jackal10

I choose, in consultation with the catering manager and the head chef. The wines are from the college cellar. As a by-fellow I get acess to the Fellow's wines, rather than the standard catering list. The college has many tens of thousands of bottles laid down. As I said earlier, Colleges provide living and dining, and it is a requirement for the students to eat a certain number of meals a term in college hall. The idea is that they learn by socialising as well as by formal teaching. There are also formal feasts and guest nights several times a year. College http://www.emma.cam.ac.uk/ has about 400 undergraduates, and about 120 fellows. Outside University term it also acts as a conference venue. The kitchen is thus akin to a hotel kitchen and has to serve a number of roles: Three meals a day bulk catering for the students and staff, both formal and self-service canteen. Formal fine dining for high table (the fellows), complete with gowns and latin grace. Private dinners and conferences Feasts. The college awards scholarships, and one of the duties of a scholar is to be on the rosta to say the Grace. The Grace has been said in Hall every day for over 400 years. For feasts it is sung by the choir,

Someone asked about corn. This is strawberry corn. You are meant to be able to use it as popcorn, by putting the whole cob in the microwave. Didn't work for me.. Inevitably some things got forgotten. I found another bag of the fish balls in the fridge, and a pack of cumberland sausages I was going to roast. They will freeze for another time. About half a loaf was left from all that bread, and I suspect that was only because it had been put away after I had used half for the forcemeat for the salmon. There was a tray of baked potatoes left in the oven, that turned to charcoal. Supper tonight needed to be something simple and restorative. Chunky Chicken Soup with Onion and Parsley Dumplings. Fortunately I had bought a chicken at the supermarket, and it was about the only thing left from the ravening hordes. Chicken stock is quickly made in a pressure cooker. Tomorrow I am at a Cambridge Angels dinner, which I am hosting in my College. The Cambridge Angels is primarily a dining club, but we justify its existance by making angel investments in promising young start-up companies. I act as steward. The average investment is around $500K, and we have made a dozen or so investments in the last year or so. Angel investment is a long term, high risk gamble. Don't do it with money you can't afford to lose. The term angel was origiinally one for a theatrical backer. It typically takes ten years to get your money back, and maybe only one in ten suceeds, thenyou have to pay tax on it. Two or three will fail, and you lose the investment. Most will settle into lifestyle companies, or zombies - sound companies, but not making much more than enough to pay the staff. However a very few will win a lot, returning hundreds of times the initial investment. We meet before dinner and hear presentations from hopeful companies who want us to invest in them. We then give them a hard time in questions - usually there are some experts in the field amongst us. I wanted it to be called the Chapter of Angels, and for us all to wear studded leather jackets, but I was overruled. The rule is that any Angel can introduce a company, but they must be prepared to invest in it themselves personally, and act as its champion. We then throw out the candidates, and have dinner over which there is lively debate or the merits of the proposals.. Individuals (who must be of high net worth and sophisticated investors to comply with the financial regulations) make the investments personally. It has the advantage that since everyone is acting on their own behalf, decisions can be made quickly. The menu planned is Sweet Pimento and Crab Soup ****** Roast Whole Venison Saddle served with a Caramelised Pear and a Redcurrant Jus Vegetable Selection Potatoes ****** Warm Prune Linzer Torte with Armagnac Ice Cream ****** Cheeseboard, Coffee and Mints Wines: Before: The Graham Beck Blanc de Blanc 1998 Bassermann- Jordan Jesuitgarten 1990 Nuits St George Domaine D'Arlot 1995 Ch. Coutet 1988 Warre 1977 I'll talk more about college life and catering tomorrow, answer any questions and then the blog baton will pass on...

More from yesterday. A tarte flambe or flammenkuche cooking in the oven This Alsacien version of onion tart is a very thin pizza base, creme fraiche, onion and bacon The beef, . Like everything else this vanished, and someone even took the bones home for their dogs... A beef sandwich, but not as we usually know it.. Various spontaneous happenings: Ross playing the Northumbrian small pipes. Dan Lepard taking a pizza out of the oven. Dan is one of the best bakers in the UK, if not the world. He was the initial baker and baking advisor for St Johns Bread and Wine, and many other famous places. Dan was heroic, and when the pizza dough ran out, happily made more by hand, discoursing and demonstrating to a fascinated audience on the properties of dough and the hydration of gluten. His new book "The Handmade Loaf" ISBN: 1840009667 will be published next month by Micheal Beazley. Plum pizza (plums, butter, sugar), and apple pizza (apples, butter sugar) (delicious). Like most food, it tended to vanish before I could snap it... There are still apples in the orchard. I guess we will have to do it again soon..

