Prawncrackers

Hey David that's crab pâté spread onto a bit of focaccia. I bought a live brown hen crab and it had plenty of back fat and roe. Live crabs are better for this purpose because you can undercook it (the white meat will finish cooking in the pasta). The pâté starts with softened shallots in lots of butter then the back fat and roe is added, cooked out a little, seasoned with lemon & s&p then blended with a hand blender. The nice bright orange colour is due to the roe. You get muddy brown colour with male crabs but it's no less tasty. I think the back fat is the best part of the brown crab we get in the UK and it's a crime to waste it.

Great dinners everyone, nice to catch up on so many lovely dishes. I started the new year off with a couple of Thai dishes. First was pad phed pla duk tod grob or Spicy Crispy Catfish. This is a really interesting dish, the catfish is deep fried until it's completely dry and crispy like a cracker then it's coated with a dry red curry sauce. Garnished with fried Thai basil, the flavour and textures of this dish is amazing. With the left over red curry paste a more conventional deep fried bream coconut curry. Then a couple of comfort dishes. Crab pasta and Claypot rice:

This is my best/favourite dish of the year. Chargrilled lobster with alphonso mango. Both of the main ingredients were at their peak around May, it tasted simply amazing. Can't wait to cook this again next May. It's also special because we won the Chefs Choice category with this dish in my first ever BBQ competition! The lobster is split and chargrilled with lime leaves and lemongrass. The alphonso mango is carefully diced with tomato, daikon, cucumber, chilli and coriander. It's dressed with sweetened fish sauce and lime juice. Really fresh and delicious. I'm kinda salivating thinking about it.

That risotto looks a bit solid, did it eat ok? I prefer mine a lot looser and creamier than that. Loads of butter and Parmesan at the end. I can't imagine that would be popular in the middle of China. As for the clay pot vs tahdig argument. The crusts on Both are delicious. The butteriness of the Persian style is amazing but let's not forget the power of the pork fat when a clay pot is cooked with loads if lap mei! At the moment I have a 10kg bag of Green Dragon brand Thai Jasmine for everyday eating. A smaller bag of Tilda Basmati. Nishiki Japanese rice (grown in America). Spanish bomba for paella. Carnaroli for risotto. Camargue red rice from France and a little American long grain somewhere for making Jambalaya! A whole world if rice but strangely I have never seen Chinese rice for sale here let alone bought any.

Though every cloud has a silver lining. Elena Arzak is opening up a restaurant here instead.

Thats a shame i never got round to eating here. It's true though we've not been able to get fresh kaffir lime leaves for a couple of years now. David Thomson is such an obsessive that closing must have been the only option on the end.

Yup that's a useful tip as a lot of thin cleavers have squared spines which can dig into your first finger with just light use slicing veg etc. But even with a rounded spine the impact forces of chopping poultry with a thin blade can be uncomfortable on your right hand. Personally I use a thick chopper type for my poultry. A good chopping tip is to flatten the section of meat slightly with your cleaver before chopping. This helps with the shape and prevents the piece flying away. I haven't come across any books on how to chop up cooked poultry and present it the Chinese way. There should as there's nothing worse than "Chinese" cooks massacring poultry!

I wouldn't use a cleaver with good quality steel to chop poultry. For example I have a nice Shun cleaver, quite light made of VG10 steel. The first and only time I used this to chop up a cooked chicken it chipped the blade quite badly. Softer steel is less likely to chip. I think the cleaver you've bought in the first post should handle the job well. A thinner blade makes cleaner cuts and is less likely to splinter the bones but a lot is down to skill and practise. A thinner blade can be awkward as the spine can dig into your grip. A thin spine is also difficult to apply pressure on with your non cutting hand if you need that extra whack to go through the bone. Though with skill and practise you should never need that extra whack. In Chinese BBQ shops they mostly use heavier cleavers as the extra weight helps with the amount of work they do. But they also use soft curved boards which help to cushion the impact and prevent splintering.

You probably won't find any of those brands in Kappabashi. Go for Misono if you like modern style or Masamoto for traditional. From memory, Tsuikiji outer market has Masamoto, Sugimoto and Nenohi shops. All are excellent makers.

Depends on what you define as “meat”. The cheeks were massive and each one easily big enough to feed one person. Then there were the meaty bits where it had been cut off. But as you dug in the head it’s just full of funky gelatinous collageny stuff. All very slurpable. I bought another one this week, slightly smaller than the last one, it was only £3 and the milt came free with it. (That last part sounds wrong…) There were two heads at the wholesale market this week but the other one was so massive that I doubted it would actually fit in my oven. I think I’ll roast the one I bought again but finish it with a teriyaki glaze. Should be awesome with rice. The milt was very bland tasting, the texture was exactly like fresh tofu.

