Spicy Bacon & Cheddar Scones

If I were the Pioneer Woman, I'd tell you this recipe makes my skirt fly up. If I was Deb of Smitten Kitchen, I'd tell you you'll regret every minute you wait to make this recipe, and then post a picture of my cute baby. If I worked for Word Of Mouth, I'd say that I subbed Cheddar for Gruyere as I was staying true to my working class roots. If I was living in London, I'd worry about whether I should reveal that half the ingredients were PR freebies, start writing about unctuous pork, and then get so stressed out that I'd just blog about going to Tayyabs for dinner instead.

It's not skirt wearing weather, I don't have a cute (or plain, or ugly, or any type at all) baby, I'm not that working class, and all of the ingredients were bought with my own money. So there.

I've been doing an after work craft market in a bar, so I decided to make some savoury items to capture the crowd who aren't up for a pint of beer and a chocolate cupcake. After sifting through a huge pile of cookbooks for inspiration, I settled on the spicy bacon & gruyere scones from 'Bake' by Rachel Allen.

Bacon & Cheddar Scone

I changed from gruyere to cheddar for purely economic purposes. Baking is a fairly low margin product. When you add up the number of hours of labour I put in, minus costs, I'm lucky to make anywhere near minimum wage. Every penny counts in this game. Although I did buy free range bacon, because I'm not that cheap.

The recipe was fairly simple, although I was worried that the mixture was looking rather dry after adding the butter. I'd forgotten that buttermilk came in later, which took it to the other extreme of being too wet. The recipe says not to knead the dough, which is hard, as it doesn't seem to want to come together. Although the dough is quite sticky, it is fairly robust. This makes it quite easy to scrape the scones off the counter and on to the baking tray without them falling apart.

They rose really well, and had that stretchy look around the edges that is the mark of a good scone. Most of the time I don't try more than the crumbs of stuff I've made for the stall. Eating the produce is not great hygiene, as well as depriving me of much needed profit. However, there was a small blob of dough leftover that wasn't really big enough to sell, so I baked that as well to try it.

They smelt fantastic coming out of the oven, and I could barely wait for them to be cool before eating the mini one. The outside had a bit of crunch, while the inside was soft and airy (buttermilk is one of the best ingredients for airy baking, it's just a bit tricky to find!). The cheese flavour was clear, with a subtle spicy tingle from the cayenne. When you hit a lump of bacon, it went to the next level of deliciousness. The pre-cooking followed by baking meant that the bacon was crispy, and the fat had rendered in to the surrounding dough. My limited grasp of English vocabulary is not enough to describe how great these scones are.

Airy texture, with bacon peeking out.

Spicy Bacon & Cheddar Scones (From 'Bake')
Makes 10-20 depending on cutter size

450g plain flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp salt
30g cold butter
110g bacon, cooked and finely chopped (this cooks down to less than 110g, use more if you love bacon)
110g cheddar, finely grated (use gruyere if not being cheap)
1 egg
375ml buttermilk (or milk)

1) Preheat oven to 220C, Gas 7
2) Sift the flour, baking soda, cayenne and salt in a large bowl. Rub in the butter until it looks like fine breadcrumbs. Mix in the bacon and cheese.
3) Combine the buttermilk and the egg in a jug, and add it to the dry ingredients.
4) Stir until the mixture forms a dough. Turn it out on to a floured surface, and gently fold to fully incorporate all the ingredients.
5) Roll the dough out to about 2cm thick, and cut out the scones. I used a 3inch cutter to make monster scones, but you could use a smaller cutter, or even cut the dough in to squares.
6) Place the scones on a floured baking tray and bake for 10-16 minutes (depending on size). Cool on a wire rack for as long as you can bear, and then eat warm.

While these are best eaten straight away, they can be reheated at 160c for 6 minutes, although this does make the outside a little too crunchy. Sprinkle with water before reheating to minimise this.

Pork Hock and Haricot Stew

The borscht I made a few weeks ago needed a bit of pork hock in it. I wasn't going to bother, but it was surprisingly cheap for such a massive hunk of meat. After putting a little of it in the soup, the rest went in the freezer for another time.

Every so often I have to have a freezer purge to get eat up some of the stuff in there, as well as saving some cash. So this week I defrosted the pork hock, and set about finding a recipe to use it in. I came across this Pork Hock and Butterbean Stew on Dinner Diary, and decided to give it a go.

