You may not think of me as an Asian Home Cook, but I do some (just some) Asian dishes reasonably well. They are mostly things I absolutely love to eat myself and this is one of my all time favourites. It’s not something you will find in restaurants, so you have to make it yourself, or cultivate some Chinese friends who can cook. It’s easy to make, can be assembled ahead of time, put in the chiller and then just goes into the steamer for half an hour and you’re done.
The pork belly is much easier to slice as thin as you will need it, if you put it in the freezer for 30 to 45 minutes before slicing. Place the belly on a piece of parchment paper on a metal tray, or plate and put it uncovered into the freezer. The meat should feel solid, but not hard as a rock, so when you slice through it, the centre is firm, but easy to slice through. It doesn’t work the other way around, where you take the solidly frozen meat from the freezer abd defrost it for a while. Reason? The outside will be soft, while the inside is still hard.
The success of your dish depends on the quality of your salted fish, so don’t stinge and buy the best, meatiest you can find. I actually don’t wash my salted fish at all, because I love that funky flavour and full saltiness, but if that’s too much for you, give the salted fish a quick wash after you have cleaned and sliced it, just to wash the top salt off. Please don’t soak it, it’s supposed to taste of salted fish!
Quickly rinse the black beans and again, don’t soak them. You can chop them roughly if you like, but I like them whole. Now slice your shallots and chillies and julienne your ginger. You do that by first slicing them thin, stacking the slices and then slicing that stack again.
Put all your ingredients into a bowl, add the sugar, soy sauce, sesame oil, rice wine and water and mix it thoroughly. I add one single pinch of salt, but that’s because I like things well seasoned. Leave to marinate for half an hour. Spread this mix an a serving bowl big enough to hold it in a single layer. I use a flatish 20cm Le Creuset bowl, which is perfect for it and looks rustically stylish, even though it’s hardly Asian. You can actually prepare this hours in advance and put the whole ready filled bowl, covered with cling film, into the chiller. Your finished mix will look quite dry, but don’t let that worry you. There will be plenty of delicious sauce once it’s steamed.
Once your steamer is at full steam, put the serving bowl in and steam for 30 minutes. All that sliced pork, fish and vegetables will actually turn into a solid meat cake within half an hour. It’s tender, juicy, delicious and just heartily satisfying.
A great roast is one of life’s reliable pleasures and yet, a lot of home cooks are apprehensive about undertaking it. So here is how you can achieve perfection without freaking out too much. Start with the obvious; a good piece of meat. It doesn’t need to be the most expensive and if I was you, I’d stay well enough away from high grade Wagyu or Kobe. I find it too fatty and it really is a lot more difficult to get right. The cut I prefer is the thick end of the rib eye. It has a nice bit of fat in it, is generally well marbled without being too greasy.
How much beef? Go for 200g a head and you’ll have enough for a couple of sandwiches the next day. Less than 180g a head is bordering on meanness in my opinion, unless you’ve invited supermodels. What you see in the picture is a good 780g, which fed three people very nicely and filled two sandwiches for lunch the next day too.
Unless your meat smells funny (in which case you should probably feed it to the dog), or is a little slimy, I recommend that you don’t wash it. Just pat it dry with kitchen towel and you’re on your way. Salt! You can eye this, but science is more reliable. Weigh the meat and then use 2% of the weight to salt the beef and you’ll be just fine. Pepper is up to you, but I recommend generosity One to one salt and pepper does it for me. Feel free to use pretty much any type of pepper, or even a mix of several, though I would stay away from 100% white pepper.
The most important aspect is the timing. Season early. The idea that salt “dries out” the meat is well and truly debunked and the horrid practice of some cooks to under-salt and then let the customers add what they want is a complete copout from the side of the chef as well as an insult to you, the guest. And while we’re at it, adding salt after cooking the meat will make you add many times more than you would have needed had the chef done his job in the first place and it will still leave you with a dull piece of meat covered in salt.
So season the meat at the very least two hours before you plan to cook it. I salted this piece at 8am, planning to cook it for lunch. I would have done it the night before and kept it in the chiller, but I forgot. Cover it with clingfilm and keep it somewhere cool. I put mine in to the wine chiller, which is at 12ºC, but you can also keep it in the chiller, if you want. The colder the meat, the longer it takes for the salt to do its job. And its job is imparting flavour and tenderising the beef. Now, it’s never going to turn shoe-leather into a fillet steak, but it will help break down the fibers a little.
Here’s the beef freshly saltedAnd here it is after 4 hours
You can see how the colour of the beef has deepened and the fat has yellowed a little. Those are good things, believe me. Now you just have to sear it. My extractor hood has given up, so I have to do this at least and hour before the guests arrive and the air the place for a good hour, it produces that much smoke! Heat a fair amount of oil in a pan that can comfortably hold the piece of beef and once the oil is smoking hot, place the beef in. I say a fair amount, but that does not mean you should try and deep fry the thing!
And this is where you’re heading. A light browning, not a deep chestnut crust. Do use a pair of kitchen tongs and sear the sides as well, if you can be bothered and you really should be. Now you are ready for the roasting. I sear the meat in advance and then just keep it out at room temperature. The heat from the searing will slowly travel to the center of the meat and your roasting time will be shortened and your doneness will be much more even.