It was quite an intimating piece of protein. In the end I sliced some pieces off and simmered it in some dashi. Served as a light snack with some ginger and scallion. Very creamy as you would expect but I don't think I could eat a whole kilo of it!!!!

Here's something from 'the other' category; halibut soft roe or milt or as American food show presenters like to say in practised seriousness sperm-sac! One of my pet peeves, along with head cheese there's a perfectly good English word it. I digress. It was free, it's 1kg of the stuff, any ideas out there?

That sounds like a very leading question Patrick... There are roasted crushed peanuts in the spice paste but it isn't overly peanutty in the finished curry. I think the recipe calls for whole nuts to finish too but I don't like the texture of them whole in curries.

My first grouse of the season, simply pan roasted. Served with sauté of lettuce, broad bean and black pudding, a vanilla parsnip puree and a marsala pan reduction with raisins. Something completely different; David Thompson's Massaman curry made with ox cheeks, a stunning dish! The recipe seems quite long winded but i used a pressure cooker to tenderise the beef which really cut down the cooking time. One of those recipes that you can't wait to try again as soon as possible.

I like this dish but I generally haven't seen it before with chicken chunks. Usually chicken wings, the middle wing - the best bit! This recipe is ok, could do with a lot of refinement. Green finger chillies (the Indian type) I think are best for this they give good sharp pepper bite that's not too hot and the garlic should be minced finer like in the photo. Ideally the salt should be toasted first and also any spice mix if you are using it.

Wonderful technique mm84321, really stylish. Love grouse but half of one is never enough! I had a good moan in a restaurant once when i was served up one measly breast of grouse, I was so disappointed.

Yeah, i parboil the lobster for three minutes, remove from the water and leave the claws in for a further two minutes. Split them in half and cut the meat up neatly so it fits back into the shell (the clawmeat goes into the head). But before you reassemble, make the cheese sauce: Soften shallots in butter, add flour etc, enrich the sauce with dijon mustard, the lobster tomalley and I use a mixture of gruyere and parmesan. I like to spoon the sauce into the shell first then rearrange the lobster meat on top then cover it with more sauce. You can leave it at this point to finish later in the oven then under the broiler with some extra cheese on top. A classic!

Cheers guys, preparing eels is still somewhat outside of my comfort zone so it's nice to make something really good out of them. It's been quite a fishy week, I roasted some bream at the start of week. It was filleted and smeared with a black olive tapenade and wrapped in prosciutto. Served with heirloom tomatoes, basil, figs and some plain orzo pasta: Some steamed lemon sole with lap cheung and mushroom behind this big plate of dried fried green beans and pork: and finally some Lobster Thermidor tonight:

After my eel smoking adventure last weekend, i think i may have created one of the most awesome combinations ever - salt cod and smoked eel. At first I made Spanish style croquettas with crispy panko breadcrumbs: It was muy bueno, but I got a bit fed up with making them half way through because it was quite a loose mixture and they're a bit fiddly to form. I had some flour and egg left so mixed it in and dumped it in the fridge. The next day I folded in some beaten egg white and deep-fried them as fritters, served on top pureed beetroot and creme fraiche with caraway, and good glug of aberquina olive oil. This may be the best tapas style dish I've ever made, if not eaten: If you can get your hands on some smoked eel, I urge you all to try this. There is something amazing about the combination, especially the hint of caraway which marries Northern and Southern European flavours into one dish. To further boost the rich flavour I scraped the eel fat from the inside of the skin and added it to the mix. The fish equivalent of Iberico ham fat!

Yes I forget we have serious bacon addicts on the forum! Thanks dcarch, i should have crossed the rashers over the other way to show them off better! You know i didn't want the focus to be on the bacon but on the pancakes. I really like the pleasing appearance of the stack especially the top of it under the sheen of the syrup. I supposed this is what food stylists get paid to do; maximise the visual appeal of every aspect of the shot. .