I replaced the butterbeans for haricots, as I had some in the cupboard, and the whole point of freezer left over day is to not spend money! I also used white wine instead of sherry. The rest of the dish was very easy to make, and although it took a few hours, most of that was spent watching "Eggheads" while the stew bubbled away. The hardest part was getting the meat off the bone as it was too hot to get a proper grip on it.

The stew was delicious, and the paprika did give it a Spanish feel. A bit of chorizo in there would have been excellent, but it was still tasty. I served it with some brown rice and some crusty bread for mopping up the juices.

Pork Hock and Haricot Stew

There was enough of this for some of it to go back in the freezer as a left over portion, and if I hadn't used some in the borscht it would have made two portions to freeze. I was really impressed with the pork hock, which was incredibly tender by the end of the cooking. There were some sinews and fatty bits left, but I managed to get most of these out when shredding the meat. Definitely a store cupboard triumph!

PS - I did the guest round up at Nora The Kitchen 'Splorer this week, check it out!

Borscht

After my recent trip to Russia, I have been craving borscht. I've made it once before a few years ago (and stained practically everything I owned red in the process) but it wasn't as good as the stuff I had in Russia.

After reading multiple recipes, and even tweeting about it, I picked the Valentine Warner recipe from "What to Eat Now". It was in two stages, firstly making a meat broth from vegetables, stewing beef and ham hock, and then adding in roast beetroots, parsnips and apples.

Borscht with Sour Cream

The soup should take about 3 hours to make, as the broth and the roasted beetroots both took 2 hours of slow cooking. However, I ended up taking more like 5 hours, as about 2.5 hours in, there was a power cut. Not only did all the lights in the houses go out, the street lights and traffic lights also went out. It was really strange to look out in to the street and see complete black. A couple of stairwells had emergency lighting, but apart from that the only lights I could see were flickering candles or torches. As both the hob and the oven are electric, I just had to abandon the borscht until the power came back on an hour or so later.

I'm not sure if it was this enforced hiatus or the recipe that meant the soup was a little lacking. The initial stages of frying off onions and garlic with dill smelt fantastic, as did the roasted beetroot and adding the meat. I was less convinced about the apples and parsnip and I would skip this if I was making the soup again. Krysia Boo suggested on Twitter to add the juice from re-hydrating dried mushrooms, which I didn't get the chance to this time but will definitely bear in mind in future. I also think next time I would grate the beetroot instead of cubing it, as I didn't like the thin broth with massive chunks in. I prefer my borscht more texturally homogeneous.

Not Quite Up To Russian Standard

I won't bother posting the recipe, as it needs a lot of work before I'm happy with it. I think next time I'll make the meat stock as a stock rather than a broth, and add the dill and onions later on. However, the soup did tick a lot of boxes, and I enjoyed it for my lunch with a good piece of bread and loads of sour cream. It didn't have an overly earthy flavour, and the sweetness of the beetroot was highlighted. A definite starting point for further adventures in borscht.

Scotch Eggs

A while back, my dad spent quite a while telling me that the perfect boiled egg was all about heating the white to a certain temperature, and that if you kept it at that temperature, it would never over-cook. As I've been reading more about the science of cookery, I've found that my dad was correct - an egg cooked at 65C will have a set white and a creamy yolk.

I've also been intrigued by the rise of the scotch egg from Greg's abomination to acceptable gastro-pub fare. They always seem to have a runny yolk, so maybe it was time to apply science to snacking.

Here comes the science bit!

Egg Number 1
Initially I thought the easiest way to keep an egg at 65C without using a fancy-pants waterbath (I don't even have enough worktop space to justify a stand mixer, let alone an water circulator) was in the oven. Although the oven was labeled 60C, it didn't seem particularly hot in there. I could comfortably put my hand in the oven and move the racks around without it burning. The oven thermometer starts at 100C, and the needle was hovering just under this, so I left an egg in there for about 45 minutes.

After the egg had cooled down a bit, I cracked it open. It wasn't firm enough to peel and so in that respect was an epic fail. However, I scooped the egg out of the shell and ate it, and it was amazingly delicious. The yolk was runny and rich, and the white was cooked but still creamy and soft. The only way it could have been better was if there had been some buttered soldiers to dip in it.

Egg Number 2
Next up I decided to try a water bath. Using a sugar thermometer, I heated a saucepan of water to 65C. I was surprised to find that by putting my hob on the lowest setting, that I could maintain this temperature very easily. I occasionally added a little cold water if the temperature started rising, but I only had to do this about twice in the hour or so that I cooked the egg for.

