Well Done Fred

Glorious thanks to all the wonderful folk that attended the Bred by Fred Launch Party last night.

Colossal thanks to all those that unwhipmeringly pitched in and made it run (to all outward appearances) without hitch. It truly wouldn’t have happened without your help.

For all you non-attendees, here’s what you missed:

—————————————-

Lavender, raspberry or rose bubbles

—————————————-

Homemade Pork Scratchings

Pea’d Broad Bean & Mint on Fadge*

Little Urn Ewe’s & Sorrel Frittata

Chicken Liver Pâté on Fred’s White Toast

Onion and Marjoram Tartlets

Egg Mayonnaise on Soda Bread

—————————————-

Lemon & Blackcurrant Leaf Curd Tartlets

Rhubarb Jelly & Orange Thins

Rose & Pistachio Marshmallows

Chocolate Truffles with Crystallised Fennel Flowers

*Or, plain old, non-Irish potato cake.

A Seasonal Curry and One Tricky Tart

Gosh, isn’t autumn forgiving? I mean, forgiving in the ‘providing you with all of the squash and pumpkin that you could ever need, plus some more’, sense.

You get to dream up lots of ‘interesting’ ways of consuming the funny looking things and if, one day, your dish is something of a cock-up, you have the rest of the season to try again.

Thankfully, yesterday evening was only half a cock-up. Or maybe even less than that. The squash dish was pretty darned amazing, in fact.

Believe me, so far this autumn, we’ve eaten squash fatayer, squash and rosemary risotto, roasted squash with walnut and parmesan salad, pumpkin soup, and pasta with squash in a walnut and ricotta sauce. Most of these dishes didn’t even make it onto the blog and the majority were delicious and gorgeous-looking, to boot.

But as I said, on this occasion, the squash wasn’t the problem. It was the hastily thrown-together apple custard tart, which wasn’t quite up to scratch. Edible. Tasty, even. But not quite right.

The pastry was too crispy and the custard was too eggy and there was a distinct lack of apples for my liking. So, I give the recipe to you today solely on the premise that you will remedy these elements for me – that is, if you should be swayed by the pictures and feel the need to rush to the kitchen and bake it.

I would suggest removing an egg from the custard and adding the yolk to the pastry instead of water, but hell, I wouldn’t even trust me when it comes to apple custard tarts at the moment.

So, back to the squash.

Throughout the last eleven months living in Switzerland, there has been a significant lack of heat-inducing spice in my diet. Recently, this has seen me tearing down the mountain to our favourite Thai restaurant and practically begging to be fed chillies. On this occasion, to save myself the cost of petrol and the expense of eating out in Switzerland, I thought a squash curry was in order.

This Sambal is one I adapted from Chris & Carolyn Caldicott’s World Food Café, which is the book I always dig out on the days that I’m feeling spice-needy. I have only adapted it insofar as the vegetables have been altered in line with the season and therefore, so has the cooking method. Serves 6.

Onions – 1 medium, roughly chopped

Garlic cloves – 4

Hot, red chillies – 4, deseeded if you only want gentle heat

Ground almonds – 45g

Lemongrass stalks – 2, thinly sliced

Root ginger – about a 5cm cube, peeled and roughly chopped

Tomatoes – 400g (or about 4 medium-sized), roughly chopped (no need to peel or deseed, here)

Sunflower oil – 4 tbsp

Squash – 2/3 of a medium sized squash, peeled, deseeded, and chopped into 4 cm cubes

Turnips – 2 medium, peeled and cut into fairly slim wedges

Carrots – 2 medium, peeled and cut into batons

White cabbage – ½ a small one, finely shredded

Spring onions – a bunch of about 4, cut into 2½cm strips

Kaffir lime leaves – 4, rolled up and thinly sliced

Coconut milk – 200ml

Brown sugar – 1 tbsp

Lime – juice of 1

Salt

To Garnish:

Beansprouts – 125g

Cucumber – 1/3 of a medium sized one, grated

Hot red chillies – 2, deseeded and finely sliced lengthways

Coriander leaves – a handful, chopped

Lime – juice of 1

Roasted peanuts – 60g, crushed in a pestle and mortar

Dump the chopped onion, garlic, chillies, almonds, lemongrass, ginger and tomatoes in a food processor and blend until smooth. Leave this alone for a few minutes, while you get on with the rest.