We were lucky with the weather - one of those lovely sunny autumn days, althugh the Saturday and today are grey cold and windy. Everybody helps, and the kids have a great time. The apples are picked. That tree is an Ellison Orange, which has a characterisitic resinous flavour. The garden near the house has some old apple trees, but the main orchard is to the left and behind the oven.. The apples are then notionally washed - dumped in tub of water. Here are apples waiting to be processed. Here is the press. Apparently the ratchet mechanism was designed originally by Leonardo de Vinci. so I guess it was originally designed for olives. The apples first go through a garden shredder (I pressure washed it first), to make pomace. The press takes 40 litres of pomace, to the top, and the juice comes out of the bottom, remarkably clear, considering it is unfiltered. The juice is already brown. You can keep it white, but only by adding ascorbic acid, vitamin C to the pomace. I prefer it natural, just organic apples (OK, maybe the odd worm and a drowsy wasp get in) Wood blocks fil the gap between the follower and the ratchet. The remains are cake, which I just compost. We get about 60% juice to weight of apple, which is quite good. Professional hydraulic presses will get 75% or more. We just mix the apples, and the juice is delicious. It gets put into plastic containers and froze. Freezing is the best way of preserving it at home, and keeps the flavour intact - pasturisation is tricky, and I don't like chemical preservatives. The freezer is full, and I'll make cider (US: hard, alcoholic cider) from the surplus. As these are eating, rather than cider apples, it doesn't make good cider, but you can freeze it and filter out the ice to make applejack. which is wicked stuff, at about 20% alcohol. (I'm drinking fresh apple juice, not the applejack) More in the next installment

Thanks Marlena. Good to see you both, and thanks for coming. Glad you enjoyed it! I don't usually hire caterers. We have the excellent Mrs A, who comes twice a week to clean and iron, thank goodness. The half hour progress meeting turned into a four and half hour strategy meeting, so lunch wsa a samosa and two pieces of chicken in spicy batter was from the local Indian store "Nasreen Dar" The office has a well used automatic expresso machine, that makes a quite acceptable cup, fresh ground from Lavazzo beans. Like most high-tech organisations good coffee is essential, and there is a deep freeze of ready meals and a microwave free for those working late.. Back to yesterday. Salmon en croute. Good easy party dish Cheat by using shop bought puff pastry, but given a couple of turns with more butter. Roll out the pastry and put the skinned salmon fillet on it. Make forcemeat stuffing with breadcrumbs, parsley, rosemary, onion, salt, pepper, bound with an egg Layer the salmon with the stuffing, and lay the other salmon fillet over the top, head to tail end of the one below. Cover with more puff pastry, eggwash, and decorate - scales made with a small pastry cutter and a head and tail are traditional. Bake for twenty minute or so. Unfortunately I wasn't paying enough attention, and the brick oven was much hotter than I expected, so it burnt. Quick work with a sharp knife saves the day! Collect saladings: cucumber, lettuce (this is buttercrunch), and the overgrown tomato patch The tourte blette (being finished by Fabien). The pastry is my standard pate brisee 3 flour: 2 butter: 1 sugar, and egg yolk to cohere. Put all in the food processor and whizz together. I did not get a chance to photograph it before it vanished. That is a pizza baking on the right, but I did get to taste a piece of the tourte. To me, apart from the buttery pastry, with a hint of woodsmoke, the apple and the brandy dominated the taste, with a rich, slightly bitter and almondy backgound, a bit like a green sort of frangipane. Nice. I'll make it again. The pate, and the chocolate challa. Maybe a bit too much salt in the challa Put out the beer and champagne. We used plastic champagne flutes, which are OK, safer outside and save washing up. Ice bucket on the right. Tie bottle opener on string. There was also a Provencal Rose. Apple juice and champagne is excellent. More food on the kitchen table The cheddar is a Butlers Vinatge Traditional Farhouse Cheddar (again from Tesco, one of the few good and serious cheeses they do). It was a quarter of a whole truckle, and vanished like the snows of yesteryear... More in the next post...

