Oishinbo Style Ramen

So I suppose an argument could be made for comic books not being the best source of reliable recipes, but I've built my life on blindly believing virtually everything I read so I doubt I could be convinced.
I trust the research that goes into producing the incredibly detailed dish descriptions in the Oishinbo series, and just thinking about it now is making me hungry.

A couple of days ago I started re reading the series, and it's impossible not to get inspired. Luckily every issue has a recipe or two at the beginning of the book, and for the Ramen and Gyoza volume it was for Osihinbo Style Ramen.
The book follows, in a few separate episodes, the protagonists dissection on the ramen scene in Japan. Ramen is seen as a low class, fast food, and as such has fallen foul of the short cuts and questionable practices that famously plague the food industry in the West. This was quite a surprise to me, I'm sure a lot of people see Japan as some kind of mythical culture where everyone is nice and everything is above the dodgy standards we live with, but apparently not so. The prevalent use of MSG and kansui is criticized, which I found particularly interesting as I thought both of those were typical ingredients in noodle dishes.
Kansui is also known as lye water and is a strong alkaline that is substituted for expensive protein such as eggs in cheap noodle recipes. It gives a distinctive 'tingly' taste to the noodles - here's an interesting post about how to make normal dry pasta taste like ramen by adding baking soda to the water (it works).
Anyway, the point is that I assumed that this was an integral taste and texture element authentic noodle making, but apparently using it is just a short cut, and flavor is developed by aging dough. God love comic books, if you were looking at the pictures right now, instead of my boring synopsis, it would all stick. If only all educational materials were available in comic book format, everyone would know everything! Just imagine!!

Here's the Oishinbo Style Ramen, pork mince fried with onions, garlic, miso and sake, on top of shop bough noodles in dashi. It was... ok, nothing to write about.

4 Hour Potatoes and Pig's Ear

Look at that post title, could be the name of a new cop drama, couldn't it? 4 Hour Potato is the nickname of the tough guy, because he's hard boiled! and Pig's Ear is his sidekick, because he's so ugly. Don't steal my idea.
Over the weekend I decided to tackle these two projects since they both take a long time, but hardly any effort, so I could get on with unpacking some clothes that have seriously been in boxes since we moved into the house a year ago.
I have a fascination with offal and 'variety meats' in general. I love that you can buy tripe and trotters in some supermarkets now - for absolutely different reasons, mind. Tripe is sold in my local Morrisson's which is in a largely Eastern European part of London, and trotters are cool and sexy now so the Sainsbury's near my office in Westminster has started carrying them. But for everything else Chinatown will always be ahead of the curve, none of it will be organic or lovely, but at least it's there.
Loon Fung Supermarket on Gerrard Street has a huge butcher counter with a fierce female butcher peeking out from behind piles of odd joints, hearts, ears and feet. Occasionally you can find something like beef eye of round for a fraction of a supermarket price. There are always live razor clams, and sometimes crabs wriggling around, it's a great place to explore. I always overspend here.
This is what the ear looks like when you get it home, exactly the same colour and texture as my own skin, which is incredibly unsettling. Larousse instructs you to burn off the hair with a blow torch which really tests your resolve because it fills the room with a rancid stink and makes you feel like a murderer disposing of your victim.

You braise the ear slowly in wine and stock and carrots in a covered dish in the oven and after an hour it emerges a completely different color. Instead of an unsettling hue of human skin it is now brown and purple, like the bruises on a cadaver someone left out in the rain.
That's my internal monologue, if I was writing this up for people to read I would describe that shade as 'caramelized' and 'unctuous'. Better?
Anyway, you let the ear cool and then smother in a sauce you had been making all this time and leave for an hour to let the flavors develop, I guess.
The sauce is something else, I love Larousse Gastronomique for including this ridiculous recipe, because I doubt anybody else would invite you to make this with a straight face. The sauce you want is called Villeroi, which is just Allemande sauce diluted with stock and mushrooms (didn't you know that?), you obligingly flip all the pages of the book back from the V section to the A section and discover that the basis of the Allemande is the Veloute. Back to V, and thankfully the beginning of the shrubbery maze, and begin. A Veloute is Bechamel made with stock instead of milk, to make Villeroi you thicken your Veloute with egg yolks and cream and then add more stock and mushroom essence. On it's own this was delicious, rich and creamy. I stopped taking photographs of the pig's ear by then, but if I had to describe it as it sat in the thick, yellow, congealing sauce for the requisite hour... I would choose not to.
After an hour it's finally show time, you take the sliced ear out of the sauce, roll in breadcrumbs and fry.
The end result is spectacular. It's incredibly satisfying to add value to an essentially valueless thing, and even though I will never be able to justify the time commitment to make this again, I'm glad I tried it.
The boyfriend and I had pig's ear at a Szechuan restaurant in King's Cross a few years ago, I loved it, he hated it, we would both describe the dish as spicy, slimy and crunchy, which I think I'm in the minority in thinking of as a delicious description. My pig's ear was meaty and crunchy, which has more of a universal appeal and cost very little to produce.

