Monthly Archives: February 2011

The larder in the freezer

I go through periods where I don’t really want to cook very much, as everyone does. I don’t really enjoy takeaway food that much, so I like to keep stocked with some shortcut ingredients that help me make things quickly, and means I can avoid a lot of processed foods. I would call this a larder, except that these mostly live in the freezer. I have developed something of a rhythm with these things over time, and although (like everything else I do) my commitment to this waxes and wanes, here is the list of things I continue to return to.

So when your weeknight cooking degenerates to pasta with tomato sauce, fried rice and curry, as mine often does, having these things in stock will keep you going with cheap, good food until you can get back into the kitchen properly.

Muffins

I have a snacking problem. A serious need to nibble while at my desk. I have recently re-subscribed to Graze, which is helping somewhat. I also like to have some muffins in the freezer. The recipe is based on a Gordon Ramsay one, and uses mashed bananas, a little oil and wholewheat flour for a wholesome and not too sweet muffin. I don’t think I’ve made the same flavour twice with these. Ones I have tried include: raspberry and white chocolate; espresso banana; ginger coffee walnut banana; chocolate and cherry; cherry and almond; apple and walnut – I could go on.

I can get one out of the freezer in the morning, pop it into a ziplock bag and into my handbag and take it to work. By the time the munchies kick in about 10:30 (OK, sometimes it’s 9:30), it has part defrosted. A minute in the work microwave and I have a warm, fresh muffin to have with a cup of tea.

Breadcrumbs

I know, you don’t need a recipe for breadcrumbs. It’s great to have fresh breadcrumbs in the freezer, and that helps assuage my guilt about all the times I buy bread and let it dry out in the bread bin. I use them occasionally for baking, but mostly I toast them to put on pasta, or use them on top of a gratin or pasta bake. But the real revelation came from Ruth Reichl’s website. She suggested making and freezing toasted breadcrumbs, and even giving them as a gift. Pre-toasting them means they can be put right onto the pasta, and speeds up the creation of a crisp topping on a baked dish. And there are times when it’s good to have yet another shortcut.

Stock

I became a stock convert with Nigella’s How To Eat, and haven’t looked back. It does sound like the sort of thing only absurd housewives do, and I don’t often admit to it in public. But I like doing it. There are endless recipes and tutorial on proper stock, and it will be better if you do it really carefully, but a simple method will still be good. I generally freeze chicken bones from roast chicken as they appear. When I have two or three in the freezer, I put them in a pot, cover with cold water and bring to the boil. Barely simmer for 2 hours then add roughly chopped carrots, celery, onions and/or leeks, bay leaves and some peppercorns. Cook another hour, then strain. Chill overnight in its bucket, remove the fat from the top, and then boil hard to reduce it a bit. Freeze in small containers.

You can use the stock for risotto, soup, to moisten curries and sauces, and importantly for gravy. And if all else fails, when your heating breaks down, nothing heats the kitchen quite like a big pot of stock on the stove.

Tomato sauce

Tomato sauce is incredibly useful. A really good tomato sauce is the best thing to have with pasta. You can also use it for baked beans and grains, curries and chilli. It shortcuts that long simmering period you need to get the sweetness out of tinned tomatoes and onions. The easiest and best version is Marcella Hazan’s (and others agree). It needs only tinned tomatoes, an onion, butter and salt. I also use some passata, and you can add herbs if you want to make it fancy.

Bread

There are three basic bread recipes that I’ve been making semi-regularly. All are minimal effort recipes. I generally slice and eat whatever we want immediately, and then slice and freeze the rest.

The first is the original no-knead bread recipe from Jim Leahey in the New York Times. Although this is low effort, it is a long project, needing about 24 hours start to finish, so I more often make:

A Michael Ruhlman-style 5:3 ratio recipe: 400g flour, 240g water, dried yeast, a tablespoon or so of oil and a teaspoon of salt. This makes a smallish loaf that can be made either in a loaf tin, or freeform on a baking sheet. It can also be baked in a pot like the no-knead bread. After reading Azelia’s incredibly helpful post on how she makes bread, I often don’t knead this at all,

Finally, if I want bread in short-order, such as for Saturday lunch when I’m starting from not-very-early on a Saturday morning, I make soda bread. I like Deb’s soda bread, which is a little sweet with raisins, and so a nice thing to have with cheese or with butter and tea. I also like Lorraine Pascale’s soda bread recipe, which uses wholewheat flour and treacle to make a rich-tasting loaf that is particularly good with soup.

