Bluegrass Soy Sauce

My brother's mother-in-law came to the UK for a visit recently. She's from Louisville, Kentucky, and she's a gem. As she knows I like food and food related foodstuffs for fooding, she very generously brought me a dinky little bottle of Bluegrass Soy Sauce.

Told ya.

This is made in Kentucky, in the US's only soy sauce microbrewery. Apparently that's a thing. It's aged in old bourbon barrels, and it's fancy as balls.

Now, I like soy sauce, but in my experience it's rarely anything more than brown salty water. Written down that looks kind of gross, but it fills a need. The need for brown salty water. But the Kentucky stuff, I've got to hand it to them, this stuff is cool. It's smoother, less salty, and muuuuuch more complex. Smoky and spicy and tasty. Well played, America. Well played. As far as I can tell it's not available in the UK, but we must have some comparatively fancy soy sauces? Right? No, no probably not. In a way it's a shame that I was given this free taster of a high end product to get me hooked, ensuring I keep coming ba- waaaaait just a second. Carla, you sly fox.

I have a standard recipe for a meat marinade that I use quite a lot, but that's for regular soy sauce, not fancy soy sauce. I pared it down in this instance so you could taste the soy more. If you happen to have some fancy soy sauce, use this version. If not, add some grated ginger, a pinch of chinese five spice, and half a teaspoon of liquid smoke (if you have it).

You will need:

1 tbsp honey
2 tbsp rice wine or white wine vinegar
3 tbsp fancy soy sauce
1 clove crushed garlic
1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon crushed chilli flakes
1 tsp tomato puree

Mix everything together, and use immediately. Phew.

I use this as a marinade for all types of meat, but mainly chicken or belly pork. This time round I had some diced turkey. I let the meat sit in the marinade overnight before making skewers with onions and peppers, and cooked them on a griddle. I poured any remaining marinade over the top while cooking so that it would thicken into a nice glaze.

It worked exceptionally well. Turkey is already quite a smooth meat, so the marinade kept it nice and soft and stopped it from drying out.

Bluegrass Soy Sauce, then. I'd recommend you try it, but I'm not sharing sooo...Well. The weather's nice, isn't it?

Basic Vegetable Salad

I've been poorly this week. A nasty cold made me all tired and spacey, so I left most of the cooking up to Pete. And I'm very grateful, too.

The other day I thought I was better, and bought everything I needed to make burgers and a vegetable salad, then collapsed on the sofa and didn't move again for the rest of the day. Conversation that evening went as follows:

Pete: Shall I cook these burgers then?

Bron: OK. But I'll make the salad.

Pete: Don't be silly.

Bron: I will. I'll make the salad.

Pete: We don't even need salad.

Bron: WE DO NEED SALAD. WE'RE GROWN UPS.

Pete: [Looks at Bron]

Bron: Just burgers is fine.

I'm more or less better now. Still a little groggy but basically ok. And now I've made the salad I was going to make. It's my favourite 'basic' salad, as it keeps for a couple of days in the fridge, and you can add any number of optional extras to it to keep it interesting.

Basic:
4 carrots
1 cucumber
3 spring onions

Optional extras (suggestions):
Capers or olives, chopped
Peppers
Crumbled feta
Croutons
Bacon bits
Grated ginger
Chopped fresh coriander
Salad leaves (I like rocket)

Dressing:
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice
salt and pepper
crushed clove of garlic

Grate the carrot and cucumber, and finely slice the spring onion. Leave everything in a sieve for half an hour so that the juice can drain out. Mix the dressing up separately, and toss with the salad, along with your extras (strongly recommended)

If you don't add leaves it won't wilt, so it will last a bit longer than other salads. I like to make a big bowl so I can eat it over a few days without too much fuss, even if I'm sick and can't make anything fresh.

Here with feta, green peppers and toasted sesame seeds and coconut

As well as a side to main meals, this is good in a wrap, mixed with cous-cous, or added to some hot chicken stock with a little chilli and some noodles for a very quick soup. Or for proving that you are a damn adult, and can cope with eating your vegetables even if you don't have to and don't want to. It's a matter of pride.

The GBM Experiment (BBC et al, 2014)

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd say. The finals week of Great British Menu is reminding me a lot of the Psychology course I did on the International Baccalaureate.

I've already said all I need to say about the show so far (in short: the brief is weird, the editing is weird, the chefs are pricks), but now it's finals week, and there's one element of finals week that I find absolutely fascinating.