Now to the tricky one. How long to roast the beef for? First of all temperature. I used to blast the meat at super high heat, but I’ve changed my technique and prefer to sear well and then set the oven to 180ºC fan forced. The relatively gentler heat and longer roasting time gives me a good crust and tender meat. As for time, it really depends on so many different factors that any exact instructions are mostly useless. As a rule of thumb, for anything thicker than an inch you will need 20 minutes at the least, if you start from room temperature. My room temperature here in air-conditioned Malaysia is about 24ºC, so my two inch piece of beef took exactly 35 minutes roasting and ten minutes resting.
This may seem like very thin advice, so let me tell you how to cheat. First of all; if the meat feels like it’s raw when you press it, it definitely is. So wait until you feel some resistance, then choose the side you want to present. This is the one you leave intact. Turn the thing over and stick your knife into it, then cut enough for you to be able to have a peek inside.
You should see a core that is a little less cooked than this, just a centimeter of raw right inside. Residual heat will finish your meat to a beautiful medium rare while you rest it. Look at the edges as well. If your roast is red right to the crust, you will definitely need more time.
One last piece of advice: Don’t stress over your roast; a little overcooked or a little undercooked, it’s not a disaster. I personally like my roasts a little more cooked than a one piece steak. I find the texture more agreeable and leftovers will make a much better sandwich than a rare roast would.
Now to the side dishes. I am absolutely besotted with these super easy to make burnt carrots and French beans. All you need to do is peel your carrots and cut them into wedges, remove the string from the beans, wash and dry them and you are set. You will need about one and a half carrots and a good ten beans per person. It may sound like a lot, but the stuff shrinks like crazy.
Grab a very large pan that can hold your vegetables in one messy layer, meaning they overlap a little at first but will have enough space once they start to shrink. Pour a generous amount of oil into the pan. You will need about three tablespoons for six carrots and two dozen beans. Once the oil is smoking hot, add the carrots and beans and stir to coat with the oil. Then you must leave them alone! Don’t salt, don’t pepper and don’t stir until they have started to take colour on one side. Now flip them around as best you can and let them brown some more.
You are not aiming for even frying. The difference between some real blackened ones and some just wilted ones is most pleasing to the palate. Once your vegetables look like the ones in the picture, give them a liberal sprinkling of flaky salt and a good grind of black pepper and serve them.
This is a wonderful vegetarian dish and I say that as an incorrigible meat eater. To me a great vegetarian dish is one that you eat and never notice that it’s vegetarian. And that’s not because I think that vegetarian dishes are in any way lacking. I think we should not approach any dish asking whether it has meat in it or not, but asking whether it is tasty or not. Unless of course we are vegetarian… Think of some of the most famous and most wonderful dishes in the world: Pizza Margherita, to my mind the most perfect of all possible of pizzas or ratatouille, which can be the mist delicious thing, whether hot or cold; the list of earth shatteringly great dishes that just happen to be vegetarian is endless. So, unfortunately is the list of dishes that seek to “replace” meat, but really make a mockery of it.
That’s my sermon for the day. I added a little pork belly to my noodles not because it was necessary, but because I had some left over and I am dreadfully loath to throw anything edible away. Before you read this, please remember that the first thing you have to do is soak the dried mushrooms. They take a while.
I have used Sau Tao egg noodles, which I believe are from Hong Kong. I like them because they don’t go soggy too fats and have a great springiness to them. I’m not quite sure why it says egg noodles in French on the packet. Maybe they have a direct supply to Tang Frères in Paris?
For the Meat (optional):
150g pork belly or boneless chicken thigh
1 Tbsp Chinese rice wine
1 Tbsp light soy sauce
1 heaped tbsp corn starch
white pepper
Cut the tough skin off the pork belly and slice the meat into thin slices. Marinate with the rice wine, soy sauce, corn starch and pepper and leave for 10 minues.
For the Mushrooms:
5 dried shiitake mushrooms
50g baby eryngii or shimeji mushrooms
1 Tbsp sesame oil
1½ tsp sugar
1 Tbsp soy sauce
Try and prise the stems off the dried mushroom and discard them. Pour 300ml boiling water over the caps and leave to rehydrate for at least one hour. Now before I say anything else; KEEP the mushroom soaking water!! Once the mushrooms have softened completely, pick them out of the water, squeeze any excess water out, but don’t kill the mushrooms and slice them into thin slices. Cut the eryngii in half lengthwise and add to the shiitake. Pour the sesame oil, soy and sugar over, stir and leave to marinade for about ten minutes.
For the Sauce:
250ml mushroom soaking water
2 Tbsp dark soy sauce
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp oyster sauce
Mix all the ingredients together. You should have about 300ml in total. A little more is fine.
To finish the Noodles:
About 200g egg noodles (4 nests)
1 Tbsp lard, duck fat or oil
5 garlic cloves
1 small thumb old ginger
½ carrot
80g spring onion, dark green part only
1 heaped tsp corn starch plus water to dissolve
1 Tbsp Chinese rice wine
Boil some water in a saucepan big enough to hold the noodles. Do not salt the water. Drop the noodles into the boiling water and use chopsticks to gently separate the strands. Once they have come loose and the water is boiling, drain the noodles in a colander, then run cold water through them to cool completely. Shake dry and reserve.
Peel and chop the garlic, peel the carrot and slice into thin rounds. Peel the ginger and cut it into slices, then cut the slices into matchsticks. Cut the dark green part of the spring onion into 5cm lengths. In a little bowl, mix the corn starch with about one tablespoon of water and stir to dissolve.
Heat the lard or oil in a wok. When it is smoking hot, fry the meat until nicely browned. You don’t need to clean the marinade off, just throw the meat plus marinade into the hot wok. To get a nicely browned meat, don’t move it about too much. Once all the meat is no longer looking raw, spread it in the wok and leave it to sear for three minutes. Now stir the meat one more time, spread and leave to fry for another two minutes. Remove from the wok and reserve.
Add a little more fat if needed and add the garlic to the hot oil. Stir and as soon as the garlic starts to take a little colour add in the ginger. Now pour the mushrooms and their marinade in and fry until the marinade has caramelised and the mushrooms are nicely browned. Add he noodles and stir to fry for about 1 minute. Add the meat and carrots and pour in the sauce. Bring to a boil and stir for 2 minutes. Push the noodles to one side and pour the starch slurry into the bubbling sauce. Quickly add the spring onion, pour in the one tablespoon of rice wine and stir to mix. Turn off the heat and slide onto a serving platter. Sprinkle with spring onion rounds and serve.
Shopping List
200g egg noodles, softened in simmering water
150g pork belly or boneless chicken thigh
5 dried shiitake mushrooms
50g baby eryngii or shimeji mushrooms
5 garlic cloves
1 small thumb old ginger, finely sliced
80g spring onion, dark green part only
Chinese rice wine
light soya sauce
dark soy sauce
oyster sauce or mushroom sauce (vegetarian oyster sauce)
I call it Spanish eggs, but it’s probably about as Spanish as Bizet’s Carmen. It’s just that the dish reminded my of Spain. I do miss the travelling! Treat the family (or just yourself) to a great tomato egg tomorrow morning, why don’t you? By the way, the paprika I am using is from our friend Aida’s shop and it’s quite the best there is; sweet, smoky and with a nice little spicy kick. (https://www.mysybaritas.com/)
Eggs with Fried Tomatoes and Paprika
1 medium tomato
2 eggs
1 Tbsp breadcrumbs
1 tsp Spanish smoked paprika
salt & black pepper
a pinch of sugar
1½ Tbsp olive oil to fry
a little chopped cilantro or parsley for the top
You will need a small frying pan with a lid (or any lid that will cover it) to make this. Slice the tomato into 4-5 slices. You should have just enough to cover the base of your pan. Check the quality of your tomato by eating the end bit. If you live in Malaysia, chances are your tomatoes may look nice and red, but they will not be sweet at all. If so, sprinkle a little bit of sugar on your slices. Be careful though, no one should be able to tell that you sugared your tomatoes.
Lightly salt and pepper the tomatoes on one side only. Sift the paprika into the breadcrumbs. I know it’s one more thing to wash, but sifting the paprika will make your life much easier, as it tends to clump a bit. There is no need to salt the breadcrumb mix. In fact, I think salting breadcrumbs is a bit of a waste of time, unless you have extremely fine salt. The normal fine salt is heavy and will just fall to the bottom of the plate, so I prefer to salt the tomato rather than the crumbs.
Break the eggs into a bowl, add two pinches of salt and a good grind of black pepper and beat the eggs until they froth lightly. Heat the olive oil in your small pan. Lightly press both sides of the tomato slices into the breadcrumbs and fry one side of the tomatoes on high heat. Once golden, turn them over and immediately add the eggs. Once the side of the eggs starts to set, turn the heat to low, cover the pan and leave to cook for 4 minutes.
The cooking time depends a lot on your stove, but once you have figures out the time, you can pretty much rely on it. I set my phone alarm to 4 minutes exactly and it works out just perfect every time. What you’re looking for are eggs that are just set, with a little uncooked egg at the top. This will be partially set by the residual heat once you turn the egg over, as you must.
To turn the pan unto the plate, take the pan off the heat (obviously!), cover it with your plate and deftly turn both plate and pan. As I myself am not particularly deft, I like to use two kitchen cloths to hold the pan and plate in place. I have tried just turning the thing holding on to the handle of the pan, but it’s mostly a disaster, so…
A light sprinkling of chopped cilantro and you’re all set for a great breakfast. I eat this one without toast. I find it’s hearty enough to support me all the way to lunch, but if I was eating toast with it, I’d butter it fresh out of the toaster and then I’d rub a halved garlic clove over it.
You may be wondering why you have not heard from me in such a long time (or you may not) and the answer is: Cheese! I’ve been making it and it takes time, especially if you are making butter and sausages as well. It’s all this churning, curdling, pressing and stuffing that gets into the way of writing your blogs. But as you can see, cheese makes you happy.
This is a Leicester that will be ready to eat in 4 months’ time. Below are the various Halloumi, Feta, Munster and Tomme I made in my short absence from the blog.
And it’s butter we should start with. Why make your own? Because you can! And then most butter here in Malaysia is either very commercial or very expensive, so I did a bit of research and found that I could culture the cream with cultures I ordered online and then would never need to order cultures again! “Why is that?” I hear you ask. It’s a bit of a long and convoluted story, but let me try and make it simple.