Last one I bought around the new year was £22 per kg, and it was dead on about kilo too. I didn't weigh the smoked fillets, but if I had to guess then I got about 200g from it. So not cheap at all, but so worth it. I'll give you a procedure in this very thread if I can get my hands on one or two soon. Watch this space! Right at the start of this thread I promised a step by step guide to smoking eels. Here it is finally! Eels haven't been available this summer, it's taken this long to get hold of them. The price has climbed to £30 per kg since, so there may not be many opportunities to smoke them in future. Step 1 - Buy and kill Get your fishmonger to choose the most lively eels, 1 kilo in size is just right. Any smaller and the yield is poor, much bigger and they're difficult to handle in a normal kitchen. I get mine from the Indoor Fish Market here but they won't kill them for you but if your fishmonger does then get them to do it and clean them too, making sure they leave the head on. Some people just go for it, whack them over the head and gut them whilst they're still thrashing but I like to handle them as little as possible. So in a suitably sized pot with a lid scatter three or four big handfuls of coarse salt all over the bottom and pour in a little water to make a grainy slush. Tip the eels into the pot and clamp the lid down tight. Leave for an hour, the eels will thrash around for a while but the salt will eventually kill them and help to deslime. You can tell they're dead when the eyes go blank, they usually go belly up too. Step 2 - Clean and Gut Remove the eels and rinse them under plenty of cold running water. A lot of the slime will be left in the pot but there will still be some on the eel. You have a choice here, you can rub this off with some more coarse salt or scrape it off with a sharp sturdy knife. It's a messy job either way. When the eel has been fully deslimed, gut it from it's anal vent to it's jaw and remove all it's innards making sure to clean the bloodline. Most other fish are quite easy to gut but eel guts are particularly tenacious, you may need sturdy fish tweezers or pliers to make a really clean job of it. Most importantly when gutting eels you need slice a couple of inches towards the tail to get the kidney out. The tip of my knife in the photo is where the anal vent was located, you can see how far to cut in that direction. Step 3 - Salt and Dry For every kilo of eel rub 70g of salt into the cavity and all over the outside. Place covered in the fridge overnight, preferably 24 hours, redistributing the salty brine at least once in that time. The next day rinse the eels off and dry them quickly with a clean cloth inside and out. Place the eels on a rack uncovered in the fridge overnight for a sticky pellicle to form on the skin and in the cavity. A pellicle allows smoke to adhere better to food so make sure that the eel is as exposed as possible while it's in the fridge, that's why a rack is useful. The resting in the fridge also helps to redistribute the saltiness throughout the eel. Step 4 - Smoke You're ready to smoke your eel. Prepare your hot smoker for a 80-90C burn for up to 90 minutes. It's very important that you don't smoke them too hot or they will split and all the oil will burst out. If you're using a horizontal smoker, lay the eels carefully belly up, you may need a small skewer to stop the eels from turning over. More commonly eels are smoked vertically, tie some string or twine around the throat just below the side fins and use this to hang them head up. If you don't do this and simply insert a hook straight into the jaw then as the eel cooks it softens and will fall off the hook - a complete disaster! I like to use oak chips, it's a classic flavour with fish, robust and sweet but really you can use any smoking wood. Check your eels after an hour, they should be nicely smoked, leave for up to half an hour longer if you've got particularly fat ones. For posterity, a 987g eel at the market weighed 751g after smoking and produced 482g of pure meat. Enjoy, it's worth it.

Fellow Shutterbugs, I bring you two shots of this morning breakfast; a short stack with candied bacon and smoked ice-cream. Yum! The usual set-up for me, a flash gun bounced off the ceiling. The first shot came out exactly how i wanted it, everything nicely framed and in focus: The second shot was a bit soft, i must have been moving and the only thing in focus seems to be the very tip of the bacon. As the first shot was what i was looking for I left it at that and got stuck in before the pancakes got cold: Loading these shots onto my pc, I brightened them up a little and I couldn't help but to love the second shot more. It's one of those situations where my head says the first shot is better but my heart says the second. There just seems to be more "emotion" in the second, more a feeling that I want to eat it again. I admit the colour temperature is slightly warmer in the second but that can't be the only reason that the first seems now more cold and clinical in comparison. So questions are: which do you prefer and why; and how do I actually recreate something like the second in future because it was a complete fluke!?

Ha Liuzhou, you do know that all the guardian food journalists plunder egullet for their pieces. Felicity Cloake in particular simply repeats her "how to cook the perfect..." series on our cook-off ideas. But Ollie Thring is right about this series though, it is brilliant!

Nice Bruce, i'm always stuck for something to go with ribs and I like to look of that salad. What kind of rice did Mrs C make? I usually do a Mexican style green rice to go with que. Prawns with Whore's Pasta, though Gamberi Bucatini alla Puttanesca sounds much better! Both taste wonderful:

So back to the present. Sea Bream, gilt-head bream or dorade. Call it what you want they are very common and popular fish in British waters. They're mostly farmed from Turkey or Greece nowadays but still very nice fish to cook and eat. They also freeze very well, I dug one out along with some frozen squid and soft-shell crab. The fish was filleted, the bones made a light stock with which to make a quick Thai red curry with them. A 30 min meal and a great midweek option, good to cook and one of the the wife's favourites: