nevada, back in February. A little less handsome than my burgers, but fantastically tasty. I need to get back to America soon.

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Bobotie

We were visiting some South African friends a few evenings ago, and were sent home, late and pleasantly hazy (at least on my part; Mr Weasel had to drive), with a packet of spices for making bobotie. This is serendipity; I’d already planned on making bobotie this weekend, as it had popped into my head the minute the same friends had invited us over. This bobotie, though, turned out even better than my old recipe, thanks in part to a slightly different method as described on the back of the spices, and also to the Cape Malay curry powder that was included in the pack of spices.

This curry powder is very different in character from the Bolst’s I usually use. It’s approximately Madras-hot, but it’s much heavier on the fenugreek than Indian curry powders often are. If any readers know where I can find some in the UK, I’d be delighted to hear from you.

I first came across bobotie when I was a little girl. I remember asking Mummy what we were having for tea that evening. ‘Mince and custard,’ she replied. I wasn’t terribly happy about the concept, but it was, in fact, delicious. I would recommend that you don’t introduce the creamy topping on the spiced meat to your family as ‘custard’. Although it is, strictly speaking, a custard made with milk and eggs but no sugar, your squeamish children will not thank you for pointing this out. Call it a delicious creamy sauce or something.

You’ll need:
3 tablespoons medium-hot curry powder (Cape Malay if you can find it)
500g steak mince
1 thick slice white bread
1 ½ cups milk
1 large crushed onion
1 teaspoon cumin, crushed
1 teaspoon coriander, crushed
1 teaspoon crushed garlic
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
1 knob butter
2 large eggs
5 bay leaves
Juice of a lemon
Salt
½ cup sultanas
⅓ cup mango chutney (I like Sharwoods’ Major Grey)
2 teaspoons Garam Masala

Soak the bread in half the milk, then give it a good squeeze, retaining the excess milk. Crumble the bread and mix it with the beef and the curry powder. Leave to one side while you fry the onion so the flavour of the curry powder can penetrate the meat.

Melt the butter and use it to fry the onion, sliced finely, with the ginger, garlic, cumin and coriander until golden. Remove the onion and spices to a bowl, retaining the butter, and fry the meat, curry powder and bread mixture in the butter until the meat is cooked. Put in a bowl with the onion mixture, one egg, the lemon juice, salt, half of the remaining milk, the sultanas and the chutney. Mix thoroughly.

Press the mixture into a greased baking dish. Beat the remaining milk with an egg, and pour it over the top of the mixture. Press the bay leaves into the top (in South Africa you might use lemon leaves) then sprinkle with the Garam Masala. Bake at 180°C for 35 minutes, until the top is set and golden. Serve with rice and a salad.

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Whole sirloin of beef with prosciutto, porcini and herbs

Christmas dinner for twelve people is a tricky one. Several of the people present admitted that they didn’t like turkey, some had moral issues around the consumption of ducks (no, I don’t get it either) and no goose this large was going to cook without being dry. Was any bird outside the Emperor Penguin going to be big and festive enough? Would those who had been to see March of the Penguins forgive me? Were dead, French-trimmed penguins readily available in Cambridgeshire?

Eventually I decided that this was unlikely, and remembered that cows come in handy, family-sized joints. I ran straight to Waitrose and ordered a whole sirloin of beef – at £60, this works out as surprisingly good value when you realise it will easily serve twelve with ample leftovers.

Cambridge boasts an excellent Italian delicatessen in Balzano’s at 204 Cherry Hinton Road (01223 246168). I spent a further £25 on 40 large, paper-thin slices of prosciutto, and £15 on ten small, Italian packs of porcini (cepes). I love Balzano’s. It’s a short walk from my work, and they sell every antipasto you can think of: huge jars of artichoke hearts in olive oil, enormous Kilner jars of anchovies, tubs of fresh pesto, roast vegetables and tiny capers. They also stock excellent Italian preserved goods: Barilla pastas and sauces, tins of traditional fennel sauces, nut and chocolate confections and a healthy line in fascinating little biscuits.

Having bought Balzano’s out of Panforte di Siena and the oddly German (but still welcome) packs of lebkuchen, I carted my treasure home, refrigerated it all until Christmas day, then drove it to my parents’ house first thing in the morning and got cooking. Mum and Dad’s house made sense in that they have twelve chairs to my six, a large table to my small one, an Aga and a conventional oven, as well as four gas hobs and two Aga ones. Mr Weasel and his family followed on later, wisely keeping out of my harried way.