In the beginning there was a cow. Its rich, fresh milk would split into cream that would rise to the top and milk that settled under it. Both the milk and cream contained cultures that would turn the lactose in milk and cream into lactic acid and this acid would sour the milk and turn the cream naturally into crème fraîche or sour cream. That was nature. Then we came and made the milk safer for drinking by pasteurising it. Although that was better for mankind, it was not good for butter. The cream would no longer culture and the butter, though perfectly fine ended up without the richness of the lush green fields.
A lovely block of homemade butter
And that’s where the cultures come into play. By adding Mesophilic Aromatic culture to the cream, we reintroduce the lost bacteria and once the butter has been churned, the left over buttermilk (as well as the butter) will contain these cultures, so you can use them again to make more butter! You can even freeze the buttermilk and the bacteria will sleep until you wake it up again. It’s like magic!! The butter you have made out of cultured cream will not only age very well, it will develop a wonderful, deep flavour you simply cannot find in store-bought butter. And of course you can add whatever type of salt you like!
Cultured Butter, Crème Fraîche & Buttermilk
No, it’s not three different recipes. You get three for the price (and work) of one! You can decide whether to do a single recipe’s worth (I don’t recommend it, because the work does NOT double with the quantity and neither does the washing up) or do three in one go. Three is as much as my Kitchenaid will take, so that’s normally as big as I go.
1 litre cream
1/16 tsp Mesophilic Aroma Type B cultures or 50ml buttermilk
(1.8% of the weight of the butter in salt if you are salting your butter)
Crème Fraîche and Buttermilk are by-products of butter making, so we don’t need to worry about them, they just happen. There are 5 stages to making butter:
Culturing the cream
Churning the butter (whisking, in our case)
Squeezing out the buttermilk
Washing the butter
Shaping the butter
Culturing the Butter
Culturing the butter will sour it and set it to the texture of soft tofu. This adds a great flavour to the butter. There are two ways to do this, either with a store (or online) bought culture, or by adding 5% of the volume of cream in buttermilk. So for each litre of cream, you add 50ml buttermilk. But you have to make sure your buttermilk contains live cultures. I’m not quite sure how you test that, short of just trying it out. If the buttermilk has been pasteurised, or heated to more than 38ºC, the cultures will be dead and your cream won’t sour.
If you are using culture, you will need one for buttermilk, which is basically a Mesophilic Aroma Type B. Start by heating the cream gently to 30ºC, sprinkling the culture on top and leaving it to hydrate for 5 minutes, then stirring it in thoroughly. And that’s it! Pour the cream into a jar or tub that will just hold it, close the lid and leave it at room temperature, between 20ºC and 30ºC for 24 hours. This is not going to ferment (unless you did something wrong) so there is no danger of the jars exploding.
If you are using buttermilk, just add the buttermilk to the cream and heat both up together. If your buttermilk is frozen, put the frozen buttermilk into the cream and wait for it to dissolve before heating the cream. The proceed as above.
After 24 hours at room temperature, your cream has turned into crème fraîche and can scoop off as much as you like. I actually prefer to pour some of the heated cream mix into a dedicated container and leave that out together with the cream for the butter. Then after 24 hours, I can just chuck the container into the chiller and my crème fraîche will be happy for a week or two.
There it sits between the toaster and the olive oil in the relative dark for 24 hours before going into the wine chiller
You could make butter straight away, but I like to mature my crème fraîche for a few days. If you have a wine chiller, transfer your cream for butter making into the wine chiller and leave it there for 48 hours. If you don’t, put the cream into the vegetable drawer of your chiller and leave it there for 3-4 days.
Churning the Butter
Once all of that has been done and the cream has turned into something greater, pour it into the bowl of your stand mixer. I say pour, but if it’s matured nicely, you should be able to turn it upside down without it falling out. Loosen the bottom with a spoon and the whole mass should plop out easily. Attach the whisk and whisk the cream at the second highest setting. My Kitchenaid stand mixer will take three litres of cream at most, so check the capacity of your mixer before you start on a ten litre batch. Watch the cream carefully and you’ll see that it’s becoming fluffier at first, then it starts to look a little lumpy and over-whisked, which is about the time you want to bring the speed down a notch.
Now, you can just let the thing be whisked at top speed and get butter but reducing the speed throughout the process will extract more buttermilk right from the start and make your life a lot easier when it’s time to wash the butter. So lower the speed gradually, so that when the first bits of liquid buttermilk appear, you can switch to the lowest setting.
You will soon see the first specks of butter appear. Make sure you’re at the lowest speed, but do NOT turn the mixer off at this point. Keep churning your butter until it has formed clumps around the whisk and the buttermilk is sloshing around in the bowl. Now turn the machine off and do NOT turn it on again unless you fancy mopping up the buttermilk that will have been ejected from the bowl all over your kitchen counter.
Squeezing out the Buttermilk
Now you have butter floating in a sea of buttermilk and all you need to do is get all the buttermilk out of the butter. Take a bowl (preferably chilled) and put your newly crafted butter into it. Tilt the bowl and squeeze the butter against the side and you will see a lot of buttermilk coming out. Pour this back into the bowl of the mixer that holds the rest of the buttermilk and you’re ready to wash the butter.
Washing the Butter
Prepare a large bowl with lightly iced water. You need this to be cold, but not so cold that your hands suffer frostbite. I like this part, so I make my water agreeable chilly and washing the butter will be a joy. Drop the whole ball of butter into the iced water. Start kneading the ball of butter. I like to just squeeze the butter between my fingers. The water will become milk as you knead.