Accompanying my folly above was the 4 Hour Potato, for which I got the idea from Oishibo, the Manga about food that has frustratingly not been fully translated into English. The particular storyline is about a guy who has to eat a potato, but had a bad experience with potatoes once so can't do it. But if he doesn't do it, he will be a laughing stock, so the main characters set about producing a potato dish he will eat. I'm making is sound stupid, but it's really really good!

The technique they describe involves simmering a peeled potato in dashi and butter for 4 hours, a method that I would have though would result in a mush but instead produces a soft, tender potato floating in a golden soup. It tastes nothing like a potato, the typical earthy flavors are inexplicably replaced with sugar so the whole thing is oddly sweet. In the book this is described as the 'true essence' of the potato, but honestly, I can't recommend this. I like the idea, but if I'm going to be extracting potato sugar it will be to make my own vodka.
And this concludes my report on how I spent my weekend.

Oat Lace Cookies and Rasberry Twists

Ridiculous, but I'm giving The Nordic Bakery a couple of more chances to redeem itself and prevent me from depositing it bitterly at the local charity shop. That would probably be the kind thing to do, because I'm sure it would sell quickly, and when the unfortunate who buys it cracks it open at home they will, I know, be very happy with following one word reviews I have penciled in next to some choice recipes 'pointless', 'stupid' and 'bad'.
The boyfriend, incidentally, is very vocal about how unfair it is to judge a recipe after only one attempt, but since the things I have made from this book so far were all both time consuming and spectacular failures, I have no desire to try again. I was only following directions, after all, and if the recipes are designed to keep you away from the secrets of Nordic baking (which most seem to be) no technique of mine will fix the problem.
So much bitterness for such a small book, maybe I'm having problems at home? You'd think that I would know about it.
I made the Oat Lace Cookies and Raspberry Twists and then later a loaf of bread, which meant keeping the oven on for most of the day, which warmed up my house enough to turn the heating off, which made me feel very frugal and practical.

The oat cookies use an obscene amount of butter, most of which melts away during baking, leaving you with a very delicate and fragile (and in my case a little burnt) disk that crumbles and melts in your mouth and feels light and airy despite being loaded with nuts, chocolate, raising and oats.

The Raspberry Twists use an even more incredible, immense amount of butter, which doesn't melt away during baking, imagine shortbread with veins of jam that have burnt into a tasty, chewy caramel and you've got it.
The recipe instructs you to prepare the dough and chill in fridge for at least an hour, but since my kitchen was so warm by then, the dough began to melt and sag while I was rolling it. That's the reason my cookies have mysterious veins instead of neat spirals of jam. I will make these again, and next time will try the recipe's suggested variation of using marmalade instead of jam, which sounds a little bit more delicious and grown up to me.
My brother and stepmother arrived just as I was taking these out of the oven and I managed to persuade them to take half of them home with them, which is a good thing because I wouldn't feel safe in the house with so many sweets.

The final thing I made, since the oven was already warmed up, was this sour cream bread, which exceeded all my expectations and persuaded me to order the book it came from.
Nordic Bakery lives to fight another day.

Quiche

I wasn't going to post this because it's so boring. I made a quiche - woo hoo, lets have a parade.
I made a quiche to use up a bunch of slimy mushrooms and to take for lunch at work (really economizing here, must have saved myself at least £5).
On the previous two whole times that I've made a quiche I always used shop bought pastry, but since it's basically butter and flour I decided that even I couldn't mess it up. The recipe I used is from I Know How to Cook, which is a book I hate quoting because of the silly title.

