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June 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment

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Cookbook Review of Maze by Jason Atherton

June 17, 2010 By 2 Comments

Last week, I received this great little book from Quadrille Books to review and tried out the Rack and braised shoulder of lamb ras el hanout and served it with the warm couscous salad. Maze is one of the Gordon Ramsay’s empire of restaurants in London and Jason Atherton was the head chef, who has now left to do his own thing. This book is a collection of the best dishes from Maze and the recipes have been written in a clever way and is very accesible for the home cook.

warm couscous salad

Maze by Jason Atherton

Even though the list of ingredients seemed a bit dauntin, the recipe was very simple to follow and not overly complicated steps in it at all. I did miss out the white onion puree and cofit baby leeks part of the recipe.

The sauce was the most complicated part to this recipe but worked out amazingly well. I substituted the white wine vinegar for the shrry vinegar as that was all I had at home but the end result was stunning. It was the first time that I had used ras el hanout and harissa paste and the use of these 2 in the sauce resulted in a spicy and tangy sauce to go with the meat and couscous.

For the lamb, the supermarket had run out of racks of lamb by the time I got there late afternoon, so I had to settle for lamb chops, which when seasoned with the same spice was so easy to do and delicious.

As for the couscous which can be often so boring and bland, adding ras el hanout to this and I substituted stock for water, made it unbelievably moreish. I also added some balsamic roasted vegetable to the couscous just to add a bit more veg to the whole dish.

The result was a total triumph with the dinner guest duly impressed with the flavours and everyone had seconds.

lamb ras el hanout

Was pleasantly surprised at how easy this book is to follow as I expected another poncy Michelin star effort with extremely complicated steps to follow. The recipe worked and it is done in a way that any average home cook can follow and recreate. So big thumbs up.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-06-13

June 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

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Massimo Bottura Recipe for Veal Cheeks and Magnum of Foie Gras

June 11, 2010 By 1 Comment

Here are the recipes for some of the delights we sampled at the Birra Moretti event the other day created by the 2 Michelin star chef, Massimo Bottura

VEAL CHEEKS in lager, balsamic vinegar and chlorophyll

The cheeks

4 veal cheeks

100 g of celery carrot and onion

2 litres of Birra Moretti La Rossa, reduced by 50%

20 ml of stock

Traditional Villa Manodori extra-aged balsamic vinegar

Pure extra virgin olive oil

Vacuum-cook the cheeks at 68° C for 30 hours with the beer, celery, carrot and onion reduction

The puree

200 g of fingerling potatoes

50 g white cow butter

100 of white cow’s whole milk

Extra virgin oil and Villa Manodori olive oil

veal cheeks

Cook the fingerling potatoes, peel them and mash them. Place them in a copper saucepan with some Modena white butter (better if fresh) and white whole milk.

Assemble using the Bamix, drizzling on the extra virgin olive oil.

Add salt to taste.

The beer-based balsamic reduction

Strain the cooking liquid from the cheeks and reduce slowly until creamy in consistency with a very intense aroma, adding the traditional Modena balsamic vinegar and salt to taste.

The intense CHLOROPHYLL crème

100 g of parsley

30 g of basil

20 g of watercress

Heat the water to 75 degrees and allow the herbs to infuse for sixty seconds.

Strain and cool quickly in water and ice. Dry carefully with cotton towel and put in refrigerator for two hours. Whisk with 100 cc of mineral water and strain overnight at refrigerator temperature.


Magnum of Foie Gras

400 g of duck foie gras

2 l of milk

30 ml of Birra Moretti Lager

1 cinnamon stick

10 g of cloves

30 g of Noto almonds, bitter and sweet

30 d of Piedmont hazelnuts

50 g of sugar

2 cl of water

1\2 a vanilla pod

The peel of half an orange

Traditional extra-aged balsamic vinegar

Fleur de sel

(sorry for the poor quality of the pics, my flash was not working properly.)

Soak the liver in the milk, at 30 degrees temperature, for a couple of hours. Remove and dry.

Clean the liver, delicately separating the lobes and remove the connective tissue from the larger veins without ruining the meat. In the meantime, reduce the beer on the heat by 50%, before cooling it in the blast chiller.

Allow the cleaned liver to marinate in the beer reduction and the spices for 6 hours.