I cracked it open, and initially was quite pleased - the white was set enough to be able to peel the egg, but still wobbly enough to suggest that the yolk would be runny. However, as I continued peeling, it became obvious that the egg was far too fragile to put in to a scotch egg. As I took off the last pieces of shell, the egg collapsed completely.

By some fluke of science, I'd created an inverted egg. The yolk was completely set, and was like a little orange pebble in a pile of white gooey jelly. I ate this egg too. It wasn't as tasty as the first one, but the yolk, while set, was still moist. I'd be quite interested in using this method again to create set yolks that could be used as a garnish or as a component in a dish.

What had happened was that the yolk proteins had set at 65C, as had some of the white proteins. However, one of the proteins in the yolk doesn't set until 80C, so this egg obviously had a higher ratio of this high temperature protein and thus the white was still quite runny.

Egg Number 3
By this point, the leftover sausages that I was planning to use for the scotch eggs were dangerously close to their use-by date. So I wimped out and put two eggs in a cold pan of water, brought them to the boil, and simmered for 8 minutes. They were pretty standard hardboiled eggs.

In future, I think I'd go for a two stage process to find the perfect peelable boiled egg. First a lovely bath at 63-64C, to firm up the white, but keep the yolk runny. Then a quick dip (1-2 minutes) in a 90C bath to firm out the outer layer of the white, so it's possible to peel it without it falling apart. Then maybe a quick shock in iced water to ensure they don't over cook. Hmmm, several different baths and a peel, sounds like a day at a spa hotel.

Baked Scotch Egg

The actual scotch eggs were fairly simple to make - mash up a load of sausage meat (about 2 sausages per egg) and wrap this around the boiled egg. Then roll the egg in some seasoned flour, some beaten egg, and then breadcrumbs. I seasoned the breadcrumbs with a little cayenne pepper to give them a bit of a kick. As you can see from the photos, my wrapping wasn't entirely even, but that wasn't too much of a problem.

Uneven but tasty

As with most Scottish items, a proper Scotch Egg is deep fried. I didn't really want to do this, so I baked them at 200C for 30 minutes, and finished them off in the frying pan to get the breadcrumbs crispy. I think the sausage meat insulates the egg quite well, as when I finally got to scoff the eggs they yolk was still quite moist and not overcooked. They were also delicious later on when they'd been chilled for a while. Even though I'd baked them, you could feel the cholesterol destroying your arteries as you chewed. Perhaps this is not the recipe to repeat until I perfect it...

Tonkatsu with Japanese-ish Salad

In my handbag I have a red notebook. In the notebook are various scrawls and doodles that categorise my life at any given time. The current notebook has a few shopping lists, a pictorial representation of our holiday in Florence, and a record of how far I ran in January. It also has a list of hard-to-find ingredients I am always on the lookout for.

The two items that refused to be knocked off the list were freeze-dried raspberries (Ideally powdered, but I'll take whole. I would also be tempted by freeze-dried strawberries.) and panko breadcrumbs. I'd tried the Thai store in Bruntsfield, but to no avail (they did have kaffir lime leaves though, so that got crossed off the list). Lupe Pintos was also lacking on this occasion.

The area of Edinburgh I live in is apparently the "Chinatown" area, although you wouldn't know it. The only clue is Hot Hot Chinese, an advice centre for elderly Chinese, and the Chinese service at the local church. The evidence is there, but there are no dragon arches and bilingual signs like some of the more established Chinatowns around the world. I came to the conclusion that if I was to find panko, it would probably be available within a 10 minute walk. Googling around, I found there was a Chinese supermarket hidden on Lauriston Place at the junction with Tollcross.

I headed down there the next day. Within a minute I'd found not one, but two varieties of panko. Yay! I went for the one that was cheaper, I think because it didn't have English instructions on the packet. There were loads of other weird ingredients in there, plus a good selection of utensils and woks. There was also a large section dedicated to nearly every brand of pre-made stir-fry sauce you can get. I have never seen so many varieties of Blue Dragon and Sharwoods in one place.

So... On to the actual post!

I had some pork chops in the freezer that I wanted to use, and the only recipe in the Wagamama cookbook that used them was tonkatsu. I've never had this, so I thought I'd give it a go. I promised T "crispy Japanese pork" for dinner, but conveniently forgot to tell him that it would be served on a salad.

