I had been vaguely intending on writing one of those structured posts where something happens which informs and influences what I do in the kitchen. That hasn't quite happened, but I'll fill in anyway.
The other week I caught an episode of No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain's food and travel show follow up to A Cook's Tour on the Good Food channel. I've previously stated my admiration, and indeed envy for Mr Bourdain here; he basically gets paid to travel the world and eat, what's not to like about that? Far from being just Alan Whicker with an appetite, his mantra for A Cook's Tour was "I'll try anything, I'll risk everything, I have nothing to lose", coupled with a 'cut the bullshit, give me the good stuff' approach and you're on to a winner in my book. And indeed, his own.
This particular episode featured two things which are seemingly synonymous with Bourdain shows, namely the consumption of large quantities of regional liquor and the slaughtering, butchering and eating of a pig. As a result of this I ended up looking for more episodes on Youtube, and finding the one from the same series where he visits London and Edinburgh and spends time salivating and eulogising in Fergus Henderson's restaurant St. John. Which made me think, why do I not actually own a copy of Henderson's book Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking? Given my food ethos (although I like to look at it as something less rigorously structured as deserving of the term), espoused on this blog on several occasions, I should have been subscribed to the Church of Henderson far sooner.
So I went and bought a copy, the reprint which appropriately contains an introduction by Bourdain. This is where I should be diving into accounts of wonderful dishes made from all manner of livestock organs, bits of guts and bones and heads which would be off-putting even to most meat-eaters, let alone the squeamish type of vegetarians. But I'm not. I haven't actually cooked anything from it yet, nor been inspired into creating anything in it's vein. In fact from hereon in, there is no mention of meat whatsoever. A couple of days before leaving for Belgium and Holland I picked up Thomasina Miers' Mexican Food Made Simple, a book I've not visited for a while. It's the sort of book in which recipes will call for the use of something you've already made from another part of the book. I love this in principle, but it doesn't sit too well with my often short-noticed what-the-fuck-am-I-going-to-cook? approach to cookery book use.
So the week just gone after consulting the suppliers section in the back I took myself off to Borough Market on a gloriously tourist-free day when seemingly everyone was there to actually buy produce rather than take photos of piles of food to show Facebook just how much they love markets, and returned with a mere fraction of what I was sorely tempted to buy. These are the results of my endeavours.
Chipotles en adobo
200g chipotle chillies (about 65)
1 large white onion, roughly chopped
a head of garlic, cloves roughly chopped
3 tablespoons fresh oregano leaves or a few good pinches of dried oregano
1-2 tablespoons thyme leaves
2 fresh bay leaves
1 teaspoon cumin seeds, crushed
4 tablespoons olive oil
350ml good quality white wine vinegar
50ml good quality balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons tomato purée
7 tablespoons demerara or palm sugar
2 tablespoons sea salt
Wash the chipotles in cold water and drain. Snip off the stalk end of each chilli with scissors, which will allow the water to penetrate their tough skins.
Cover the chillies with water in a medium pan and simmer for 30 to 40 minutes until completely soft. When the chillies are soft, rinse off any excess seeds.
Put the onion, garlic, herbs and cumin into a blender (or a stick blender is just as easy) with 200ml water and six of the chillies. Purée to a smooth paste.
Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pan until it is smoking hot. Add the chilli paste and fry for about 3 minutes, stirring continuously with a spatula to prevent it catching and burning. Add the vinegars, tomato purée, sugar, salt and another 100ml water and cook for 5 more minutes before adding the rest of the chillies. Cook, whilst stirring, for a further 15 minutes and at the end check to see if the purée needs more salt or sugar. Store in clean, sterilised jam or Kilner jars.
This stuff is fantastic. The flavour is initially sweet from the sugar, which then gives way to the taste of spice and the sourness from the vinegar. It is a relatively potent heat, but not too hot, and it is a very well rounded heat. It doesn't affect one particular part of the mouth as some do, rather gives it a lovely warming heat all around, which after the initial heat has dispensed leaves a really wonderful flavour. The recipe states it makes approximately a litre, so I was glad to have bought two 750ml jars whilst filling them both up.
Afterwards I used some to make chipotle ketchup from the same book.
Chipotle ketchup
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 very large Spanish onion, or 2-3 medium-sized ones, halved and sliced
8 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced
1.5kg ripe tomatoes (or tinned plum tomatoes)
1 stick of celery, chopped
125ml cider vinegar
70g demerara sugar
½ cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon celery salt
½ teaspoon mustard powder
½ teaspoon cloves
1 piece of mace
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
2 teaspoons black peppercorns
2 bay leaves
1-2 tablespoons Chipotles en adobo
sea salt
Heat the olive oil in a large pan and cook the onion over a medium-low heat until the onion starts turning translucent. Add the garlic and keep cooking until the onion starts taking the merest hint of colour.
Add the tomatoes and their juices to the pan, crushing the tomatoes with the back of a spoon. Stir in the rest of the ingredients, bring to the boil and then simmer for an hour, stirring occasionally.
After an hour, purée the mixture, and then continue to cook over a low heat until it reaches your desired thickness and looks like ketchup.
The ketchup can be stored in clean, sterilised bottles in the fridge for several months.
It's rather orange, rather than red, but I think this is because I used fresh tomatoes which tend to be less of a full on, deep red than tinned. I got three 500ml bottles worth out of this recipe, and in true Pot Tossery tradition, one will be winging its way up to the midlands post-haste. Unfortunately they don't lend themselves to stacking, otherwise the one labeled 'reserved for Kirsty' would almost certainly have been at the base of such a structure. In the meantime, I need to get thinking about animal parts.
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