In the regionals it's always a treat to see someone cook their little socks off, just for one of the judges (probably Oliver) to say 'Well, this isn't good enough. They clearly haven't tried at all'. Always makes me laugh. In finals week, though, it's not just the judges giving out scores, but the chefs too. And they don't sit round a table and discuss it, they splinter off into little groups. There's ususally about three or four separate groups all pronouncing their judgements independently of the others.

Now to psychology. In the fifties, Solomon Asch conducted studies into group conformity. In his initial experiment, one test subject was placed with a group of stooges. All were asked a simple visual question with an easy answer (pick which line is the longest, or something). The stooges all gave the wrong answer. Asch found that, after conducting the test a number of times, around 75% of people would give an incorrect answer at least once to conform with the group consensus, with 35% conforming at any one time. Asch then ran a number of follow ups, finding that conformity rates were highest with three stooges, while high group numbers actually lowered conformity. The presence of just one other person disagreeing with the group would lower conformity rates.

Back to the chefs. They're all off in their little groups, and you can actually see Asch's theories play out in front of you. Obviously here it's all subjective and there's no strictly right or wrong answer, but the cheeky editor is very keen on following one person saying 'This is really over seasoned', with that group nodding in agreement, with someone from another group saying 'The seasoning is perfect', with their group nodding in agreement. One person's strong opinion will sway the whole group - and these are people not short of confidence in their own opinion. Keep an eye on Colin and Emily. Emily is quite generous with her scores, and any group with her in will probably mark a dish highly. Bless Colin, but he is a little bitch, and will pull the scores down in his group. And just like Asch found, there's more disagreement when the group is larger. If I were a scientist, I would be positively aroused at the papers I could write on this.

Any psychologists reading this, maybe look into writing something on the practical applications of conformity theory in modern competitive cooking shows. But remember to reference me.

The Perfect Cheese Toastie

Did you know it was British Cheese Week? I didn't, which is unusual because I'm interested in both cheese and periods of time devoted to food. Well.

In honour of the week now rapidly drawing to a close, I feel I should mention something cheese related, and I can't think of anything more appropriate than the Best Cheese Toastie of all time, knowledge of which is mine and mine alone.

I have very strong memories of 'exam time' in school and college. It meant a disruption to routine that felt exhilarating as we stayed home without having to fake anything. Suddenly I was on my own for extended periods, making a lunch that didn't need to be packed. It could be anything! I may have gone slightly mad with the possibilities. Eventually I got into the habit of making myself a cheese toastie everyday, but I would not be satisfied with just any cheese toastie. With the dedication and rigorous experimentation of someone who should be spending their time revising, I slowly built up a quantity of data that could be used to create something magnificent. I tried different types of cheese, in different combinations, with different accompaniments. I was very thorough. Although I started 'experimenting' at school (heh), I continued my toastie project in the summers that followed.

After a lot of hard work you'll be glad to know that my efforts paid off, and I now know exactly how to make the best of all cheese toasties. First a few notes to bear in mind when constructing your own toastie:

- Don't waste my time with brown bread. White only.
- Consider both the taste and texture of your cheese, as you do want it to melt properly. I found combining two types gets the best results.
- Any additional condiments should be low in water, but high in flavour. For example, sundried tomatoes are fine, but fresh tomatoes have too much water and turn into soggy, scalding hot distractions.
- Making a filling of cheese sauce with ham as 'a twist on a classic croque monsieur' is a lovely idea in theory, but don't do it.

And now the final recipe *drumroll*

2 slices white bread. Cheap supermarket bread works best in this context.
A few slices of Wensleydale
A little ripped buffalo mozzarella (OK, so it's not British. Whatevs.)
4 basil leaves.

Butter the bread, and place one slice in the toastie maker butter side down, in the traditional style. Put a basil leaf in each corner of the slice, and lay on the slices of Wensleydale. Sprinkle the ripped mozzarella evenly over the top. Top with the second slice of bread, and your sandwich is complete. Close the toastie maker and cook according to instructions.

The mozzarella provides excellent stringyness, while the Wensleydale remains crumbly, salty and flavourful. The basil leaves are the perfect addition as they provide flavour without interfering with the cheese consistency. This is the perfect toastie. You can't argue. The data doesn't lie.