Moving slowly this morning... Need to go to the office for a 10am engineering meeting (weekly prayers..) Should be back lunchtime to post pix

What a day! THe hordes descended and ate and drank...nothing left...I guess we picked and processed a metric tonne of apples and made something like 500 litres of juice Completely knackered...I'll post pix in the morning. My collegue Jamie made this excellent panoramic view from fairly early in the proceedings. Its very wide, so you may need to scroll sideways. It covers more than 360 degrees - there is only one table! http://67.18.205.234/~jack/applepick04_medium.jpg The pizza dough takes about 4 hours to prove - its sourdough remember. I guess its useable for another 4-6 hours, although you could retard it in the fridge for up to 24 hours or so. When we ran out of dough, Dan Lepard kindly made some up with conventional instant yeast, but flavoured with sourdough starter that was ready in half an hour...

Good Morning! Its bright and suuny, with only a gentle breeze. I've adsorbed two mugs of coffee, and it looks like it will be a good day... The pheasants and the squirrels have come and had their breakfast at the kitchen door. They will make themselves scarce for the day I've set up a webcam on . http://67.18.205.234/~jack/ccam.jpg. It will reload every 30 seconds.It might even reload here if you refresh the page! Unfortunately the view includes some of the scaffolding. The oven is under the trees mid right in the distance. The pork had cooked overnight to falling off the bone perfection. The oven was at 125C this morning. Took the pork oput, and light a small fire on one side to heat for the pizza later. Got out the beef - the supermarket had kindly hung it for me for a fornight - amazing what they will do if asked nicely. I'll long time low temperature cook this, and then flash it in the super hot wood fired oven. The beef is Scottish wing rib on the bone, but nicely butchered. Mde the pizza dough. 4.5Kg/10lbs flour, 90g sea salt, 3 litre water, and the rest of the starter.. time to get my hands stuck in and messy.. Next up, the salmon en croute, and the tourte. Will report when I can...

I think Pizza crust should be thin and crisp. Basically it will be a version of the standard white sourdough, bulk fermented for four hours or so.

Thanks! I've ordered it!

Last years apple pressing day is on Dan's website at http://www.danlepard.com/applejack.htm. There is a chance Dan may come today. I guess you've seen his eGCI Baking Day

I hope we won't have any left over, or that people will take whatever is left away with them... It was about 6 large onions and 500g/1lb raisins to 2Kg/5lbs flour. The onions were softened and slightly caramelised in some butter, the allowed to cool first.

Its past midnight, and its been a busy day, including the couple who turned up a day early for the party! Where were we... Second batch baking (red onion and rasin, and the chocolate challa) Cross sections above. The chocolate challa stuck to the peel a bit, so ended up a bit squished. I wonder if the acid in the sourdough made the chocolate go very dark reddish, like devils cake. Some bread: The oven was still over 200C, so put the pate in for a couple of hours, in a bain marie. This is it uncooked. After that the oven was still over 150C, so I put in the BBQ pork ribs (with my own secret spice rub) to cook overnight.. Made some Pimento Cheese. It was that or Lipatauer, and Pimento won, since everything was on hand After all that supper needed to be something simple and quick: Pasta carbonara Enough already! Until the morning... List for tomorrow: Light oven Make Pizza dough Put on beef Make salads (green, cucumber I guess) Pick more tomatoes Set up car park Make Tourte Blette etc Make salmon en croute Bake off chicken, sausages etc Set up for Pizza making, Lay out breads, cheeses, pate etc Put out beer etc Set up apple press Await the throng... Looking over the blog I see the promised potato kugel never happened, since the tzimmes had potatoes in it. Maybe next week...

It wasn't the high sugar content that made if difficult to shape, but the big lumps of solid chocolate! Tzimmes, like lobscouse, can come with or without meat...I think it was poor mans food, and they cooked what they could.

As I said above, the internal brickwork is a shell bought from Four Grandmere. The external brickwork was built on site by a local bricklayer.

That sounds like a book I'd like to read! Can you find a reference? Thanks!

