Salmon Gravlax with Sourdough

Jenny and I first encountered gravlax whilst on honeymoon in Scotland. We decided to treat ourselves to dinner out at a nice pub and, being near Aviemore, wound up at The Old Bridge Inn. Being  indecisive we got a starter to share and, having never had gravlax, we decided to try it. Having thoroughly enjoyed our dinner I wanted to learn more about how it was made. The finished dish is rather akin to smoked salmon but without the smoke.

Upon returning home to the joys of google, I was intrigued to discover that gravlax required only store cupboard ingredients, dill, salmon and a fridge (ticking some of my "like to cure / preserve traditionally" boxes). I have now made this a few times and it is one I like to pull out as a starter - British salmon that I have cured myself is very satisfying.
In my opinion, cured salmon sits wonderfully on a good solid loaf. Rather than just bake a wholemeal loaf, I decided on a fresh sourdough starter to bake a loaf with more tang. For those who haven't come across sourdough before, it's a loaf baked with natural yeast and bacteria, in this case out of the air (some people use grape skins that have collected the natural yeast on the outside).  It makes a slower-rising loaf that has lots of tangy flavour. One word of warning - you need 48 hours to make this dish!

Recipe:

• 1 quantity sourdough starter
• 400g wholemeal bread flour
• water
• 1 side of salmon (about 600g)
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp pepper
• 2 tsp sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp juniper berries
• 1 small bunch of dill plus a sprig for the dressing
• 1 tsp mustard seeds
• 2 tsp salad oil
• 2 tsp cider vinegar
• a pinch of lecethin or other emulsifier (optional)
• Salad

For the sourdough, mix the starter with 1/2 the flour and enough water to make a wet dough. Leave this overnight to sponge. Knead in the remaining flour to form a nice dough and leave to rise in a covered bowl for an hour. Knock back and allow to rise (I have taken to using a well-floured basket to give a nice texture). Bake the bread at 200C for 45 minutes, with a tin of boiling water on the shelf underneath. Allow to cool.

For the gravlax - grind up the salt and pepper coarsely, add the juniper berries and crush lightly before mixing in the sugar. Sprinkle this over the side of salmon and add the coarsely-chopped dill. Wrap the salmon up tight and leave in the bottom of the fridge for 36-48 hours, depending on thickness, turning regularly to ensure the cure is worked in. 

Once cured, rinse well, pat dry with kitchen towel and slice thinly with a very sharp knife - cured salmon gets very sticky.

To make the dressing, grind the mustard with a little salt and add the remaining dill, grinding to a paste. Add the vinegar, oil and lecethin and mix to a smooth consistency (so I got lazy adding the emulsifier - I just happened to have some around as I was making apple foam).

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The Birthday Dinner

For some crazy reason, this year I decided to cook a dinner in honour of my birthday. "Why not?" I foolishly thought. So after many weeks of head-scratching and much practice, the menu was pinned down as follows:

Gravlax and Sourdough

Traditionally cured salmon served on fresh sourdough, with a leafy salad and a dill mustard sauce

Lemon Sorbet

Haggis Ravioli

Fresh Ravioli filled with haggis and served with a whisky cream sauce

Baby Plum Tomatoes and Pesto Topping

Baked Hake

Hake baked whole on-the-bone, served with a butterbean puree and crispy bacon

Apple Foam

Triple Beef Pie

Slowly-cooked brisket, chuck and shin of local beef served in a suet pie with mashed potato

Rosebud Tea Granita

Profiteroles

A trio of flavoured profiteroles, berries, white chocolate and caramel

Caramel Macchiato Panna Cotta

Coffee and Chocolate Terrine

A dark chocolate terrine served with fruit coulis

Six full dishes, 5 smaller between course things. To add to my burden I thought I would try and record it all for your reading pleasure. I was hampered by a combination of forgetting to take photos at key stages and a flat battery half way through service so I might fail on my original plan of writing up every dish, but expect to see more posts over the next few weeks!

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Excuses

January has passed and it transpires I haven't written a single post since before Christmas! My sincerest apologies. I have been working on learning lots of new skills and planning a dinner party for the end of the month. All of the recipes will be being blogged after the event to try and make up for this long silence. To help you wait here are just a few of the things I have been working on:

Fresh Ravioli

Cooking with Bones

Curing Fish

Sous vide

Sourdough

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All Butter Shortbread

December is now creeping past and it's time to do one of our usual Christmas treats. Shortbread is something that is just right for this time of year. A recent trip to Scotland has only heightened my seasonal desire for this traditional treat! Rather than just opting for the usual recipe, I decided to take a little longer over this one - and it has been a while in the baking: 8 kg of shortbread mix has been made to multiple recipes, 9 different flavours have been tested and different shapes have been baked. The winning four flavours are listed below, along with the best base recipe.

