Matthew's Journal

A while ago I acquired a proper round-bottomed carbon-steel wok. It needs seasoning before use, and has thus sat unused for a while now while I fail to commit to doing so (in my usual "I don't know what I'm doing, so I'll screw it up" manner of failure).

There seem to be a number of opinions on how to do this.

Ken Hom says[0] to scrub the protective coating off (water and cream cleaner), dry, put on a low heat and rub 2tbsp of oil onto the inside; heat for 10-15m, wipe thoroughly (paper will blacken). Repeat wipe, heat, rub off until the paper comes clean.

The bag the wok came in says fill with water and boil for 10-15m then scrub off the coating (water and detergent or cream cleaner), wash and dry. Put a couple of tbsp of oil in the wok and heat - when warm, rub the oil round the inside of the wok with a paper towel, then heat gently for 15m. Or look up videos online.

The internet has many theories, including:

• repeated baking with low smoke-point oil in a very hot oven (I think the wooden handle could be removed on my wok)
  
• School of wok do a dry 'burn', then add a high heat oil for the second burn
  
• Serious Eats apply oil to the hot pan with a sacrificial dish-cloth (about 3 times)
  

...all of which is has left me confused as to the Right Way (and hence stuck not doing anything, which is daft); even WP is unclear. One blogger swears by flaxseed oil(!) and also repeated hot-oven baking.

Cleaning-wise, Ken Hom says to wash with water and no detergent, dry on the hob before putting away.

The wok bag says clean water, don't scrub. If you have to scrub, re-season

School of wok boil water in the work and scrape with a ladle, then dry on a hot hob.

Please provide advice, opinions, ...? [Please don't say "oh, just use a non-stick pan" :-) ]

[0] Ken Hom's Chinese Cookery, BBC books, 1984

One bit of iPlayer I enjoyed before going to Scotland (and still available for a couple of weeks) is Remarkable Places to Eat. There are four episodes, and in each one Fred Sirieix (a Maître d'hôtel) accompanies a well-known chef (Angela Hartnett, Tom Kerridge, Michel Roux Jr, Nisha Katona) to a different city, where the chef shows him some of their favourite places to eat in that city. As well as eating there, they meet some of the front of house and kitchen staff, and also get a bit involved in the other aspects of the business (going out to buy ingredients, waiting tables, cooking some of the dishes).

Inevitably, a lot of the eateries visited are heavily booked-up and/or expensive (e.g. La Tour d'Argent in Paris, where the signature Canard à la presse costs €260 for two, and the wine lists starts at €60 and goes North of €10k), but they also endeavour to visit more reasonably-priced places - Sirieix and Roux Jr going into raptures about €5.50 jambon-beurre, for example. I also liked how they talked in the round about how the restaurants operated, including the importance of the front-of-house staff.

One thing I've watched this week on iplayer are the 3 episodes of Nigel Slater's Middle East - where he's visited Lebanon, Turkey, and Iran, and seen both commercial and domestic cooking in each country. He comes across as a bit of an enthusiastic geography teacher type of person, but his joy in meeting people and trying new foods feels genuine.

A fair bit of typical middle eastern food (olives, hummus, chickpeas) leaves me a bit cold, but I found this very interesting television anyway; not least because he doesn't just go and visit traditional farmers and suchlike, but he also asks them about their way of life, the good and the bad, and the impact of politics and industrialisation. I remember the farmer who says "oh, we used to just pick za'atar, but then after the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war there were too many landmines, so now I farm it", and the woman who (after extolling the virtues of her farming life) candidly admits that she hopes her children do something else. And some of the food did look pretty exciting :)

I was wasting time on the internet, and came across a blog post about Soubise, a savoury onion sauce. AIUI, it originally involved rice (Escoffier describes it thus), but more conventionally is Béchamel sauce with sweated onions added. Serious Eats suggested there was a modern, lighter, variation, which was to use cream instead of Béchamel[0]. That seemed worth a try, so I made one this evening, and it was pretty good.

