ChrisTaylor

One of my (many) vices is potato crisps. Or, more specifically, new kinds of crisps. A new flavour of something? A dodgy-sounding 'roast turkey and cranberry sauce' special edition of your mediocre 'deli' crisps? I'll be all over it like white on rice. It's hard for me to walk out of a specialist grocery store without blowing a lot of money on imported, 'high end' British and American corn- and potato-based snack foods. And no matter how many times I'm disappointed by stupidly expensive crisps, man, I just keep on going back. A fiend. Anyway, happy news. Local pan-Asian grocer recently expanded its range of savoury snack products. Everything is reasonably priced: on par or cheaper than what you'd pay for a locally made foil-wrapped, air-padded party of starch/salt/grease. Last night's product wasn't even worthy of a photograph. The packaging was what got me into the store. Through the window I spotted it. This ... golden foil bag with a huge, near-pornographic picture of some hot wings on it. All greasy and red. I am very fond of chicken wings. I am very fond of chicken wings that have been assaulted with hot sauce. I had to have these. But, er, yeah ... avoid, kids. Avoid. This Japanese product--a 'corn snack'--was akin to croutons in appearance. Only the texture was more like dodgy supermarket white bread than had been lightly warmed in a pool of scary-smelling vegetable oil than actual toast. Now, croutons flavoured like hot wings? That's an idea I could get behind. But greasy, soft puffs of corn that tasted like nothing in particular? Not even salt? Pfft. I'd pick up another packet to take a photo but ... yeah ... no. 0/5 stars. Today's selection is significantly better. Enter the CALBEE, Inc-brand Hot and Spicy Flavoured Grill-a-Corn (dig the ... masculine corn cob chilling, sans sunglasses, on a ... tanning bed? on a gurney under a range hood? on the packaging). Prepared and packed in China for the Japanese market. Product is corn-based, obviously, and is a somewhat superior version of a product Australians are very familiar with: Twisties. The level of heat isn't, unfortunately, as bold as the front of the packaging suggests. Mild without being boring. Only a slight background note of arse. Barely detectable under the chilli powder/paprika double team. The soy sauce and flavour enhancer mean this bad boy packs a fair bit of umami: something lacking from many snack foods, something that earns Calbee Grill-a-Corn an extra point. Not much corn flavour but, hey, like anyone would be surprised by that. 3.5/5 stars. Ignore the disgusting table.

Days when you're meant to be writing your thesis are the best days for messing around in a hot/humid kitchen, pickling stuff, right? Of course, one of these things is not like the others. One of these things is not the same. Both are the products of John Currence's Pickles, Pigs and Whiskey: pickled sweetcorn and marinara sauce. At some point in the next week or so I'll get around to the pickled grapes and pickled pig ears (so I can deep-fry them).

What is the difference between grits and polenta? In Australia, I can purchase polenta everywhere. Coarse. Fine. White. If I look hard enough--like, say, at the supermarket five minutes drive from here--I can get mealie meal. I can, of course, get the regular kind of corn meal. I can even get masa easily enough. And yet the only grits I've seen for sale locally are a) very expensive and b) the instant kind intended for consumption at breakfast. i.e. a finely-ground product pre-flavoured with cinnamon and whatnot. I do not intend to serve grits for breakfast. I do not want an instant product. I'm sure that some health food store, somewhere, probably sells organic grits ground between the thighs of honey-coloured virgins. I don't want to spend a lot of money on a ground-up grain. At one point I even purchased some whole dried-up white corn kernels and ran them through a tiny, flimsy hand-cranked coffee grinder. I'm not doing that again. Anyway, the other day I was wandering around the local pan-Asian grocer and stumbled on a vac-packed bag of 'crushed corn'. I've yet to remove it from the vac pack and closely examine it but it seems significantly coarser than polenta, without being anywhere near as coarse as the 'broken corn' I once tried using (picture large dried white corn kernels broken into four or so chunks apiece). If it's simply what it looks like--a really coarse polenta--then it's basically grits, right? I can't say I've ever had 'the real thing', so I'm happy to settle for 'near-enough' in terms of texture and flavour. My only reference point for 'corn porridge'-type dishes are polenta and sadza. EDIT So, the photo reveals basically nothing, but ... hey ... here's a photo!

I weighed up two options: Making a full-sized batch of the Collards & Carbonara marinara. No more effort than a small batch. And, too, I could pack the rest in jars and store it.Buying a good quality marinara from the supermarket.Guess what I did.

I had a few people visit on New Year's Eve. One of these people kindly left a six-pack of this stuff. Matso's brew the kind of beer that, frankly, doesn't sound appealing to me. Flavoured with fruits and spices and so forth. Not the sort of thing I usually like. But, hey, it's summer and it's hot and there's beer in the fridge that's maybe more approachable than the line-up of beastly IPAs I recently purchased. So, er, yeah. Here we go. It smells sweet. Fruity. Like, er, lychees (and that whole family--rambutans, longans). To my mind this is not encouraging but, hey, at least I know when Matso's say they've made a lychee beer they weren't fucking around. Anyway, on the palate, it's like a really, really, really light ale with a mild hoppiness and a whole lot of lychee. A flavour, too, that reminds me of musk stick lollies. It's not bad--much better than I expected--but it's clearly one of those things where a little bit is a lot.

The ricotta/spinach gnudi from Collards & Carbonara. I admit to cheating on the marinara.