Heat the oil in a wide pan, or wok, until hot. Add the squash and fry for a few minutes and then add the turnip. A few minutes later, add the carrots and keep frying until the vegetables are lightly brown and the squash has begun to soften around the edges. Then add the cabbage and continue to cook until it has softened down.

Next, add the spring onions, lime leaves and the mixture from the blender, gently turning all of the vegetables over until they are coated. Add enough water to make a thickish sauce which barely covers the vegetables, add salt, and simmer until everything is just about tender. The carrots should still have ‘bite’ to them, while the squash and turnip should be a teensy bit more done.

Pour in the coconut milk, sugar and lime juice and taste again for salt. Bring back to a light simmer and cook for another couple of minutes.

Serve the Sambal in bowls and garnish with the remaining ingredients. The Caldicotts recommend a shake of soy sauce over each serving too, but I didn’t have any to hand. Serve with rice.

Now, to the aforementioned tart. The only bit of cookbook referral I did when it came to this, was to remind myself of Nigella’s pastry-making method. After one too many baking upsets and “… but this never used to happen to me!” incidents, I remembered how I always used to follow her fail-safe approach.

For the pastry:

‘00’ flour or plain flour – 120g

Golden icing sugar (if such a thing should exist where you are) – 30g

Unsalted butter – 80g

Iced water – 3 tbsp

Vanilla essence – ¼ tsp

Salt – a pinch

For the filling:

Whole milk – 85ml

Sour cream – 2 heaped tbsp

Free range eggs – 2

Nutmeg – a good grating

Golden caster sugar – 2 tbsp

For the topping:

Apples – 2, thinly sliced (I used Boskoop and didn’t peel them)

Golden caster sugar – for sprinkling

Ground ginger – for dusting

Butter – a few shavings, for dotting on top

First, the pastry. Sieve the flour and icing sugar together in a bowl and add the butter, cut into small cubes. Place the bowl in the freezer and leave it there for 10 minutes.

I’m presuming, you’ve got your iced water sitting somewhere in the fridge. To this, add the vanilla essence and salt.

After 10 minutes, remove the bowl from the freezer and tip the contents into a food processor. Pulse together all the ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse sand and then, tablespoon by tablespoon, add the iced water until the mixture only just begins to come together. Go cautiously after the first couple of tablespoons, as you may not need all the liquid.

Scoop out the mixture, flatten it slightly, wrap it in clingfilm (or something similar, as I can’t stand the damn stuff) and place it in the fridge for 20 minutes.

Once it’s had it’s time, flour your worksurface and rolling pin well, roll out the pastry and line a 24cm tart tin. With my tart, I rolled the rolling pin over and made it all uniform, but I would advise to leave the pastry hanging over the edges for you to neaten up later, as mine shrank pretty drastically.

Prick the base of the tart all over and pop it back in the fridge for another 20 minutes, while your oven warms up to 200 degrees Celsius/gas mark 6.

Blind bake the tart case for 15 minutes, then remove the baking beans and give it another 10 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius/gas mark 4, until lightly browned all over (you may want to cover the pastry edges in foil to prevent them from browning too much). Place the tart shell on a wire rack to cool for a while.

While the tart shell is cooling, make the custard. Place the milk and sour cream in a small pan, grate over a decent amount of nutmeg and heat gently.

In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs and sugar until pale, and then slowly pour the heated milk mixture over the eggs, whisking as you go. Pour this mixture into the semi-cooled tart case. You don’t want to fill it right to the top, so you may not need it all.