Here's what I did (which was too much sauce for 2 people, would certainly have done 3, and probably 4)[1]:
25 butter
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
300ml double cream

Melt the butter over a medium heat until foaming; add the onions and cook gently (stirring frequently) for ~20 minutes, until properly soft and any liquid has gone. The aim is to avoid caramelising the onions, so resist the temptation to fry them hot!
Pour in the cream and simmer for about 5 minutes until it starts to thicken.
Blend to as nearly-smooth as you can be bothered with, season with a little salt and some black pepper, and serve.

You could choose to flavour this sauce further (Serious Eats suggest 1tsp curry powder; I'd think about chilli flakes), but it's good as-is.

[0] definite win, since I haven't successfully made white sauce in a very long time
[1] the recipe is taken from Serious Eats (an American site) which uses 2 tbsp butter (about 28g) and 1.5 cups of heavy cream (360ml, but heavy cream's a bit less fatty than double cream).

蚂蚁上树, or Ants climbing trees has become something of a favourite chez nous recently. It's a Sichuan noodle dish, and this version comes from the book of the TV series Exploring China, where Ken Hom and Ching-He Huang travelled round China, making and eating food from the various regions of the country, and well as reflecting on what it means to be Chinese living abroad. The name refers to how the mince clings to the noodles in the finished dish.

These quantities feed 2 people; it's pretty more-ish, so we never have left-overs! You can fling some quick-cook veg (e.g. sugar-snap peas) in with the noodles if you want some more vitamins. It packs a reasonable chilli kick, too...

2 tbsp groundnut oil
2 garlic cloves, crushed (and chopped a bit if necessary)
1 tbsp grated ginger (I go for a "lump")
1 red chilli, chopped [the recipe says de-seed, which makes it a bit less hot]
250g minced beef
1 tbsp Shaoxing rice wine
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 tbsp chilli bean paste.
200ml chicken stock (hot; I just make up a stock-pot thingy)
noodles [recipe says "150g mung bean noodles pre-soaked in hot water for 10 minutes then drained"; I can never find them, so just cook some Sharwoods dry noodles per the packet instructions]
1 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 large spring onions, chopped

Start by boiling water to cook the noodles; once that's under-way, make a start on preparing the other ingredients. I usually find I've finished cooking the noodles a little before I'm ready to start on cooking everything else.

Things that say "chopped" should be chopped pretty finely. I do the spring onions first, then set them aside (before the knife gets chilli on it). You want everything ready before you start cooking, as it's pretty quick from that point!

Heat your wok over the highest heat you can manage; add oil, and let it get as hot as you dare. Add the ginger, garlic, and chilli, and stir-fry for a few seconds. Add the mince, and stir-fry until it's all browned (if it's watery, let that bubble off quickly). Add rice wine, soy sauce, and chilli bean paste, and stir well to mix.

Add stock, bring to the boil. Then add the noodles, and stir well. This takes a few minutes, while the stock is absorbed and/or boiled off (keep your hob on max). Then add the seasame oil and fling in the spring onion; stir to mix and serve immediately.

At least some large supermarkets will do Shaoxing rice wine and chilli bean paste these days; I've never found anywhere that does mung bean noodles, but I dare say some of the oriental shops on Mill Rd would...

Crème brûlée is one of the standard desserts I like to make (the fact you do most of the work the day before is a particular plus, it's nothing to do with the fire); for Easter this year atreic suggested that I try doing something a little different with it. We have some rhubarb in the garden, so this was my attempt at Rhubarb Crème brûlée.

Below are the quantities I used for my trial run (for 4 people); on Easter itself, I was too sick to cook, so atreic did a scaled-up version.

