Breaded Cod with Tartar Sauce and Spring Vegetables.

It may seem like fish fingers for adults, but this classic way of preparing fish never fails to please.   Sealed in a crunchy coating the fish cooks perfectly and retains all its moisture.    Any fish can be prepared this way but cod is ideal.

Buy your cod in the morning and as soon as you get home unwrap it, sprinkle it with salt and leave in the fridge for the afternoon.   This is not compulsory but gives the fish a firmer texture.

Take the fish out of the fridge and cut it into slices about half and inch thick.    Roll these in flour (because you need something for the egg and breadcrumbs to stick to).     Take an egg or two and separate the yolks from the whites.    The yolks go to the tartar sauce.    Beat the whites lightly.   Then take your breadcrumbs which you have made from an open textured white bread like Ciabata, allowed to go completely stale and crushed with a rolling pin to make a coarse textured crumb, and put some in bowl.    With your right hand, dip the fish in the egg white and drop it onto the breadcrumbs.    With your left hand roll it around until covered and remove it to the frying pan, not yet on the heat.    This way you don't end up with a sticky mess on every fingertip and you have a clean dry hand you can use for other tasks, answering the phone, or whatever.    When all the fish has been coated pour a generous quantity of oil into the pan and put it over a medium heat to cook.    When one side is coloured to a light gold turn them over and repeat on the other side.

Now make the tartar sauce.    The vinegary condiment that goes by that name these days has only tenuous connections with the original.    Tartar in cookery means raw, and all the ingredients of tartar sauce are indeed raw.    They are egg yolk, mustard, olive oil, onion, salted capers, and a generous quantity of fresh herbs which should include chives and parsley as a minimum, and preferably tarragon, chervil, and fennel as well.    Add a teaspoon of mustard to the egg yolk, then beat in oil to make a fairly firm emulsion which is the base of your sauce.    No further seasoning is needed.   As tablespoon or so of chopped onion, a small handful of washed salted capers, and a large handful of chopped fresh herbs.   That's it, no further seasoning needed, and no vinegar.

It's a simple classic and the sauce, of which there should be plenty, is a fine accompaniment not only to the fish but also to boiled potatoes (the last of last season's pink fir apples in the photo, their skins lifted off after cooking) and plain boiled early spring vegetables like purple sprouting broccoli and asparagus.

White asparagus risotto

Home grown vegetables divide into three kinds, those that taste just the same as the ones you can buy, those that taste distinctly better (the majority), and those that bear no relation to anything you can ever find in a shop.    Asparagus is in the third category.   Eating white asparagus fresh from the garden for the first time is a totally new experience, and for the cook it is a new vegetable requiring quite different treatment from the bought-in version.

Fresh Asparagus should always be white, blanched by earthing up.   If your asparagus is stale, which it starts to become a couple of hours - purists say 20 minutes - after cutting then it doesn't much matter if it's blanched or not, but if it's fresh it is essential.   The benefits are two.   Firstly, the green tips of asparagus contain mercaptans which don't taste great and which are the things that make your pee smell after eating green asparagus;  and blanching eliminates these.    Secondly the true flavour of asparagus is not in the green tip but in the white base of the stem which when fresh is not only sweet but has a powerful zingy flavour, or perhaps just an effect on your palate.    This zing is what asparagus is all about.

The stems of white asparagus should be peeled with a speed peeler as the scales of the underground shoot are likely to harbour earth and grit.     They can be eaten raw but are best if very briefly blanched, plunged into boiling salted water for about a minute.   Longer cooking will diminish that all-important zing.    Ignore advice about bundling, or standing the asparagus up in a tall pot so the bottoms boil fiercely while the tender tops gently steam.     This is irrelevant.   If the bases of the stems of your asparagus are tough, they will remain so however hard or long you boil them, and to treat your tips with extra care and respect is to focus on the wrong part of the plant;   though it is true that if you insist on a long boil for the base, and the older asparagus is the longer it needs to cook, then the tips of green asparagus will disintegrate.

My favourite way to eat asparagus is in a risotto.   You have already formed the view that I am a purist, and how right you are, but to show you I am not a dogmatic one I will share with you a chef's secret that is known by many but admitted to only by a brave few who are prepared to face the derision of the risotto mafia.    You do not need to stand over a risotto stirring and fussing for what seems an age to make a perfect risotto.   You use a pressure cooker.

Risotto should be al dente.    This often misunderstood term means that the rice (or pasta) should be cooked, but retaining a certain firmness and elasticity, giving a resistance to the teeth.    It does not mean that it should be undercooked, with a floury white centre.    This is unpleasant to eat and hard to digest (would you contemplate eating raw rice?).    The problem with the usual method for making risotto, stirring constantly and carefully rationing additions of stock, is that, at least in my experience, by the time the rice is properly cooked in the centre the outside has become mushy, and that toothsome quality we sought has eluded us.    We have to choose between undercooked rice and savoury rice pudding.     With the pressure cooker method you will get rice properly cooked al dente in a creamy surround every time.

