Adam Balic
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Posts posted by Adam Balic
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How about Scottish beef?
I rarely eat beef in Scotland, that is in a form to appreciate its beefy goodness. On the occasions that I have, well it is very Butcher dependent. My local butcher has beef rangeing from crud to excellent. The excellent stuff has little cards telling you the names of the parents and grandparent of the meat you are looking at. Those cute hairy highland cattle taste very good.
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Gosh, that must be why most of the planet speaks French right?
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Suvir - I forgot that I am also using pomegrante concentrate/syrup as a souring agent. The use of these souring agents are at the experimental stage for me, it is quite difficult to judge how to use them to there best advantage. I completely ruined a dish the other night by the incorrect use of the pomegrante concentrate.
I buy barberries from a middle-eastern store (also supplies Indian produce), two American dollars will buy you about a pound of dried berries.
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I have been using dried limes and dried barberries as souring agent. Both common in Persian cooking. Are these used in Indian cooking?
What are barberries? Dried limes are used by some. Not very often.
Suvir - Barberries are the berries of the Barberry bush (
), which is a small shrub. The berries themselve are like red coloured dried currants. When you cook with them you gently fry them in butter and this makes them translucent and glow an attractive red colour (they look like rubies at this stage). They don't have that mush taste, but are very sour. As they are so small they are often used in pilaus and other rice dishes to give an attractive appearance to the dish. They are used in a traditional Persian marriage dish (along with something sweet) to symbolize married life - both the sweet and the sour. They were also a very common ingredient in English cooking until the nineteenth century, when they were eradiacted when it was discovered that they haboured the wheat rust funghi. -
I have been using dried limes and dried barberries as souring agent. Both common in Persian cooking. Are these used in Indian cooking?
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Steak, pot-roast, normal roast with Veg. That sort of think can't offend to many people. However, as they gave you such a dire meal why not cook whatever you like and make them deal with it? The worst that could happen is that you would never eat another meal cooked by them right?
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Suvir - Wow, those links are fantastic, you sure have been putting in a lot of effort in this board. I am glad to see that the recipe has some authentic roots! It should be pretty easy for home cooking (which after all is what I do), but in fairness, any credit should really go to Simon since I so brazenly stole his prawn recipe!
I will go down to the local middle-eastern store and buy some "fresh" dried Fenugreek seeds, mine are obviously over the hill. I will tell you what I think of them.
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Thanks for the info. Either my spice is old and tired or my Westerner taste buds need fine tuning. Have enjoyed Fenugreek greens (menthi?) in various forms, prefered to spinach in some cases.
Indian Prawn recipe.
Take Simon's recipe above, except add the raw prawns cut up into 2 cm bits. Take small Papadum and dip into water, wipe of excess water add small amount of filling and either fold (carefully) and seal or roll into a spring roll type thing (harder to do). Helps to use toothpicks for this. Deep fry. Eat with plenty of lime juice squeezed over and beer as chaser. Not sure where I picked up this recipe, has all the hallmarks of not being particularly authentic Indian. Is the idea of stuffing Papadums objectional? Is there a better way of getting the same flavour/texture without all the buggering about with papadums?
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Simon that looks like an excellent recipe. I have made some similar, sealed it in a papadum then fried it as finger food stuff. One question, what does the Fenugreek add to the recipe? I have trouble with this item as it doesn't seem to taste of much, but it is widely used. Is it like, some type of flavour enhancer?
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Screwcaps have been used for some time in Australia, mostly for white wines. The only negative comments I have seen have been astheticly based, oh and some idiots try to open the bottles with corkscrews. I don't really see any reason not to age reds in screwtops as well, other then it looks a little cheap. Some wine makers I have spoken to favour the screwcaps over "plastic" corks as they have detected some strange flavours in wine aged with plastic closures. Here is a link to some information on the product.
http://www.wineoftheweek.com/screwcaps/his...story.html#stel
Incidentally, those cork oak forests in Portugal are a important habitat for several rare types of birds etc, so there are some environmental issues (and culinary if you are Cabrales
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Because they ate PATE, you ignorant bastard
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Hand cranked pasta makers can be bought quite cheaply and the strange thing is that making pasta is dead easy. Stupidly simple in fact. It is especially fun to make stuffed pasta ("pasti"?) and this is something that you can do with several people including kids. Recently I bought a "Chittarra" which is a box with lots of fine metal strings (hence "Guitar") for making pasta. This means that my wife can make the pasta sheets (she is better at this then me) with the pasta maker and I can cut the pasta into noodles at the same time. It is rather nice to be able to do this stuff together after coming bacj from work.
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I agree the restaurant seems to be the key. Crikey, just look at the amount of posts on restaurant experiences compared to all other food related activites there are on this site alone.
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There are some Soyer recipes in Willan's 'Great Chefs' book, but only a few. However, there is a huge volume on gastronomy by Soyer in the New York Society Library, which I shall try to to take a look at.