Slightly annoying that the recipe doesn't tell you that the longer you handle the pastry the more gluten will develop and the tougher it will be. I barely combined all the ingredients, the resultant pastry is very 'short', by which I mean flaky and crumbly, almost like thin shortbread - and absolutely delicious. This is why I'm posting an ugly photograph and an update about quiche, because it's simply too good. I'll never buy shortcrust pastry again, because while this is definitely a little too full of butter, pastry is never going to be part of any diet food anyway, so you might as well have your unhealthy food be delicious.

Sausage with Sauerkraut, Quick Rolls

I found a new bread recipe to make me forget the nightmares Nordic Bakery's 'rye bread' induced last week.
It's available online so I don't feel guilty about publishing the recipe. Delia, say what you want but she know what she's doing.
I made the roast Sausage with Sauerkraut from Nigella Express to use up the jar and a half of sauerkraut my dad gave me a couple of months ago. He makes amazing sauerkraut and is very generous, but there is only so much of it you can eat 'straight'. You tip the kraut into a baking dish, sprinkle with slivers of onion and juniper berries (I used dill seeds), rest the sausages on top and drown the whole thing with German white wine.
While that was cooking I made ketchup and prepared the dough for the bread rolls.
Here's the thing about ketchup, the reason you should probably never bother making it yourself - everyone likes the ketchup they grew up with, so if your parents always bough Heinz, or Tesco own brand or whatever, you'll prefer the idiosyncrasies of that brand. It's true! Ketchup loyalty runs deep.
I actually didn't grow up eating ketchup, I was always a mayonnaise girl, so I haven't been spoiled forever and can make passable stuff for myself. In fact the boyfriend doesn't like to have it in the house because it makes him go off on one about how much sugar is hidden in EVERYTHING these days.
This is actually how idyllic our relationship is, we have nothing bigger than to argue about than condiments. Sweet, or sad?
Here's how I make ketchup for myself - pour a certain amount of tomato puree into a pan, add however much brown sugar, salt, pepper, malt vinegar and celery seeds as you like and cook on low for 20 minutes.

Here's the incredible roll recipe that takes less than 1 hour to make. I adapted it from this to make 4 small rolls.

225g bread flour
1 tsp salt
145ml hot water from the tap
1 tsp brown sugar
1 tsp fast action yeast
1 tsp butter

Mix the sugar and yeast into the water in a jug. Mix the salt into the flour and rub in the butter, pour in the water and mix into a ball, Knead the dough on a flat surface for about five minutes then shape into four rolls and leave covered in a warm place for 35 minutes. Start heating the oven at 220C.
When the rolls have risen sprinkle with flour and bake on a high shelf for 20-25 minutes.

The rolls are a little denser than hot dog rolls, but they still make amazing hot dogs. Very amazing.

Rye Bread

Remember the difficulty I had with the Nordic Bakery cook book? I happened to be in the neighborhood on Saturday and popped into the cafe. The coffees are nice, the cakes look pristine (I had just had lunch and want hungry) but the book is challenging. Not challenging as in hard, but challenging as in there is nothing extraordinarily tempting about the recipes, probably because I am very aware that they will not live up to my expectations.

Is that harsh? Fair enough, does this look like a loaf of bread? I don't think so.
I followed the Nordic Bakery's recipe for rye bread to the letter. Through the fussy step of fermenting the yeast the night before, using almost a kilo of rye flour and spending almost 5 hours coddling it. The yield is supposed to be three loaves of bread, if I had tampered with the recipe I would have accepted that this thick leathery pancake with a gummy glue filling is my fault, but I resisted temptation. Incidentally why give a recipe for three loaves, why not one? Under what circumstances would you need to bake this in bulk, like maybe if you wanted to open up your own bakery? Is that the lesson of this failure, that I should buy my bread in the future because the I'll never find out the secret of making it?
There is something aggressively hateful about a recipe that fails on such a grand scale. I have a rye bread recipe that works every time, I didn't need to use all my flour up on this.
I just read some reviews of the book and they are all predictably gushing, so maybe I am just an idiot, but even an idiot occasionally manages not to screw up, right? Normally I would get rid of a book I have no further interest in cooking from, but this was a gift I'd specifically asked for so I'll suffer on for a while longer. Until the next disaster.