For an asparagus risotto, soften a chopped onion in olive oil in the bottom of the pressure cooker (stainless steel preferably, Lagostina make a good small one that is ideal for risotti), then stir in a measure of rice, roughtly 90g per person but measured by volume, about an espresso cup.    Use Carnaroli rice which works best for this method, and use the best you can lay your hands on - Carluccio's is good.    Add three times the volume of rice of good home made stock brought to boil in a separate pan, using the same measure you used for the rice, close the pressure cooker, bring to pressure, and simmer for exactly eleven minutes, using a timer.    Now peel the asparagus which ideally you picked about ten minutes ago, cut it into bite size pieces, and plunge it into fast boiling salted water for a minute, then drain and briefly refresh with cold water.    Grate parmesan and have butter standing by.    When your time is up, release the pressure from the cooker and inspect the risotto.   If it looks too dry add more stock to get the creamy consistency you want and if any rice is sticking to the bottom - ideally it shouldn't be but this sometimes happens especially if the overall quantity is small  - dislodge it with a spatula.    Then fold in the asparagus, parmesan, a generous knob of butter and serve with Maldon salt and black pepper.   The risotto and stock should not be salted in the cooking stage and should be seasoned only at the table.

Nettle - the new Elderflower - Iced Tea and Sorbet

It's nettle season and we are busy picking and making nettle infusion for our Yum Cha Iced teas, as well as for other customers use our infusion to flavour their own products.    Selling weeds is a farmer's dream, but the nettle is no ordinary weed.   For a start, it seems impossible to cultivate.    Two years ago I scattered 100,000 seeds on a third of an acre of nicely prepared ground, but not one germinated.    Another farmer in Northumbria, a wild flower specialist who knows his trade better than anyone, failed three years in a row to grow nettles for me before finally giving up.   They seem to have very particular requirements and of course where these are met they grow rampantly and are mostly unwelcome.    Fortunately we have Mare Mead, an ancient meadow by the river Mole that floods every year bringing nutrients the nettles approve of and which they have all but taken over so we have a regular supply.

In Italy  you are considered fortunate if you have a patch of nettles.   They are much less common there and highly appreciated mostly as a green vegetable, spinach style and welcome especially for being available early in the year when there is little else around, before even the first asparagus comes up to herald the arrival of spring.   Nettle risotto is delicious, and there are nettle frittatas, nettle gnocchi, and even, for the bold, nettle salads.

Nettles are also one of the most important medicinal herbs.    Most medicinal herbs in fact are common weedy plants, not exotic rarities, and elder and nettle together are by some way the most important plants used in western herbalism.     You can find out more in Mrs Grieves excellent and encyclopaedic "A Modern Herbal" here:

http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/n/nettle03.html .   Nettles are thought to be particularly good for autoimmune complaints such as hay fever and arthritis.

For me though the great thing about nettles is their lovely fresh aroma, which to me even surpasses that of elderflower.    It is strong and distinctive, but also delicate and does not survive cooking.   If you want to preserve it you have to treat your nettles with great care.   On the other hand, you do need to at least warm them up to about 80 degrees C at some point  to neutralise the sting which otherwise you will notice even in a tea.

Yum Cha nettle iced tea is my favourite out of the twelve teas and infusions in the Instant Iced Tea range so far by some way.    Nettle tea itself is nothing new, but it is always made from dried nettles and the lovely fresh aroma is completely lost.    By infusing fresh nettles and then preserving the extract in a syrup we get a concentrate that can be added to iced water at about 1 part to 20 to make iced tea in an instant that has all the flavour and aroma of fresh nettles.    It's easily recognisable as nettle if you know what it is, but if you don't you would probably take it to be a fruit, so sweetly aromatic it is.

Nettle sorbet is equally stunning and if you want to wow your guests at a dinner, serve just a scoop between courses as a palate cleanser.    It will be the talk of the evening.    To make it you just need some lemons, water, sugar and nettles.    Pick say 100g of nettles.    Take about 80g lemon juice and add 120g water then the nettles.    Press them down from time to time, and they will soon settle into the liquid and start to infuse.   If you are in a hurry, heat them up for a moment, which will wilt the nettles and extract the flavour in a few minutes, but for best results infuse cold overnight.    Strain off the liquor which should be an attractive light red colour (I know, you thought it would be green, but look carefully at nettles and you will find most of them have a lot of red in the stems and this colour infuses out, while the green doesn't) and measure or weigh it.    Whatever the weight add about 2/5 of the amount of sugar, i.e. if it is 100g add 40g sugar (or for a better texture slightly less sweet taste, 20g sugar and 20g glucose).    Now heat to 80 degrees (if you don't have a thermometer, 80 degrees is when a coating of fine bubbles starts to line the pan) and set aside to cool.    To make the sorbet use an ice cream maker if you have one, but if you don't it doesn't matter, it works just as well if you just put it in its container in the freezer.     If you do the latter, take it out once frozen, break it up a bit and pound it with a pestle to improve the texture and break down any large ice crystals, then return it to the freezer to set again before serving.