There are at least three ingredients in traditional shortbread and generally all in a fixed ratio. 1 part sugar (normally caster, sometimes icing), 2 parts butter and 3 parts flour. Its that last part that differs from recipe to recipe (according to whose 'Scottish grandmother' you ask). The flour part is generally subdivided into two parts plain flour and one part something else: semolina, ground rice, rice flour or corn flour. The test bakes with semolina and ground rice came out wonderfully crumbly but after a few chews left something reminiscent of eating biscuits on a sandy beach. I even tried using all plain flour but this came out more like a biscuit than shortbread!

Recipe:

• 125g sugar 
• 250g butter 
• 250g plain flour 
• 125g corn flour 
• pinch of salt 

Plus choose one flavour:

• 1 tsp vanilla extract 
• Zest of one lemon
• 3 tsp green tea, ground
• 25g very fine milk chocolate (the sort used for making fancy hot chocolate) plus 50g dark cooking chocolate, chopped.

1. Rub in the butter with the base ingredients. In my case I just put it all into the kenwood. 
2. Once it reaches a fine powdery consistency add the flavouring and continue to work until it comes together as a nice dough.
3. Roll out on a well floured surface to a thickness of 1/2 cm and cut into circles. If the dough is too stiff to roll, knead it for a few moments to help ease up the mix (you can even knead it in batches if its really stiff). The lazy alternative at this point is to roll a thick sausage of dough and slice it thinly but it is hard to get a perfectly round biscuit.
4. Bake on a greaseproof sheet at 170 degrees for 15-20 minutes, until starting to colour. The mix will spread a little so give enough space between the rounds!
5. Leave to cool for 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

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Pickled Onions

I have never pickled anything before. It has been on my to-do list for years (my culinary to-do list is diverse, mostly in my head and only partially shared with a few people). Whilst at the farm shop I discovered they had pickling onions in stock. Suddenly a reckless urge overcame me as I looked at this box full of shiny, brown onions and before I knew it I was asking my wife to pick up vinegar on the way home from work!

Many of the things on my to-do list involve traditional methods of preseving: smoking, curing, salting, pickling, fermenting... I want to do them all! At some point I'll get round to trying some more of these, and when I do pictures will follow. But for now, on to the onions...

Ingredients:

• 600g pickling onions (small)
• 40g salt
• 400ml vinegar
• 3 blades of mace
• 1 tsp juniper berries
• 1 tsp black peppercorns
• 1 lump of cinnamon stick
• 1 tsp of corriander seeds
• 3 bay leaves
• 1/2 tsp cloves

1. Step one - peel the onions. Lots of them. Those who know me will realise this was a mistake. I start crying before I finish chopping even one onion. I am not sure what possessed me to buy an entire pile of them to peel at the same time. I do have one avoidance method - goggles. A snorkel mask lives in the kitchen cupboard (much to the amusement of my brother in law who decided to do the washing up in it for some reason). Despite this, I managed to peel them all in only an hour or so. Right about this point, shop-bought pickled onions looked really tempting!
2. Step two - Salt the onions and leave overnight to draw-out as much excess moisture as possible.
3. Step three - Rinse and drain. Most of the salt should have dissolved in onion juice and the onions should be ready for pickling.
4. Step four - Add the spices to the vinegar and pack with the onions into jam jars. (Some recipes involve boiling the vinegar and spices and leaving to cool, and some just involve it all sitting in the jars. I opted for the throw-it-all-in-a-jar method.)
5. Step five - Sit in a cupboard for at least 3 weeks.  Results to be announced...

Update - The Results (5 weeks later):

The onions are nicely pickled and perfect with some mature cheese (gooey brie in this case) and crusty bread. The onions have browned slightly from using black peppercorns, but the flavours from the spices are coming out nicely. I might make half the next batch with chilli to give it some more kick, but I shall have no problem with polishing-off these first!

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Bad days and bad meals (or Comfort food and Nachos)

I live in hope that my wife and I are not the only ones who have "bad days". These are the times when your computer crashes, you can't seem to make any headway at work and it's dark and wet outside. You can tell you're having one of these days because you're curled up on the sofa underneath a patchwork quilt watching a trashy movie. Well I can at any rate! Jenny and I plan for these little crises in life. Normally with food. There are several meals we just refer to as "bad meals". We can have them on a good day too but they are definitely comfort food. Some of our favourites are actually quite healthy. Not this one. 

My first realisation that nachos could be more than greasy pub snack food was courtesy of dinner at a friend's house. Instead of the usual stack of nachos buried under a layer of cheese, served with amorphous blobs of coloured goo, a roasting tin emerged from the kitchen with far more than just nachos and cheese in (there was meat and vegetables and everything!). Rather than sinking under the weight of grease, this meal was light enough that it felt natural to have salad with it (rather than having salad as a way of guiltily trying to offset the badness). Alongside it all was some lovely fresh bread. It was definitely a light summer meal and it actually felt healthy. Above all it made me think about nachos as a platform for distributing flavours through rather than just as shovels for salsa!

