White Chocolate, Peach Caramel & Candied Mint Tart

This is a riff on this excellent looking cake from Adventures in cooking. It is a perfect storm of deliciousness: toasted hazelnut base, peach caramel filling topped with vanilla white chocolate ganache (which I brûléed like a boass) all topped with the light touch of candied fresh mint leaves. Do it. 

 Ingredients:

HAZELNUT CRUST

1 and 1/3 cups flour
2 tbs crushed toasted hazelnuts
2 tbs corn meal
1/2 tspsalt
1/2 cup powdered sugar
½ cup butter (cut into small cubes)
1 egg, whisked
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

WHITE CHOCOLATE FILLING

400g white chocolate
1/2 cup double cream
Vanilla pod or essence
1/4 teaspoon peppermint extract

PEACH CARAMEL

4 peaches
125g butter
100g golden caster sugar

CANDIED MINT LEAVES

1 cup fresh mint leaves
100g golden caster sugar
1/4 tsp Lavender extract (optional)

Candy Mint Leaves

Lay out about 20 mint leaves. Mix sugar with 100g of water, add lavender extract if using. Brush this onto the mint leaves and put in the oven at 50 degrees Celsius for 15 min. Don't let the leave get too hot or they will discolour, you just want them to dry - if worried just leave out to dry on a rack.

Hazelnut tart base

Beat egg and sugar together with an electric whisk. Sift in flour, cornmeal, salt and cinnamon. Once all is incorporated mix in the butter. Wrap in cling film and leave in freezer for 30 minutes (this makes it much easier to roll out). Grease tart tin with butter. Add a little flour to the surface and roll out the evenly pastry so that its slightly larger than your tart tin. Roll it around your rolling pin them unroll it over the tart tin. Squeeze into the tin with fingers - doesn't matter if it broke up while unrolling, it should not look like this:

Put a layer of baking paper over the top and put some metal coins or baking beans onto the middle of the case to prevent it rising up during baking. Bake blind (that is without a filling) in a preheated oven for 30-40 minutes at 190 degrees C.  In the meanwhile...

Peach Caramel

Add 4 peaches to boiling water for 1 minute (makes easier to peel). Heat sugar and butter on medium heat until sugar is melted (be careful not to burn either butter or sugar). Peel the peaches and halve. Add peaches caramel and cook gently for 5 minutes. Leave to cool while tart is baking.

White Chocolate Ganache

Get a small pot of water boiling put a medium heatproof dish pan over (double boiling). Add broken up white chocolate to dish then add vanilla and peppermint extract. Once melted add cream. 

Putting it all together

1.Spoon some (half to a quarter) of the white chocolate ganache onto the base of the tart:

2. Add your peach caramel:

3. Now put your ganache into a piping bag or into a freezer bag and cut off the corner to make a piping bag. Pipe the ganache over peach mix in circular fashion working from centre outward. At this point I got out my favourite thing, my blow touch, and got my brûlée on to even it out:

4. Place the best specimens from the candied mint episode on top:

Now that's a bit of an effort but it will impress. Enjoy!

Toasted Sesame Oil

This is a great condiment to have around and super simple to make. After making it I find myself using it more and more often to pep up everything from fried food to salad dressing and dipping sauces. This recipe has a number of virtues:

1. Cheap: you make a large batch from a cheaper neutral flavoured oil.
2. This sesame oil can be used at high temperature (unlike oil derived from sesame seeds, which has a low smoke point) i.e. to fry meat, vegetables, etc.
3. Crunchy delicious seeds (if you desire).

Ingredients:

100g sesame seeds

1 litre neutral oil (e.g. Rapeseed or groundnut).

Toast the sesame seeds

On a medium heat toast the seeds in a dry pan. Keep the seeds moving with a spatula so that they don't burn, and toast evenly. You want a light brown colour.

Infuse into oil

Add your oil to the pan you've toasted the seeds in and turn off the heat. The oil should warm up but not be so hot as to start frying the seeds (as they will then burn). Leave to cool.

Decant into bottle

Decant the oil, seeds included into a bottle for final use. You can remove the seeds if you like but I find them a wonderful option to add to sauces and dressings when using the oil. To use the oil for frying you don't want the seeds to come out with the oil as the seeds will burn when you are frying other foods at a high temperature e.g. steak or charring vegetables. To that end cut some muslin cloth and secure it to the top of your bottle with some elastic bands. You can easily slip this cloth off when you want some seeds in the mix.