I rolled out two sheets of greaseproof paper large enough to wrap the sirloin in, and laid the ham in a thick, unbroken layer on top of it. I soaked the mushrooms for half an hour in hot water from the kettle, and, keeping the soaking water aside, fried them in quarter of a pat of butter with a bulb of chopped garlic until the liquid had evaporated, leaving them glossy, then added the juice of a lemon and a glass of Marsala. When this had bubbled away as well, I spread the nearly dry mushrooms and garlic on the ham, reserving a small handful, and covered them with a thick layer of of chopped tarragon, parsley and sage. I placed the raw sirloin on top of the layered prosciutto, mushrooms and herbs, and used the greaseproof paper to wrap it in them, Swiss-roll style, folding ham over the ends and tying the whole bundle tightly. I put it in a large roasting dish, with another bulb of whole, unpeeled cloves of garlic tucked in around it.

These photographs, incidentally, are the reason you’re reading this a week and a half after Christmas. I remembered all the meat but forgot my camera, and had to use my Dad’s. The bits of handshaking which meant the pictures from his camera would end up on my computer ended up rather more complicated than they needed to be . . . still, they’re here now, so read on.

A beef sirloin will cook amazingly fast, even one of this size. Mine needed an hour and a half in the top (roasting) oven of the Aga, which runs at around 190c. The best way to tell how yours is doing is to use a meat thermometer, stabbed into the middle of the joint before you start to cook. Keep an eye on the thermometer from 45 minutes into the cooking time. When the needle reaches ‘rare’, take the joint out and rest it on a serving dish for ten minutes.

I deglazed the juices and sticky deposits in the pan to make an intense, rich gravy with the mushroom stock, the reserved mushrooms, half a pint of Marigold vegetable stock, another two glasses of Marsala and half a pint of crème fraîche, all simmered until reduced and silky.

I served the beef with King Edward potatoes roasted in goose fat, Brussels sprouts (steamed and served with roast chestnuts), petits pois a l’étoufée (peas cooked in a light vegetable stock with lettuce, butter and spring onions) and Yorkshire puddings, cooked in muffin tins.

After a starter of gravadlax, with a homemade dill sauce and foie gras with quince jelly, we launched upon the main course. And a happy silence fell on the chattering table, which is the best Christmas compliment I could have had. I’m already looking forward to next year, when perhaps I will get my hands on that penguin.

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Slow-simmered Chinese beef and fried rice

Slow braising in soya sauce is one of the best things you can do with stewing meat, making it scented, tender and melting. Here, I’ve used some whole spices, oyster sauce, sugar, garlic and ginger to turn some cheap cubes of stewing beef into meaty gold.

To accompany it, I’ve broken out my packet of Chinese sausages (lap cheung). These are a sausage rich in pork fat, sugar and anise, preserved by wind-drying. You can buy two kinds of Chinese sausage; these, which are red in colour and made from pork and pork fat, and the darker ones, made from duck meat and liver. I’ve put the rest of the packet in the freezer, to use another day in some steamed rice. Today’s sausage is going in some stir-fried rice.

The beef is easy – all its deliciousness comes from long, slow simmering. You’ll need:

1 lb cubed stewing beef
1 bulb of garlic, halved
3 slices ginger
2 dried chilis
2 stars of anise
1 stick of cinnamon
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons soya sauce
1 wine glass Chinese rice wine
1 teaspoon sesame oil
Water to cover

Put all the ingredients in a heavy-bottomed pan and simmer very gently for two to three hours, until the meat is tender. Top up with water if the pan starts to look dry.

The fried rice is full of simple, assertive flavours. I used:

4 Chinese sausages, sliced thin
3 cloves of garlic, sliced
2 inches peeled ginger, julienned (cut into matchsticks)
8 spring onions, sliced into circles
1 pack shitake mushrooms, sliced
1 large handful frozen peas
1 large bowl cold, pre-cooked rice
2 eggs
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespons soya sauce

Stir fry the sausage slices, moving everything round quickly over a high heat until they give up some of their fat, then throw in the garlic, ginger and spring onions and stir fry for three minutes. Add the mushrooms and peas and continue to stir fry until the mushrooms are soft and cooked. Crumble the rice with your hands into the wok. It’s vitally important that the rice is cold from the fridge; warm rice will go gungy and come apart. Cold rice will keep its grains whole and keep its texture. Stir fry the rice until it’s all piping hot, then make a well in the middle so you can see the bottom of the wok, break the eggs into it and use your spatula to scramble them in the well. Stir the cooked egg into the rest of the rice, add the sesame oil and soya sauce, stir fry for another twenty seconds, and serve.

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Steak rub and a new gadget

I’ve nothing very complicated to cook this evening; Christmas has reduced me to a withered husk. Those wanting to see what Christmas lunch looked like will have to wait until after the New Year, when I next see my Dad, who currently has custody of the memory card with all the photos from Christmas on it. (Stay tuned. The main course was, if I do say so myself, fantastic as only £100 of ingredients can be.)

