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'Red Bor' kale flower buds

Hay Rice Pudding

100g Pudding rice 50g Light brown sugar 1L Raw milk 50g Cultured butter 100g Cultured cream

1 Indonesian long pepper A pinch of dry ginger, a sprinkling of caraway seeds and of cinammon. A large handful of meadow hay

Roast hay in at 160C for fifteen minutes. Toast caraway seeds, cracked long pepper and spices in a dry pan, grind and add to a pot. Add the milk and turn the heat on low. Add the roasted hay and cover with cling film. Heat until nearly at the boil (or the cling film blows off - whichever is sooner) and then leave to infuse for a couple of hours, off the heat.

Melt the butter in a wide pan and add the sugar. After a minute, add the rice and stir over a low heat for ten minutes, until the grains have swelled a little and are translucent. Strain the milk and add it to the rice along with the cultured cream. When the cream has melted mix the rice well, pour the whole lot into a baking dish and bake for seventy five minutes at 145C. Grill the top for 3-4 minutes and let cool for about ten minutes

The rice pudding in the picture looks a little split, which it is, but I am not one to be offput by escaping hay-infused clarified butter.

Eat with plum jam.

#Rice Pudding #Hay

Twenty five days after burying seven beetroots in Mike Knowlden's High Easter sourdough starter, I dredged them out of their purple goo and gave them a scrub. They have battled outbreaks of amazing, gloriously coloured surface moulds, and suffered the fluctuating temperatures of my kitchen on recent sunny mornings. They are soft and squidgy, although the inside remains intact. Their smell is powerfully yeasty, and combined with the muddy and fruity flavour of beetroots, is almost like paint - sharply sour and sweet with a twang of acetone. There is something reminiscent of soap, and associatively they bring to mind some of the more extreme hoppy IPAs around at the moment. They are unsalted, so as not to limit the action of the yeast. I have put three of them in a pot of live beetroot lactic brine, and I will roast a couple to see how caramelisation affects the sugar remaining post-fermentation.

#Beetroot #Sourdough #Fermentation

Sourdough, duck egg yolk emulsion, kelp powder.

#duck egg #sourdough #kelp

I'm leaving peeled beetroots in sourdough starter to pickle, inspired by a conversation with a chef at Kadeau in Bornholm, Denmark.

Not sure how long to keep them in, but there are seven to test, and the bread made with beetroot starter should be cool.

#Bread #beetroot #sourdough #fermentation

Slow sloe vinegar

Each autumn, English hedgerows are festooned with the lustered blue berries of the sloe, or blackthorn (Prunus spinosa), and every year, millions of them are infused into gin, which is a great way to enjoy them. But surely not the only way ? Inspired by an amazing and confounding dish made by the indefatigably innovative Rosio Sanchez, pastry chef at Restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, which consisted of discs of frozen sloe juice with brunost ('Brown Cheese' - caramelised whey cheese), I have been scouring the hedges in October and November to use sloes in cookery. The fruit is incredibly astringent, very aromatic, and hard as hell. They are supposed to be harvested after frost, which makes them softer and more easily processed. They recall cranberries in flavour, but with a distinctive complexity also reminiscent of port wine, in fact, it is said to have been used historically to make 'spurious port' or to roughen actual port.

I recently made a 'fast' vinegar by adding a measure of 88% Baltik vodka to a bottle of sweetened and cooked sloe juice and innoculating the whole with live apple vinegar, which was brilliant, if lacking in depth and character. As is often the case, slowing the process down should result in a more complex vinegar, and so with my last batch of sloes (picked with the help of my ten year old nephew Reuben in Gloucestershire) I decided to go through the traditional method of vinegar making - fermenting the juice into a 'country wine', and then acetifying the wine.

I cooked the sloes with brown sugar in a vacuum bag for ten hours at 70C, primarily to extract as much flavour from the must, and secondarily to pasteurise and detoxify the kernels*. Given the realtively small amount of fruit I had, I made a second infusion of the must in water, reduced it slightly and added to the main amount. Since this was the first wine I have tried to make, I spent quite some time researching the process of alcoholisation and the systems of analysis - for which I finally got to use my new hydrometer and refractometer - and I was more rigorous than usual in writing down all measurements and methods, resisting my usual urge to just fling a bunch of things together, stand back and wait.

I added some 'SN9 Wine Yeast' (Saccharomyces bayanus) which I happened to have in my store cupboard, bought for a bread making experiment. According to the manufacturer' blurb, it is good for fortified and country wines and is robust enough to survive mistakes on the part of the amateur, which is nice coincidence.