Keep doing this for at least five minutes and you will notice the texture change very subtly. This is extremely important. If you knead it well, you butter will be smooth and wonderful, if you don’t, it will be crumbly and not quite so wonderful, so err on the side of caution and squeeze that baby!
If you are a dab hand at butter making, you will not need to change the water, but if you are new at it, you may want to prepare a second bowl of iced water and move the butter into it after kneading. Squeeze it a few more times and if your water remains clear, you’re obviously in the clear. If you are not salting your butter, shape it any way you like, wrap it in parchment paper or cling film and drop it into the chiller.
Salting the Butter
If you are salting either all or part of the butter, weight the washed butter and add 1.8% of its weight in salt. So that’s 1.8g salt per 100g butter. This will feel like a tiny amount of salt but resist the urge to add more. Make sure to massage the salt well into the butter, so it is evenly distributed. If you are going to the trouble to salt your butter, you should really use some nice salt to do it with. Try coarse sea salt, or Maldon smoked salt flakes.
Shaping the Butter:
You can shape your butter by just rolling it into a cylinder, using either parchment paper or clingfilm. I find that using surgical gauze, which you can pick up by the roll from most pharmacies makes the shaping much easier. So first wrap the ball of butter in gauze, then squeeze it into the shape you want.
I actually use tofu moulds I got online to mould my butter. I first line them with surgical gauze, then drop the butter into it, push it into the corners as best as I can, cover it with more gauze and then use the follower provided with the mould to press it into shape. I then put the whole tofu basket into the chiller for an hour or two to firm the butter up.
Next, I pull it out of the mould, which requires a little brute force, so make sure there is enough gauze to hold on to and pull. I have parchment paper in two colours, so I can easily tell the salted butter from the unsalted without having to peer at a label that’s illegible to my unbespectacled old eyes. Remove the gauze and check for rogue threads on your butter and it will stick nicely to the baking parchment without the grease coming through.
Enjoying the Butter:
Your homemade butter will get better after a few days in the chiller, so take your time to enjoy it. It will easily last a month or more, if it’s stored in a properly cold chiller (that’s one set to 2ºC). Any extra blocks can be either vacuum packed in its wrapper, if you have a vacuum machine, or just put into a freezer bag to prevent other it acquiring a freezer smell. It will then last for a year or more.
Nothing can equal the pleasure of bread and butter. Especially if you’ve made both yourself
Words of Advice:
You are dealing with live cultures here, so hygiene is very important. Wash your hands thoroughly before you start making butter, wash all your containers with a good amount of soap and use clean towels throughout. Surgical gauze does not need to be washed, as long as you keep it wrapped after opening the package. You do not want pink mold to appear on your butter. You don’t need to go crazy sterilising everything, just keep it all freshly washed and your butter will be fresh for a long while.
Not all creams are created equal! Look for a cream that does not have emulsifiers in it, otherwise your cream might not split at all. Stabiliser (that’s E407) is usually fine, but emulsifiers have the nasty habit of bringing your cream back together again just at the moment it was about to turn to butter. So if your butter won’t churn; it’s not you, it’s your cream!
Liver Cheese in English. Which would explain it all if only it had liver or cheese in it, but confoundedly, it has neither. Does it make you smell of cheese and feel liverish? Not either. The etymology is fascinating to a language nerd like me. Laiba in old German means leftovers and käse is a corruption of kasten, box. Leftovers in a box? Great name! It is actually a grand meatloaf and quite possibly the best you will ever have eaten. Fantastic straight out of the oven, wonderful chilled and sliced thinly on your sandwich and even better (wait for it…) sliced thick, fried in butter and served with an egg on top. A heart attack never felt that good! Your no liver or cheese Livercheese will keep for two weeks in the chiller and give you and your cardiologist lots of pleasure.
It may seem daunting to make, but it’s actually very easy! And if you don’t have a meat grinder, you can cut it all into small cubes and put it into your food processor! If you don’t have one of those either, forget about it. Unless you have Popeye forearms, you shouldn’t attempt to chop this by hand.
Leberkäse – Meatloaf (if you must)
enough to fill one 1.45l terrine mould
500g pork shoulder
300g lean pork belly
200g pork backfat (green fat)
21g nitrate salt mix* (see note #2)
5g white pepper
2g garlic powder
1g ginger powder
1.5g cardamom powder
2g coriander powder
2g nutmeg
40g onion
220g cold water
Make sure that the meat, as well as the mince is really cold at every stage, so crank up your air-conditioning, if you are in the tropics and if necessary, spread the mince on a flat tray, cover it and put it into the freezer for half an hour for a little extra chilling, if that becomes necessary. The reason for this is not bacteria, which our nitrate salt will keep at bay, but protein. If the meat becomes too warm, the protein that we later need to bind our Leberkäse together will break down and we will end up with a crumbly loaf.
Before you start, butter your terrine or cake mould and line the bottom with a piece of parchment paper. You can line the long sides, but I find filling the thing is then more cumbersome that just running a knife around it after baking. Make sure that the mould you are using can hold water. The baking process generates a lot of juices that you don’t want to have making a mess of your oven.