French Dressing Mayonnaise

Mayonnaise is a bit weird, isn't it? Eggs and oil whipped together to make a soft white jelly? That's weird right? I find it best not to think about it too much. On the plus side it's way easy to make. On the double plus side it's also really easy to add all sorts of different flavours to customise your mayo according to your tastes and requirements. I make aioli a fair amount, and if you follow the recipe at that link you'll come away with a very poky and deliciously antisocial garlicy mess. Easy enough, but I can hardly take credit for the idea of 'garlic mayonnaise'. This recipe, on the other hand, is all Bronners.

To digress a moment - rejoice one and all! For it is Jersey Royal season. The new potatoes with flaky skin and a fresh nutty taste are so good just boiled and buttered there's very little else you need to do with them. Granted I also like roasting them, but that's because I am a contrarian and a pervert.

Anyway, the other day I boiled up a bag of the tasty little bastards, and I wanted either an interesting dressing or sauce to go with it. I was torn between making a classic french dressing with vinegar, oil, mustard, garlic and capers, or a fancy potato salad with mayonnaise. *Record scratch* Wait a minute, hold on now. Didn't I just say that you could easily add different flavours to homemade mayonnaise to suit your tastes? I think you'll find I did.

So here's the deal. For the basic mayonnaise (that you can change as you see fit), I use:

1 egg
salt and pepper
1 tsp cider vinegar
300ml olive oil
300ml sunflower oil

I blend all the ingredients apart from the oils in a food processor and add the oil slowly in one long, thin stream. Use an electric whisk if you don't have a food processor. Use a whisk if you don't have an electric whisk. If you do use a food processor you should hear it change tone as the texture thickens and emulsifies. After this point you can add the oil a little quicker.

For my French Dressing Mayonnaise, I tripled the amount of vinegar (I don't know how good you are with maths, but that brings the total amount up to 3 teaspoons), added a small clove of garlic, a teaspoon of mustard and a tablespoon of capers.

You recognise the glass pot, don't you. Don't lie to me, I know you do.

You can either mix your potatoes into the mayo for potato salad, or do what I did and just dip them into a little pot on the side. Nothing else needed.

This recipe does make about a pint, so rest assured it goes really well in a lot of different scenarios. I can personally vouch for it in a turkey roll, on a poached egg, or smeared on to bread and stuffed in my mouth.

Kidneys in mushrooms

Kidneys are gross. That's a science fact. But I'm not going to let a little thing like whether or not something is even vaguely appetising stop me from writing about it.

As I mentioned, I recently picked up a pack of lamb kidneys from the Slow Food market in Bristol. It was a spur of the moment thing and at the time I didn't think too much about how I was going to cook them, since I had no intention of eating them. Pete would have that honour, as he is the sort of person who doesn't mind eating organs designed for wee cleaning. If you are also that sort of person, then good for you! I hope you enjoy this post.

After a little research we decided to combine our efforts. Pete would cook the kidneys while I would make a creamy mushroom sauce. Pete would have the kidneys in the sauce along with chips, and I would just have the chips and the sauce for dinner.

Pete cut the kidneys in half across the middle and asked me to cut out the gristly core, as it was proving difficult with his large, manly hands. This was a little more tricky than I anticipated as it's basically like boning jelly, and they kept on disintegrating on me. Pete then fried them in butter for a couple of minutes in a hot pan, until just pink in the middle.

As you can see, they didn't hold their shape too well, but it's not like they were that pretty to start off with.

Now came the most difficult part of cooking kidneys; putting up with the smell. I'd heard that they vaguely smelt of wee, but that's not entirely accurate. Or rather, they don't just smell of wee. Urine, sure, but also leather, game, sweat, and I think a tang of cement. Like the smell you get on a hot day when a gentle rain hits the pavement, except instead of rain it's piss. Like changing rooms at a gym which weren't cleaned before they were sealed up for a year. Like the festival toilets at Glastonbury if the only people who went to Glastonbury were horses. If you were a connoiseur of bad smells, you would become positively aroused by the depth and complexity and nastiness of the aroma that these things gave off. It did not smell nice.

But back to cooking things I actually want to eat. I made the mushroom sauce by roughly chopping a whole 300g punnet of mushrooms and softening them in a little olive oil with a generous amount of salt and pepper, a pinch of dried chilli flakes, and a crushed clove of garlic. Once they had softened and expelled some juices I added a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice and a dash of vermouth (I would usually use a little white wine, but I didn't have any open and vermouth is a decent enough replacement if you also add some acidity. If you do use white wine you can leave out the lemon juice). Finally, I mixed in about 100ml of creme fraiche.

I took the lion's share of the sauce and piled it over my chips. Lovely. Pete had his kidneys, with a little sauce ladled over the top. Ergh.