That's it!

Slow Pork Ribs

On a recent (6am!) visit to the Smithfield meat market I picked up 1.6kg of pork ribs for the tidy sum of £5. I'm a huge fan of the Waitrose's slow cooked ribs so I tried here replicate the soft, sweet and charred results they achieve.

Ingredients:

1.6kg Pork ribs

250g Pork or beef stock

Basting sauce:

3 tbs soy sauce

1 tbs honey or golden syrup

Pulp of 2 passion fruit (optional)

Juice and zest of 2 limes

2 tbs sesame oil

1 tsp grated ginger

1 tbs hot sauce or chili flakes

Baste the ribs

Combine all the ingredients and brush over the ribs. I cut the rib rack in half to put into a zip lock bag. Store overnight in the fridge.

Slow cook ribs

The trick to ribs is cooking the tough meat slowly so that they are meltingly tender but giving them a high temperature finish so that they get charred and crispy (inducing Maillard reactions that make charred meat so good). Pour the beef stock into the base of the pan and put the rib racks over this. Cover with tin foil. Bake at 80 degrees Celsius (180 F) over night or 110 degrees Celsius (230 F)  for 6 hours. Once cooled place in the same zip-lock bags you left them in and pour into these all the pan juices which will include the lovely beef stock. Marinade overnight or freeze for a quick rib dinner later.

Grill ribs to finish

20 before you're ready to serve the ribs, remove from the zip-lock bags place in a lareg roasting tray and grill on meduim-high temperature for 10 min on each side (or until charred). Even better, do this on a BBQ. 

Serve

I served these with a crisp green salad. Whilst ribs and chips are damn satisfying they are, I feel, too heavy to be a good combo. The crisp salad is light and sharp and complements the sweet and rich ribs

Crisp Salad 

Ingredients:

Crisp salad leaves (mix of Iceberg, Frisee & Radicchio)

Steamed green beans

Feta

Toasted sesame seeds

Dressing:

Juice of 1 lemon

4 tbs of olive oil (or to taste)

1 tbs Dijon mustard

Salt and pepper to tattie. 

  

The Hot Sauce Fantastic

This Christmas I gave my mom the best kind of gift: one I loved. It was the Pitt Cue cookbook and it's a cracker. In preparation for a chicken wing hors d'oeuvre to a pizza night, I made their untouchable hot sauce.

Ingredients:

1 kg roasted, skinned & smoked peppers

100g charred red chilles

20g finely choped garlic

50g cider vinegar

Smoke your peppers

First you need to halve and deseed the peppers then put them on the BBQ. Ideally use some woodchips or logs in your fire to get a good amount of smoke coming through.

Leave them to get soft and turn occasionally until they're charred and softened. You can now put the chilies on which the book suggests you can blacken but you need to be careful if your fire is hot that they don't become completely burnt.

Leave the lid on the BBQ once the heat has died down and let the chillies and peppers smoke for an hour or two. Make sure the heat is not too high at this point or they will burn.

Skin, blitz and cook

Once the peppers and chilies are smoked scrap the blackened skins off the peppers and combine with the charred chilies in a food processor. Once chopped to a pulp add to a sauce pan with garlic and vinegar and simmer for 20 min. And that's it! 

This batch turned out incredible. It was the best hot sauce I've ever had. That said I think a lot will depend on smoking the peppers sufficiently and getting good meaty medium heat red chilies. I've subsequently tried to recreate this with Scotch Bonnets (Habaneros) and it's way too hot. Enjoy!

Tyrannosaurus T Bone

One the great joys of South African life is the braai (bbq). A convenient complement to that is the fact that beef prices are mouth watering. The monster T bone prepared here cost about £8 whereas in London it would be more than three times that. And so it was with pecuniary delight and sweet nostalgia that my oldest friend, Guy Standley, and I took this beast to the braai. I followed 5 steps: dry age, grill, bake/smoke, rest, serve. 

Home dry aged T bone (with salt)

All (quite marvelous) photos by Guy Standley.