Remove from the marinade and all excess moisture to drip away. Mould it into a terrine, then insert it into a vacuum bag and cook in the Roner for around 35 minutes at 55°.

Remove from the Roner and cool in the blast chiller to 2 degrees, before allowing to rest for at least two days in the refrigerator. Boil the water with the sugar, vanilla and orange peel. Immerse the almonds and hazelnuts into the syrup, drain them, place them on a silicon mat and dust with fleur de sel. Place them in an oven until thoroughly crystallised (200° for a few minutes).

Use a hot knife blade, prepare by cutting the terrine into two parallelepipeds around 8 cm long, 4 wide and 1.5 high. Under pressure, cover the six surfaces of the liver with the sweet/salted almonds after inserting the vinegar inside the terrine, using a cinnamon stick. Finally, insert the stick of ice-cream into the opposite side.

Recipe by Massimo Bottura ©

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Birra Moretti bring 2 star chef Massimo Bottura to London

June 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I was invited to this lunch which was in conjunction with Identità London, the two day Italian food festival on 7th & 8th June, sponsored by Birra Morretti. It was an exclusive beer and food tasting lunchtime event with world renowned Two-Star Michelin Chef, Massimo Bottura.

It was fascinating to watch how Massimo introduced the dishes he was preparing for our lunch and also how he sources his produce. See below for the video on how he works with his producer for suckling pigs. As his roots are from the Emilio Romagno region, his cuisine is not a slave to the region which is famous for the Parmigiano Reggiano, Grana Padano, Prosciutto di Parm.

He has taken the traditional Italian cooking and its famous food products and reinterpreting it with a new modern twist, not unlike Heston, leading to him being branded as one of the chefs pushing the boundaries of Italian cuisine. He has 2 stars and was voted 13th out of the top 50 best restaurants in the world.

Am now planning a trip to Italy next month to eat at his restaurant :

His restaurant is :
Osteria Francescana
Via Stella, 22 / Modena – Italy
Tel.(+39) 059.210118

Here are some not very good pictures and videos of the event. Some of the recipes are here .

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qABzC6-uer4&feature=youtu.be&a

Pannini de Mortadella

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Not your usual mortadella, but made with the flavours of mortadella without the fat. The result is a highly flavoured mortadella mouse.

In this video, he starts talking his take on mortadella.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNXwNCeTB2c

Leek, Spring Onions, Black Truffles

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This dish was unbelievable, if only there was more of it.

Ingredients for the dish all had DOP status from the sweet salt from Cervia (Saline de Cervia), Spring onions from Romagna to Black Truffles from Bologna.

Ravioli with 3 lentils – must be a posh Italian name but I didn’t catchit

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Massimo said he learnt to make dim sum in Hong Kong from a top chef there and brought back some techniques to apply to his ravioli. In this, he used cotechino which was steamed in the Moretti Beer and 3 different types of lentils with different textures, Casteluccio, Colfiorito, Decorticato (skinless) which were also steamed in beer. This is normally served for new years eve as the lentils signify money. MB said that this was a way to eat cotechino in June.

Adding truffles to the leek dish

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Veal cheek in beer and balsamic

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The veal cheek was slow cooked at 63C for 3 hours and then the sauce was reduced.

It was finished with chlorophyll, wild apple mustard ( delish) and creamy potato.

For dessert – the Foie Gras Lolly

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This is made with a foie gras, injected with 35 year old balsamic in the middle and rolled in crunchy almond and hazelnuts. On the plate are dots of 20 year old balsamic. The combination of the foie gras and balsamic was a delight but oh so rich.

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An inside view of the balsamic centre.

The recipes for the Magnum of Foie Gras is here .

Philip Kauffman sampling the chocolate spiked ravioli

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When Massimo saw who had turned up for lunch he was inspired to create a second ravioli by adding some chocolate to the dish that he was preparing. One chocolate button from Original Beans was added and he said it added ” a clean finish ” to the dish, actually it added another layer of flavour to the taste of the ravioli which was quite interesting and not unpleasant.

Philip’s Original Beans Wild Chocolate made with Bolivian wild beans.

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Currently only available in La Fromagerie London. I will be interviewing Phillip for the blog soon so watch this space.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-06-06

June 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment

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