Arrange a layer of apple slices over the custard and sprinkle this layer with golden caster sugar. Don’t worry if they sink a bit – this means that hopefully, the second layer will stay neatly on top.

Arrange a second layer of apple slices on top of the first, sprinkle again with golden caster sugar and dust all over with ground ginger. Dot shavings of butter here and there, before placing the tart back in the oven for 45 mins, or until the custard has set and the top is a golden brown.

Allow to cool for a while on a wire rack before serving.

Chocolate, Cardamom and Quince Tart

I’d say yesterday evening was fairly successful, all things considered.

In total, eight of our friends managed to squeeze themselves through our front door to arrange themselves on the most uncomfortable chairs and/or settee in the whole of Switzerland. Most even voiced that they were happy to be there. I think the food and wine helped.

Since this was the first party-esque gathering we had managed so far in our 10½ months of being en Suisse, I had decided to do something easy on the eater. Something that would be happy to take a backseat in the way the evening panned out, that could be eaten in stages and revisited at will while conversation did its own thing. Mezze seemed like the perfect choice.

And as good and as well received as it all was, I don’t want to go into too much detail about the recipes, the ingredient-gathering and the cooking. Suffice to say, my morning was spent visiting bustling grocery shops and a Syrian café, while my afternoon was something of a kitchen-wrecking blur, but one which yielded pretty good results come eventide.

There was the obligatory hoummus, minty cucumber yoghurt (both made so often, they no longer require a cookbook trawl), some baba ganoush, meatballs and tabbouleh made to Claudia Roden recipes and yoghurt-topped beetroot and squash-filled fatayer pastries, both taken from Sam & Sam Clark’s Moro cookbook. I had notions of baking some flatbread too, but in the end, shop-bought pitta (tarted with sumac and nigella, and baked) had to do.

What I was rather pleased with and which I’m more than happy to gush about, was the dessert: a Chocolate, Cardamom and Quince Tart.

The original idea came, again, from my well-loved (read: food-stained and tattered) Moro cookbook, in which there is a recipe for a Chocolate and Apricot Tart. Although this in itself sounded like it would make an idyllic ending to our Middle Eastern feast, I decided to take a good idea and fiddle a little.

A week earlier, I had made a few jars of beautiful, pink quince jam, which were now perched at the top of my kitchen shelves, gleaming quietly. The quince has traditional associations with Middle Eastern cooking, and knowing that my jam wasn’t overly-sweet, I decided to make this a feature of my tart. And I must credit Tartelette with the addition of almond and cardamom to the pastry base, since I stumbled upon her Quince Tartlets some time ago and thought the combination sounded perfect. I must also confess, I did get a teeny bit cardamom-happy and ended up sprinkling more into the chocolate filling, but with very pleasing results.

So here it is. This managed to bring a smile to the faces of eight guests and their two semi-capable hosts. Normally though, I think it would feed a little less (say, 8 or so).

Pastry

Plain flour – 100g

Ground almonds – 40g

Cardamom – seeds from 3 pods, ground

Icing sugar – 30g

Butter – 75g, cold and cut into small pieces

Egg yolks – 1

Filling

Quince jam – 180g

Unsalted butter – 135g

Dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids, if you please) – 110g, broken into pieces

Eggs – 2, large

Caster sugar – 45g

Cardamom – seeds from 3 pods, ground

To make the pastry, sift together the flour and icing sugar in a bowl, then stir in the ground almonds. Add the butter, get your hands in the bowl (why on earth would you want to use a processor for the best part of pastry making?) and rub between your fingers until the mixture feels like coarse sand. Add the egg yolk and mix with a fork until the pastry comes together a little bit, then finish off the process with your hands and pat into a flattened ball. (If the mixture doesn’t initially look like it’s coming together when you are stirring, add a tiny splash of iced water.)