He tells me they were delicious. 'A lovely, deep, savoury flavour' he says. He did offer me some, but I politely refused, even though he assured me they didn't taste like they smelled. What can I say? I'm narrow minded. It takes a little while to forgive and forget such a violent nasal assault, and I guess I'm just not a big enough person for that. Maybe one day. One day.

One day...

Actually, no, probably not.

Bristol Food Connections. With meat.

Look at all this meat. Look at it.

Much meat. Look.

But we'll get to that in good time.

Bristol Food Connections, the city-wide food festival held a couple of weeks ago, was a great example of something Bristol does really well. I've always enjoyed how cultural Bristol can be, as it always seems to have something going on. Since the 2014 Food and Farming Awards moved down here this year, naturally we'd want a ten day long celebration of the producers and chefs of the south west to go along with that. That's obvious. But it wasn't just a few restaurant tie-ins and a market here and there - oh no. The BBC got involved, there were food talks and specialist evenings, and local restaurants did one-off meals in teepees. Yes, teepees. No, I don't know why. As someone who knows from organising, I'm impressed with the undertaking. Just think of how many emails they would have needed. The emails, man, think of the emails. Like, so many emails.

It would have been impossible to go to everything on offer, but I think I got the best of it by going to the city centre event right at the start of the festival. This was spread out over a quite a large area, but since the weather was nice I was happy to wander. I kicked off at the Slow Food Ark of Taste market at College Green, then moved down to the Love Food Producers Market and BBC @ Food Connections at Harbourside, and the Street Food market at Millenium Square.

This is where the meat comes in. Look at it again.

Same as before, but bears repeating.

What we have here is a selection of cuts from The Lost Farm, specialising in forgotten and rare breeds of animal. This is all Manx Loaghton Produce, rare breed lamb with four horns. Funny looking chaps. Sometimes the horn number can go up to six, apparently. Six! That is too many horns. The meat is raised for a little longer and has less fat on it, and I'll let you know how it tastes when I write up what I've done with it (spoiler: good. It tastes good).

I got this haul from my very first stop at the Slow Food market. To be perfectly honest I had no intention of buying any meat, but I spotted a box with a '£1 a pack' sign, and, by law, I am obliged to look through anything that says that. The box had a fair amount of offal in it, which I'm not crazy about, but also some lamb neck. 'Excuse me', says I 'Is that right? A pound for this lamb neck?'. I was prepared for this to be an error, because there's no way you can get any sort of non-innards meat for a pound, let alone lamb neck from rare breed lamb with four to six flipping horns. But 'No!', says the lamb lady 'A pound a pack is right, and there's a box over here which is two pound a pack with even more cuts'. I went quiet at this point, as I saw that my trip to the market was going to go in a very different direction than I had anticipated.

I got down to business. I pulled out some neck, some lamb shanks, and while I was waiting for someone to bring more shanks from storage I browsed the offal, and threw in a pack of kidneys. As I said, I'm not a fan myself, but Pete likes 'em, and since they were only a pound I figured I'd treat him. To kidneys. A pound, though! Do you know what you can get for a pound these days? Diddly shit is what you can get for a pound these days. All told I spent £7, and came home with four shanks, two packs of neck (each with 4-5 joints in them), and the kidneys.

Now bear in mind, this was the very first stall in the very first market I had stopped at. I felt energised from a good business deal and set out to see the rest of the festival with renewed vigour, swinging my bag o' meat next to me. To be fair, I didn't buy too much else (some smoked trout pate, some cake. You know, the usual), but I did try a lot of things and had an excellent time doing so. The Caephilly from Caws Cenarth? Creamy and delicious! Dried seaweed used as a seasoning? Um, sure, I guess! Why yes, I would like to try some blood, wine and chocolate salami, thank you! It tastes weird! How delightful!

I didn't go to any of the ticketed events in the BBC section (where you could go see people from off the telly talk at you in real life), but I did enjoy wandering around their interactive bits. It was clearly designed for children in mind, like planting workshops, smell tests, milking a model cow, etc. It's just the sort of thing I would have loved doing as a kid myself, or as a fairly drunk adult. Like, a bit more than tipsy, but not falling over. Liiiightly smashed, that's about the level, I think. Yes. Perhaps a demographic the BBC would like to target next year.

I walked home at the end of the sunny afternoon having thoroughly enjoyed myself, with some bargains in the bag as well. Well played, Brizzle. Well played.

Meat.