So tonight, rather than rolling whole sirloins of beef up in herbs, making complicated things with pastry or setting fire to the fumes coming off hot Cointreau-soaked Christmas puddings, I’m just doing some steak with some chips out of the freezer. I want something easy and tasty tonight, so I’ve made a cross-continental steak rub using Asian, European and American ingredients.

I’ve mixed two tablespoons of soft brown sugar, one tablespoon of a good five-spice powder (this is from Daily Bread in Cambridge, where they mix it themselves. Its ingredients include aniseed, fennel, cinnamon, cloves and pepper), an extra tablespoon of cinnamon, a teaspoon of Maldon salt and a teaspoon of ground chipotle chilis. (I get mine in America when possible, and take it home in that bulging suitcase of contraband, but fellow Brits can buy dried chipotles online in the UK at the Cool Chile Company and grind them up in a coffee grinder or Magimix. The Cool Chile Company also do excellent chipotles in adobo and a very nice chipotle ketchup.) I then added two tablespoons of liquid smoke (also from America – if you can’t get your hands on any, use a couple of tablespoons of cooking sherry, which will taste completely different, but fantastic). I rubbed the paste into the steaks, and left them to marinade for half an hour, then drained them and fried them with diced shallots in a knob of butter for four minutes each side until medium rare. Delicious.

Those shallots are where my new gadget comes in. Among a Santa’s sack of presents from Mr Weasel’s obscenely generous family was a little package containing an Alligator Onion Cutter. I’m not usually one for single-purpose gadgets, but this device is a thing of genius.

I’ve always had a problem with onions and shallots; I’m extremely susceptible to the vapours coming off them, and usually spend half an hour at least after chopping a particularly strong one looking like I’ve just been punched in the face. Tearstains and unusual swellings are not a good look for dinner. I’ve tried the business with the swimming goggles, the trick with the teaspoon between the teeth, and chopping them underwater. None of these ideas has worked very well; I steam up, lose bits of onion and weep, weep, weep the night away.

I also suffer from pretty mediocre knife skills; I may be fast, but I’m not very tidy, and my slicing and dicing is competent but uneven.

My new onion cutter eradicates both these problems, and reduced my shallots into perfect, tiny dice in three seconds flat. No fumes. Gorgeous little cubes which make me look like I know what I’m doing with a knife. And, best of all, it rinses clean or goes happily in the dishwasher. Keep one hand over the blades while slicing to keep the onion or shallot from popping all over the working surface, and you’re away. Hurrah! My next experiment will involve a potato, the Aligator and some hot, deep fat. And some of that chipotle ketchup.

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Beef and Guinness casserole

My Dad told me a while ago that he doesn’t enjoy stews and casseroles which use stout as a base; he finds them, he said, bitter. This is an opinion shared by a lot of people, and it’ s such a shame; the only reason the stout casseroles you’ve eaten in the past have been bitter has to do with length of time in the oven. Cooked at a low temperature for several hours, the beer will magically turn into a rich, sweet and glossy sauce, and there won’t be a hint of bitterness. Promise.

The preparation of this dish doesn’t take too long, but you’ll need to leave it in the oven for at least three hours – if making if for lunch, I usually make it the night before, leave it in the fridge overnight and reheat. Like many casseroles, it improves with keeping.

Stout, for those who are only familiar with good old Guinness, is a generic term for a very dark, heavy beer made with roasted malts and barley. You can use any stout; it doesn’t have to be Guinness. Stout has a toasty, dry flavour; buy a couple of cans to drink with the meal.

I used:
2 1/2 lb rump steak, cubed
3 red onions, quartered and split into layers
2 cans Guinness (or other stout)
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
4 cloves garlic, squashed
1 jar of pickled walnuts, halved
2 tablespoons of juice from the walnut jar
2 tablespoons flour
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Pickled walnuts are another curiously English thing; walnuts picked before they are ripe and pickled whole in a sweetened vinegar. They’re perfect with sharp English cheeses like cheddar; sweet and tangy, with a lovely nutty aroma. I use Opie’s pickled walnuts; they do look like tiny roast mouse brains (that’s one in the photo at the top, nestling to the right of the meat and kind of indistinguishable from it), but they’re extremely good. Leave them out if you can’t find any (English supermarkets carry them all year round with the other pickles), and add the juice of a lemon and a tablespoon of sugar instead.

Preheat the oven to a very low setting (140c/275f).

Brown the meat in olive oil in small batches. (In the picture on the right, it’s just been browned. There is only half a glass of Guinness because I have drunk the rest of the can already. Oops.) Use the pan you’ll be cooking the casserole in, over a high flame, and remove the browned meat to a dish. You can really go to town with the browning; you want a good deep brown, almost charred finish to give the flavour depth. When the meat is removed from the pan, add some more olive oil, and add the onions to the pan, stirring them until their edges are also a little charred. Return the meat to the dish with its juices, and stir in the flour (which will help to thicken the sauce). Continue stirring for a minute, then add both cans of Guinness, the herbs and garlic, and the pickled walnuts and their juice. Season, bring to a simmer (hard to spot, this; Guinness gets very frothy when you make it hot), and then put the lid on and put the dish in the oven.