Since I don't own any actual fermenting vessels, I tend to use glass bottles from Duskin - a Kentish company who bottle a bewildering variety of single variety apple juices - for all my fermented drinks and kombuchas. They have a pleasant curve and it means I get to drink a lot of great apple juice.

I have 1800g of liquid, with around 450g of sugar, .5g yeast, a handful of sloe must, and will add some crushed kernels after the first fermentation. I expect it to have turned to alcohol in between 7 and 14 days, and after that i shall open it to the air (acetification being an aerobic process) keep it at around 21C, and let it develop for a few months. It's a long time to wait, especially if it is crap in the end, which is entirely possible. If it's good, I expect it will become a prolific ingredient in my cooking.

* Like many members of the genus Prunus, the kernels inside the stones have a glycoside called amygdalin, which reacts to mechanical destruction by producing benzaldehyde (the aroma characteristic of bitter almonds) and hydrogen cyanide. Obviously the first is desirable, the second not so much..

#Sloes #vinegar #Wine #fermentation #alcohol

Last cook of the year. Leftover BBQ'd dry aged Longhorn forerib, a stock of smoked beef bones, hay, chipotle, mushroom scraps, onions cooked in red ale, garlic and aged beef fat.

#Beef #leftovers #hay #stew #ale #onions

Cranberries, dried blueberries, mulberry vinegar, long pepper, thyme, galbanum tincture

For a Blanch & Shock event two weeks ago, I made a batch of butter to be served infused with fried mushrooms and seaweed, to make an umami spread served with butter - a distant relative of dripping served with bread.

I inoculated 500 grams of Helsett Farm cream with 200 grams of their live crème fraîche, and left it to colonise the cream for three days and nights, at room temperature (around 21C during the day, dropping to 19C at night. I recently bought an incredibly cheap plate warming blanket thing from Lidl, which heats up fast, but lacks a variable control and claims to hit 70C, which would destroy the bacteria ripening the cream. Until I have put together a PID controller to regulate it, the temperature of my kitchen will have to suffice.

I whipped the butter after chilling it briefly, draining the first and second waves of buttermilk that broke (to be used in an unrelated sauce) and then whipping the mass, with some of the buttermilk and 0.5% salt. The smell was extremely buttery, rich in what I have learned to recognise as diacetyl, an aromatic compound in butter. The taste was rich without being especially grassy or herbaceous like it might be in summer. I packed it and cooled it before it was later infused with powdered dulse and fried girolle and chestnut mushrooms.

Two days later, and left with a decent amount of the butter, I added three large scoops to a container of live yoghurt whey to try and instigate a kind of bacterial showdown. It had four days in the fridge and then three days at room temperature

The whey treatment has added a satisfactorily identifiable extra note, at once related and foreign to the butter, and an umami flavours have developed.

The butter has no significant role to play at the moment, it having been an experiment, but will inspire me to look at the interaction of yoghurt and cream and whether they can collaborate. For now, it has been steadily disappearing, mainly spread onto bread from Brickhouse Bakery in Peckham. The final spoonful is around sixteen days old now, and, as has been the case with most of the butters I have subjected to such tests, it has started to drift towards being like a cheese.

I will most probably end up in a bowl of scrambled eggs.

#Butter #Cream #Helsett Farm #Dairy #Diacetyl #Ageing #Whey #Cultures

Rye grains

I'm working through a list of whole grains, treated in the same way - 1.5 days soaking in water, dried a little and cooked in a frying pan with salted butter. The rye grains are chewier than the spelt, which although not unpleasant (they would be good in a porridge) is not the point of the exercise, which is maximum crunchiness.

Next up: Oat Groats, Barley, After that: Different liquids for the soak - vinegars, kombuchas, juices, wheys from buttermilk, yoghurt etc - and different fats my collection of animal fats - oxtail, bone marrow, roast chicken, dry-aged forerib, super-aged raw butter to fry with.

#Grains #Rye #Crunch #Fats

Four cool ingredients from the last month. From the top -

- Beach rosehips (Rosa rugosa) from autumn, previously frozen, and smelling of kiwi, banana and tomato. Nothing like roses.

- Cauliflower - One of the best things there is, in my world. To be pot roasted with hay and birch bark

- A potato variety I can't remember the name of, but included because of it's jazzy purple streaks.