Tonkatsu: Slightly out of focus as I was impatient to eat

Overall, I don't think this dish really worked. The tonkatsu was pretty tasty (and it's the first time I've breadcrumbed something where the breadcrumbs stayed mostly on the meat and not in a pile in the pan) and I quite liked the crispiness of the salad too. It's also the first dish on here to feature a mangetout! However, I wasn't convinced by the recommended sauce, a mixture of ketchup and Worcester sauce, although it did taste weirdly Asian given the total Britishness of the two component ingredients.

The main failing was pairing the salad with the pork. Although Wikipedia has just told me tonkatsu can be eaten cold, it felt strange having a lukewarm piece of meat on a freezing salad (all the ingredients except the spinach were kept in iced water to ensure their crispiness).

T was not interested in the salad at all, and I struggled to finish mine. I would probably make it all again, but have it on different plates. The tonkatsu would be really tasty with some stir-fried vegetables or on a ramen soup, while the salad would be better accessorized with some smoked fish and lots of dressing.

I now have a fridge full of daikon, spinach and bamboo shoots and a cupboard full of panko... more Japanese food to come soon I guess!

Japanese Style Salad (adapted from Wagamama Cookbook)
Serves 4 as a side dish, or 2 veg lovers.

2 small carrots, julienned
4 inch chunk of daikon (mooli), julienned
25g mangetout, thinly sliced diagonally
1 green chilli, finely diced
8-9 spring onions, thinly sliced diagonally
a handful of alfafa sprouts
3 handfuls of spinach

1) Once all the vegetables have been washed and chopped, place everything but the spinach in a bowl of ice water for an hour to ensure their crispiness.
2) Using the spinach as a base, artfully arrange the drained vegetables on top.
3) Add the toppings and dressings of your choice.

Pork and Beans

We've already established that I like South American style food, and I like trying new recipes. So the two came together when I found a recipe for spiced pork loin with black eyed beans at T's flat.

I bought a massive hunk of pork from the butcher, who was actually nice to me for once. Probably because I ended up spending the best part of £20 on it, but it was good to be spoken to as a proper person rather than getting sarcastic comments. (I should really go to the other butcher, but it's so much further to walk to.) I also stocked up on tinned black eyed beans and paprika from Lupe Pintos, which is an Aladdin's cave of random food from around the world. I also got a couple of their chorizo rosario, which is uncooked so it isn't as tough as the precooked chorizo you find in the supermarkets. I got everything else from the green grocer, although I completely forgot to get the fresh tomatoes, instead just getting tinned ones.

Spiced pork loin with chorizo, bean and tomato stew

The recipe itself was pretty easy to pull together, and although the butcher scored the skin for me, I didn't ask him to french trim the bones as there was still as lot of meat in that area that I didn't want to waste. The crackling came up well, the paprika gave it a mild spiciness, and the fat underneath was creamy rather than chewy. I ate a bit too much of it and felt ill afterwards. I found the tomato sauce a little too watery, although this meant that I could mop up the leftovers with a slice of bread instead! I used larger chillies, so the stew wasn't too hot even when the chillies were sliced in to it at the end. Plus I absolutely love stewed chorizo. I had to restrain myself from picking out all the chorizo while dishing up and eating it all myself. The pork wasn't as melt in the mouth as I'd hoped, but the steam from the stew meant it was still moist and tender.

T enjoyed it too, I am trying to get him more in to pulses as a) they are tasty, b) they are good for you and c) they are a cheap way to bulk out a meal. I haven't yet managed to get a vegetarian chilli down him, but surely it is only a matter of time?

The picture in the Jamie Oliver book/website looked much prettier than mine, and either he used meat from a withered pig or that baking tray is enormous. T's roasting tin is tiny, as it was about the only one we could find that fitted in to his shoebox sized oven. I can't wait until I have my own flat and can buy a decent oven that can fit in more than one thing at a time.

There were some left overs, which I divided into chops. The one in the fridge reheated well the next day (let's face it, stew is always better the next day), but the one in the freezer is an unknown quantity... I would definitely make it again, but reduce the amount of liquid in the stew, and add in way more chillis. It was a bit messy for a posh dinner, but would be great for a more informal meal.

Talking of which, I might have my first ever dinner party next week. I am trying to decided whether to just invite my friends or to get each of my flatmates to bring a randomer. Decisions decisions.