Three hours later, you’ll have a rich and unctuous casserole. The meat will be incredibly tender, dark brown and full of juices. I served it with some mashed King Edward potatoes, with quarter of a pint of boiling milk beaten into them, some truffle-infused olive oil and a sprinkling of thyme. I’d like to try making this with Young’s Chocolate Stout some time; there’s a world of chocolate beer out there just crying out to be cooked with.

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Weeping Tiger

It’s a chromosomal abnormality passed on by my father (Chinese by way of Malaysia); every week or so I find myself subject to an overwhelming craving for oriental food. One kitchen cupboard is kept full of Chinese, Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian and Japanese condiments, including seven kinds of soy sauce, numerous sticky brown things in jars, hermetically sealed packets of blachan (the stinkiest thing in the house, but completely necessary in a lot of Malaysian and Thai dishes), dried fungus, four different kinds of dried noodle, four kinds of rice (not including the two risotto rices in the other cupboard), lye water, pork floss, fish floss, rice wines, black and red vinegars and some mysterious tins which have lost their labels. This is all in order that this craving can be assuaged any time it hits, as long as I’m in the house.

The craving thumped me between the eyes this time when we were expecting some friends. Weeping Tiger, a Thai beef dish, would hit the spot, with some Chinese noodles for some stodge. I took a good-sized piece of sirloin steak per person, and rubbed each well with kejap manis, an Indonesian sweet soy sauce.

I made some Nuoc Mam Gung – a sweet, salty, strong sauce made from raw ingredients. I put a peeled piece of ginger the length of my forefinger, two peeled limes, four cloves of garlic, half a stalk of peeled lemongrass, two birds eye chilis, four tablespoons of Nam Pla (Thai fermented fish sauce – I use Squid Brand, a Thai premium brand, because it has a fabulous label) and four tablespoons of caster sugar into the Magimix, and whizzed the lot until I had a sauce. If you follow this recipe, you may prefer to use less chili; taste the sauce when it’s out of the blender and see whether you think it needs more lime juice or fish sauce. You may want to add a little water if you find it too strong.

After the sirloins had marinated for half an hour, I grilled them in a very hot, stovetop grill-pan, keeping the middles pink (about two minutes per side). The steaks were then sliced very thin and placed, still warm, on top of a crisp salad with grated carrot, Chinese leaves, cabbage, shallot, mint leaves and coriander leaves. The nuoc mam gung I’d made earlier was drizzled on top – delicious.

This dish is notably lacking in carbohydrate. To remedy this, I made a very simple garlic cauliflower noodle stir fry which my Dad used to make regularly when my brother and I were little; real childhood comfort food.

This dish needs pea thread noodles – a very thin noodle made from mung beans. These noodles are one of my favourite kinds; they’re thread-thing, transluscent and glassy, and they don’t go slimy in sauces. I broke off half a packet and made them soft in boiling water, then drained them and rinsed them under the tap in a sieve. At the same time, I took eight dried shitake mushrooms and put them in boiling water to rehydrate. When they were soft I sliced them thinly.

To serve four people, I broke up a large cauliflower into bite-sized florets. I stir-fried six roughly chopped cloves of garlic in very hot groundnut oil, added the cauliflower and mushrooms after about a minute and stir-fried that for another three minutes. I then added a pint of chicken stock (I usually keep home-made stock in the freezer, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a stock cube if you don’t have the time), half a glass of Shaosing rice wine, about three tablespoons of mushroom soy and the same amount of light soy. I then put the lid on the wok for four minutes. Lid off, noodles in, taste, add more soy sauce. (I also add half a teaspoon of MSG at this point, which will doubtless cause gasps of horror from my Mum when she reads this; sorry Mummy.)

I thought my Chinese food craving had been squashed for the week. Unfortunately, writing this meal up has made it come back again. Time for a pork floss sandwich.

Lunchtime update:
Emails and comments have been arriving asking what the hell pork floss is. It’s not something I shall be cooking for you, since I don’t want another bout of RSI (this is a dish which needs several hours’ constant stirring); besides, it’s one of those things I always fill suitcases with when returning from Malaysia. There’s an excellent post at Umami on pork floss, which I commend to you.

Pork floss is, simply, lean, lean pork cooked with spices, sugar and sauces until the muscle fibres come apart in a dry, flossy mass; it melts in the mouth and tastes beautiful. It’s a gorgeous garnish, a delicious snack and one of my favourite things.