Wrap the pastry in cling-film and place in the fridge for at least an hour. (When I made this, I left it in the fridge overnight to make the pastry-making process a little less troublesome.)

Once the pastry has had its chilling time, remove from the fridge and roll out to a thickness of 3mm to 5mm. Lift this over the top of a 24cm tart tin and gently ease it into place. Prick the base lightly all over with a fork and pop it back into the fridge for another half an hour. In the meantime, preheat the oven to 210 degrees Celsius/gas mark 7.

Scrunch up enough baking paper to line the pastry case and add baking beans or dried pulses, before sitting the tin on a baking sheet and placing in the oven for 10 minutes, or until the edges are light brown. Remove from the oven and carefully hoist the baking paper and beans out of the pastry case, and lower the heat to 180 degrees Celsius/gas mark 4. Cover the edges of the tart case with foil to prevent them from burning and return the case back to the oven for a further 10 minutes or so, until the base is also light brown. Remove and leave to cool on a wire rack. Leave the oven on at this temperature.

To make the filling, heat the quince jam in a pan over a low heat until it liquefies a little and then pour this carefully into your cooled pastry case, smoothing out to the edges. Leave this to cool for a while you attend to the rest.

Place the butter and chocolate in a bain-marie and heat until melted and then remove to one side. In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs and caster sugar until pale, light and a little frothy. Stir the ground cardamom into the melted chocolate mixture and fold this into the whisked eggs and sugar, before pouring into the pastry case.

Place the tart back on the baking sheet and bake in the middle of the oven for 20 to 25 minutes, until the chocolate filling has lightly risen and appears to crack slightly (it will sink upon cooling).

We ate this, unadorned, at room temperature. You may want to offer something creamy to go with it, but make sure whatever it is has a little tang (some sharp yoghurt, or crème fraîche, perhaps) to offset the tart’s wonderful richness.

Lemons from Liguria (Crostata di Marmellata)

In May, the Eastern Ligurian coast reeks of blossom. Just walking around outdoors, you can’t escape the smell and it’s pretty wonderful. It’s a bit like being in the world’s most amazing garden centre, only there’s this great, glittering expanse of blue in front of you, dotted here and there by a few white boats.

Whenever we visit Italy, my tastebuds seem to get hypersensitive and I return home with a renewed fervour for cooking, baking and tasting. I desperately want to create that freshness that you experience with simple Italian food and while I’m there, I try to dissect everything I eat to unearth the few core flavours of each dish.

I especially suffer from the desire to try and recreate the sweet things I eat in Italy. On our last day in Liguria, I vowed I was going to purchase some little pandolcini that I’d been drawn to everyday in the window of a small panificio. I wasn’t sure whether they would be hard and biscuitty, or soft and bread-like, I just knew I wanted them. Safely stashed away, those babies made it all the way back to Switzerland in one piece, before making it into my mouth the next morning for breakfast.

It was one wonderful breakfast. The pandolcini were biscuit-like, with a flavour similar to many cantuccini that you can buy outside of Italy. However, the texture was softer, akin almost to a British rock cake.

And the main flavours? Blossom, of course. There was orange blossom, fennel seed and there were raisins, pint nuts and several other ingredients I just couldn’t single out.

I’m not sure whether this was typical of the Ligurian pandolce, since all the semi-desperate research I have conducted over the last couple of weeks would seem to indicate the use of yeast (which I’m fairly sure didn’t feature in our little bundles of joy) and quite a lot of other dried or candied fruit.

I think the single answer is to return to Liguria for a bakery-crawl, so I can grill each baker in my broken Italian about what goes into their version of pandolce. My only hope here is that they see me as a naïve tourist and not the recipe junkie that I really am, as I understand that pandolce recipes are closely guarded family secrets, not given away lightly and especially not to strangers.

