Last week we covered Offal at cooking school. I was determined to at least taste everything we did, so here are the verdicts, saving you the trouble of sampling them all for yourselves:

Heart
We prepared beef heart Peruvian-style by slicing it very thin, marinading it overnight in a spicy marinade and then barbequing it over charcoal. It was actually very good – meaty with a slightly softer texture than beef.

Tongue
Also beef, this was not a pleasant dish to prepare. The whole tongue is boiled for several hours with vegetables, then peeled (yes, peeled) while still warm. The whole thing is then pressed and cooled (to make it look less like what it is) and sliced thinly and served cold with a gribiche sauce of herbs, capers and chopped hard boiled egg. The sauce was good – the texture of the tongue was too soft for me.

Kidneys
This was another dish that was not at all pleasant to prepare. The kidneys (lambs’) were split in half and trimmed, then pan-fryed over high heat and finished with a mustard-butter sauce. The sauce was good. The smell emanating from the frying kidneys was not – after all, we all know what kidneys do in the body …

Liver
We prepared pan-fried calves’ liver with caramelised onions and a red wine and cream sauce. This was also good – a much more meaty texture than most of the organs. It was tricky to get it cooked just right though – when over-cooked it had a mealy texture.

Sweetbreads
Sweetbreads is the rather euphemistic name given to either the thymus (from calves and other young animals) or the pancreas (from older animals). These were poached, then cooled and pressed and some of the membranes removed. They were then coated in seasoned flour and pan-fried to make them crispy and served with a black butter sauce and capers. These weren’t bad – a slightly creamy texture which worked well as long as the outside got good and crispy. Not something I’d order in a restaurant or make, but I would eat it if it were presented to me.

Tripe
As I’m sure you know, tripe is cow’s stomach. Sounds appetising already, doesn’t it? This was brought to a boil in salted water, then drained and simmered for 6 hours with vegetables. It was then drained, rolled up and chilled. Once cold, we sliced it into thin strips, coated in flour and fried over high heat to make it crispy. This was also served with caramelised onions. It didn’t really taste of anything (perhaps not surprising after all that boiling). The crispy parts were fine, but the texture of the rest was predictably gelatinous. That, plus the fact that it smelled disgusting while boiling made it very much not worth the effort.

Oxtail
Not technically offal (it’s just the tail) but requires a little bit of elaborate preparation as it is mostly bone and quite fatty. It made a very good, rich beef stew.

If this has whetted your appetite, firstly you’re a better eater than me, and secondly, you should check out Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s latest tome, The River Cottage Meat Book, which has all these and the even more scary Lights and Fries (also known as Rocky Mountain Oysters).

Technorati Tags: food, offal

Two weeks ago, Apple launched a version of iTunes that supports podcasting. If you are currently mystified by this phrase, fear not, as today I shall attempt to reveal all. Or at least a little more.

Broadly, in my view ‘Media’ (see also ‘meeja’) can be divided into print, audio and video, with each of these having traditional versions and online or digital counterparts. For example, newspapers and magazines have well established presences online, and many radio stations have a website where their shows can be ‘streamed’ or downloaded. The new component that the internet has added is that it is a publishing and distribution medium with a very low barrier to entry. So if you have something to say, you don’t have to pay to print pamphlets, or get yourself a radio show or make a TV programme. Instead, you can write a blog (like this one), create a podcast or make a vlog.

As you have probably worked out, a blog is usually an online diary written by anyone from politicians to twentysomething londoners to ex-star trek actors. They can also be contributed to by a group to act more like a news feed (see slashdot and boingboing, for example).

To manage the huge number of blogs out there and the need to check them regularly for updates, RSS readers (or aggregators) were created. These pieces of software allow you to subscribe to a series of different blogs that generate RSS feeds (usually indicated by a little orange XML box, just to confuse things further). Both Safari (Apple’s browser) and Firefox have support for RSS as part of the browser.

Blog are to newspapers as podcasts are to radio. To create one, you record a show (which can be done on any computer with a microphone) and generate an MP3 file. This is attached to an RSS file and uploaded to a web server. Software such as iPodder or iTunes can then detect when a new file is available and download it automatically if you are subscribed to that podcast.

There are an enormous number of podcasts out there for a phenomenon that has been going for only 18 months or so, and of all standards. One of the pioneers of the format was american Adam Curry, a former MTV VJ who now produces a podcast called the Daily Source Code from his house in Guildford. The BBC are great at adopting new phenomena as they come along and have been making selected radio programs available for download for some time. They are now a part of Apple’s podcasting directory, so that you can automatically receive the 8.10 interview from the Today programme, for example.

The latest addition to this crop of new formats is the vlog, which Wired has a good set of articles on at the moment. This format is in it’s early days and lacks a majority single format and a popular way of making it portable.

Tags: Podcast | Technology | Vlog | Blogging

I’m sorry. I’ve been busy – no really I have. I meant to call. But I’m back now.

So, to update:

• We’ve had some people to stay, visted Yosemite and Monterey.
• I’m on a two-week break from the course at the moment
• and we’re in Hawaii!

We are staying on the Big Island, and so far it has rained a good deal of the time – not really what you imagine when you come to Hawaii! So taday, we made the best of the rain and went to visit the Volcanoes National Park. We didn’t actually see flowing lava – that was a 4 hour hike – but we saw the Kilauea crater, which erupted as recently as 1982. It’s a very weird landscape – different types of lava over every surface, with steam and sulphur vents all over the rock, and plants pushing through the crust of rock.

More updates throughout the week. Honest. No really, this time I’ll be good.

So it is a pretty unusual site to see a blog from me. However, I am waiting for a document to print out on our handy-dandy HP all-in-one (It prints! It faxes! It scans! It vibrates so much in ‘economode’ you start to panic about earthquakes)

Speaking about earthquakes, there have been 5 reasonably sized ones in or around west coast area in the last few days http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-me-quake15jun15,1,6059376.story?coll=la-news-state

In any case, we will be swapping this earthquake prone area for Japan for a little while in September, so that will be much safer…hang on…..

This one is a little off-topic, as it’s not food related – although that probably comes as a relief to some of you.

A few weeks ago I noticed that the Levi’s Store in San Francisco was due to get a body scanning machine in. Having seen something similar on Tomorrow’s World many moons ago (not to mention Woody Allen’s Sleeper), I wanted to have a go and took a note of the dates. I also wanted to find some low-rise jeans that actually fitted, so I had a good excuse too.

So yesterday I popped into the store on the way back from school and the machine was there, scanning away. It is produced by Intellifit, who work with a number of companies, usign their scanner to take measurements which are then compared to a company database to find styles and sizes to match. They also aggregate the data anonymously to give retailers feedback on the actual sizes of the clothes-buying public (like that much publicised M&S survey a few years ago).

The scanner is a big cylindrical clear booth that you stand in the centre of while a vertical arm rotates around you. It uses short-range radio waves to detect the water in your skin, so it can take accurate measurements through your clothes. A Levi’s sales person asks you what sort of jeans you’re looking for before the scan (on the waist or below, fitted or relaxed) so that they can pull a relevant list of styles for your size. You have to remove big pieces of metal (watches, belt buckles) but otherwise it’s pretty hassle-free and very quick (but there was no queue when I was there).

And did it work? Well, of the 4 styles it recommended, one was the exact pair I was wearing at the time, the other 3 fitted, and I bought one of those (the 515s, for those who care)! It’s only there this week, but this is a trial for Levi’s, so maybe you’ll see them in a store near you at some point.

An important aspect of cooking, but one that is often overlooked, is the possible methods. When you buy a piece of meat for dinner, the methods are all the ways that you can cook what you have bought. Being familiar with them allows you to make the most appropriate choice for the ingredients you have. Probably the most versatile piece of meat is the chicken – it can be cooked using all the methods listed here.

Each Friday one of the students at Tante Marie’s gives a little 5 minute talk on a food person – a chef, restauranteur or food writer. This week it’s my turn to give a report on Elizabeth David, so I thought I would give you a little summary of it here.

Elizabeth David was probably the most influential english food writer of the 20th century. She was born in 1914, educated privately in England and then sent to study at the Sorbonne in Paris at 17. There she lived with a French family who gave her her introduction to French cuisine. When she returned to London, she pursued an acting career for a while, then in 1938 she left for Crete via Antibes. She spent the whole war abroad, first in Greece, and later in Egypt where she worked for the British civil service.
She returned to England in 1946, to a country just out of war and still in the depths of rationing. Faced with the shortage of meat and fresh food, and the array of substitutes that had been concocted to deal with rationing, she attempted to recreate her experiences abroad by writing down the food she remembered and could not recreate through lack of ingredients. This frustration with post-war English food and suppliers was to drive and inform much of her writing. Her writings at this time formed the basis of her first book, Medittaranean Food in 1950.
From 1950 to 1965, Elizabeth David published a further 4 books on French and Italian food, and countless magazine articles for the Sunday Times, the Spectator, Vogue, Food and Wine and Gourmet magazines, amongst many others.

She continued to write and travel throughout the sixties, as well as opening her own kitchen shop in London and in the seventies published two books on English food – English Bread and Yeast Cookery and Spices and Aromatics in the English Kitchen. Her trilogy on English Food was completed with The Harvest of the Cold Months, published after her death.
It is hard to overstate the importance of Elizabeth David’s writing. She brought the fresh flavours and simple preparation of Mediterranean cuisine to an England which had been making wartime dishes for 5 years and where olive oil was only available from the chemist. She was instrumental in persuading shops to stock such oddities as pasta, aubergines (eggplant) and courgettes (zucchini). As restaurant cooking made a resurgence in the sixties and seventies, she was often critical (to the point of cruelty) of the fashion for elaborate garnishes of lettuce leaves, curly parsley and carved vegetables.
She influenced virtually all British chefs who came after her and cooked Mediterranean-inspired food. Alice Waters (owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley) began cooking in California from French Country Cooking. The Acme Bread company (also in Berkeley) was founded on English Bread and Yeast Cookery. Jane Grigson called her “the greatest food writer of her time”.
And her favourite place to eat lunch in San Francisco was an Italian place called Vivande porta via, run by one Carlo Middione, who has been teaching us Italian cooking at Tante Marie’s in the past few weeks.

The american resistance to measuring ingredients never ceases to amaze me. I suspect that this has something to do with the original immigrants and pioneers travelling to a new land with as little as possible. As old-fashioned balance scales are very heavy, and require a series of weights, packing this in the suitcase would not have been an option. For some reason, in the centuries since, measuring by weight still hasn’t caught on. There is some sort of vicious circle in play where books and magazines don’t print weights because people generally don’t have scales, and people don’t buy scales because the recipes don’t require it!

For some ingredients, volume makes sense – sugar is pretty easy to measure in a cup. However, when it comes to something like flour, the room for error is huge. Even professional chefs have been known to fill a cup of flour with anything from 3.5 to 7 ounces of flour. It is a relatively safe assumption that most recipes mean a cup of flour to weigh 5 oz, unless they specify otherwise.

Butter is also measured in cups or tablespoons. This convention makes no sense at all until you realise that american butter is sold in sticks of 4oz, or half a cup, and marked on the wrapper into tablespoons. When interpreting an american recipe, use the following conversions:

1 cup = 8 fl oz = 32 tbsp
1/2 cup = 4 oz butter = 8 tbsp

2 cups = 16 fl oz = 1 american pint
4 cups = 32 fl oz = 1 quart

Now, armed with this information, you can have a look at some good American food websites. Epicurious is one of the best, containing it’s own recipes as well as those from Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines, two of the top food magazines in the U.S.

Tante Marie’s, where I am at culinary school, also has good recipes from Mary Risley’s book on the site.

The other major sites worth mentioning are Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen – the former being the magazine and the latter the TV show from the same people. These people exhaustively test recipes and equipment to work out the best way to do things. Some parts of the site require subscription, but it’s worth looking at the free stuff that’s there, and keeping an eye out for the magazine too.

So, I just promised that I wouldn’t talk you through everything we do each day – and now I’m going to break that rule, and tell you what we did today. What can I say – I make these rules so that I can enjoy breaking them.