Seeing as you don't really drink, why not pick up a mini bottle of ... whatever you can get in the mini format? Appleton does minis, right? Use that. And, yeah, nutmeg. Or allspice.

Short ribs cooked at 58C for 48 hours. I finished them over coals after something prompted me to flip through Francis Mallman's book. I guess the Caprihinia is as close to culturally-appropriate as I could get without cracking open a bottle of Malbec. Preparing the sides: burnt tomatoes with fennel and burnt carrots with goat cheese and rocket. The carrots.

' It's an injection-brined, pre-cooked product. Sous vide seems like a bad idea.

Pickle madness. A recipe in the Momofuku book for pickled cherries caught my eye. Naturally, I ended up buying a dozen Mason jars and spending the best part of a day pickling things. I've made pickles before but never got around to canning them. So, using the basic pickle recipe from Eat With Your Hands, I pickled cucumbers, spring onions, celery, radishes and green chillies. One jar of the cukes was jacked with half of a fatali chilli. From Pickles, Pigs and Whiskey I made a batch each of the peaches and okra. And, yeah, those cherries I'd originally set out to pickle.

Pumpkin cakes? I take it that we're talking a potato cake-type affair with, er, pumpkin in place of potato?

Well, I don't think I'm going to find red peas any time soon down here. Black-eyed peas are what I have. But. Okay. No tomato.

If you're preparing Hoppin' John at a time of the year when good fresh tomatoes are readily available, are they a workable sub for canned tomatoes or would I be missing out on the liquid?

Did you make the wors?

Gran Classico's disqualification is that it is not Campari. EDIT Off topic, Jo, you do need to try a Negroni. A grand drink. And, too, there are so many variations that sub one or two ingredients for something else. They're not Negronis--although the versions that play with the ratios arguably still are--but most are very good. It's an almost inherently pleasing format.

Sure, but the 'White'/'Black'/'Kingston' modifiers make clear that you're not getting the classic. I can understand the bother if you order something labeled on the menu as a Negroni, plain and simple, and get something else--I know I get shitty when I order a Daiquiri, even plainly stating I mean a classic Daiquiri, and get something with crushed ice and creme de fucking banana in it--but I can't see how you'd expect the classic when ordering something billed as a White Negroni.

I do not soak chips, whether I'm hot smoking or cold smoking. I alternatively use pellets, 'saw dust' (food grade) and larger chips: it all depends on mood and availability. Anyway, I don't have the tools on hand to hack serious holes in metal but I've nonetheless devised a new smoking device.

A bottle of Bombay Sapphire East found its way through duty free to me.

Interesting. The longest I've smoked bacon has been for maybe 15, 16 hours. I wonder if the smaller volume of the smoker, plus a potentially higher smoke output, means bacon and other products attain a smoky flavour more quickly than in a full-sized smokehouse. And, yeah, the soldering iron ... I'm wondering what I could replace it with. A single burner electric stove and a cheap pan? Maybe. The base of the smoker is large enough to accommodate such a setup.

Parked some short ribs in there for a couple hours with a view to cooking them sous vide later. Happened to walk by the smoker and smelt ... plastic. Melted plastic. Sure enough, the handle of the soldering iron--not in direct contact with the smoking box--had melted. Mmm ... hickory/toxic-smoked beef. Shame to throw the just-purchased meat away but I couldn't take the risk. I'll have to rethink the design of the smoker. This may be as simple as buying a new soldering iron and removing the plastic handle. Or finding another bran that doesn't have any plastic on it at all.

I argue it's a lot easier to sub the spirit than it is the bittering agent. But, yeah, White Negroni/Suze. It works. And I don't have a bottle, but I've seen people use Gran Classico.

It's Boxing Day tradition for me, pretty much, to go out and buy a turkey. In Australia, turkey is rarely consumed outside of the Christmas period so as of Boxing Day they're steeply discounted. Including the high end organic nonsense ones. This year I'm cold smoking it over hickory before parting it in the sous vide rig. From there I'll figure out what to do with it. I have a New Year's Eve barbecue coming up so, hey, maybe part of the turkey will make itself useful then.

This was indeed the troubleshooting process I was asked to go through. Didn't help matters, unfortunately. I tried locking the skirt in place in all three possible positions. I discovered two resulted in a slightly louder noise than the one I'd been using. Time will tell if this design issue has been addressed in the new and future versions of the circulator. I'd consider it a more pressing matter than mobile connectivity or anything like that.

The confit peach was good and I reckon I'll hang onto that element of the dish to use elsewhere. Roast pork, maybe. Even chicken. Anything that benefits from a bit of sweetness. The compressed peach was problematic. The recipe itself is simple: peach slices are sealed in a chamber vac with some Sauternes. I only have a strip sealer. The NotCompressedTM peach tasted like, well, a thin slice of peach that'd been soaking in a semillion-based dessert wine overnight. I purchased a firm peach, as the recipe prescribed, but found had softened a little by the time I got around to 'compressing' it. Dousing it in liquid and leaving it like that overnight didn't help matters. I'd have to rethink this element if I made the dish again: perhaps making some kind of semillon/peach-based syrup. Perhaps trying to burn off (i.e. with a match) the wine's alcohol, then freezing it and sealing it in with the peach using my strip sealer.

Campari. And I don't think they are interchangeable at all. Totally different flavour profiles. Campari is more bitter. Aperol tastes like off-brand soft drink.