We Should Cocoa: Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf

As a fan of Katie’s chocolates at Matcha Chocolat, and especially her masala chai caramels, I knew I should enter this month’s We Should Cocoa, the monthly chocolate challenge co-ordinated by Choclette. This month’s challenge was tea with chocolate, a great combination. Unfortunately, I was on holiday for most of this month (I was in Mexico – so not *that* unfortunate), so I needed something I could do at short notice to get in before the deadline.

I would have loved to spend some time on different tea infusions for this, but with limited time, and the need to do this after work, I needed something more straightforward. This tea loaf is a recipe I had bookmarked some time back when going through Paul A Young’s stunning book ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘. It sounded like a potentially overwhelming set of flavours, but also one that really appealed. The recipe calls for a huge amount of crystallised ginger, no fat and lots of ground cardamom. The tea is there to moisten the loaf, and also provide a malted, caramel background to these other flavours.

[Update: Choclette also made this recipe as part of the challenge – read about hers here.]

The recipe is unusual for a cake, as it includes just the tea-soaked fruit, sugar, eggs and flour – no butter or oil is used. However, this is the traditional tea loaf recipe. Tea loaves are an old traditional recipe, and can be called Tea Brack in Ireland, and similar to the Welsh Bara Brith. Irish Tea Brack recipes date from the 1800s, and would seem to be somewhat similar to soda bread, with the leavening from baking powder.

I made very few changes to the original recipe, even though the amount of ginger – 250g – seemed potentially overwhelming. Given the strong flavours, I wanted to try the recipe on its own terms before making changes. I baked this in two small loaf tins rather than one large one, so I could freeze one. I also swapped wholemeal self-raising for white self-raising, as that’s what I had in the cupboard, and I thought it would fit well with the rustic idea of a tea loaf. As this calls for Assam tea, which is a major component of English Breakfast blends, you could probably substitute with your everyday teabag. I used loose leaf Assam to make sure I got the strong and malted flavours Paul described.

I used two different brands of crystallised ginger, because I already had a packet open, and needed to get more to make up the large amount. Both come in large chunks, and I decided to slice the chunks into fairly thin pieces, so that the final cake wouldn’t be overwhelming with chewy lumps of ginger. The softer of the two was Humdinger Traditional Stem Ginger, that came with large sugar crystals on. The Waitrose Cooks Ingredients ginger comes in a cute plastic jar, and is firmer and drier, and cut into more even cubes. That made it easier to slice into pieces, so might be worth bearing in mind if you need to chop ginger finely for another recipe.

The smell of the ginger and raisins soaking was incredibly aromatic, with both the orange and cardamom coming through clearly. Even when baking, you could smell this amazing perfume, along with the chocolate. I was right about the flavours – it’s a really intensely flavoured cake, which sets your mouth buzzing with the ginger. Having said that, I think it works really well – the chocolate comes through, the orange holds its own with the ginger, and the cardamom is just about there in the background. My teaspoons of cardamom were a bit scant, so I probably could have used the full measure. It reminds me a lot of Divine’s orange and ginger dark chocolate – that also has quite a bit of crystallised ginger embedded in the chocolate. So I’d definitely recommend making this, but it’s not for the faint-hearted!

Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf

barely adapted from Paul A Young’s ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘.

  • 250g crystallised stem ginger
  • 100g raisins
  • 75g light brown muscovado sugar
  • 2 tsp ground cardamom (about 1 tbsp green cardamom pods)
  • zest of 1 orange
  • 200ml strong assam tea
  • 1 large egg
  • 200ml wholemeal self-raising flour
  • 100g dark chocolate, chopped into chunks (I used Divine 70%)

Slice the ginger chunks into slices, and combine with the raisins and sugar in a heatproof bowl.

Warm the cardamom pods until fragrant in a dry pan, then cool. Pop the black and brown seeds out of the shells and grind into a powder in a pestle and mortar. (This step is optional – you can buy ready-ground cardamom, or grind the pods without toasting them, but this method will get you the most aromatic powder).

Brew 200ml strong assam tea (1tbsp of loose tea leaves, 200ml boiling water) for 4-5 minutes, and strain over the raisins and ginger. Cover and leave overnight or for about 8 hours. (I prepared the ingredients one evening, poured the tea over the following morning, then made the cake the second evening).

After soaking, the tea should almost all be absorbed, with some syrup where the sugar has dissolved. Don’t remove any liquid, but add 1 beaten egg directly to the fruit and mix in. Mix in the flour, then fold in the chocolate to combine. The texture is very similar to a traditional fruit cake at this stage, fairly stiff but still moist.

Put the mixture into two lined 1lb loaf tins (or one large loaf tin).

Bake for an hour at 160C. Check with a skewer that it is cooked through. Cool for 30 minutes in the tin, then remove and cool completely. Wrap in fresh paper and store in a tin for a day before cutting and eating, on its own or buttered slices.