Yes its all from the supermarket or the garden. The only veg (so far) from the market are the onions, which I find are just as good if not better than the ones I grow. I try an buy veg with the least food miles. We do have farmers markets, but they are of variable quality. The sweetcorn for the pizza is a tin of Jolly Green Giant kernals. Some like it, I don't myself, but it is a common pizza ingredient here. I'm growing some, not very sucessfully, as the mice, squirrels, pigeons, munjac etc eat it before I do. Also the main block of it this year turned out to be (by a mix up) strawberry corn, whicj is mostly ornamental but cab be used for popcorn. I'll try and get a snap tomorrow. Other years I've had success with bi-colour super-sweet, like Thompson and Morgan's Honey and Cream and also with Indian Summer. Tomatoes This year I am mostly growing Gardeners Delight (small red) and the ever wonderful Sungold (yellow sweet cherry). For bulk I grow Fireworks (bush, Flame deriviative), but its not doe well. I have a few plants of other that people give me or swap like Apricot Brandywine, Hector, Maryanna's seedling (disapointing). This is more arable than cattle country, so there are no small butter producers or dairy farmers. The regulatory regime also make it difficult - you may remember the foot and mouth, and the mad cow epidemics recently. I could get Neals Yard unpastuarised cream from a farm sjop locally, but they have stopped shipping it. I'm using mostly President, an unsalted french butter, and also unsalted English Country Life. Generic, but OK.

Here you are: Wholemeal Red onion and raisin Note the thin but crisp crusts...

I only really fire the oven for entertaining, and also occaisonally baking a batch of bread to sell at a charity event, maybe half a dozen times a year. It would be a lot easier and cheaper to give them the money! It took maybe 6 months to build, but we had builders in anyway, building the new garage, so bricklayers and other trades were on site. Its bult around a shell made by Four Grandmere. The circle is the pipe for the embedded thermometer. I've done some hot-smoking in it with a small fire, but you can't really smoke in it - it gets too hot. I should have built a smoke-box in the chimney, but its really better seperate, as smoking needs a different sort of fire, and a long pipe to cool the smoke. Another project...

Its about 33% starter, which is about 2 of water:flour by weight, so about 10% white flour, an 90% wholemeal

Not a silly question at all. I think what happens is as follows: The heat has two functions: to activate the expansion, and to then set the matrix. Bread the expansion is mostly by heating the gas; the gluten/starch matrix sets at quite a high temperature, so to get bread to rise you need a hot oven, Pizza is thin, so conduction is not an issue, but for larger loaves you need lower temperatures. Cake sets differently, mostly by denaturing the egg protein. It also expands differently, from chemical action of the baking powder, both of which only need lower temperatures. Highre temperatures would cause the high sugar content to burn, before the inside gets up to temperature.

First batch of bread out; next batch in. Makes me respect artisan bakers - its a hard way to make aliving... J for Jack!

I seem to be talking to myself here a bit... First batch in. The sourdough has risen nicely overnight in the fridge Tools of the trade: On the right is a lame a curved razor blade on a stick, used to slash the tops of the loaves. The slashing provides an expansion point othewise the crust would inhibit the rise (oven spring). In the old days the different patterns of slashing would distinguish people's loaves in the communal oven. It is very sharp! On the left is my shiny new peel, used for putting loaves in and out of the oven. The loaf is turned out onto the floured peel (floured so it does not stick), slashed and put in the oven. Note how the pattern of the basket has been imprinted in the dough Loaves in the oven. The rear ones have already begun to rise. At the front are some cut into bun size triangles

Its now 16.30, the fire has burned down to embers, and the oven is up to temperature. The dome has gone from sooty to clear. The embers are raked out into the ash bin - that is the metal box hanging on the front. It has a lid which closes it tightly to extinguish the charcoal, that cen be used to light the next fire The oven fllor is then swabbed out. Traditionally thsi was done with a baker's scurfle, a rag on the end of a stick (and hence the expression for a dirty person), but I use an ordinary floor mop. My radiant themometer says the dome surface temperature is 350C/660F, and the floor about 300C/575F. I'll leave it with the door closed dor about half an hour to even out in temperature. Besides its raining again, and I want to let the rain shower go through. In case you are wondering about health and safety, the temperature is well above sterilisation, and the wood is untreated, so there are unlikley to be noxious chemicals. The base of the loaves might get a slight disting of wood ash, but that adds tpo the flavour. Mankind has baked this way for hundreds of year without too much harm..

Cladia Roden mentions Salmon poached in white wine, as a Russian dish. Not sweet and sour, however. I've also found recipes for pickled salmon, made form cooked salmon steeped in vinager. I wonder if its a version of that?