Cut all the meats into strips that will fit into the mincer, dice the onion and then spread it all on a tray and chill overnight. The next day, put it all through the finest bald of the mincer. The fat will be the most difficult to process, so alternate a bit of fat with a bit of meat to give your grinder a little rest. Once this is done, roughly mix the mince and pass it through the finest blade one more time.
Putting minced meat through the mincer is a little troublesome, but if you form little balls or sausages that can be dropped down the feeder tube your life will be easier. Oh, and push the pusher all the way down before trying to pull it all out again. The minced meat tends to form a little vacuum in the feeder if you don’t. Feed all this mince into the bowl of your mixer.
This is the point at which you want to preheat your oven to 80ºC on a top and bottom heat setting, if possible.
Attach the bowl to your mixer and using the blade at a low speed, add the spices, salt and pepper. Once this is mixed reasonably well, slowly pour in the ice cold water. As soon as the water has been absorbed, you can increase the speed to the second setting and leave this to run for two minutes. Now check the internal temperature. You need this to be 12ºC, so if it is still too cold, leave it to mix a while longer. If it is a little warmer, don’t panic quite yet, as long as you are under 18ºC you should be fine. If you don’t have a meat thermometer, you should still be able to gauge the temperature by touch. Warmer than a nice bottle of beer, but colder than running water from the tap. Unless you live in the Alps.
Fill the forcemeat (which is what your mince is called now) into the prepared mould, making sure there are no air pockets. Use a scraper or spatula to smooth the surface. This is easier if you wet the scraper. Last, add a nice diamond pattern to the top and you’re ready!
Bake it at 80ºC for 20 minutes. Increase the heat to 120ºC and bake for 1.5 – 2 hours until the internal temperature is 70ºC. I found that in my thin long terrine this was done within 1 hour and 20 minutes. If you don’t have a meat thermometer, this should be reached once the sides are bubbling furiously and the loaf is perfectly springy to the touch. Increase the heat to 200ºC and bake for another 5 minutes, just to get a nice, brown crust.
Here’s a repeat for those of you who have skipped straight to the recipe: You can eat the Leberkäse straight from the oven, sliced into nice thick slices. Leave it to rest for ten minutes before cutting, though. You can also cool it completely and then eat it thinly sliced on well buttered bread, which is incredibly delicious. I pile a few slices on hot, buttered toast and believe me, life doesn’t get much better. Another heart-attack-provoking way of serving cold Leberkäse is slicing it thick, then frying it in lard and serving it on toast with a fried egg on top. That’s what my German grandmother used to do and we loved her for it.
NOTE: If you are using one of those thermometers that you can just stick into the thing and put in the oven, do not remove it until the Leberkäse has cooled down at least a little, or quite a bit of the juice will come streaming out.
NOTE #2: You can order nitrate salt online. Make sure this is a ready to use mix and not pure nitrate, because that would kill you. You can make this Leberkäse with plain salt, but it won’t be pink (which doesn’t really matter) and it will not keep as long. With nitrate and kept well chilled you can eat it for a week or more. As long as it smells good and isn’t slimy to the touch, it’s good to eat. I’m saying slimy, not oily, because it’s definitely oily. Without, I would try and eat it within 5 days if you make sure it stays chilled, so no taking it out to put on the table for an hour!
Tagine is a dish that you either love or hate, though I honestly don’t understand how you can hate something so deeply satisfying. I have to admit that a lot of middle eastern food leaves me entirely cold, quite probably because it is so desperately badly cooked here in Malaysian restaurants. So if, like me, you can’t possibly bear the thought of another dry as shoe leather skewer of sinewy lamb, here’s a recipe that will change your mind forever!
Tagine is traditionally served with bread, not rice or couscous, though I have served it with both (not at the same time, obviously) and no one complained. If you think you have enough energy to make your own bread, check out this recipe Moroccan Flat Bread – Khobz
Possibly the Best Lamb Tagine Ever
For the lamb marinade:
1.4kg – 1.6kg lamb shoulder roast
1½ preserved lemons (pulp only)
1 big handful cilantro
½ handful of English parsley (that’s the curly variety)
4 garlic cloves
2 Tbsp smoked paprika
2 Tbsp ginger powder
2 tbsp cumin powder
1 tsp finely ground black pepper
2 tsp fine sea salt
2 tsp ras el hanout (if you have it)
75ml saffron water (from 0.1g saffron)
3 Tbsp good olive oil
I usually buy a shoulder roast and then just take the netting off, flatten it out and cut it into nice big dice, about 4cm. When I say dice, it’s only in the loosest sense. Lamb shoulder will give you all sorts of shapes and sizes, so just try to even it out. I trim off some of the solid fat, but just some. You really do want some nice lamb fat for flavour.
Grab a nice big bowl that will comfortably fit all you lamb pieces and still fit into the chiller. Cut the flesh out of the preserved lemons and chop it fine. Keep the peel for later, we will be adding some of it to the tagine. Put the saffron threads into a small jug and pour 75ml warm (not boiling!) water on the threads. Leave this to infuse and release its colour and flavour for some 15 minutes.
Wash and dry the cilantro and parsley and chop it all together reasonably fine. You can use some of the cilantro stalks, but try to keep to just the leaves of the parsley. Peel, chop and finely mash the garlic. You could do this in a mortar and add the salt to it to make a paste. It’s faster, but you will have to wash up one additional item.