330g trimmed rhubarb [about 3 small stalks; see below for more discussion of quantities]
2.5 tbsp caster sugar

300ml / 1/2 pint double cream
1 vanilla pod (split) or 1.25 ml vanilla essence
2 large egg yolks
7.5ml / 1/2 tbsp caster sugar

caster sugar plus blowtorch for topping
4 ramekins

Pre-heat the oven to 180 centigrade (150 fan). Start with the rhubarb - trim off leaves, wash well, chop off the woody ends, then slice into slender bits (about 1cm). Mix well with the sugar, then spread onto a baking sheet. Put in the oven for 15-20 minutes, turning half-way, until the rhubarb is very soft. Make a layer of rhubarb in the bottom of each ramekin, then put them in the fridge. Surplus rhubarb can be eaten :) It's worth rinsing the baking sheet in hot water PDQ, otherwise you'll have a mess to deal with later.

Turn the oven down to 150 (135 fan), and start on the custards. Heat the vanilla and custard, bringing it slowly to the boil. Cover, and leave for 30 minutes to cool and infuse.

Beat the egg yolks and sugar in a large bowl. Pour in the vanilla cream, and mix well. Strain into a jug, and then pour into the ramekins (not right up to the brim - you want to leave a bit of space to make caramel on later).

Put the ramekins into a roasting tin, and fill that to about half-way up the ramekins with hand-hot water. These go into the oven for 30-35m - if they start to colour on top, then they're probably done! You don't want them too solid. Take them out of the hot water, and once cool put them into the fridge overnight.

Finally, make the caramel topping just before serving. There's a knack to this that is hard to describe in text, but I'll have a go. Basically, you make a layer of sugar on top of the custard (thick enough that it looks white rather than yellow), and then play the blowtorch over the surface, creating little molten balls of sugar. As you get more and more of these, they begin to run together, and you can use the flame to "fill in" the bits that haven't yet melted. Don't worry if you brown the sugar quite a bit (do worry if you burn the custard, though!), and you can tilt the ramekin a little to get the molten sugar to run into any holes. Don't touch the rim, it gets very hot! Once you've got a good layer, put the ramekin in the fridge to chill; you want to serve them chilled but not fridge-cold, otherwise the caramel layer is too hard to get through.

These quantities resulted in rather too much rhubarb, and just enough custard - so adjust depending on the size of your ramekins. The custard ingredients scale neatly with integer numbers of egg yolks; rhubarb-wise, go with 3 tbsp caster sugar per 400g of trimmed rhubarb.

A foody post again, I'm afraid. Firstly, the recipe for Bananas Foster. This is just a straight adaptation of the recipe from the restaurant that invented the dish in 1946, because I'm fed up of doing the units conversion every time I want to make it!
( Bananas, booze, and fire - what's not to like?!? :-) )
Secondly, there's a very unhealthy risotto that I knocked up the other day; I mostly record it here so I have a record of the quantities of things I used.
( bacon and blue cheese risotto )
Finally, I want to recommend a cook book. It's The Whisky Kitchen, which we picked up at the Dalwhinnie distillery. I have quite a few cook books, some of which I never use, and others of which are very unreliable. This one, however, has been really on the money with everything I've made. Some of the recipes are pretty fiddly, but they are well explained, and seem to "work". When piqueen came to stay, I made spicy Laphroaig smoked salmon pots followed by peppered pork fillet, and both were very good. I've also made the Dundee lamb chops with Jura sauce (the orange flavour really worked with the lamb and whisky sauce), and the Drambrulee (dreadful pun, good twist on a classic). One of the authors has won awards for his cookery with whisky, and I have to say it does show - the whisky flavour is incorporated very well in to the dishes, so they often don't end up tasting "of whisky", but you can discern flavours from the malt in the end result. An added bonus The down side is it's easy to end up buying a lot of whisky :-)

I am irrationally squicked by potato eyes. Am I the only one?

[Poll #1545069]

I have a recipe book (published in Crete, in an English translation) that calls for "baking pan (No 35)".

Despite a fair chunk of googling, I cannot find any indication as to how big a cake tin this might be. Anyone know?

Thanks :)

Our new oven is fan-assisted, but we have no destructions for it. Food packaging always says "for fan-assisted ovens, RTFM"; is there a good rule-of-thumb we can/should use instead of TFM?