Ingredients:

Steak:

1.5 kg T bone steak (dry aged)

Salt

150g butter

30g rosemary

Anchovy butter sauce:

6 anchovies (tinned or jarred)

200g butter

1 tsp smoked paprika

Lemon juice

Salt

Pepper

1 tbs Worcestershire sauce

Fresh herbs (e.g. parsely, chives, basil, majoram)

1. Dry Age

Supermarket meat often comes wrapped in plastic and ages in the bag (wet ageing). Dry ageing involves resting the meat in a fridge, uncovered or covered in a porous cloth. The dry ageing develops a lovely dark, dry outside and a steak which both tastes and crisps up better than the wet aged steak does. The flavour comes from moisture loss which means the steak is less "watered down" and the bacteria that also tenderise the meat (as with cheese the bacteria add flavour). It's really easy to do. Just open your vacuum packed steak, pat dry with paper towel and leave in a fridge for a couple days to a week (I think you can push this but probably best to do some research before hand).

2. Grill

Take the steak out of the fridge and salt. I follow my brothers method of cooking a steak like this on a Weber. This involves crisping the exterior over a medium / high heat then move the steak to an area of the braai with less heat and baste with butter and rosemary on each side (turning every few minutes). Once basted in this way smoke/bake by closing the lid. The 

Crisp the fat

Sear each side

3. Bake, baste & smoke

Apply the butter and rosemary. Flip over and do the same for the other side.

Baste

Once the butter has melted, move the steak to a part of the grill with less coals and cover with the lid (with vent open). Baking helps to cook the meat to the appropriate doneness at a lower temperature.

Bake

This last part will give it a great smokey flavour (add a little wet wood or wood chips to your charcoal for more smoke).

Smoke

The hardest part about cooking steak is gauging doneness. You want the steak to be about as soft as the thumb muscle in your hand when you touch your thumb to your forefinger. Alternatively, tech up and get a meat thermometer. The internal temperature should be 50 (rare), 55 (meduim-rare) or 60 (meduim) degrees Celsius. Anything more than that and you've blown it.

Done?

4. Rest

Rest the meat, covered in tin foil for at least 10 minutes. Why? It keeps the steak juicy. If you slash the steak open straight off the grill the moisture inside will gush out. If you let it rest for 10 minutes or more the temperature falls and the meat fibers can absorb more liquid than they can if they are at a high temperature (when they're more constricted). See this excellent post for further explanation and a test.

After a 10 minute rest

5. Sauce & serve

You don't need sauce. In fact, the steak had a gorgeous smokey flavour without anything and was pleasingly moist. However, I'm partial to anchovies and my desire to try anchovy butter with steak overcame me. Just combine all the ingredients in a blender and sauce away. We served the steak on a roll alongside some beef dripping roast potatoes. 

Serve!

White chocolate, peach & pistachio cake

This is a slightly adapted version of a swell cake from bbcgoodfood - see the link for ingredients & method.  I've used more chocolate and peaches in the cake, added lime zest and almond extract to the frosting and some toasted hazelnuts for good measure. The lime and almond extract gives a sherbet-like quality to the frosting, combined with the sweet sticky cake and crunchy toasted nuts is just bang on. Similar to a blondie topped with sour cream.

Roasting the hazelnuts and pistachios:

Frosting the cake:

The finale:

Old Tom Ale Bread

Oak smoked flour and Old Tom ale seemed like a good combo for beer bread. This ale has an intensely malty flavour and in combination with this flour produced a very flavourful (if mildly dense) bread.

Ingredients:

500g Oak smoked flour.
1 330ml bottle of Old Tom Ale (room temperature).
1 Tablespoon of active dried yeast.
30 ml of honey or a 2 tablespoons of sugar.

Pour out 450g of flour on a clean surface and make a well in the centre. In a small jug put 200 ml of Old Tom and 50 ml of hot water. This mixture should now be tepid. Add the yeast and sugar or honey to the watered down Old Tom and leave for 5 minutes. Slowly add mixture to the well in the middle of the flour stirring the liquid in a clockwise motion mixing it with the flour. Once combined knead for 10 minutes until you have a smooth, elastic dough. Flour that thing, put it into a bowl or baking tin and leave it in a warm moist area to prove (I put a pot of boiled water in a cold oven with the loaf) . Knock down after 2 hours and leave in a floured tin to prove once more. I left mine overnight. Bake for 20-25 min on 220 degrees Celsius.