culinary bear

Don't use butter - i believe they still lynch people in Yorkshire for that sort of crime. Any hard rendered fat would do - lard, beef suet (though do check it's not floured), goose/duck fat, schmaltz are all alternatives. Good beef dripping does give an unmatchable flavour. a basic yorkie pud recipe (all proportions by volume, not weight) 1 part plain soft flour 1 part eggs 1 part 50:50 mix of water and milk salt and pepper to taste about a half-teaspoon of english mustard powder per cup of flour. mix all to a batter in the normal fashion... let rest for at least an hour. fill pan to a depth of 1/4" with your fat. put your pan and fat in the oven, as high as it will go - when smoking, pour in the batter and put in the oven. Cook until brown and crisp. don't open the oven until it's done. My old head chef produced amazing yorkies this way - always higher than mine, although I watched the old codger make them so often I knew he couldn't have deviated from this recipe. I swear he had baking powder in his pocket. :)

I'm very interested by the notion that some herbs and spices are assumed to sit on different parts of an imaginary sliding scale between sweet and savoury. Probably convention rearing its ugly head, of course, but there seems to have been a trend away from highly spiced, fragrant british cooking as practised in wealthier households of the 15th and 16th centuries, to the plain boiled English fare as practised by the Blackpool landlady c.1950-1980. We now seem to be more free with herbs and spices, but once more the (perhaps unconscious) notions of sweet/savoury herbs and spices are being blurred. I've long been a fan of using aromatics in pastrywork that have been more accustomed to being used in the hot kitchen; black pepper, chilli, thyme, bay, savory and pennyroyal, to name a few. Some of the more exotic ones produce results that are more curious than workable, but all experimentaiton is good. You may or may not be amazed (most people are) to find what a pinch of salt can do to the flavour of sweet dishes; two obvious examples are shortbread and caramels. Thanks for a very informative post; my copy of Salt, Spices and Aromatics is well-thumbed, and sadly near falling apart - I need to get ebaying, I think.

The service isn't too bad when I've been in, bearing in mind it's only been three months sice I moved to the area; when were you last in? Normally I'm just in with a pint and a book. There's a bearded bloke called Adam who's often behind the bar, he's friendly though not overly familiar and pulls a good pint. It's not bad for a local; could be worse, could be a 'Spoons. I'm beginning to worry about the similaritied between the two of us, although as you weigh about as much as my left leg there's little chance of shared parentage. :) You'll have to brave the Marble again; their recent batch of Chocolate Heavy is rather moreish, especially to someone like me who grew up on the slightly maltier, sweeter, less overtly hoppy beers of Scotland. Allan.

*ponders stealing a bottle of 6M hydroflouric acid for the purposes of mayonnaise research*

I've never had any problems freezing it, provided it was well-wrapped in aluminium foil or vac-packed in order to prevent freezer-burn and not kept frozen for too long. An alternative handy trick is to put the ginger through a fine microplane grater to render it into a puree, then add about 10% by weight lemon juice. This will keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks.

The rustic sourdough bread from Valvona and Crolla in Edinburgh. Exquisite.

My local, the esteemed Marble Arch Brewpub in Manchester, does a brisk trade in all of its splendid beers, all of which are organic and vegan. Natch. :)

I try to, as often as I get back North of the border. Sadly, as more and more people get their meat from supermarkets, traditional independent butchers are going to the wall. The situation is as bad for independent fishmongers, greengrocers and bakers. Like most things, if you're interested enough and can strike up a rapport with your supplier, you'll get access to all the good stuff.

*removes chef's toque* *puts on safety goggles* The pH of lemon juice is obviously variable, but tends to be around 2.3; the pH of white wine vinegar depends entirely on the brand, but would be around 2.7-3.0. Since pH is a logarithmic scale, one whole pH 'point' represents a tenfold change in acidity, so you could (tenously!) assert that lemon juice, for the same volume, is 3-4 times more acidic than white wine vinegar. That's actual acidity... Perceived acidity, to the individual's palate, is a very complex matter and would vary widely. *injures self while removing goggles*