Today’s workshop was on pasta – we made fresh egg pasta and 3 different sauces that we then had for lunch. Now, I’m sure you have heard this before somewhere, but making pasta isn’t hard. However, this time I want you to believe it – it really isn’t. In fact, it’s not much more difficult than making playdough.

Having said that, there is a caveat – you need a pasta maker. Nothing else will do unless you really want to get to work with a rolling pin. However, they are not expensive – John Lewis has one for £35, and in the US they are between $30 and $80 depending on how many accessories you get. Imperia is a good make – it’s has interchangeable cutting attachments, which is useful.

Pasta dough is a lot like bread dough – a very simple mixture:
1) The ingredients are flour, water, salt, plus optional fat. Eggs can provide both fat and water.
2) The dough is kneaded in both cases, to develop the gluten and make the dough stretchy. Fat in the dough gets between the gluten strands and makes the dough more silky.
However, in the case of pasta, you don’t have to worry about yeast, or rising, or baking, making things *much* simpler.

The steps in making pasta are as follows:

• Combine the ingredients into a dough. This can be done equally well in a food processor or mixer as on a counter. It’s better to leave out some of the flour, as it can always be added in later.
• Knead the dough (like kneading bread dough) until it is a smooth ball. Add extra flour to prevent it sticking, but not so much that the dough dries out. This can also be done in a processor or mixer.
• Rest the dough. This is important as it allows the gluten in the dough (which you just developed into nice stretchy strands) to relax, making the dough easier to manage later on.
• Knead the dough further to make it smooth and silky. For this use the widest setting of a pasta machine, feeding it through several times until it feels super-smooth. Dust the dough with flour each time to prevent it sticking in the machine. If you don’t have a pasta machine, you should knead it by hand for about 10 minutes until the same consistency is reached, and rest it after this instead. The dough should be quite stiff and solid.
• Roll the dough out by feeding it through the pasta machine one setting at a time, to make it thinner and thinner, or by using a rolling pin and plenty of elbow grease. If the pasta ribbon gets too long, cut it in half and continue one piece at a time.
• When it is thin enough (apparently fettucine and other flat noodles should be thin enough to see through when it is done), use the appropriate cutter attachment to slice into noodles or whatever other shape you need. Filled pasta is trickier and waits for another time.
• Dry the pasta for at least 30 minutes, with the pieces separated, before cooking just like dried pasta, but for a shorter time.

And that’s it. Smooth, silky, tasty pasta dough. Ideal for light, creamy sauces and delicate vegetables like asparagus. For a more complete description, try the links below, or your favourite recipe book. Italian cooking books will be a good starting place, and Jamie Oliver is keen on making fresh pasta (not surprising given his time at the River Cafe).

A recipe for fresh pasta from Epicurious.

Jamie Oliver’s basic pasta recipe on his website.

The recipe we used today at Tante Marie’s was 8oz all-purpose flour (plain flour is fine too), 2 large eggs, 1 tsp olive oil and a pinch of salt. We didn’t use all this flour, but keep the surplus to hand to flour things as you go.

The basic curriculum for us follows classical French cuisine, with Californian twists sprinkled throughout. But what Nathan wants to know is, why do the French always have to get involved?

One of the main reasons that we (and almost every other cooking school) follow French haute-cuisine is that it the only national cuisine that has been codified. The idea was to create a definition of what a French chef to be able to do and thereby create a profession. By ensuring that all chefs met this standard, they could maintain the quality and make sure that chefs were paid appropriately. The result of this was to generate a list of standard dishes, sauces and preparations that should be within the repetoire of a French chef. In this way, if a chef from Normandy were to say “Make me a mornay sauce” to a chef from Bordeaux (or Boston), he would get what he expected, and not some regional variation.

Many people were involved in the gradual codification and organisation of French cookery, including La Varenne, Antoine Careme and Brillat-Savarin. Auguste Escoffier simplified their work and out on the final touches, which he then recorded in Le Guide Culinaire – still used by chefs today.

Of course, a lot of these sacred rules and standards were overturned in the wave of Nouvelle Cuisine, but that’s another story.