Potato Pizza, Aubergine and Carrot Salads

I had a potato pizza at Story Deli in Shoreditch once. This isn't it. Story Deli serves their paper thin crusts topped with a few slices of potato, rosemary, pine nuts and dried apricots, it's really incredible. Silver Spoon wants you to cover the generous topping of potato and rosemary with an obscene amount of pancetta and plenty of creamy cheese. It's very nice too, but not life changing. The biggest issue I have with it is that the crust turns into a cracker and is redundant to the whole thing, but I suppose a recipe for just potato slices covered in bacon and cheese wouldn't make it into the Silver Spoon (and if it had I wouldn't be making it) that's how they get you.

Baby aubergines get you too. They're nature's great joke, absolutely beautiful and very tempting when raw, and brown and muddy when cooked. But I can't resist buying them every time I see them. I made the Warm Aubergine Salad from Harumi's Japanese Cooking, which takes less then 10 minutes to make since all the cooking is done in the microwave. The taste is grown up, (that's a euphemism for there's booze in the dressing) smoky, nutty and a little sweet. I doubt that I will make this or the Carrot and Tuna Salad from the previous page again, but I love Harumi. All the recipes in this book are easy and she gives substitutes for hard to find Japanese ingredients. This is something I would have bristled at a year ago - I mean, how inauthentic! But now I appreciate as both of these salads were assembled from ingredients I didn't have to travel all over London to find, I already had them.

I don't know if it's a sign of maturity that I now deign to follow recipes that have less than 10 ingredients. Maybe it's being the main bread winner, or general exhaustion but I just can't face dishes that take a week to plan, layzeeass. I'm doing everything I can to snap out of this funk.

Polenta Pasticciata, Apple Puree, Tomato Gnocci

#that awful time at the end of the month when you've run out of money and have to root around your cupboards for something to eat.
oh and also #relying on a coworker to bring in banana bread so you can have breakfast.
Yes I'd sunk quite low last week, low enough to try some recipes that wouldn't normally appeal. Sometimes I wish I was more like the boyfriend, he can have cereal (or sweepings from the floor, as I call it) for dinner 7 days a week and not get bored. He appreciates good food, but in the way you appreciate a Picasso painting - it's nice but you can live without it. I can't.
This week we had Polenta Pasticciata from The Silver Spoon. I got all four of the Phaidon magna opera (that's plural for magnum opus, learn something every day, I would have thought 'great work' would be singular in all cases... Did you know that plural for cul-de-sac is culs-de-sac?), that is before the Indian one came out, and never really bothered to explore them properly. Here's what I discovered recently, most of the recipes call for simple cheap ingredients you probably already have, the reason is probably that they were originally meant for the housewife to use on a daily basis. I'll try and not be put off by the size next time I'm in dire straits.
On Thursday I made the polenta, which is formed out of polenta, dried mushrooms, bechamel sauce and cheese. It was very heavy and bland and I sent myself to be without dinner.

After a pathetic, picky eater amount of leftovers the next night I decided to cheer myself up with a simple dessert of Apple Puree with Creme Fraiche and Caramel from Moro East. For a kilo of a mix or cooking and eating apples you add 250g of sugar, cook down, liquefy and drizzle with caramel. I only had 200g of sugar and even so this was painfully sweet.
Disappointing, but looks really pretty. By the way, I have no shame in photographing everything I make. Very occasionally I'll try and style it out, but until I start getting comments reading "fugly pics LOL JK" I won't be going to town.
Or maybe it's just my perspective that's the problem, when you're down the outlook on everything is grim. When it won't stop raining and you realize that none of your shoes are waterproof. When things are not going well at work. When you finally do your wedding guest list and come to terms with the fact that you have too many friends and won't be able to host the reception at your house. That's when you can start getting really depressed.

The topping on this particular shit cake was Sunday night's meal of Tomato Gnocchi with Mascarpone sauce from a ridiculous book I bought for the pictures, Hot Tomatoes.
Written by a chef who has access to all kinds of different varieties of tomato most of the recipes in this book are out of bounds to mere mortals, but one or two call for relatively easy to find ingredients.

For the tomato gnocchi you combine potato, butter, egg, breadcrumbs, flour and vast quantities of tomato paste, then drench in a sauce of cream, wine, stock and mascarpone. If you've ever thought that tomato paste always has a chalky, toothpasty after taste you shouldn't make this recipe. The taste of whatever thickener is used in your tomato paste will be so pronounced that no amount of cream will disguise it.
The conclusion is, #manage your money better, and it's true what they say that you can taste anger in someone's food, you should only cook if you're in a good mood.