If that all sounds a bit daunting you can try this alternative  recipe.    Get hold of a bottle of Yum Cha Nettle Instant Iced Tea (ask me how), and dilute the syrup about 3:1 with water.   Freeze it.    That's it!  It will be just as good as the above because that's just how Yum Cha is made.

A perfect Easter breakfast?

Could this be the perfect breakfast?    A free range boiled egg fresh from the nest with a home baked sourdough baguette, and nothing else at all except salt, butter, and of course coffee, or in my case, because I'm taking an extended break from coffee , a mug of cocoa (note to Starbucks - why do you have to spoil lovely cocoa by sugaring it and calling it hot chocolate?   Is that even legal?    Doesn't chocolate have to contain cocoa butter as well as cocoa solids?    Cocoa + sugar does not equal chocolate)).

The egg is simple enough.   Just get a few hens, a henhouse or ark, feed and water them making sure they have plenty of access to greenery, keep the foxes off, and they will do the rest, giving you a glorious egg most days of the year, though they will take a well-earned break from time to time.

Soudough bread is another story.    Sourdough or leaven bread (I prefer the latter, "sour" just doesn't sound attractive or accurately describe the wonderfully complex flavour and texture of good sourdough bread) is the ultimate bread.    All bread was once made this way, and all the best still is,  but bakery has moved on and now uses brewers yeast, originally a by product of the brewing industry ("barm") but now produced specially for baking.    It's all part of speeding up the breadmaking process.    If you are a baker, and you have room for say 100 loaves worth of dough in your bakery, using the sourdough process you can make 100 loaves a day, because the sourdough process takes at least 24 hours from from starter to oven.    If you can speed this up to say 2 hours (and you have the oven capacity), you can make 400 loaves in an 8 hour shift or 1200 if you work 24 hours.    The economic pressure to do this is hard to resist and this is what modern yeasts combined with improvers can achieve.   Improvers by the way are not so called because they make the bread better, but because they speed up the "proving" or rising of the bread.

In fact everything that speeds up the process of breadmaking detracts from the quality of the bread and for the best bread patience is required.     In commerce this is generally a recipe for bankruptcy and nearly all bakers will make the lowest quality bread they can persuade their customers to accept and no more, and most likely you or I in their shoes, with a living to be made and competition to deal with, would do just the same.    Even in France, perhaps the greatest bread culture ever, most bakeries now produce only mediocre bread, much of it made in great centralised factories and sent out frozen to the shops who only have to thaw and tan the bread in their ovens.    Such shops can't call themselves "boulangeries" but "depots du pain" and seem to be in the majority with only a few bakeries taking the trouble to make bread from scratch.   But the bread culture lives on in France and many locals will think nothing of a 20 mile round trip to get a decent loaf.    In fact I will be in France next weekend and will be making just such a trip to St Tropez market, passing at least half a dozen "depots" on the way, where you will find "Raymonde"   (markets are a first names only zone in France) an artisan baker who makes the best sourdough bread I have ever come across and whom I seek out at every opportunity.

To make such bread at home is not easy and requires a lot of skill that has to be learned by experience, but is by no means impossible and maybe easier at home than in a professional bakery because we have time on our side and don't face the same commercial pressures.   The only ingredients you need are flour, water, and salt, and for the perfect sourdough loaf don't consider adding anything else.     In France the baguette by law can contain only these three ingredients plus one other, bakers yeast.

Baker's yeast is actually brewer's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae.    To make sourdough, you rely instead on the wild yeasts and bacteria that grow on the wheat itself and are present in the flour.      The principal yeasts are Saccharomyces exiguus or Candida milleri, not brewer's yeast (which oddly enough doesn't seem to exist in the wild so must be a cultivated species though nobody quite knows how it was cultivated in the first place).     All you need to do is to make a batter from flour and water, and leave it until it starts to bubble, which will happen in a few days.    You can then start to make bread, but I have found in practice that it pays to build up the sourdough starter for a couple of weeks and wait until it is in rude health before using it.    Feed it daily with more flour and water, then every time you want to bake take half the culture to seed your dough and replace it with flour and water.    It can now live in the fridge and only needs feeding every week or two if you are not baking regularly to keep it ticking over.


I won't give the full instructions for making sourdough bread here.  They can be found easily enough elsewhere, although ultimately there is no substitute for experience preferably under the guidance of an old hand.    I will just say that the other ingredient I find indispensible is steam.   A normal domestic oven is too dry to make good bread.     When you put the loaf in the oven a crust starts to form too quickly, inhibiting the "oven spring" that is so important to getting light bread with an open textured crumb, and you also get a thick hard crust, not the light crunchy crust you associate with the best french bread.    I've tried many ways of achieving this but the simplest and most effective is just to heat up a  brick (I have a nice granite cobble) and put it into a pan of boiling water at the bottom of the oven just as you put the bread in.   It mimics to some extent the effect of a brick built wood fired bread oven, and more prosaically the steam injection ovens that were developed in Vienna in the nineteenth century and which are so good for bread and certain pastries like croissants that became known in France as Viennoiserie.

Be warned though the quest for perfect bread can be addictive.