Mix all the dry spices together in the bowl, add the chopped pulp, the herbs and salt, oil and saffron water, so basically everything. Add the lamb dice and mix well to coat all the pieces evenly. Cover and refrigerate for at least 3 hours. You can do this the day before and leave the lamb overnight. If you are in a hurry, you could leave the lamb at room temperature for an hour and get a decent enough marination, but honestly it is best to do this in the morning and then make the tagine that same evening.
For the tagine:
2 big onions, finely chopped, about 300g-400g
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp fine salt
1 tsp turmeric powder
our marinated lamb
juice of 1 lemon
150ml second saffron water (from the same saffron threads)
about 2 dozen green olives (which is a normal sized can or jar)
thinly sliced peel from 1 preserved lemon
roughly chopped cilantro to garnish
I have to confess that I do not have a tagine dish, so I use a very big paella pan and cover it with aluminium foil. It’s 30cm in diameter, so I have to link two pieces of foil together to make on that is wide enough. You do that by placing one piece on top of the other and then folding the edge over two or three times before opening the two sheets up. This makes sure no steam can escape from the pan. You can make this with pretty much any fire and oven-proof dish, as long as it can be well sealed with a lid, or with aluminium.
Pre-heat your oven to 160ºC. Spread all the chopped onion evenly in your dish, sprinkle with salt and turmeric. To get the turmeric to be even, mix it with the salt and then sprinkle this mix over (I obviously didn’t think of this early enough). Place the marinated lamb in one layer over the onions. Don’t worry if this is a bit of a squeeze. The meat will shrink when cooking and it will all come out just nice. Make sure to add whatever marinade is left in the bottom of the bowl and don’t wash the bowl just yet. Make a second batch of saffron water with the previous strands and 150ml water, wash the bowl out with that and reserve the liquid plus whatever solids there may be.
Put your pan on a medium fire and once it starts to bubble, cover it loosely with your aluminium foil. Leave to simmer for 15 minutes, until the juices have come out of the lamb and onions. Add the saffron water you used to wash you your marinating bowl. Turn off the heat, cover the pan tightly with the aluminium foil, making sure there are no cracks or tears and put it into your oven. Leave to slow cook for 1½ hours. I want my lamb to be really soft and fall apart delicious, so I do not check it at all, I just trust my oven.
Remove from the oven and gently lift the foil. Check that the lamb is tender and check the seasoning. There is normally no need for any additional salt, as the preserved lemon is quite salty, but if you feel you need more salt, just sprinkle a little all over. Do not stir the pan! Now pour the lemon juice all over, distribute the olives evenly and cover with the preserved lemon rind julienne. Put the pan back on the fire and just bring it to a simmer for 5 minutes to make sure the olives are warm and you’re ready to serve.
That’s obviously the pork, so how about the party?
In the days when Jalan Sultan looked less like an agglomeration of hipster bars and cafes and more like the picture above, we would come here at four in the morning to eat yong tau foo, assam fish, claypot loh see fun and the star of them all – chow siew yoke – caramelised, refried sweet, crispy roast pork with lashings of garlic. After a night of drinking and dancing it was just the thing to satisfy at least one of your cravings.
There was a famous club at Central Market Annexe, from which it was just a short walk to Jalan Sultan. Those who had not been lucky or just wanted to see their new date in something resembling daylight could be found here. Times were very different, licensing hours were only loosely imposed, we were young and parties more or less any day of the week and here on Jalan Sultan a number of restaurants opened after midnight and served food right until dawn broke.
This is obviously a very, very long time ago, all the clubs are gone, most of the restaurants are no more and we are definitely no longer young. The chow siew yoke of my dreams has long vanished, the stall operators retired, the children probably sent to a better life in Australia and yet the memory of this dish sticks to my mind like caramelised pork does to my teeth nowadays.
I have searched high and low for a recipe that would give the same result, but all, categorically all, have fallen far short. They just did not give me that crisp crunch of saltiness and sugar that hits the happy spot. Until, that is, I came across a 27 second long video in which a Chinese auntie showed me how to fry the siew yoke correctly! I have not been able to ever find the video again, so I may have dreamt it, but hey, I’m not complaining!
The trick (and here everyone else just got it wrong) is to fry the siew yoke in a completely dry wok at high heat until the oil comes out. Yup. That’s all there is to it. We add NO additional oil AT ALL! I was going to keep this recipe to myself, but it’s just too good not to share. The rest is truly basic and simple, but it is also very easy to mess up, because the timing is vital if you don’t want to burn anything. And so, without further ado, I give you:
Chow Siew Yoke The Marvelous !
250g siew yoke (crispy roast pork)
4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
5 dried chillies, soaked in hot water
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp thick soy sauce
1 Tbsp caster sugar
Mix the two soy sauces and the sugar in a bowl. It’s not essential for the sugar to have dissolved completely. As for the red chillies, some people prefer not to soak them to preserve the full heat and get a darker colour out of them, but for this particular recipe, I prefer to soak them, so I can fry them a little longer and get their full fragrance into the sauce without burning them. The choice however is yours.
Cut the siew yoke into bite sized pieces. You have quite a bit of leeway here, but try not to make the pieces too small, or they will burn, or too big, or they will not render enough of their fat. Chop the garlic roughly and cut the chillies into 2 cm segments. I keep all the seeds for the heat that’s in them, but you can remove them if you like.