- One of the many varieties of kale around at the moment - this one is biodynamic 'seaweed' kale from Brambletye Farm in East Sussex

#Autumn/Winter #Vegetables #Varietals

Two varieties of quince grown in the gardens of houses within half a mile of each other in South East London. Both are intensely sweet-smelling, the small one with a bright and almost citrussy note and the big scarred one with en ever-so-slight whiff of fermentation, which makes it smell something more like sea buckthorn. The fluff on the big quince must have quite a bit of yeast trapped in it, more so than the smooth one, and I will scrape it off this and a few others to start a quince mead.

#Quince #Yeast #gardening #Fermentation #Winter

Spelt grains

Soaked in water for two days then dried a bit and fried in salted butter until they begin to burn. They are perfectly crunchy without being tough, hugely savoury and the darker grains have a similar taste to, and role as the intermittent burnt bits in popcorn, which is one of my all-time favourite ultra-specific niche flavours.

It takes a very short amount of time to devour a bowl. The time management of this snack could be improved

#Spelt #Grain #Snack

Tres Hombres image from New Dawn Traders

Cultures going on a voyage

Here are two of the three jars of starter cultures that I gave to Dr. Lucy Gilliam to take aboard the Tres Hombres, a 32 metre brigantine which set sail yesterday from Holland on a seven month voyage trace the Atlantic trade routes. The project New Dawn Trader has been following this route since 2009, hoping to explore the possibilities and ramifications of trading by sail power, all the while operating and living as sustainably as possible.

Lucy will share the duty of cooking for the 20-strong crew from a tiny galley kitchen. I gave her three starters. The first is a sourdough culture, started in february with the yeast from two bottles of Kernel IPA and with the subsequent addition of wild yeast. The second jar contains a kombucha starter, born in Denmark aboard the good ship Nordic Food Lab with birch sap and a starter, and fed on Pu'er tea and raw cane sugar since April. The third jar (not pictured) is a ginger bug started in July.

The ship's route takes her first to Norway, then over Scotland and Ireland before turning south for Lisbon. She will then cross the Atlantic to Brazil, and head north to the Caribbean then back east, and home, via the Azores.

The project is still seeking funding for various activities, you can see what and how to contribute on IndieGoGo. Follow them on Twitter here, and you can read Lucy's blog here.

#Cultures #sourdough #Ginger Bug #Kombucha

Corn and yoghurt pancake with butter and bee pollen honey from Østermarie on Bornholm in Denmark.

#Honey #pollen #pancakes

Yellow Beetroots

1. Beets in a pressure cooker with bay, butter, mulberry vinegar, ground ginger, water and toasted hogweed seeds. Cooked at 15psi for 45 minutes

2. Cherrywood sheets soaking in homemade mulberry vinegar.

3. After being roasted at 180°C for an hour on infused wood sheets and brushed with rendered roasted oxtail fat.

5. Wood beets Mk. 1

#Beetroot #Wood #Spices #Pressure Cooker #Vinegar

Grape vine leaves (Vitis vinifera - cultivar unknown)

At Blanch & Shock, we have been experimenting with leaves from fruit trees recently, most notably fig leaves, which we have been making into tinctures and infusions. I picked some vineleaves from between the lethal tendrils of razorwire at Edible Eastside in Birmingham, thinking about the use of the leaves in Sarma (or Dolma, depending where you are) in which leaves are stuffed with rice and/or meat and boiled or steamed. I wasn't planning on stuffing them necessarily, just seeing whether they could be encouraged to express a good flavour. It being the middle of summer, the leaves were quite dry and tough, and I wanted to avoid boiling them for hours as tradition dictated. Instead I left them submerged in a 5% salt brine with a sprig of bay for five weeks, hoping they would soften somewhat. After five weeks, they smelled good - lactic and vegetal and a little bitter, but were still tough and sort of crinkly. So they went into white wine vinegar, with the later addition of some Greek Yoghurt whey. In this solution they now sit, stubbornly refusing to become soft, but tasting great.

Tannins have the effect of keeping lactically-fermented pickles crisp, and this blog post contains some more information about their role in fermentation. Given the large amount of tannins in leaves, and later in the grapes that will follow, it could be that these leaves will never get soft enough to be served as they are, but could possibly still be wrapped around a stuffing and steamed or boiled. Incidentally the pickling brine, especially since the addition of vinegar and whey, has become kind of delicious, reminiscent of the taste of dolma. It may well find itself forming the basis of a new pickling brine for something else.

#Vine Leaf #Lacto-Fermentation

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