Another thing I ate on our trip which made firm friends with my sweet tooth, was our agriturismo’s Crostata di Marmellata. I’d like to hazard a guess at the type of marmellata which featured in the one I ate, but I’d probably be wrong. The owners of the agriturismo seemingly grew every type of fruit imaginable. At breakfast, there was a jam with a citrusy flavour which just wasn’t quite lemon and another which was chunkier and orange in colour. Either of these could have been the featured jam in the crostata. But it was the pastry that made it different to just being any jam tart. It was almost too thick and too unsweet, and it stuck to the roof of my mouth in the clingy manner of a digestive biscuit.

And I’m still trying to recreate it. I’ve made my jam from the world’s most fabulous and fragrant Ligurian lemons; it’s just the pastry that eludes me.

For now, I’ve settled on a standard sweet pastry, the recipe for which I dug out of my Silver Spoon Italian cookbook. But until I make one with the perfect pastry, I fear everyone around here is just going to have to keep eating the daily supply of lemon jam tarts that I keep churning out. And I’ll know the perfect one when I make it. Oh, yes. It will taste of breakfast by the sea.

If you should manage to get your hands on some particularly remarkable lemons, then I urge you to try your hand at some simple jam-making. This jam doesn’t involve any special equipment, just a solid pan, a wooden spoon, lemons, sugar and water. And it doesn’t make a great vat of the stuff, just a couple of jars’ worth. I adapted it from a recipe by Tessa Kiros, which features in her book, Falling Cloudberries.

Unwaxed lemons – 3

Caster sugar – 625g

Cut the ends off the lemons and discard them. Slice the lemons very thinly, removing the pips as you go, then cut the slices into smaller pieces.

Put the lemon pieces into your pan, cover with 625ml water and bring them to the boil. Once the liquid reaches boiling point, lower the heat to a simmer and leave it for about an hour until the lemons are completely soft. Give the lemons a gentle stir from time to time and make sure it doesn’t boil too vigorously.

Once the lemons are soft, add the sugar and stir gently until it dissolves. Simmer for another 45 minutes to an hour, until syrupy. You can test to see whether the jam is done by dabbing a small blob onto a saucer and tilting to see if it runs. If it seems a bit sluggish, then it’s done. If it runs freely, then give it a little more time.

I have to confess, when I made my first batch, I did something which is probably considered a little unethical in jam-making circles. Towards the end of cooking, it looked like my mixture still had quite a lot of fairly sturdy peel in it and, not wanting to end up with marmajam, I removed most of the bits of peel and gave them a whizz in the Magimix before returning them straight back to my pan.

Once it was done and still warm, I filled two sterilised jars, put the lids on and turned them upside down until they were completely cold. Most of it has now been used with great success in several jam tarts, but the rest is residing happily in my fridge.

So, to the pastry. Not quite the perfect pastry for me, but it still makes a damn good tart.

Plain flour – 200g

Caster sugar – 100g

Unsalted butter, soft and cut into pieces – 80g

Eggs – 1, plus 1 yolk

Salt – a pinch

Sift the flour into a large bowl and stir in the caster sugar. Shape this into a big pile and create a well in the centre, into which you need to add the butter, egg, egg yolk and salt.

Knead the mixture together until combined (but don’t overknead), then wrap the pastry in cling film and pop into the fridge for an hour. While the pastry is chilling, preheat your oven to 180 degrees celcius/gas mark 4 and grease a tart tin with butter.

When the pastry has had its time in the fridge, remove it and set aside a small piece. On a floured surface, use a floured rolling pin to roll out the pastry to a thickness of 3mm and line your tart tin. I can’t provide any useful tips on how to do this. All I can say is do your best, don’t get angry/cry, and use some of the pastry overhang to patch up the rips that you will make. Fill the tart with jam to a depth of about 2cm.

Take your remaining pastry and roll it out. Either cut it into thin strips and make a lattice across the top of the tart, or make your own pattern. Turn the pastry overhang inwards and pinch to form a rim, moistening with a little water if needs be.

Bake for about 20 minutes until light golden brown. When cool, dust with icing sugar and serve.