Heat your wok thoroughly, drop the siew yoke into it and stir fry until the oil has started to render. Remember; Do Not Add Oil! Once you have a good tablespoon of oil in the bottom of your wok, add the chillies and stir fry for a couple of minutes, until the chillies are starting to dry up. Now add the garlic and continue to fry until it has nicely browned. You should have a fair amount of oil in the wok by now. Pour the soy sauce mix all over the pork and stir to coat evenly.
From here on, it’s a judgement call when you stop and dish the thing out. Perfection is when the pork is nicely sticky, caramelly, but the oil has not split when it’s on your serving plate. It should then start to slowly split as the dish sits there being eaten. But honestly, as long as the sauce is not too thin, The pork will be delicious no matter what!
Yes, yes, I know. You can buy these cheaply, pre-packed with a shelf life as long as an elephant’s memory, but really? Seriously? Are you going to go through all the trouble of making babaganoush, eggplant salad, hummus and stuffed vine leaves just to spoil the meal with a preservative laden bag of floppy starch pancakes? No, you are not. You are joining me in making your own pita bread.
P.S.: All the recipes for the above mentioned dishes will slowly be added to my blog. Give me a week or two. Babaganoush
makes 10 pitas
For the Poolish:
50g organic wholemeal flour
50g organic plain flour
7g active dry yeast
250ml lukewarm water
Inside your stand mixer bowl, mix the flour with the yeast, pour in the water, stir to a reasonably smooth dough with a fork and leave to bubble up. You want the surface to be pretty much covered with little bubbles and if your water is not lukewarm, this can take an hour or more, so you know what I’m saying.
To finish the Bread:
350g organic plain flour plus extra
6g salt
3 Tbsp good olive oil
Pour the flour and salt on the poolish, add the olive oil and knead at the lowest speed in the mixer for just 2 minutes. Sprinkle about 5g flour over the top and leave to rest for 10 minutes.
Knead again for 2 minutes at low speed. Remove the hook, lightly cover the bowl and leave to rise until doubled, about an hour.
Once the dough has risen, knock it back and put it on a lightly floured work surface. Now divide it into 75g portions, roll each portion into a ball and cover the dough balls with a damp cloth.
Heat a dry stainless steel pan to medium heat. Roll one ball into a flat disk, about 6-7 inches across and cook in the dry pan. Make sure to wipe any excess flour from the pan before continuing on to the next pita.
NOTE: The pitas are really best eaten fresh, but you can make them in advance and keep them covered with a dry tea towel in a very low oven for an hour or so. Make sure your oven is at a very low temperature. You don’t want your tea towel to catch fire.
As this bread isn’t really all that flat, it’s a bit of a misnomer. I made it because I’m a bit lazy and could not be fagged to make pita bread, which is what you traditionally eat with hummus and babaganoush, the recipes for which will follow on the heels of this one. I have used semola flour for this one, which is reground semolina, so it has the semolina flavour without the coarse texture. You could use all semolina, or a mix of both, but obviously your water to flour ratio will change. Which isn’t too big a problem, if you add the water slowly, you’ll probably see when to stop. If the dough gets too wet, add a tablespoon of plain flour, if it is too dry, add a teaspoon of water (teaspoon, not tablespoon!).
If you do it right, you will end up with something like this.
For those of you who are now shaking their heads, wondering what’s too wet or too dry, here’s a tip (the rest of you, just skip to the next paragraph): Add the water slowly and watch what’s happening. Stop pouring as soon as the dough starts to come together, even if it looks like it is going to be too dry. Give it a minute or two and if there is still some flour that has not incorporated, add a little more water. What you are looking for is a dough that is relatively sticky. Once it has been kneaded and rested, it should stop being too sticky to handle. You will notice that it does not stick to your hands, but will attach itself to your chopping board. So dust the board with semolina and work swiftly.
Khobz
200g fine semola flour
400g plain bread flour
12g dried yeast
12g sea salt
15g cassonnade or brown sugar
300ml water
30g olive oil plus extra for topping
2 tsp cumin seeds
2 tsp anis seeds
rough sea salt
Mix all the dry ingredients in the bowl of your mixer. Pour the oil into the water, turn the mixer with hook attachment to lowest speed and slowly pour in the water. Once the dough has come together, increase the speed to the second setting and leave to knead for 5 minutes. Turn off the mixer, remove the hook and cover the bowl with a cloth. Leave to rise for 30 minutes.
Knock back the dough, attach the hook and leave to knead for another 5 minutes. Remove the hook again, shape the dough into a ball and leave it to rise until doubled, about one hour.
A quarter of my dough shaped into a nice ball
Flattened lightly and dusted with semolina
Flattened and ready to prove one last time
Knock the dough back again and divide it into four. Using coarse semolina, knead each quarter quickly and shape into a flat disk. Oil the outside and score it across in one direction only. Sprinkle some coarse salt, some cumin and anis seeds over it and leave it to rise for about 30 minutes. Pre-heat the oven to 220ºC
Bake for 30-35 minutes or until golden brown on top and hollow sounding when tapped. Leave to cool.
NOTE: This bread is best when reheated at 180ºC for 15 minutes before serving. It can be frozen and reheated in the exactly same way. there will be no need to increase the time of re-heating.
Planes, Trains & Anchovies 