Hey, at least you have a system over there... We have a coding system to classify carcases over here, but it's not in the public domain. The great majority of UK supermarket (i.e. not-from-a-butcher's-shop) beef is sold hopelessly underaged, boned, and in horrible sealed styrofoam trays with its own pantyliner to soak up the blood. A sad state of affairs. Sadly, it's down to the consumers. The majority want very lean (i.e. non-marbled) meat, bright red (i.e. unaged), and they want it cheap. I bought a wonderful 5-bone fore-rib (what you'd call prime rib) from a very reliable butcher in Edinburgh a couple of years back. It had been hung for 34 days, the butcher could tell me which field in which farm it had come from, the marbling was beautiful, and the meat was purplish-black. The butcher had to shave some blackening from the bone ends and had to trim a slightly furry section, and supplied me with some very nice backfat with which to bard the joint. Very well-seasoned, I roasted it and served it rare - I could have carved it with a spoon.

I think the name might be a nod to the butchering terminology, whereby carcasses are broken down into 'primal' sections which are then cut down further into the usually traded cuts. Perhaps it's a legal grey area that needs tightening up; I suspect the majority of people buying prime rib think that they're buying USDA Prime meat.

Personally I prefer 3-4oz cat escalopes, lightly batted out and paneed, then fried in clarified butter. In all seriousness though, don't read "The Decadent Cookbook", by Lucan Medlar and Durian Gray (pseudonyms, of course) in front of your cat. It has a chapter devoted to that sort of thing...

Not to query your figures too closely, but that seems to me to be rather excessive. I agree with jackal10 on this issue; 8oz of boned meat (assuming you mean not to cook the meat past well-done to carnbonised) is ample. Leftovers are another question of course, but to state that 11lb is "required" is, perhaps, a little absolute.

To my mind, that's a capital offence. Would they serve a steak well-done by default? *shivers* On another note, does anyone have any experience eating at the White Horse at Parson's Green, Fulham?

they don't say must have riedels, silver, linen cloths, sommelier etc but most assume that's the sort of direction youmust be heading in to get your star and beyond. ← Surely that's the crux of the matter for many smaller establishments - what we ex-biologists would call convergent evolution rather than divergent; many different places feeling they have to conform in order to get a star, certainly to get two. Shouldn't it be about time that individuality is more highly valued?

re: the mix of food/front of house... Would it be heretical to thoerise that with a few exceptions, getting a star tends to be more about the food, and with gaining a second and third star the surroundings, ambience and 'luxuriousness' tend to play more of a part than in the original one-star grading? I'm not being so simplistic as to say that the first star is for the food and the second and third the surroundings and service, but what does everyone else think?

I think, and I'm hoping, that the Establishment in Manchester will get one. Not having a starred restaurant in Manchester, unless you count Juniper in Altrincham, is a bit of a disgrace. I have to declare an interest in that I've worked there.

I can pare a few of them down here and now for you if you like. Oloroso is laughable - It has very few grand ambitions, which is just as well considering it couldn't help but fail to live up to any of them. The Apartment has had the same menu running for the last three years. A half-pitta pocket on the side of most plates filled with the same nauseating pink beetroot coleslaw does not make for a happy bear. Confusingly, it seems to be one of the most consistently popular restaurants in the city. The service was of an immpeccably consistent standard, somewhat lower than whale shit. The Outsider is run by the same team as the Apartment, with the same identikit approach to the menu, and slightly less atrocious service. Rhubarb is run by one Kenny Coltman, formerly sous chef at Number One. Interestingly, this means that the three chefs at the top of the Edinburgh tree (Jeff Bland, Martin Wishart and Kenny Coltman) all worked at the Balmoral at the same time. I haven't eaten at Rhubarb yet, but Kenny's a solid chef, and the failure of Farfelu. his restaurant in Glasgow, shouldn't be taken to mean much in the overall scheme of things. James Thompson has spent a great deal of money refurbishing Prestonfield House, and I can only hope that Rhubarb doesn't go the way of the Tower, and to the same extent the Witchery, in starting off well and then declining, at least from the kitchen perspective. The Tower used to be run by Steven Adair, now heading up Searcy's contract to run the restaurant in the National Gallery of Scotland, but after David Haetzmann's exit (formerly of Blue) things have lurched downward at the tower. If such things were posible, I would glady bear Iain Mellis' children. The man is a godlike affineur. It strikes me as an interesting choice of restaurants to review; not a list most people would make. The inclusion of teh Apartment and the Outsider, both rather flaky places, smacks of a bit of unofficial advertising.