In the quest to make ultimate nachos a certain focus on the comfort food side of things means ours are not light and summery but they certainly tick all the boxes on a bad day! It is, in fact, so bad that we are yet to serve it in polite company. Please enjoy our naughty little secret:

Joe's Nachos:

Serves 4 (6 if you added salad and nice bread)

• 1 Large Onion
• 3 Cloves of Garlic
• 2 Peppers (colour doesn't matter)
• 200g Chorizo (or as much as you like)
• 1 Tin of Refried Beans
• 300g Grated Cheese (I like to use cheddar)
• 1/2 tsp Paprika
• 1/2 tsp Cumin
• 1/2 tsp Black Pepper
• 400g Tortilla Chips (cheap ones are fine)

For the Salsa:

• 1 Small Onion
• 2 Cloves of Garlic
• 6 Tomatoes
• 1 tbsp White Wine Vinegar
• 1 tbsp Good Oil (I use rapeseed oil out of preference but anything you would use on a salad is fine)
• Coriander (if available)

Optional Extras:

• Pickled Chillies
• Soured Cream

First thing to make is the salsa - it needs time to sit and allow the flavours to blend. In a push 10 minutes will do but 24 hours is a whole heap better! Chop the onion finely, mince the garlic and add with the oil and vinegar into a glass bowl. Hack up the tomatoes into small lumps and mix it all in. Add a pinch of salt and, if you wish to, chillies to taste (the onion and garlic provide a decent kick to begin with so taste as you go).  We didn't have any fresh coriander around so we left it out but a little herbs help lift the salsa. If you want to feel extra summery add some lemon or lime juice as well (you may wish to use a little less vinegar to keep the acidity balanced). Shove this mix in the fridge for later (or eat it with a spoon whilst cooking the rest).

For the main nacho's dish, halve the onion and slice, frying it off with the garlic (minced) and the chopped up chorizo. Cook this slowly and long enough to start to crisp up the outside of the chorizo. Whilst it is cooking add in the spices (ground first of course), chop up the pepper into strips and preheat the oven to 180 C. Once it is all looking a little brown add in the peppers and continue to cook until they are al dente.

Layer up your roasting tin with tortillas, refried beans, cheese and the mix from your pan and bake for 5-10 mins until the cheese is starting going golden brown.

Serve with pickled chillies, a pile of salsa and an (un)healthy dollop of soured cream.

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Glazed Pork Chops with Celeriac Mash

Autumn must be one of the best times of year for celeriac. The ugliest of the root vegetables (and possibly of all vegetables) has a wonderful earthy flavour with aromas of celery. Not loving the sound of it so far? I can understand - celery is somewhere down the bottom of my list of things I enjoy eating on its own. Somehow celeriac manages to take the essence of celery and remove the stringy, chewy wateriness and turn it into a hearty root.
My mother is to blame (or thank) for first introducing me to celeriac. I first encountered it added to mashed potatoes. There is little chance of a bland mash when topped up with a healthy pile of diced celeriac. Mixed amongst roast vegetables it adds a freshness that delights the palate. I have even heard it makes pretty good soup (but I am yet to try this). Mash, however, is where I feel it is truly at its best.

Ingredients:

• 4 pork chops
• 1/2 tsp dijon mustard
• 1tsp balsamic vinegar
• 2tsp honey
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• good pinch salt
• 1/4 tsp smoked paprika
• splash of Worcestershire sauce
• a small glass of sage wine (my own home-brew; sherry or cider would be an acceptable substitute)
• 1/2 medium celeriac
• 6 potatoes (about enough for 2-3 people)
• a small knob of butter
• a splash of milk

This has to be one of the simplest meals I cook and you can do lots of variations - almost any bit of meat will work. Simply mix the mustard, vinegar, spices and Worcestershire sauce in a bowl before marinating the meat in it overnight (or for a few hours if you are pressed for time). Chop the potatoes ready for making mash. Cut the tentacle-like array of roots off the celeriac along with the shoots off the top. Peel it and chop it so that the pieces are about half the size of the potato pieces.
Boil the celeriac and potatoes for about 20 - 25 minutes (or until nice and soft).
Whilst this is cooking fry-off the chops over a medium-low heat in a non-stick pan. The glaze will go very brown and sticky as it caramelises. When cooked de-glaze the pan with the remaining wine (or cider, sherry, etc.),turn the heat up high to reduce by about a third. Once the celeriac and potatoes are cooked drain, return to the pan with butter and milk, and mash.

Broccoli Optional

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