Blether

My stainless cookware is never cleaner than when I boil up some water, drop in a tablespoon of baking soda, simmer for fifteen minutes, then wash normally. That might help with a mixing bowl, even if it's less useful for a table.

Hi, HawkeyeFoodie. I brine pork belly for bacon in a cold fridge in an 80% brine for 3.5 days. Given a day or two more drying out, that evens out to be about the right amount of saltiness throughout the meat (my taste in saltiness terms is for something like a typical commercial cure, or slightly less). I don't find it gets mushy at all. I wouldn't want a roast as salty as bacon, but one or two days sounds reasonable to me.

There are a lot of those dictionary-translations to scare the unwary I really love some of the little tonkatsu places you come across, where it's mom-and-pop and they've obviously been making pork cutlets and nothing else for 30 or 40 years, and the quality is just so honed. But I figure prawncrackers should make those suggestions after his (?) recent post in 'Dinner', with a tonkatsu that looked superb. To my shame, in my own kitchen I tend to concentrate on the things I can't go out and buy - after all this time, actual engagement with Japanese cooking continues to pass me by. The odd shioyaki fish or miso soup (is that cooking ?!) is the exception. I've had pig ears Chinese style (and other strange pig snacks) at Yotsuya's well-known Kouya, just down the road; I've also had motsu-ni (a stew of the lower parts of pig guts) elsewhere, that I could barely eat. Gyoza and shumai are of course great Japanese pork-based foods; along with char siu (chaashuu) they've been here long enough to be near native. But Japanese char siu uses belly, again - I think the Chinese version is more normally shoulder ? 'Shouga-yaki' is another Japanese standard - thin slices of loin cooked with ginger and soy, and a nicely-flavoured dish when done well; sometimes the meat's cooked till it's too dry. Shabu-shabu's a possibility for pork, and there's yakiniku, too. Are these things cheffy ? The diner does the cooking

Thanks. The pies were good - more when I have the confidence to type a long post without thinking eG is about to go down for several days, and I might lose a work in progress. My forcemeat was very successful - 50/50 shoulder and belly for mincing, and in that picture you can see one of the pieces of loin I left as cubes. I'm not sure I'd do that again. Pastry maybe just a bit on the thick side, but yes, I was pleased with it, overall. Noisettes de porc aux pruneaux de tours - I meant Jane Grigson's Good Things, but it's also an Elizabeth David recipe - I dunno about reproducing published recipes, here, but as it turns out I can be lazy and just link to another site where ED is quoted word-for-word Vindaloo's Goan, isn't it ? Some mango chutney, and seafoody-coconutty, tropical things ? Or take a bunch of drugs and eat on the beach, maybe. I have an economical pork (shoulder) / white wine / cabbage pot roast that I posted about before, again more Bistro than cheffy - I think the recipe is in the dinner thread, *somewhere* - or I can re-post it.

Right. You threw me with 'spare rib joint". How about some vindaloo, which can be cheffy if you make a varied menu around it, and has great flavour when built up carefully from the basic ingredients ? Out of interest I had a look in Good Things, too... I did make pork with prunes and Vouvray a couple of years back, and that was certainly on the sophisticated side. Hey, PC, I'm only quotin'... I have a (not cheffy) pork pie write-up to do. So far I've only uploaded pictures. Here is a preview:

I believe Boston Butt is pork shoulder, and you don't mention having any. Loin makes an elegant pot roast / braise with milk, Bolognese style - see Marcella Hazan, for example, for a recipe - and that's at least bistro level, if not quite swanky. Marcella has good recipes for chops, too, braised (with tomatoes, cream & porcini ? with two wines ?), which still let you escape last-minute cooking for a large number of diners. Otherwise loin always works sliced and quickly pan-fried, doesn't it, with any number of pan sauces ? It's lean enough to carry cream, and you've lots of bones to make reductions and really build up flavour. Yes, I think Italian cooking is good at swanky with pork. I'd be delighted with oven-roasted ribs, too.

Thank-you very much for the recipe link, Kim Shook. Kidney beans and butter beans - in canned form, or dry weight ? What do you use ?

One of the places we drop by at on off-road motorbike tours in Japan's mountains, offers various skewered meats, including bear. It's fatty and strong-flavoured. Like David Ross said, you'd want to choose your cooking method to match the cut.

I admire your spirit ! I left the UK in 1991. I'm the first to admit that I don't know what's going on there (hello, Jenni !) any more - and the culinary landscape has certainly changed in that time (though no doubt mooli was on the market all along). Funnily enough I guessed that your two sauces were like those for shabu-shabu - one based on ponzu and the other, sesame. Mustard ?! It's almost obviously the choice for tonkatsu. Worcester & soy sounds to me like a better sauce than the over-cloved standard. There's a lot of really excellently-done breaded breaded pork here, but that sauce... no. We don't get crackling here, more's the pity. Maybe it's all being made into purses or something, but the closest I've got is enquiries at the specialist supermarket, where they said they'd get skin-on pork by special order. I've been too busy with everything else to bother.