I have a sneaky suspicion Martin's going for a second star. The wise old sage of Tollcross, a.k.a. Davy from Pro-Chef Catering Supplies, said they're really expanding the front-of-house staff as well as hiring two more hands in the kitchen. Sadly, I've only eaten there the once, a year ago; the food was by and large spot-on. Nothing terribly cutting-edge, no nods to the molecular approach, but what was there was technically superb, including the finest gazpacho I have ever had (not to mention the bonbon of confit quail). The only gripe I had was with the dessert (we had the degustation menu) which seemed to let the overall standard down with a clumsy citrus brulee. What's the considered opionion? Does MW merit two stars, or is he close to the threshold?

I worked at the Balmoral under Jeff Bland in '98 and '99. The gentleman responsible for the bread is Peter Hyde, the pastry sous. 6'9" of dry wit and motorcycle leathers, who had a great touch with bread. He possessed the largest pair of clogs I have ever seen outside of Amesterdam. Incidentally the best pastry chef I have ever seen worked there at the same time as myself, a young German chef de partie by the name of Marcus Huber - brilliantly talented, and I wish I could find out where he is now.

Most of the nasty fish smells in the kitchen are sulphur-containing compounds, which seem (in my admittedly less-than-strictly-scientific investigations) to be accentuated by contact with hot fat. I'm beginning to think that the compounds might be significantly fat-soluble. Cooking less-than-fresh fish will accentuate the less-than-fresh smell, but if it smelled fine when you bought it it's not likely to have been off. Interestingly (at least to a former egg-head like me), related sulphur compounds are present in Allium species; plants such as chives, onions, shallots and garlic. They tend to cling to hands and make the air smell too. You should always wash your hands in cold soapy water after handling fish (then hot water). Washing them in hot water straight away seems to make the sulphur compounds stick to your hands in a most unpleasant lingering fashion. in summary - all fish smells to some extent of fish, expecially if cooked with fat. :)

A good guideline for cooked meat is three days in a domestic fridge, in a sealed container or well-wrapped. The edibility or otherwise of chicken can be difficult to gauge. Clostridium species often have a pungent smell, but other spoilage bacteria like Campylobacter or E coli can pose a threat without any of the obvious signs of spoilage such as a sticky or mucilaginous coating, discolouration, or an 'off' smell. It's tempting to be cavalier about such issues, but food poisoning can be extremely dangerous (20 people died in my home town six years ago in an E coli outbreak linked to cooked meat), and remember, it may not always be you eating the food in your fridge. Accidentally killing your eighty-year old granny might not be a good thing. :) The phrase we use at work is, "If in doubt, get rid of the fucker". We haven't poisoned anyone yet.

Well, I could wait until my grandmother passes on, I suppose. Are you looking for US-availability? And yes, I suppose I still have a bit of the mad scientist in me when I work. :)

I'm lucky in that I can get french specification flour easily over here, in relatively small quantities if need be. Is it relatively easy to get specialist flours in the states, or do you have to go through an independent dealer?

ground rice? heresy! I'm Scottish, and believe me, you'd be risking lynching (or lycheeing, which I assure you is more painful) if you used ground rice north of the border. Your basic mix is a 3:2:1 mix, by weight, of plain soft flour, butter, and caster (superfine) sugar. Your butter should be salted, not sweet. This can't be rectified by adding salt to unsalted sweet butter; the "cultured' taste of salted butter is important to the final taste of the shortbread. Every mould I have seen in Scotland is wooden. My grandmother owns several. They must be washed with a sparing amount of warm water, and then dried in a low oven. Don't submerge then in water for any time, or they'll warp and go out of shape; it's the same reason you shouldn't submerge a wooden rolling pin. The completely dry mould should be filled with flour, and the excess knocked out. If you work quickly, and don't press the shortbread paste down excessively hard, it will not stick. If it does stick, your paste is too soft, usually caused by an excess of butter in your mix. Use the above recipe, and everything should go well. Use a silcone-covered baking sheet as recommended by confiseur...