Reform Cutlets, nice but not great. Actually, I wasn't thinking of Soyer in particular, I was more thinking that had all these chefs come from a different country like say, Syria, would be be eating Syrian derivative food now or would the inherent superiority of French cuisine overcome all?
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Adam - I love fruit pudding for breakfast.
Well then, you are a true born son of old Blighty! But, I thought that fruit pudding was a Northern thing or are you pulling my leg and making reference to some type of healthy Californian fruit thing you have for breakfast?
To what extent to you attribute the historical success of French cuisine to the Entrepreneurial skills of ex-pat. French chefs like Soyer? Given the man did cook and design the kitchen at the Reform Club, but was the success of his food (and other French chefs) in part due to them putting themselves in the position of actively promoting the cuisine, rather then any inherent superiority of the cuisine?
nb. smile should go after first sentence.
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If you go back to Wilfrid's original posting which began this discussion, you will see that Colin Spencer's new book, coming out the end of October, should hold a lot of answers concerning French influence on Britain. This is Colin's advance summary from another list. Germaine Greer calls him "the greatest living food writer", which may be over the top but not by very much.I thought this might be the opportunity to mention my own book which is being published on October 31st called: British Food, an extraordinary thousand years of history - published by Grub Street. It starts with a brief look at Anglo-Saxon Cuisine then goes onto the astonishing changes wrought by the Norman invasion when they brought with them Mediterranean ingredients and influences from Sicily and further East from the Persian cuisine itself. I follow the story to the present day. Colin
Great John, another Grub Street book I have to buy. That place is sending me to the poor house.
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Duh, I get that bit, what I am asking is
, if they can get people to produce this good site for the, why can't they improve the standard level of the product they are selling, which is what they are in the business of doing. It's all very similar to the Labour party if you ask me.
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Nice site, I really like the pretty lady saying "Little Chef satisfies me". Really now, isn't that trying a little to hard to be Gen-X, groovy, self -aware and cynical? Actually, why does such a pedestrian product/service have such a great web site?
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But these were puddings in the manner of Yorkshire Pudding; i.e., starchy stodge to fill up the diners so that they wouldn't want so much meat.In the older British cookbooks I have, the "Pudding" came before the meat.No, not really, if you look at the recipes it is difficult to see where they would fit in the desert V savoury sliding scale. Most of the examples that I have seen are not of the yorkshire pudding type (although this exists), often the same recipe is given and you have the choice of either sticking it under the roasting joint of meat or boiling it in a cloot/cloth. Before the Russian style of serving became popularised, all sorts of (to modern tastes) weird combinations of food were served together, sweet and savoury. However, much of the contempory literature talking about the practice of serving the pudding before the meat say that yes it was a filler-upper to stop you from eating more meat. Whether this is strictly true or not is difficult to determine.
Wilfrid is of course correct with his view that they are the ancestors of "modern" plum puddings and the like. In Scotland a fruit pudding (a basic plum pudding) is sold to be fried and served with bacon, sausage etc, this is one of those nice anachronisms that you see from time to time. I have a plum pudding recipe that contains a large amount of meat in it (not just suet), I have always wanted to make it but have just never got around to it. Difficult to serve to people really, maybe if I said it was Moroccan they would go for it.
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"Thank God it's Friday".
Nah, only joking, never been there, never will. Starbucks is as low as I go, although I went to Cafe Rouge once.
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My current favourite book (Pub. 1831) is divided into French, English and Scottish cuisine. The basic feeling I get from these books is that they (you Brits) felt that the quality of the beef was so good, there was really no reason to cut it up into "sippets" and sauce it like the Frenchies, who's cattle were obviously pretty poor quality. Could you make a case that the common dominace of French cuisine is an English fad that has refused to die?
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Very interesting. In the older British cookbooks I have, the "Pudding" came before the meat. This became a sign of being old fashioned by the mid-18th. C. From this and many other examples, I don't get the feeling that English/British food was ever un-dynamic from the 15th C. onwards, but these comments indicate an obvious reason that the French cuisine became so popular, namely the emergence of the restaurant trade.
Even the 18th C. books I have mentioned things cooked in the "French" manner, but other books carry on about French "gee gaws" and "ragouts". So the was some resistance to the introduction of French cuisine, at least amounghst the middle classes.
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Surely 1870 marks the date of the Paris Commune. Where notoriously outstanding cooking was to be had.
If you like rat mornay.
When was the Franco-Prussian war? Them were real rat eating times. And Dog and zoo animal eating times.
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Wilfrid, believe it or not, is going to research what interests Wilfrid.
Thank God for that, I thought there was a danger of you becoming Plotnicki's Winged-Monkey-Bitch-Whore.
Beef
in Kitchen Consumer
Posted
Galloways are a lowland breed (but yes, tasty) I was thinking more of these:
http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/cattle/HIGHLAND/