Hello, V. Gautam. Are you familiar with Fishbase ? I don't know silver hake, but funnily enough it seems to be one of the species known as whiting in the UK and USA (I searched on Common Name = whiting). I grew up in Scotland, where fish & chips always meant haddock. I believe the staple in England (certainly in the midlands and south) was always cod, and I think one of the main reasons for its popularity is its lack of bones. It's no match in the eating for real Dover Sole, or for red sea bream / red porgy / tai where I am now. Dogfish - as 'rock salmon', as Lindsey said, was commonly available too, but not in Scotland. That red sea bream is my fish of choice when I make fish & chips now - and is also great, simply dipped in seasoned flour and pan-fried in olive oil, Italian style, with a pan sauce of onions & lemon if I can wait that long. We do get Alaskan Pollock here, sold as 'sukesoudara' - fairly good eating, but no great delicacy. As for the quality of frozen fish, I agree that that varies enormously. I think the biggest factors are the quality of the original catch, the diligence of the freezing operation, and the integrity of the distributors. It's hard for consumers to tell the quality of fish once it's frozen, and we only have the word of the seller as to its age. I can make one observation about trout. As I have mentioned before on eGullet, at high school and as a student I worked part-time on a trout farm and in the on-site processing factory. The farm had two sites, one on a large loch and one beside a river, with earth ponds and water fed fron the river. In summer the loch, being deep, maintained a low temperature, but the earth ponds would warm up significantly. The original stock of trout being the same, and the feed the same, the trout from the cages on the loch were distintly better - firmer fleshed, juicier - than those from the pond farm. For cooking, trout that were filleted and blast frozen, were as good that way for three to six months, as the same fish filleted and prepared fresh. The difference between fish from the two locations was very noticeable; those frozen within half a day of the cull were effectively indistinguishable from fresh. Sadly, Japanese trout cannot hold a candle to Scottish trout. Their flesh is a pale white, and yes, mushy by comparison. My suspicion is that the summer heat spoils them, but I'm not sure. At least I have eaten a lot of them as breakfasts at country inns, and none has impressed me. Of course the Scottish seafood industry, in general, trails that of Japan by some margin.

I have charcuterie jealousy, too ! But can I ask you about the two accompanying sauces with the tonkatsu, on the left ? I've lived in Japan some time and I'm familiar with the food - I'm interested in how it works in Birmingham. Your miso soup looks very authentic and the tonkatsu itself wonderfully coated, and I'm impressed you have daikon there. What rice do you use ?

That reminds me... I forgot to mention the bag of 1" and 2" pieces of trimmed ginger for curry-making.

To me, it sounds like you baked it too hot and/or too long. I use a similar approach for the dough, very little topping (a tbsp or two of tomato sauce) and find 7-8 mins is just right at 250C. As for the parchment trick, I typically make a personal-size pizza, about 10". I proof / retard the dough in an oiled plastic bag. When the time comes to form it, I open the bag and place the dough-in-the-bag on my left hand, and sprinkle *lots* of flour over the top of the doughball. I reach in with that floury right hand and flip the (floury side of the) dough ball on to it, and draw hand and dough out of the bag. the top (as-yet-unfloured) side of the dough then gets its generous flouring. At that point the dough is totally handle-able, and I just shape while moving from hand to hand. I can see how parchment might help for a bigger pizza. I do in fact use parchment to bake on, only the pizza is formed before I lay it on the parchment.

Did you make sure you were logged in ? Please, please share your smoky beans recipe

Yes - different lens lengths for different camera formats can be confusing. (And opening your mouth without checking what a D90 is can be a mistake !)

Some shop-bought breaded fish (these days, aji / horse mackerel) and french fries for days when they're necessary. Frozen (Chinese) broccoli because fresh veggies are *so* damned expensive here. Several 290ml / 10oz tupperwares of Marcella's tomato-butter-onion pasta sauce, which is also my go-to pizza topping. Some individual-size pieces of pizza dough in their oiled plastic bags, already pre-risen to the squishy stage. This season's ongoing chili harvest in a plastic bag. Sadly, still, the remains of last season's chili harvest in another. A 1kg pack of beef mince - typically stays in there a month before getting used. A bag of chicken bones accumulating as I eat through the latest chicken or chickens; bag of bits of carrot and other veg trimmings accumulating for the stockpot. Ground African coffee Since this year, a BIG bag of frozen brussels sprouts from France via Nisshin, who started stocking this, out of the blue. 800yen. Hurray for Nisshin for getting past the local standard 800yen for 10 pack of fresh sprouts. Ice Fresh breadcrumbs made in the blender from pieces / ends of bread, as and when. A box or two of cooked stuff - soups or stews, cooked mince, chili or whatever. A couple pieces of pork left over from making pork pies. Due to become sausages soon.

Are you happy with the perspective in your original shot ? I find that for most of the food photos I take, even in macro mode, I'm zooming right in and standing back to the point where that frames the subject nicely. Mine is a fairly simple point-and-shoot digital - full zoom is about equivalenmt, I guess, to a portrait (~85mm lens for 35mmm SLR) lens. I certainly wouldn't choose a 17-35mm lens for shooting food.

Ah... I've adapted this expression out of context. I learned it from a Kiwi friend who says this is what they call tomato ketchup. I use it ironically for the microwave - it rhymes and the first word is 'tucker'.

Well, if it's not the Sunday Mail it's professor Terry Wogan, eh ? As for the Press and Journal, I was back in Perthshire at the beginning of the month. I asked the butcher to freeze up 2lbs of unsmoked Ayrshire, a half black pudding, 2 haggis and some square sausage. I needed it wrapped to keep it cold during the flight, and out of all the newspapers at the newsagent, the Press and Journal gave the best paper-per-penny performance. Just in case you ever need to know. Is that the same dougal ? Because 2.5% salt is exactly the proportion I mentioned above, under "perfectly normal for bread". And btw I believe sugar put into bread dough at the start isn't aimed at making it sweet - it gives a kick-start to the yeast, which eats it all up. I put sugar in my pizza dough & I'm not into sweet pizza. So rowies are salty. Got it. Are you going to start the thread "The Scottish Diet", or should I ? You seem to be pretty good on food hygiene. What do you think about HYoungJoo's comment about fish batter 'sitting around for a whole night' with 'fish germs' ? I can't think of any contamination that (1) will produce relevant amounts of toxin in that timeframe, or (2) will survive close contact with 180C oil.

It's the noise your microwave makes when it's finshed doing what you asked: hence the common Japanese verb ching-suru / ching shimasu.

Moist heat, convenience... sorry, it has to be zapped, or "ching-ed" as the Japanese say. Once to get it most of the way there with the auto 'reheat', a wait of several minutes to equalise, and a final blast to get it piping hot. Yes, the TF is the king of braise re-heating.

When I bake bread I put about 1 3/4 tsp of salt in a loaf made with 14oz of flour. I have a Japanese breadmaker with a Japanese menu book, and those recipes ask for the same amount, if not a little more. Other recipes from a variety of countries use much the same ratio, and frankly, bread that's too salty is pretty unpleasant. This rowie / buttery recipe quotes 1/2 tsp of salt for 12oz of flour, which is quite a bit less, proportionally. No doubt rowies are served sprinkled with salt, giving a salty hit for the eater, but even in this thread we've expert opinion that salt used in cooking / sprinkled on at the table isn't the major factor in Scotland's high-salt diet. So I have my doubts about the rowie as 'salty' in the unhealthy sense. Fatty, sure, big tiime. You and I though, Lindsey, not having experience to speak from, have to bow to dougal's other eminent scientific journal, the Sunday Mail. Oh yes, just to stay on topic, erm... fish batter.

They'll have had their tea anyway.

← Yes, the statistics say so, don't they ? Funnily enough, I lived in Scotland - 2 hours from Aberdeen - till I was in my twenties, and it's now more than twenty years since then, but I'd never heard of rowies or butteries till about ten years ago, via the web. I'll shoot down your physical evidence by saying they're about the same as croissants in dietary terms, and ten million per year is of the order of 2 per head, per year. Of course they're a local thing, and there's no accounting for Aberdonians. On average the Scottish diet is famous, as you say. Though short on vegetables other than potato, I don't think Fish and chips counts as the kind of processed food that does the damage. A big part of the dietary problem, I believe, is the aggressive marketing of sugar since the 19th century, by groups in the UK with interests in overseas sugar cultivation. But none of this has much to do with fish batter

Hi Lindsey, I'm not a commercial chef, but I always salt the fish, salt & pepper the flour, and salt & pepper the batter. That way no element is left bland. So, I agree with your policy of 'season everything'. I believe the biggest difference is salting the fish far enough in advance for the salt to penetrate (fish only needs half an hour in the typical thickness of fillets for fish'n'chips). Recently I've also settled on lemon juice or malt vinegar for the liquid in the batter (just something I came up with whilst messing about with it). Raw, the batter seems like it will be intolerably sour (and pungent in the case of malt vinegar). Fried, it's just nicely tart. It also means you're not then sprinkling on wet vinegar or lemon juice that makes the crust soggy again. (This is all very well, but as dougal said, you'd want to be careful how it'd go down in the chippy). Hi dougal - Is that from your personal experience ? As a Scot I've cooked and lived abroad for many years and found people of all nationalities enjoy the same amount of salt that I do